Lee Teter's Vietnam Reflections

Good morning my favorite small humans!

 

Today is the Tuesday after Memorial Day, and I’ll be in Florida to help Gram-E unpack boxes in just a few days!  I am extremely excited! J 

 

I’m going to have to keep it short this week,  because since I’m taking a vacation day on Friday and yesterday was a day off, I have an AWFUL lot to get done…but I chose a piece of art that goes with Memorial Day to show you this time.

 

Lee Teter is an American artist who does historical paintings.  The one I’m attaching is probably his most famous.  What I think is incredibly cool about Lee is that to help him become a great historical painter, he spent a lot of years living without modern conveniences…he stayed in a tiny cabin in the mountains and rode a horse for transportation…in the 1960s and 70s, which wasn’t all that long ago and awesome things like cars and central heating were certainly available if he had wanted them!  I would not do well without modern conveniences – especially the water heater (I love hot showers!) and air conditioning in the summer.

 

Lee is also well known for burning a lot of his paintings that he doesn’t think turn out well.  That’s kind of interesting.  We all have projects that don’t work out quite right – I tend to paint over mine so I can re-use the canvases, but a lot of people hang on to their “bad” stuff and it clutters up their lives something awful…so I respect that he just gets rid of the things that don’t make him happy and think that’s very smart.

 

This is his painting “Vietnam Reflections” (although it’s not a very good picture of it – I couldn’t find a really clear one to copy in).  It shows a man standing in front of the Vietnam memorial, which is in Washington D.C. and has the names of the American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War.  The reflection in the memorial are his friends who didn’t make it home.  I think it’s incredibly beautiful and it’s important that we remember that we get to have a day off to have fun and celebrate with our friends and family on Memorial Day because a lot of good men and women serve in our military to help keep us free! 

 

I hope you had a wonderful Memorial Day, and I’m sure I’ll see you for a bit this weekend!

 

Love you tons, and know that I think you’re awesome.

Auntie Paula

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello, Miss Shannon!

Well, hello!  I loved your letter - much fun!! 

 

Spending some time with Grandpa Lou for his birthday sounds awesome - will you get to see some of your cousins, too?  And I DEFINITELY want to see pictures of what you make at the glass factory - that sounds AMAZING.  I've always wanted to try that & haven't gotten to yet, so I'm pretty jealous!

 

I am going to spend most of my summer working, since they don't give summer breaks from my job - pretty much just teachers get that deal.  Your Uncle Patrick and I are taking a week of vacation, but we'll be headed out to Washington State (on the far west side of the country) to look for Bigfoot - this year is our tenth wedding anniversary (at Halloween), so we wanted to use our vacation time to do something kind of cool and different.   We rented awesome cabins near Mt Rainier and on the Snohomish river, out in the woods...I'm REALLY looking forward to it.  I'll take lots of awesome pictures to share with you, though!

 

I would love to try your bow & arrow - that's very cool.   And maybe when I come down this weekend to help Gram-E with the unpacking we'll get to spend a little time together - and if I don't make it back down this summer, Uncle Patrick and I are planning to be there for sure at Christmas time, so we should get to see you then!

 

:)  I will send another artist later this week!  I'm glad you're enjoying them! 

You rock!!

Hugs and Kisses,

Auntie P

 

 

From shay

Hey auntie Paula! I'm really sorry I haven't written to u yet. I've just been super busy with school ,homework, and all of that boring stuff. But anyway,I think that those paintings are just super cool! Here are the answers to some of your questions. There are 7 days of school left, but the only good part about that is that my class will have a huge party every day until school gets out. This summer, my family is going to New York to spend grandpa Lou's birthday with him! We are going to go at a glass factory to make our own glass! For me it was pretty hard to choose what I was going to make. In the end, I chose to make blown glass! I can't wait! If I can figure out how, I will send you a picture of what I did at the glass factory! Now, I have some questions for you to answer! how are you going to spend your summer? Maybe, you can buy a plane ticket, and fly down to Florida! There are so many amazing things to do down here! If you're interested, you could try my bow and arrow! There are so many things we could do, I can't even remember them all! If you come down, and if it's hot enough, we could go to cocoa beach, Daytona Beach, and a bunch of others! We could watch movies, we could go swimming, we could ride bikes, and you can even teach me some of your amazing art skills! Please please please please please come down this summer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In your next letter, mention if you got this letter. Bye! I miss you. Come down as soon as you get a chance. See you soon.

