Connecting Artists to the Community with Education, Therapy and Fun

since the blog has been updated~ so much has happened and life is busy.

First, Miracle's portrait is finished :) The look on her face is due to the concentration she had while drawing me at the same time I was drawing her. The best way to teach portraiture is to do portraiture. 

The primary colors is from her strength and the squiggles is due to the energy the girl has, lots of it... The shirt she made is great, too, must upload pics of the rest of the kids' work, too. They've all done so well.

The piece has so much glare because it was wet~

If nudes freak you out, look no lower. Me? The human body is not a big deal at all, having drawn in figure drawing class all different shaped and sized figures. You loose sight that its a person and see shapes, colors and line- it really isn't a big deal.

Lavarrah's Soul Portrait is from a picture she gave me to paint in her "20th anniversary of being 20" lol... anyway, she said do whatever I wanted to with it, so I put what I knew of her in it~ she had the bouquet and cards in the background, so I pulled that element into it with the pieces of Martin Luther King (her hero) and Joan Baez (she and her mother went to the concert :) . Funny thing, the date shown is her birthday, the numbers line up right.

The puffy thing to the right is her angel wings and the sparkly thing is her halo that she took off  (along with everything else, ha ha) to have a glass of wine. The grapes is symbolic of abundance and time being her ally.

Her hair was painted in metallic gold and red, the same red in the flower wallpaper--- a spiritual and  fiery temperament. Her New Orleans heritage is shown in the mask to the left. The columns are also symbolic of New Orleans architecture, where she lives now--- humorously named "Mortgage Manor".

The chicken to the right is mine, ha ha, as that was one of our first conversations--- about a chicken painting. The hen is picking at the seeds she's pouring out onto books- her psychology education- and the seeds sprout as her clients (who need some self advocacy training) the "shrinking violets" are turned into strong and tall sunflowers. The sunflowers, strengthened by all that she's helped them do for themselves, sometimes turn into permanent additions to the wallpaper of her life, embossed with fire-red glitter embossing powders... that turns back into the fiery, spiritual temperament we started out with.