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