Leonid Afremov's Palette knife paintings

Hello there my favorite small human beings!!

 

How are you?  How many days are left in the school year at this point?  Are you excited about summer?  What are you planning to do with your free time?

 

Last night I finished my final assignment for my Andy Warhol class – it was a term paper.  The last time I had to write a term paper was probably 15 years ago.  I have not missed it.  In the work world you tend to write power point presentations with things in bullet points, or at least that’s how it works in MY work world.  I never write whole paragraphs anymore!  But I did it, I turned it in, and I am very proud of myself.  J  So yay!

 

As mentioned, I went searching for a famous palette knife painter to use in my letter to you this week.   I’ve chosen my all time favorite, a guy who is still living and painting right now named Leonid Afremov.  He’s kind of famous, but there isn’t a lot of stuff written about him, the way there is on Georgia O’Keeffe or Vincent Van Gogh.  Maybe because he’s still making new work! 

 

I hope to be able to paint half as well as he does some day.  He was born in Russia, but later moved to Israel, then to the United States, and now he lives in Mexico!  I think that’s pretty cool- can you imagine living in countries all over the world?  He must speak a lot of languages.  He also teaches classes….some of them are on-line, but I don’t really like on-line classes.  But maybe someday I can go to Mexico and take a painting class from him – that would be AMAZING!

 

I love all of the bright, happy colors he uses in his work; in all of his pieces that I like best he has entire rainbows of color – reds and oranges and yellows and blues and purples…but never very much green.  I don’t know why, but I do know that just looking at his paintings makes me feel happy, and that is what art should do!

 

Know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

 

 

 

PS - Auntie Paula's latest paintings. :)

These are palette knife paintings, which is a style I just started learning this week....kind of fun, yes?  I'll try to find a fun example of a famous palette knife painting for the next time I write to you - I love them!!!

 

Eva's fabulous art! :) Love it, love it, love it!

Tarsila do Amaral's beautiful painting of the moon...and radioactive beavers

Hello, beautiful ladies!

 

Welcome to letter number 8!  It’s now past the middle of May, so I’m guessing things are getting hot down there in Florida – are you getting lots of use out of your pool?  I love to go swimming.

 

This week at my job we’ve been talking a lot about Brazil, because my company has locations down there and the tax codes in Brazil are probably the most complex I’ve ever seen.  Tax codes are not particularly interesting to talk about, but Brazil is pretty cool and some amazing artists have come from there. 

 

My pick for today is Tarsila do Amaral, who was from Brazil & born in 1886. Early in her career, her work isn’t all that interesting to me, but as she got older it got really colourful and vibrant and beautiful.  At one point she talked about how she’d been taught that the colors she had loved as a kid were ugly and unsophisticated, so she stopped using them, but later she decided that she loved them and would use them anyway - which is one of the things I like best about her. 

 

In life, people will always be trying to get you to be what they think you should be…but the definition of what is cool, or beautiful, or sophisticated is always changing, so you can wind up pretty unhappy if you spend your life trying to be those things based on how other people define them; you need to figure out what you like and what makes you happy (and that changes over time, too, but that’s ok!), and love what you love with all your heart, whether it’s bright colors or neutral ones, playing sports or painting pictures, whatever…it doesn’t matter what everybody else likes, the only thing that matters is that you love it.  

