Christmas Trees

Hello there my favorite tiny people!

 

Today is going to be Christmas at my house, so that your Uncle Patrick and I don’t have to bring our presents to each other all the way down to Florida just to bring them back home again – so I’m having bonus Christmases this year!  We also had Christmas last Saturday with your second cousins (who are also on the list of my favorite tiny people, except they forgot to stay tiny and have totally grown up on me.  Their names are John and Joseph, and they are now both totally bigger than Uncle Patrick – it’s so very strange when the small people in your life get bigger than you!), but it’s a Christmas-palozza in my world right now!

 

And with that, I decided to share some art that doesn’t come attached to famous names – Christmas tree art!  These are all pictures I found on the internet of unusual and beautiful Christmas trees.  I don’t know who made them, but each of them is lovely and interesting and totally the work of the hands of an artist, even if maybe they don’t think of themselves as one!  My tree at home is very traditional.  It’s made of a green plastic tree shaped bits and has multi-colored lights and pretty multi-colored ornaments (most of them handmade by someone I love) and it is amazing and beautiful and every time I turn it on and look at it, it fills my heart up with happy, because I remember all the beautiful Christmases Uncle Patrick and I have had.  But I would love to make an artsy tree sometime, out of sticks or books or antlers…but my most favorite thing here is the lady that turned her hair into a tree, or the one that made the crazy tree-dress …and the parents that turned their baby into a tree.  Because these are some seriously awesome people, and their pictures just make me laugh and feel happy – and that’s what Christmas is all about for me!

 

I hope you enjoy seeing some unusual trees, I can’t wait to see you tomorrow, and know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

Manuel D Baldemor

Morning, ladies!

 

Happy Thursday to you on this last Thursday before Christmas 2014! 

 

Yesterday your Auntie had a Christmas party at work.  It was in a fancy place, with a big ballroom, and they had REALLY LOUD music….which was good, because it meant your Auntie didn’t have to talk to people as much as I would have if it had been quiet, but was also bad, because some of it was quite good music, but a work party is not an appropriate place for dancing, and you know how much I love to dance!  There was a lot of food, and for dessert there were TRULY excellent brownies, though. So all in all, despite the fact that I had to make chit-chat for several hours, it was an okay party.

 

The artist I’ve chosen for this week is Manuel Baldemor, specifically for this piece right below, which just feels amazingly Christmas-y to me, without actually having a single Santa or Christmas tree in it.  I love the bright colors, like twinkling Christmas lights, and all the lovely stars.  It looks like a very magical village that is just before dawn on Christmas morning, and they’re about to have a wonderful day.

 

All of his work that I’ve seen has these amazing, super bright colors, which I love – art people will tell you that you can’t do that, that you have to put neutral tones in the painting to make the bright colors pop – and that really does work - , but my favorite pieces tend to be the ones that are just full of lots of crazy bright colors all at once.  They just look happy.  Aren’t the mountains in the last one AMAZING?  They look like Van Gogh, but not.  I think that’s because when he was young he was trained as a wood carver – so he kept that style of using shapes that are simple to create layered images.

 

Manuel is from Laguna, in the Philippines, was born in 1947 and is still very much alive and painting.

Next week we’ll be celebrating Christmas together, so I’ll see you then!

 

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

xoxoxo

 

 

Thomas Kinkade

Oh My Goodness…how has another week gone by already?  This time of year always seems to go so fast!  It’s snowy here in New Jersey today, so things look pretty, but it’s cold.  When I sit at my desk to work, the desk is cold, so it sucks all the heat out of my arms where they touch the desk!  Terrible.  I am not a fan of winter.

 

I’m looking forward to getting down there to see you in just two weeks! 

 

This week’s Christmas artist is Thomas Kinkade.  He is probably one of the most reproduced artists in the world, because he was a genius at mass marketing of art.  At one point I remember hearing someone say that one out of every 20 homes in America had something in it with a Thomas Kinkade print on it.  When I worked for Avon products, we had a bunch of knick-knacks with his stuff on them.  I actually hate that.  My favorite thing about paintings is the texture of the paint – being able to see the brush strokes, and feel the movement of the artists hand….so when you take a lovely, big painting, and turn it into a tiny print on a coffee cup, it just seems kind of yucky to me.  However, doing that allowed Thomas Kinkade to make a lot of money, and to share his art with a huge number of people who otherwise would never have been able to afford an original painting for their homes, so I give him props for that.

 

He was called the “painter of light”, but the funny thing is that he chose that name for himself, and he kind of stole it from J.M.W. Turner (I’ll tell you about him some other time).  A lot of art critics didn’t like his work, saying it was meaningless.  But for a whole lot of people, his work showed a lovely and kind of idealistic world that they’d want to be part of if they could, so I think that has a meaning all by itself.   And I do think his paintings are really beautiful….but….

