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Green therapy, mud sketching on recycled paper!

The weather is been fantastically good, so in order to give an art lesson outdoors to the kids and enjoy the sunshine, I have taken them outside in the school playground/pound area for painting.

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By dipping a paintbrush in the water pound, and mixing it with soil, you can create beautiful earthy shades, pretty much the same principle as watercolour.

By breaking grass and smudge it on paper you can make a shade of green, and by using a burned wood stick you can create some chalky black. Using only these natural pigmentations from nature you can create 100% organic art on recycled paper.

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I have made two organic sketches, one that I prepared at home in my back garden and another one I used for a quick demonstration how it works for the kids.

Here are some of the results:

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Age 9

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Age9

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Age9

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Age 10

For more school art lessons check out my blog at Life of a Mother Artist
More to come…

reinvent your childhood

Suppose you grew up in a place that was ravaged with destruction, imagined, imaginary or real, where would you subsequently gravitate?

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a child’s horse

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This horse is the earliest painting by Karl that I treasure. The cheap acid paper has darkened with time. The purple/maroon colors have faded. Time to archive the horse as a digital print. Taking the frame apart for the removal of the glass, I noticed that the paints were absorbed on the foam board backing so that I now the original painting plus a print of it.

Was the hand of the small child directed by something bigger than himself to paint the lines of the horse’s head given his tender age? The lines makes me think of Zen. more… »

how to move on?

“If you come to a fork in the road, take it”, David recently quoting Yogi Berra.

How can I prepare for such a change in direction while avoiding mishaps? Friends of mine, relocating to new jobs, suffered minor strokes and a bout of pancreatitis. This is the advice offered in the current Yoga journal:

“Once you find your center, you can move in new directions”.
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Dune Quest

I tried out my new camera along one of the beaches at Sleeping Bear Dunes. Cotton wood trees survive here in the migrating sand because they can grow new root systems higher up on their stems as needed.

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joyous view of manhattan

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Happy faces from all windows of a skyscraper merging with the blue sky as painted by a little girl visiting her grandparents in Manhattan in the 1970s.

The grandparents, living in an apartment complex of the garment district, introduced Nina to the culture of this big city.

The Jewish grandparents led a complicated life, balancing jobs with their struggle for social justice in this country, and to their granddaughter, they offered the unsullied joys of Manhattan.

Disasters happen, skyscrapers may topple. This painting celebrates the possibility of joy and innocence.

whiffs of north american modesty

In the 1960’s, parents were admonished to keep their toddlers in bathing trunks by a sign on Jones beach created by Robert Moses. In contrast, healing diaper-sore bottoms on the beach is luxury for European children. ‘Nakedei’ is an affectionate German term for a naked toddler.

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