 

I can’t find the name of the big painting I’m putting in this letter, but it’s my favourite one of hers.  She’s really famous for the picture of a guy with a tiny head and giant feet, which is kind of funny, but not nearly as pretty as this one.  I love the colors in this, and how the white bands in the sky softly fade out.  I love all the questions that this picture makes me ask.  Is that a guy or a cactus in the front?  Is it/he on the edge of a river, or is it/he standing on top of some kind of ball?  If the moon is the yellow “C” in the sky, then what is the curve behind it? Is it another world somewhere and that’s a bigger planet, hidden behind a belt like around Saturn? It makes me happy to look at this and wonder.  I also like the red/orange one a lot…it looks like radioactive beavers, swimming past the finger of a giant that’s pushing his way up from under the ground.  I’m sure that’s not what it’s supposed to be, that’s just what it looks like to me.

 

 

Know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

Picasso's "Portrait of Sylvette David in Green Chair"...and "Guernica"

Hello, my favourite young people!

 

What’s shaking?  How’s things in the south today?  New Jersey is good – it’s raining again, but the last few days have been really pretty and I have high hopes for the weekend!

 

By the time you get this, it’ll be past Mother’s day, but I hope you had a good one and told your mom how amazing and wonderful and awesome she is!  :)  Moms are awesome!  I would have liked to see my mom for mother’s day, but couldn’t get out to Minnesota – plane tickets are so expensive.  But, soon Gram-E will live down there in Florida, and that’s a little easier to get to – plus, I get to see you guys when I come down there, so that is excellent. 

 

This week I’m sending images of Pablo Picasso’s work.  Picasso is known as one of the most important artists of the 20th century (the 100 years between 1900 and 2000), mostly for his work in Cubism and collage..and he’s pretty famous for putting people’s ears where their mouths should go and things like that, too – very funky.  At one point (in 1911), Picasso was considered a suspect for the theft of the Mona Lisa (a very famous painting) from the Louvre (a very famous art museum), but he didn’t do it.

His most famous painting is “Guernica”, the black and white one I’m putting in here…but I don’t actually like that one.  It’s too weird & sad for me.  It’s about a town that got bombed in the Spanish Civil War.  But, here is the cool thing about Picasso…when people asked him to explain the symbolism in Guernica, he said "It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them."  And I think that is very cool.

 

My favourite cubist piece is Picasso’s “portrait of sylvette david in green chair”.  This week I tried to paint myself in the same style (mine is the one on the right – you can tell it’s me because it has a great big chin, like me) – it was much harder than I was expecting it to be!  This is Auntie Paula, not the official explanation, but Cubist really means taking soft curves and round things and making them hard, flat areas.  So where your neck in the real world is round (which is why necklaces make circles, not squares, in a cubist painting a neck looks more like a box.  The really really cubist paintings kind of look like lots and lots of little boxes arranged in shapes to look kind of like people…which is probably why I like this one better, because it still has some curves and looks like a mostly normal girl (except she does kind of have 2 ears on the one side of her head).

 

 

Know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

 

Auntie Paula's Warhol Project!

FYI, here it is - Auntie Paula makes Panda bears, Warhol style.  :)  Someday when you're old, ask me why I chose pandas!  

Georgia O'Keeffe "Calla Lily Turned Away"

Hello, my lovely ladies!

 

How does Florida find you today?  It’s raining here in New Jersey, and kind of cold.  I don’t think it should be cold in May.  I think it should be sunny and warm and lovely.  I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of the May flowers – which is how I selected the amazing artist I’m going to tell you about today, too!

 

The picture on the back is “Calla lily turned away”, painted in 1923 by Georgia O’Keeffe.  Georgia was a very famous artist, and most of the paintings that people know best are of her close ups of the inside of flowers – she would paint them so that you would see just the inside bits of the flower in the painting, and not the outside edges of the petals.  I’ll find one of her really famous ones that I like a lot to include,too – sometimes she used the most amazing colors! But I like the Calla Lily  one, because it’s very simple, like her more famous pieces, but you can also see the whole flower.  I like that she put just one flower in the picture, instead of filling up the page with lots of them – it seems very elegant, and very peaceful.