 

One critic said that his work had “such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel.” And when I read that, I realized that’s a perfect description of how I see his work.  It’s beautiful and kind of perfect, and the lights always seem to glow, but there’s just a little bit of an undercurrent to all that perfectness that I don’t like at all…but that’s exactly what makes his work interesting to me!

 

Anyway, here are two of his Christmas paintings, and a springtime cottage, so you can see for yourself.  Can’t you just see a Grinch hiding behind that snowman, waiting for carolers to walk up so he can steal their figgy pudding, the monster that’s about to rise up out of that perfect lake, or a witch lurking inside that last cottage, ready to eat Hansel and Gretel when they come through the door?  So, not very Christmas-sey of me, but they are beautiful paintings no matter what you see in them!

 

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

xoxoxoxoxo

 

Norman Rockwell

Morning, my lovely ladies!

 

Can you believe it’s December already?  It’s snowed three times in the last week here in New Jersey, but thankfully it’s warm enough that it hasn’t really stuck.  I’m just not ready for snow.  I hate snow.  I love it while it’s falling, but when it hits the ground and gets all dirty and turns into gray yuck on the roads, I HATE snow.  I’m hoping this is my last ever cold weather winter & we can move south this spring!!

 

I heard you had a lovely Thanksgiving, complete with bouncy castles, dogs, and broken ankles?   Aside from the broken ankle part, sounded like a good time!

 

Since we’re in December, I’m going to see if I can find Christmas related art over the next few weeks.  For this first one, I’m choosing one of the best known Santa Claus painters of all time, Norman Rockwell.  He painted lots and lots of things (he was an artist for The Saturday Evening Post, a weekly newspaper, for almost 50 years and in that time had their cover piece more than 300 times – and that wasn’t the only thing he painted for!)

 

Norman was born in 1894 in New York.  When he was a young man, he wanted to enlist to be in World War I, but he was a really tall, skinny guy, so they told him he was underweight.  He went home and stuffed himself full of bananas and doughnuts, and in just one night gained the 8 pounds he needed to be able to enlist!!  That’s a LOT of bananas! 

 

His artwork is very realistic, very detailed, and it always seems very sweet to me…and I love his Santa Claus paintings best of all – he always painted Santa with chubby red cheeks and a big white beard and black combat boots, and that is exactly how I think Santa should look.  I think it’s interesting that in his picture of Santa making his list for the trip around the world, it looks like he painted him wearing a Yarmukle!   

  

So that’s why Norman Rockwell is my first choice of Christmas artists.

More to come!

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

xoxoxoxo

 

 

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Oh my gosh, how did another week go by already?  Wow, that last one just FLEW!!!  This week your Auntie is taking training at work on cash flow.  Which is actually kind of fun, but takes up a whole lot of time…and I’m due there in just a few minutes again this morning, so I’d better type really fast if I want to get a message out to you this week!  We’re talking about the difference between cash and profits in a company – which is interesting stuff, because you can have lots of profits and it SEEMS like when that happens your business is probably doing really well, but if you don’t also have cash, it’s really hard to keep a business running!   But I’m thinking that the nuance of accounting probably isn’t the most interesting thing to you guys, so that’s all I’ll say about that.

 

We’re just one week from Thanksgiving, so that’s super fun, too.  Your Uncle Patrick’s brother, Johnny, and our two newphews, John Jr and Joseph are coming to our house for Thanksgiving dinner.  So it’s going to be me and a bunch of big, hungry boys!  They will probably talk about football a lot.  But then again, they will probably also give me lots of compliments on my chocolate-pecan pie (and not one of them is going to think they’re a better cook than I am or be jealous because I got to make the dessert), so it’s not always the worst thing to feed dinner a pack of men.  J  I’ll try to take some pictures to show you.  You guys take some at your Thanksgiving, too!

 

This week I’ve picked Guiseppe Arcimboldo as my artist to introduce you to.  Big G (as I’ve decided to call him, because his name is too hard for me to type over and over) lived in the late 1500s, and he’s famous for painting people made of vegetables and fruit.  Which I’d guess would have made him a big-time weirdo back in the day, because back then everybody else who was famous for painting was mostly doing very serious religious type things, or maybe bowls of fruit…but certainly not people made of fruit!!  Then again, people in this time-frame were a little obsessed with strange and ugly things (someday I’ll show you Leonardo Da Vinci’s creepy head sketches), so maybe he fit right in.  But Big G was certainly doing something that was unique, and I like him a lot for that.  I’m also really impressed with the crazy level of detail he worked into each piece.

