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

 

 

 

 

 

Eva

Well, since I put some baby Shannon pics in, I thought I should also put a baby Eva picture here! 

This was from the Christmas when you all came to New Jersey!  That was about 5 years ago already - look how tiny you were, Eva!  Adorable.

Shannon @ Auntie Paula and Uncle Patricks Wedding - 10 years ago!

So here are a few of those pics!  Shannon, you were an excellent wedding guest!

 

Eva Elliott

Hello and Happy October 9^th, my two favorite ladies!

 

I am loving that it’s October right now.  This is my most favorite month of the year, and this year is extra special for me because your Uncle Patrick and I will be having our 10^th wedding anniversary this Halloween.  Shannon, you were just a tiny baby, but you were at our wedding in Hawaii – it was SO beautiful.   I’m pretty sure you weren’t overly impressed with most of it (6 month olds are VERY tough to impress with things like weddings), but I’m also pretty sure you did get to go swimming for the first time on that trip; your folks could tell you for sure. I have to remember to find some of those pictures and share them with you now!

 

Anyway, that’s about all the news from here!  This weeks’ artist is the lovely and very talented Miss. Eva Elliott, who sent me this awesome kitty drawing:

 

I especially love the bright color, and the hot pink with the yellow makes it extra fabulous.  You know my most most most favorite thing, though?  I love to look for repeated shapes in artwork – remember the triangles in the circus picture? – but I don’t like for things to be super symmetrical or matchy-matchy.  Well this kitty has triangle shapes inside it’s ears, which are mirrored in the “v”s made in just some –but not all - of the whiskers and eyebrows, and it has these 3 wonderful little “u” shapes in the nose and the corners of it’s mouth, and the outside of it’s ears make 2 of the same shape, but flipped upside-down!  So lots of fun things for my eyes to find, but not matchy-matchy.  Love it!!

 

And then, just to have a little extra fun, I took Eva’s drawing and ran it through a computer program to make the pictures below, which also turned out pretty cool and made me happy.

 

Thank you for sharing your work with me!

Know that I love you both and think that you’re awesome!

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

xoxoxoxo

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tony Smith

Hello ladies!  Happy Thursday, as always!  I hope this finds you well!  Miss. Eva, thank you so much for the lovely kitty drawing you mailed to me – I’ve been meaning to take a picture so I could post it here, just haven’t gotten to that yet.  I’ll try over the weekend.  It is lovely and I so appreciate you thinking of me!  J

Did you know that yesterday - October 1 – was the 43rd anniversary of the day in 1971 when Walt Disney World opened in Orlando, Florida?  I hope you’re enjoying living so close to Disney.  The pictures from your trip to Harry Potter World (which I know isn’t Disney, but it’s close) were certainly awesome – I loved the fire breathing dragon the most!!

All is well here in NJ.  I’m hoping Gram-E will come and visit me soon, since this is probably the very best time of year here – it’s not hot, but it’s not cold, and the leaves are turning pretty colors, and there’s so much fun stuff to do in October!  I love hayrides and corn mazes.

Anyway, this weeks’ artist is Tony Smith.  He’s from South Orange, NJ – which isn’t far from where your dad and I were born – and lived from 1912 to 1980. He was a “minimalist sculptor”.  Mostly he made really, really big geometric shapes.  They’re not always pretty, but they almost always look like they’d be really fun to climb on.  I would love to have a yard full of gigantic sculptures that I could climb up on and inside and see the world from lots of different angles and through different shapes.  I really like to climb things.  Sadly, very few places who have pieces of big sculpture will let you climb on them…probably because they’re afraid you’ll fall off, hurt yourself, and sue them.  Which, really, when people do things like that is totally ridiculous (the suing part, not the climbing part), but that’s a whole other issue.

So Tony got tuberculosis (a disease in his lungs, I think – medical stuff is not my forte) when he was a kid and his family made an isolation ward in their backyard while he was getting better…I wonder if he ended up making such great big things as an adult because his world was very small when he was a kid.  But that’s just me wondering, not any real fact there.  What is a fact is that as a young man, Tony worked for Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect I’ll have to tell you about sometime…and that is very cool.

So here are a few of his sculptures.  I especially like the big black M-ish one….there are so many good places to sit and read a book in that one! The yellow one is cool, but you’d have to put handles in it to be able to get to the top, and that would probably mess up the “clean lines” of it. 

In any case, know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

xoxoxoxo