 

For a while, Georgia lived in New Mexico and she did a lot of paintings of the land out there, with bright blue skies and the orange/red colored earth that happens out in the west, and those are probably my favourite paintings of hers – I love those colors together! - but most of them also have animal skulls or bones in them (when bones lie in the sun for  a long time they can become very white, and they can be beautiful – but I was afraid they might creep you out, so I didn’t pick one of those to send. 

 

One of the things that I think is really cool about Georgia O’Keeffe was that she didn’t give up when things got hard.  When she was a bit older, she started to lose her vision.  When she couldn’t see to paint any more, she learned to make pottery instead so that she could continue to make art.  I think that’s pretty amazing. 

 

Georgia also is supposed to have said one of my favourite quotes - “I wish people were all trees.  I think I could enjoy them then.”  I think that is brilliant and funny, and as someone who occasionally has trouble talking to people, there are days when I wish people were trees, too.  Or dogs.  I am often much better at talking to dogs than I am at talking to people.

 

Oh, I don’t have a picture, but I used panda bears for my Andy Warhol project – I took a picture of one and copied it over and over and colored each one differently.  It was kind of cool!

 

Know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

 

 

Andy Warhol's Soup Cans, Marilyn Monroe...and Zebra

Hello, ladies!

 

This is now the 5^th letter I’ve written you, but I have not heard back!  Are you there?  Am I boring you with the most well known art in the world? Tough noogies!  Art is important!

 

This week I started taking a new class (I try to learn at least one new thing every year – last year I took a long series of classes on wedding planning, which was a lot of fun, but this year I’m taking something a little shorter and with less homework!).  The class I just started is on an artist named Andy Warhol. 

Andy Warhol is considered the founding father of the “pop art” movement.  The pop stands for “popular”, because a lot of his work focused around celebrities and things that were popular in American culture at the time.  He did a lot of different things, but he’s probably most famous for his portraits of Marilyn Monroe – which he did over and over and over again in lots of different colors, and his painting of a Campbells soup can.  

 

One of Andy’s main points was that the amazing thing about things that become popular – like Campbells soup and Coca-Cola- are that everyone can have them, from celebrities to regular people.  It doesn’t matter if you’re the president of the United States or a girl living in Windermere, Florida – when you get a can of Coke, you get EXACTLY the same thing that the president gets when he gets a can of Coke.  If you go to the store in Florida and get chicken and stars soup (that’s my favourite Campbells), and I go to the store in New Jersey and get chicken and stars soup, and Justin Beiber (or whoever the coolest singer in the world is – I am not down with what you young people are into these days because NOBODY WRITES ME LETTERS AND TELLS ME WHAT’S COOL WITH THE YOUNG CROWD) goes to the store in California to get chicken and stars soup, we all get the same exact soup – he can be the richest, most famous, most amazing singer in the world, and he can’t get a better can of Campbell’s soup than you or I can get.  And that’s kind of cool.

 

However, cans of soup don’t make particularly interesting paintings, if you ask me.  And I kind of think a lot of his paintings of people make them look pretty ugly –he liked to color makeup in really bright and it looks a little odd, and most of the time he duplicated the images over and over again, so that  you think less about the person and more about their celebrity-ness as a thing, just like a can of soup or a banana.

 

I think my favourite Andy Warhol piece is his painting of a zebra.  It reminds me a lot of the zebras on Eva’s green blanket, because it has wonderful bright colors that don’t normally show up on zebras in the regular world…and that is awesome.

 

This week my homework for class is to create an Andy Warhol-ish piece of art for my own, by taking an image of something popular and then re-coloring it and repeating it over and over.  I am finding it VERY hard to choose a subject, but I will try to remember to send you a picture of the finished piece so you can see what I did.

 

So that’s all I have to say about Andy Warhol for now!  Know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome.

