Adria Arch

This weekend I decided to try taking my own digital, professional quality images using my little camera - and I think I succeeded. If I can manage to do this, I will save myself lots of $$. Photography expenses can be enormous, but if you have the right light set up and a copy of Photoshop, it is possible. This is a relatively new piece, part of a diptych. I like the use of white and all the little speckles of paint - I embrace the floating world.

Remember Mike Mulligan and His Steamshovel? That book was written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton , an artist who lived north of Boston on Cape Ann. She also founded the Folly Cove Designers, a group of women who printed textile designs carved into linoleum, so successfully that they were featured in a spread in Life magazine in the 1940's. Check her out!

Just returned from a much-needed respite from New England winter. Tucson and Santa Fe. In Tucson, I saw a show of work by Bailey Doogan , who used to teach at the U of Arizona when I was a grad student in the 1970's. Bailey's work is about women's bodies, and she looks unflinchingly at her own aging face in these exquisitely painted portraits. Bailey started her art career as a graphic designer, and is famously unknown as the woman who updated the Morton Salt girl in the late 1960's. Tucson has a funky old downtown area that has been embraced by the local art scene. Congress St., 6th Ave., and of course of 4th Ave. are great haunts for artists and art lovers who are looking for more than cowboy art or desert landscapes.