While I enjoy writing very much, it is the opportunity to sketch my characters in a poem or a story that truly helps them to evolve in my mind. Evolution is the improvement in form that helped birds and bats to fly, for fish to come up on land, and for some creatures to return to the sea that spawned them. We all want to evolve to be more than we were before.

It is still painful for me to recall the automobile accident that curtailed my potential artistic career. I thought I had truly said farewell to painting and sketching as a tremor kept my hand from the steadiness I had enjoyed in the past. Years went by; many years went by before I returned to sketching and eventually painting. While I can look back over the years of progress, I have made there is disappointment that I had so many years of not sketching, not painting. The pandemic that curtailed our lives in so many ways as forced me to exercise my hand to paint and sketch every single day for a whole year.

Time is precious and it did not take the loss of better than a half a million lives to make me realize that we should all seize the moment to do that thing we had dreamed of doing and talking ourselves out of it because it was frivolous or unessential. Now there is a word we have heard daily in life or death consequences’ essential. Being able to see ourselves achieving something in real life we had only allowed ourselves to dream of is affirming to our spirit. At least that is how I feel when a sketch or a paining becomes exactly what I wanted.

For me painting is the frosting on the cake as far as art is considered, unless it is iridescent pastels added to a watercolor pastel painting, then it is lustrous magic I have been pining for. Art museums are off the agenda at least until we can safely consider air travel. My collection of books on artists is how I satisfy that hunger, and Marc Chagall has been my coffee date for many days. Marc Chagall survived religious persecution, the Spanish flu, two World Wars, and gave us art to believe that dreams really can come true. 

My watercolor/pastel The Dream is on Arches cold press paper, drawn with Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Aquarelle pastels and accented with Sennelier soft iridescent pastels.