 

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

 

Rene Magritte's "Son of Man"

Hello, ladies!

 

Happy Day to you both!  By the time I mail this to you, it’ll almost be the end of April!  Gram-E and Gramp-E will probably be there visiting, and I’m thinking you’ll probably have started counting down the weeks until the end of school!  I know I always did starting in late April. 

 

For this painting I chose Rene Magritte’s “Son of Man”, painted in 1964 (so this one is actually pretty current, compared to the other ones I’ve sent you – Gram-E and Gramp-E were both already alive when this one was painted – and your Mom and Dad were only about 10 years away from being born).  I don’t actually like the painting all that much – it’s a man in a suit with an apple in front of his face – but I really like the interesting interpretations that have happened about it. 

Snooty art historians say that the painting is about the conflict between the person we are on the inside and the person everybody else sees when they look at us…and that by blocking his face with the apple, it forces us to think about the real person behind it, instead of just looking at his face.  That’s pretty deep.  And I like thinking deep thoughts, so that’s cool.  I think the inner me is much more interesting than the outer me – I always wonder if people looking at me have any idea of how truly awesome I really am.  Probably not…I am seriously awesome.

 

BUT…I’m not sure I agree with the snooty art historians…and this is why…when I was in art school and we had to do portraits, almost EVERYBODY had a bunch of them that looked like this.  What would happen is you’d start to do the painting…and you’d get the background to look ok, and you’d get the body shape right, and then you’d start to paint the details of the face, and faces are SUPER hard to get right, and you’d get mad, and you’d paint something silly in front of the face so you didn’t have to look at it any more.  And maybe I’m wrong, but I think that’s exactly what happened here…only for Mr. Magritte, he was able to create an interesting story around it turn it into one of the world’s most famous paintings. 

 

Anyway, that’s “Son of Man” by Rene Magritte.  Just one more painting to love!

 

Hope you are having a wonderful week in the Florida sunshine - know that I love you both very much and think that you are also awesome (it runs in the family)!

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

 

John William Waterhouse's "The Lady of Shalott"

Hello, ladies!

How are things in Florida today?  In NJ it is a lovely, sunny day and it’s finally starting to feel like spring.  However, because it’s spring, the deer that live in the woods behind my house have come out and eaten every single last one of my crocuses (which are very pretty purple flowers that are the first to bloom in the northeast every year).  So I am sad for my pretty flowers today, but happy that the deer had something tasty to eat.  I have tulips that are just starting to come up, but the deer always eat those before they even get the chance to make flowers.  The first few times it happened I was kind of sad about it, but now I just think it’s funny.  I like deer better than flowers anyway.

 

This time I picked a painting called “The Lady of Shalott”- it was painted in 1888 by John William Waterhouse.  He actually painted this painting three different times…a lot of painters do that, which I think is a little funny.  Once I’ve painted something once I usually don’t want to paint the same thing again, I want to paint something new!  Of course, all that practice is probably why these guys are world famous artists and I just paint in my basement.  :)

 

So let me tell you the story on this one…the Lady of Shalott was cursed, and couldn’t look directly at the world, but could only see things through a mirror, and this – of course – made her very sad.  One day she saw Sir Lancelot in her mirror (he’s from Camelot, with King Arthur – he’ll come up in school some day if he hasn’t already), and fell in love with him, causing her to look directly out at the world (ut-oh!) and the curse caused a great storm…this painting is her escaping, just ahead of the storm, out into the world to look for her love.

 

There’s a very famous poem by a poet named Tennyson, and the part that tells this bit of the story goes:

And down the river's dim expanse, Like some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance, With glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day, She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.

I like that she was brave enough to go out into the world to follow her dream (the story doesn’t actually end well for her, but that’s something else entirely).  I like the candles in the boat, and that only one remains lit in the wind – that’s symbolizes of how dangerous her journey is.  I like how she’s finally looking out into the world…and I like her dress.  :)

 

Anyway, hope you are having a wonderful week - know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome!

