Now that you’ve been to Switzerland, where else do you want to go?

Also on my bucket list are trips to Patagonia, New Zealand, the Norwegian Fjords, Alaska, Bali, Scotland, the English Lake District, Iceland, and the Northwest Territories in Canada. I have a husband who wants me to spend time in France, and a daughter that wants me to go with her to Morocco.

Right now, however, I have no plans to do any of the above. In addition to Switzerland, and driving my sister’s truck cross-country,  I’ve been to Maine five times this year, and after our family wedding in Texas this fall, I’ll be home for a long duration. Maybe in the spring I’ll visit our daughter in California, and then next summer help our other daughter move, but that’s it with my out of pocket plans for next year, other than a plein air retreat in June and teaching at camp in Maine next August.

How do you deal with people that always talk about themselves and never ask you anything?

This is all too frequent, and I understand where this question is coming from. My husband says that people only listen to one radio station, WIIFM (What’s in it for me).  I try to model interest in others, but if that is not returned, you can choose to minimize that contact or start to follow suit and volunteer all your own information like they do. Some folks seem to think a mutual download is a conversation, and don’t know how else to converse.

With this blog I put out a lot, so I’m always more interested in hearing about others, for my info is already out there if anyone was interested. In person, I tend to balance the scale very far in the other direction, and am a listener more than a contributor. Add on top of that, I listen professionally to others as my work, where I’m rarely asked anything that pertains to me. Maybe this is why I appreciate my blog readers so much, and am so grateful for the outlet of this blog, where I at least have the illusion of being heard.

You quote your mother saying, “Copying is not art,” but what about the early masters? Were they not making art?

First of all, the early masters were painting before cameras, so sometimes their job was to be a literal recorder. But when Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, he choreographed a mood, a color scheme, a smirk, a whole mystique. Mona Lisa must have had other attributes he chose not to display, and in this way his work became art more than rendering. Michelangelo, was not copying figures onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he was working from his imagination, depicting forms, gesture, and posture from a life full of studying these things. It was a synthesis that could have come only through him. Turner skies likewise are art and not copies.

I quote “copying is not art,” to help rid people of the belief that artists need to make something look photo realistic in order for it to be good. People think if they’ve achieved an exact likeness, they’ve done well, and they feel validated from succeeding at that. However, we now have cameras for that, so why bother replicating anything?  Art is made when a work expresses something only you could have done. It should ooze your feelings, your response, your perspective, your unique process, your synthesis. This connects with your audience way more than the most exact technical skill does. By contrast, a copy is lifeless, inert, and redundant.

What recipes are you making to freeze right now?

Here are some links to the recipes we’ve recently made to freeze:

Green Bean Soup

Sweet Corn Chowder

Roasted Tomato Sauce Method

Slow Roasted Roma Tomatoes

What new things do you want to learn?

This could be a huge list. Mostly, they are next steps to things I’ve been working on learning for quite a while. Here is just the tip of it:

• I want to learn to heal a paraplegic– or any extreme case– systematically, in just one Christian Science treatment.
• I want to learn how to actually do what is best for myself.
• I want to learn Lightroom, Procreate, Adobe Rush, and Canva.
• I want to learn how to draw better and actually get sketching practice in.
• I want to learn how to sell my artwork to just the right buyers.
• I want to learn to not interrupt my husband.
• I want to learn how to build a lasting and meaningful legacy.

Send me any questions you want me to answer next month…