Welcome June. A soft rain is falling and there's a strong breeze which helps keep it cool. The pressure is dropping. There are tornado warnings out for the outlying counties around Baltimore. I just came in from walking Lupé. It's kind of nice outside in a stormy kind of way.

I'm doing some of the signage (four word and symbol banners) for the show at AVAM this fall so that's going to be a new project for me. I welcome it because I'm still not making any headway with a new direction for myself. So maybe this summer will just be a summer of other projects. That's okay. I've also got the 2013 Art House Sketchbook Project I'm working on here and there.

I'm glad it's Friday and the weekend is here.
Lupé is being real clingy today. Unusual for her.
Nothing else is new.


The rooftop of Gaudi's Casa Mila, in Barcelona. Figural looking sculptures are actually working chimneys!

A church in the Pyrenees.


Fresh fruit in Barcelona.


Part of the Park Güell in Barcelona, designed by Gaudi

San Sebastian by day



and by night

We stayed in a hotel on top of a hill and had to take a funicular to get to and from. The views were amazing!

Casa Batllo by Gaudi, in Barcelona.

I've been looking through old pictures from our trip to Spain in (I think) 1996. Barcelona was one of the high points. It's such a beautiful city. I think maybe the most beautiful city in the world, or at least of the ones I've visited. The architecture by Gaudi was a strong point for me, as I adore his work.



It was a great trip. We landed in Barcelona and then rented a car and drove along the Pyrenees to Pamplona, St. Sebastian and then Bilbao to see the new Guggenheim museum.


The emphasis was on architecture for that trip and we saw some wonderful examples. We also saw plenty of other stuff too. I wish I could go back. Barcelona is such a wonderful city. I wish I had the ability to blink myself to a different location, kind of like Jeannie on "I Dream of Jeannie"-- if I did, I'd blink myself to Barcelona for a few days. How refreshing that would be.

I remember this.

I rather sloppily rebound the Art House Sketchbook Project sketchbook today. It's been a long time since I've sewn quarters together and it was very sloppy but the stitches held and with some glue I think the thing will hold together. Mainly I wanted to replace the crappy paper they give you with some good Arches watercolor paper--I used some heavy weight smooth hot press paper. The stuff they give you in the sketchbook is so thin you can't even draw with a flair pen without it seeping through to the back side. Ridiculous. You have to pay $25. to get into the project, you think they could give you something you could actually DRAW in.

I used the crappy paper last year when I did it but it really was pretty crappy and since I like to use water media I figured I should try to beef it up some. I think I'm going to do faces this year.

It's Preakness Day and I live within earshot of the track. Which means that helicopters and blimps are endlessly circling overhead. Doesn't bother me though. It's a gorgeous day. I wish I were going to the race. Sad to say, I've never actually been to the Preakness even though I've lived so close all these years. DOH!! time I should do something about that!

There isn't a cloud in the sky, it's in the 70º's and just beautiful. Kind of like the average day in California. We've had a week of this weather and it's just been heaven.

I've got zero to do. Rebecca Hoffberger and the curator of the show at the AVAM that I'm in, came by on Thursday and selected a final 12 theaters that will go in the circular display case of mine. I thought they were going to take all 24 but I guess they don't have room for them. They're putting the display in a circular room that's going to be lined with my sketchbook pages-- so all in all it sounds like a really nice display. They also had a very hard time picking out the 12 because they really did want them all and even more. So that is what it is. I'm a little let down but not really. Because the whole thing is just incredibly wonderful and I'm thrilled beyond thrilled.

I'm reading Jack London's "The People of the Abyss" on my iPad. It chronicles the slums of London around the turn of the last century. What an awful pigsty of humanity that was! It also has a lot of pertinence with regard to the current state of the homeless in our society. Things have changed but they also haven't changed.


Old pastel called Bad Luck and My Old Friends.

I swear, it's all I can do to update this thing weekly. I remember when I had one or more posts a day! What's happened? Am I bored with it-- more like bored with my life and nothing to say about it. I'm barely working on anything. Squeezed out a coastline last week but that's really drying up. New direction just isn't coming. And I'm not doing anything about finding it. I don't know how to find it. I've been to museums-- bleh. I'm reading books-- bleh. I just can't seem to get a direction that I want to take. I should do more stuff, but what? and how? Everything is a big question mark to me.

And this (above) is the essential point in my life from which everything else stems. I went to water aerobics this morning. So good for me! At least I did that much.

It's warming up in the 80º's outside. Still pleasant though. I walked Lupé. So I did THAT.
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glub
glub

this is the coastline of Iceland

glub

I'm way behind on Live Journal reading-- finally got boxes for the Art-O-Mat project but discovered that all of my previous Art-o-Mat work had disappeared when a folder on my desktop mysteriously disappeared last week. It's all gone. I replaced from the back up drive but I hadn't backed up since before I did the Art-O-Mat stuff so I'm back to square one on all of that. Sigh....