 

His man made of books makes me think of the cubist movement, which wouldn’t happen for a very long time after Big G was a painter.  I love the round onion cheeks in the second one, but my favorite one of his is the guy with branches in his head that  look like antlers – because the face is SO SO SO ugly, but the flowers are so bright and perfect and beautiful…and he has antlers.  Who doesn’t want antlers? J

 

In any case, have a wonderful week, and know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and Kisses,

Auntie Paula

XOXOXO

 

 

 

 

John Seward Johnson II

Hello and happy Thursday, lovely ladies!

GramE is here with me in New Jersey this week!  We've been having lots of fun. 

GramE and her friend Andi went to a wonderful art place this week, so we're going to use him as the artist this week.  It was a beautiful place with gardens and hundreds of sculptures and they got to walk around and look at all the art and she wishes you could have seen it with her!

The sculptors name is John Seward Johnson II, but he's mostly known as just Seward Johnson.  His family is the same one as Johnson & Johnson - like the people who make band aids and baby shampoo, and he's also a cousin to an actor named Michael Douglas.

Seward was born in 1930, and I'm pretty sure he's still alive today.  He started out as a painter, but I can't find any of his work and GramE says that what she saw in the museum didn't impress her too much - she's glad he switched over to sculpture!

Some of his sculptures are HUGE, and some are people sized, but most of them are of people, no matter how gigantic they might be.  Most of them are cast in bronze, and then he has people who help him finish it...which some art people have a problem with.  Some of his sculptures are inspired from famous paintings, and he makes life sized people that look like they stepped out of the painting - which I think is pretty cool, but is another thing the snooty art people don't like....so maybe what I like best about Seward is that even though throughout his art career a whole lot of people gave him heck about his work, he didn't let it get him down, and he kept creating beautiful, fun things, and he built this wonderful park that people can go and interact with and enjoy!  I love art that people can touch.

I'm going to show you three of his sculptures, and the famous thing that inspired them - two were from paintings and one is from a photograph; I'm very impressed that he could take something two dimensional and turn it into a sculpture!

That's all for now - I have to go spend time with GramE before she leaves!

Know that I love you and think that you're awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

xoxoxoxo

Gene Davis

Hello wonderful Misses Shannon and Eva!

 

How are you today?  It was cold this morning, so of course, as I shivered on my way to work I thought of my lovely Florida nieces, all warm and happy down there in the sunshine state.  I’m looking forward to seeing you at Christmas, but of course, first we need to have Thanksgiving.  J

 

So last weekend your uncle and I, and some very fun friends of ours went to a thing called the “Pumpkin Blaze” where there are THOUSANDS of carved pumpkins, made into amazing things – it was AWESOME. Check out some of the things we saw there!

 

  

 

So that was my artistic adventure for the week.  I totally want to make pumpkin sculptures now.

 

But I also want to introduce you to a new artist, and this guy is pretty cool. Gene Davis at one time had the record for the world’s largest artwork (most of his work happened in the 1960s and 70s).  It was called Franklin’s Footpath, and was happy colored painted lines in a street in Philadelphia.  How pretty would it be if all streets looked like that?

 

He also did work with light and color in other mediums, like this awesome piece called “Sun Sonata”, made of tubes of liquid lit from behind.  Isn’t it beautiful?

 

A lot of his work was kind of stripey, and colorful, but some was black and white, and he used a lot of different stuff to make it.  I like that it’s not matchy stripes, but there’s a rhythm to it so it almost pulsates – like music made in colors.  Sun Sonata reminds me of the UFOs in a movie called “Close Encounters” that was way before your time, but was pretty cool when I was a kid.  The aliens communicated for the first time with people through patterns in light and music.

 

So that is a bit about Gene Davis!

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

xoxoxoxo

 

Ray Villafane

Hello, ladies! 

 

Happy almost Halloween!  I am SOOOO happy it’s Halloween season!  The trees are all changing colors and beautiful, the air is cool, and we have a wonderful excuse to eat candy!  Halloween is the best holiday ever.   J  Plus it’s your uncle Patrick and my 10^th anniversary!  So I am quite happy this week.  You must send me pictures of yourselves in your fabulous costumes!

 

I keep forgetting to mention, if you want to send something back (like pictures of you in costume!  Or of your artwork!), all you have to do is send an e-mail to pshaughnessy1313.newpost@blogger.com and it will show up as a post on this blog – that’s easier than getting a password to comment, I think.

 

So for this week I’m going non-traditional again, and in honor of my favorite holiday, want to introduce you to the world of Ray Villafane, one of the most famous pumpkin carving artists in the world! 