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

Gustav Klimt’s “Tree of Life”

Hello, ladies!

Hmmm…what interesting thing can I think to talk about to my two favourite non-adults today??  Did you notice the funny spelling on "favourite"?  That's because the company I work for is British – so my computer has a British spell checker, and sometimes it adds the letter "u" in places we American folks don't normally put them. This amuses me and makes me feel fancy.  However, it would not help you out any on your spelling homework, so don't spell like Auntie P! 

 

I'm going to send you another painting I really like – this is a picture of Gustav Klimt's "Tree of Life". He was born in 1862, in Austria, so lived around the same time as Vincent Van Gogh (the guy who painted "Starry Night", but they had very different painting styles.  Gustav used gold paint a lot of the time in his pictures, and a lot of little shapes – circles and squares and spirals.  I like that very much.

 

I don't like his paintings of people so much (which is actually what he mostly did – he tended to paint people's heads on funny angles that make me think their necks must hurt so I don't like to look at them.  His most famous painting is called "The Kiss" and it's a man and woman kissing – she's wearing a beautiful robe (kind of like the ones in this painting) but her head is definitely bent all wrong & it really bothers me), but this one is cool, because I love all the little swirls in the tree, and the crazy patterns in the clothes the people are wearing.  I also like the weird little things living in the tree.  I kind of think they look like hamburgers with eyes.  Someone told me once they were supposed to be butterflies, but I don't see it. 

 

The bird in the tree (the black shape near the middle) reminds me of something Egyptian because of the way it's eye is shaped.

 

Anyway, hope you are having a wonderful week - know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome!

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

 

 

 

 

The very first letter - Van Gogh's Starry Night

Hello, ladies!

Now that one of you has turned 10, I thought I’d try to write once in a while to get to know you better.  Having reached the advanced age of 38 myself, I’m not totally sure what young ladies talk about, so you’ll have to write back and tell me what’s interesting to you, and what’s going on in your lives.

I don’t think details about my job would be very interesting to you (I work in finance for an oil company, so spend most of my day trying to understand how the decisions other people make – mostly the ones about what to make, and when or how to make it - will impact the amount of money the company I work for has, or sometimes, when I’m lucky, helping them make those decisions).  That takes up most of my time every week, but it’s not really very interesting.

When I was you age, Eva, I wanted to be an astronaut or a princess, and when I was your age, Shannon, I wanted to be a lawyer or a ninja.  I still think being an astronaut might be kind of cool (but I’d miss your Uncle Patrick too much to go to space), and I don’t think being a lawyer would be too much fun anymore – you have to know a LOT of uninteresting things to do well at that….and I will always want to be both a princess and a ninja.  I hope that maybe some days I am a little bit of both of those things.  :)

What I really love most of all is art.  I love to paint things and make things and look at beautiful things other people have made.  So maybe I can tell you some stuff about that.  I don’t know a lot, but I know what I like!

So, for this letter, here is a picture of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”.  It was painted in 1889, but even all this time later is probably one of the best known paintings in the world. It’s what’s called an impressionist painting – which I think means it doesn’t look much like a photograph of the real world, but you can look at it and see impressions or interpretations of things that exist in the real world; you can still tell that it’s hills and trees and a town and the stars in the sky, even though the real things don’t really look like that.  I saw it in real life when it was on tour in the Chicago Art Museum (Gram-E and Gramp-E took me), and it is crazy beautiful.  

The little town in the painting is a village in France called Saint Remy; someday I want to go there and see the night sky and the trees – I’m sure the city looks very different all these years later, but I think it would be cool to see the place where Van Gogh was looking when he thought of doing this painting.  I’ve tried a lot of times to paint like this, but even though it kind of looks like it might be easy to do, it’s actually incredibly hard & takes a tremendous amount of effort and planning and I’ve never been able to even come close to doing something that looks like this. 

So that’s all – I’ll try to write again soon!  Know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome!

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula