Well, we did it. The Blog Triage class is in its last day. (Oh great, just in time for me to be gone for 2 weeks and away from a computer. Probably.)

But I have my Outlook reminders in place for my return, and I will finally have time to implement  the rest of the things I learned in the class. Here are my fellow Triagers:

Kim Bennett, Pudsey, United Kingdom

Marge Bennett, Sarasota, FL

Angela Bounds, Norfolk, VA

Magdalena Castaneda, Brooklyn, NY

Connie Chadwell, Junction, TX

Marlis Egger, Pregassona, Switzerland

Ruben Esq Los Angeles, CA 

Marilyn Fenn, Austin, TX

Dora Ficher, Philadelphia, PA

Jodi Flood, Warrenton, VA

Nancy Giere, Williamsburg, VA

Peg Gyldenege, Puyallup WA

Annie Heckman, Chicago, IL

Tricia Hutchinson, North Yorkshire, UK

Katherine Kean, Tujunga, CA

Moira Mallison, Louisville, CO

Vickie Martin, Decatur, GA

Carol McIntyre, Black Forest, CO

Krista Meister, Monroe, MI

Mavis Penney, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

Dianne Poinski, Sacramento, CA

Marianne Post, Vacavile, CA

 Leslie Rinchen-Wongmo, Milan, Italy; Los Angeles, CA

Caroline Roberts, Houston, TX

Beth Rommel, Oviedo, FL

Barbara Techel, Elkhart Lake, WI

Kit Vincent, Elizabethtown, Ontario, Canada

Elizabeth Wank, Twin Lakes, WI

Denise Bellon West, Indian Hills, CO

As Arnold would say, “I’ll be back.” TTFN

This is all Cynthia’s fault. She suggested using blog titles that were a little racey, so I delivered! 

Paint Naked

Offbeat Idea #1  Paint Naked

First of all, let me say that painting naked does NOT work for me.

Years ago, I took a seminar, and they were telling us ways to loosen up. They suggested we walk around naked – outside, inside, wherever. I said, “Well, heck, I want to loosen up with my art, so I should paint naked.” That became my homework (me and my big mouth - it was a joke!).

I was a little freaked out, so I cheated and wore my painting apron…

I did find someone online who likes to paint naked (as well as doing just about everything else naked). She suggests, “live life fully and PAINT NAKED when you can.” More power to her. 

But, hey, give it a try. Some people find it very liberating.

Offbeat Idea #2. Dr. Wayne Dyer once said to imagine that you are wearing a cape (I should have tried that with my homework – then the back would have been covered, too). He was talking about when you walk into a room, but it helps when you’re painting, too. You feel like Superman, very powerful. I’m serious. Try this when walking into your studio first thing in the morning – coffee cup in your hand, and Da-da-DAH playing in your ears.

Offbeat Idea #3 Visualize that you are a famous artist. 

Have you ever watched a tennis match on TV and then gone out and played your best tennis ever? Picture being Andy Roddick as you play – it’s kind of fun pretending you’re a hot guy. (I’d picture being a hot female player, but then I don’t feel as strong and powerful…)

Stay with me here. And you know how uninhibited you are when you are wearing a costume, say, Cleopatra or a vampire?

Well, try this next time you’re in your studio, only without the costume. Just visualize. Picture that you are a famous artist, totally uninhibited. You can’t be inhibited because you’re already famous! Get in a zone. Picture that you are Vincent Van Gogh (I know that he didn’t know he was famous when he painted, but you know it now). You are using his brushes and putting his strokes on your canvas. Or Picasso, or Matisse, or Georgia O’Keeffe. Maybe be one of each of your favorite artists at different times and see if your art is freer with certain ones.

There you have it – Denise’s Offbeat Ideas for loosening up with your art. You can find normal ideas here. Tell me your favorite ways to loosen up with your art.  

Here is a list of potential future blog posts. I’ll decide the order in which to post them based on my feedback. Here goes:

1. I’ve Put off Procrastinating Long Enough! Now I’m Serious!

2. The Price is Right…Not!

3. Interest-Based Learning vs. Importance-Based Learning; How it Affects Your Art.

4. It’s Art WORK, Not Art PLAY! Get it Straight.

5. Left-hand Envy

6. Nature’s Random Perfection - Trust It in Your Paintings

7. Why I Love My Favorite Artists

8. Artists Make the Funnest Friends!

9. Ugly Movies vs. Beautiful Movies: which Appeal to Your Artistic Side?

10. Make Every Room in Your House a “Painting”…then Paint it

11. Why Painting with Friends Can Help Your Art

12. Exploring the Golden Mean

13. Take Your Camera EVERYWHERE! Yes, Even the Bathroom.

14. Switch Mediums to Improve Your Art

15. Realism to Abstraction How-to

16. Glazing Makes Fabulous, Indescribable Colors

17. Photograph Your TV Screen for Great Action Shots

18. Flat Files are Where It’s At!

19. Armed and Dangerous (with Painting Knives)

20. Paint Naked

The anticipation is burning. Which one to unleash first? Place your vote now in the comment section!

When shoe polish isn’t quite doing the trick anymore, and before you chuck your trusty shoes or other leather items in the trash or give them to Goodwill, try PAINTING them! (Artists think of strange things like this.) Maybe buying shoes is easy for the rest of you, but for me it’s rare that I find a pair of shoes that I really love. When I do, I wear them into the ground. (Guys, you probably have a pair or two of ratty old shoes or sandals, or maybe a briefcase, that are past their prime, but you can’t bear to part with them. You wear them into the ground and catch grief for it. I know these things.)

Several years ago I finally found a perfect pair of sandals that I loved. They were very comfortable and didn’t “slap” when I walked. The only problem was that they were BLUE. Most of my clothes were not.

New blue shoes!

So, after years of looking for an equally lovable pair of sandals to supplement my repertoire, I finally gave up on the idea of ever finding that perfect pair in the perfect color and the perfect style and the perfect fit to replace them (see why I rarely find anything I like?). Then, it struck me! I got the harebrained idea to paint my blue shoes and make them a color that would match everything. Would you believe it worked???!!!!

New look

Here’s what I did:

I pulled out my acrylic paints and picked out some colors that I figured would make that beautiful caramel color that I’d been looking for — yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and burnt umber ought to do it. I found a brush that I thought would cover just the right swath on my shoe, then I laid down some newspapers (on my kitchen counter, of all places) and got to work.

Past their prime...

First tentative strokes:

Ta da!

My daughter says that they now look like very expensive leather. They’re still soft, and the color hasn’t chipped off. You’d never know they were painted. Try it, it’s fun! Let me know if you need some helpful advice…or encouragement.

Part 2 of the first assignment in my Blog Triage class is to think about how I want blogging to help me in my art career. Here’s what I envision, in my perfect little art world. I want people to become familiar with me and with my art. I want them to see my art as an extension of me - ever evolving and all about discovery.

As far as the act of blogging and exposing myself to the world, I think that this will hold me accountable (which I need, big time!) and take my art to higher levels. Hey, I’ve already shown the world my horrendously disorganized studio/office. That was embarrassing, but it held me accountable and made me get it organized. I need a heavy dose of this more often/all the time. I’m sure I’d be done with the portrait from hell by now if I had people keeping me accountable!

But I also would like for people to peruse my website after finding my blog, and vice versa. I hope to meet many new friends and find people who want to share my journey with art and life.

With a commitment to building a more vibrant blog, I signed up for the 4-week Blog

Triage class with Cynthia Morris and Alyson Stanfield. Today’s assignment is to

describe the people I want to visit and read my blog. (I hurried and wrote an entry yesterday just so that I could see if I still knew how to do it and what buttons to push!)

This is something I have never considered. Hmmm… And double hmmm…… Okay, if I were to write the way I want to write and not the way I think I should write, my readers would be people who want to come and check up on me and see what I’m up to artwise and in my life but also get some little tidbits of fun ideas. I have lots of those and they’re always bubbling out of me, and my blog seems like just the place to put them.

I would envision these people sitting around one day and thinking, “Hey, I wonder what’s going on with Denise and what little ideas she has come up with lately.” These people would range in age from, I’d say early 20s to early 80s (it could happen). I would hope that these young and fun people would be from all over the country, and dare I hope, all over the world. That’s a scary thought, but I would love to have contact with people in different states and different countries, as well as Colorado. I’m excited that the people in this class are from many places, including Europe!

Up until now, I have not been able to teach people how to leave comments on my blog. They just like to read it and look at the pictures, and maybe they’ll e-mail me about an entry. They’ll write volumes to me in an e-mail but won’t leave one word as a comment. I have asked them, I have suggested to them, I have implored them to leave a comment, but I think it’s a new concept for a lot of people and they’re afraid to enter cyberspace. I hope I can encourage readers to interact with me. And I hope I won’t freak out when they do!

I painted with friends in Denver all day last Thursday. Then the snow started coming down just as I got home - 1 to 3 feet predicted (I knew we’d be the 3, Denver the 1). With heavy spring snows, the power often goes out, so we hurried and charged our cell phones and computers before bed.  We brought up extra firewood. The only thing we wished we had thought to do was grind some coffee beans!

 Heavy and wet!

Sure enough, the power went out Friday morning, just as hubby Steve was about to grind the beans, and it was off for almost 3 days (the Internet for 4). Oh, man, that hot cup of coffee with some biscotti would have been so much fun on those snowy mornings! Note to self: buy ground coffee. The smartest thing I did was to make a big pot of my favorite lentil soup on the woodstove Friday night. It was our dinner for 3 nights - an all-in-one meal.