 

Ray is from NY, and actually was an art teacher and decided to try making a sculpture of a comic book character – Wolverine – and ended up becoming a pretty famous sculptor of comic characters, but he’s also a brilliant pumpkin sculptor and sand castle artist!  I love that he’s able to do a lot of different things, and his pumpkins are just amazing.  I love to carve pumpkins, but it’s always SUCH a mess, and the goop on the inside always feels so cold and yukky….so I don’t always do it.  But seeing things like what Ray Villafane can do totally inspires me to try it more!  He’s a seriously amazing artist no matter what medium he’s working in! 

 

Here are a few of my favorite Ray pumpkins.  My favorite from a technical perspective is the last one, with the zipper, because it actually looks like soft, moving fabric as the zipper opens….but I really love the monster fish the best.  I had one of those painted on the side of my old car!

 

In any case, have a wonderful Halloween, and know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

XOXOXOXOXO

 

        

 

 

 

 

Latest project

Hey pretty ladies!

Just wanted to send you a picture of my latest art project!! 

This was for a "mystery build" at work - where you get a kit with some random supplies and you have to make something out of it.  I had a pile of coffee filters, some paper plates, some pipe cleaners, and a few paper masks.

It's a bouquet, with an homage to "Audrey II" from Little Shop of Horrors. which is a really weird movie/play about a plant that eats people. 

The roses are my favorite part - they're made of coffee filters and food coloring! 

The Audrey (the green one with teeth) is made from tinfoil and tissues and paint.  I think it turned out great!

:)   I love the chance to get creative!  And what a fun project for Halloween week!

Cake Art

Good morning, my loveliest of small people!  And happy birthday week to Miss. Eva!

 

I hope you’re having a fun and spectacular Thursday and getting ready for a fabulous birthday time.  Wish I could be there to celebrate with you!

 

Today, in honor of Eva’s Birthday, I give you….famous art about cakes!  J

 

There’s Andy Warhols’ “Wild Raspberries” series

 

And John Tenniel’s “Through the Looking Glass” – which has a lion and a unicorn sharing a cake with Alice in Wonderland!

 

And Paul Cezanne’s “The Buffet” – which has more fruit than cake, so I probably shouldn’t count it, but I’m pretty sure those are twinkie like cakes off on the right of this painting.  And there’s lots more – especially from photographers; because it’s so pretty, there are TONS of beautiful art pictures of cake!  Cake is awesome.

 

 

And then there are people who make art out of cake – the bakers/cake artists are usually not famous, but they should be, because the cakes they make are so crazy beautiful!  Do you recognize the artists that inspired the cakes below?  We’ve talked about each of them.  J

 

In any case, here’s hoping you have an amazing week, and know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

xoxoxoxo

 

Wolf Kahn

Good morning, lovely ladies!

 

Happy Thursday to you!  Today it’s raining like mad here in NJ.  It’s hot and humid and feeling very much NOT like October 16^th should feel!  Blergh.  I am having another interesting hair day.  My hair is HUGE today.  Massive.  It has made a giant, uncontrollable frizzball all around my head.  However, I will pretend that it is lovely and angelic – a shining aura of curls -  and hope that nobody thinks I look like a crazy person…but they probably do.

 

Today is also Boss’s Day.  So I am meant to celebrate my boss, even though most of the time he makes me a little bit nuts-o.  So I brought him a blue star shaped mylar balloon and tied it to his chair.  He was extremely happy about it, and this amuses me.  But really, who doesn’t get happy when someone gives them a balloon?  J

 

Today’s artist is Wolf Kahn.  He was born in Germany in 1927 and is still alive today, but he lives in the United States now.   I think he’s technically considered a “modern abstract” painter, but most of his work that I’ve seen are landscapes, so I’m not sure it’s really all that abstract to me!  What I like about Wolf (other than that his name is Wolf, which is too awesome for words), is how he uses colors.  He uses a lot of really vivid, fabulously happy colors – a lot of times colors that you wouldn’t really see in a landscape in real life, like the lilac colored trees in the first one or the teal grass in the second..but close enough to something you MIGHT see, if the light was just right, that it still looks right) , but he always puts some muddy, neutral-y colored things in there, and that makes the bright happy things look so much MORE bright and happy.  That’s something I have trouble doing when I paint – I want EVERYTHING to be bright, happy colors, and it doesn’t work as well as this! 

 

And I love, love, love the clouds reflected in the water on the last one. They’re perfect.  I want to touch that painting, to feel if it has a nubby texture like it looks like it does.

 

So that’s a little bit about Wolf Kahn and his awesome paintings.

I hope you have a wonderful day today.

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

xoxoxoxo