Best lentil soup

Eating by snowlight

Being homebound for 3 days, it would have been a good time to finish the portrait I’ve been working on, but it was too cold in my studio. I couldn’t paint upstairs, because I would stink up the house with the smell of my oil paints. Instead, I busied myself with office work and reading my latest business-help book, Making It All Work by David Allen. The storm ended Saturday night. Sunday was spent plowing our driveway and shoveling our deck and patio. We were having appliances delivered today, so I spent all day yesterday shoveling snow so they could get to our kitchen door. Hours and hours of shoveling. Note to self: wear sun screen next time. I look like a raccoon. And I’m sore. But Pasha was a big help, as always, and happily kept me company the whole day.

Pasha the snow dog

The last bit of snow, Pasha

The delivery went off without……no, with, lots of hitches. I got a call from the delivery guys, saying that they were afraid they’d get stuck if they came up our driveway. So, I went down to get them, and our appliances, with our pick-up truck. Our pick-up truck that has snow chains on all the tires and a big snow plow on the front. The guys rode in the back with the appliances, and I tried to miss all the fallen trees and broken branches so they wouldn’t get slapped in the face. I hadn’t been out since Thursday and didn’t realize how bad it was. It looked like a tornado had blown through!

I am now sitting amongst a bunch of boxes. The appliances will be installed tomorrow. Who wants my super-easy, super-fast, SUPER-delicious lentil soup recipe?

Friends came for dinner over the weekend and were greeted by the music of Boston, which I was blaring. Hey, it was a beautiful summery evening and I was in the mood for some fun music. We immediately entered into a discussion about the band, and I found out that the lead singer, Brad Delp, had died almost two years ago! I had no idea.

I had met Brad Delp and Boston’s then-drummer, Sib Hashian, many years ago while living in Chicago. My mom was dating Sib’s dad (a famous author - but that’s another story), who arranged for two tickets to the upcoming Boston concert in Chicago and an invitation to a party afterwards at a local nightclub. I invited a girlfriend and we screamed and yelled and went nuts during the concert, and then we got to meet the band at the party.  Pretty cool, I must say!

I had never met Sib, but it wasn’t hard to find him. He was sitting in the back sporting a major ‘fro. Not knowing what else to do, my girlfriend and I took turns sitting on his lap for a picture. He was a crazy, goofy guy with a Boston accent. Brad was super-cute and had frizzy, permy hair. Super nice guy. It’s very sad to hear that he has passed away.

Epilog: Years later, I learned that Sib had married a Playboy Bunny. Maybe that explains why he had so much fun tickling my girlfriend when it was her turn to sit on his lap…

Art connection: I often listen to Boston’s music while I paint and go crazy over Sib’s awesome drumming!

November 17. Holy cow, it’s mid-November and over 70 degrees in Denver! The leaves have fallen off of our peach/apple tree (it used to be an apple tree all over, but the top half has become a peach tree), but the baby peaches are still hanging on. It seems that if you never water them they don’t get big.

I want nothing more than to be outside painting, but I’m working on a portrait and need to use my monitor for constant reference. As it is, I have the monitor shielded from the sun’s glare, so taking it outside with me is out of the question, for it would be too washed out. Therefore, to simulate being outside I have my windows wide open, which gives me everything but the sunburn. I have the wind (which is occasionally blowing my reference photos around - nothing that a little masking tape can’t fix) and the bugs (a couple have come to explore my wet paint but they’re big enough to send on their way). The best part is that the smell of the oil paints is being swept away!

Still, I was so restless with “Spring Fever” that I just had to get out for a long walk. Pasha, my trusty furball, came along and we had a fabulously refreshing interlude. Now, back to work.

If necessitated, our next interlude will include jumping jacks. What do you do when you get antsy?

Testing, testing, 1 2 3 testing… Let’s see if my blog is working properly now. I don’t know if WordPress did something or if I did something or what, but it’s been annoying the heck out of me. My web designer installed the latest version, so let’s see if that fixed the problems. First test: see if it will make paragraphs again.

So far so good, but I won’t know for sure until I see the actual post. I’m back from a long weekend painting trip to Moab, Utah. The temperature was delightfully in the 70s, but the wind was outrageous! All of my paintings were sand blasted. Here’s an example:

Moab study, sand covered

I have to run. I’m crazy busy, trying to get ready for my Studio Sale here next Saturday. I figure it will probably help if I get invitations out before then. Next year I hope to have an organization person on board to help me with my office work (we’re going to trade for artwork). That’s the funny thing about us artists - we just want to make art and bury our heads in the sand when it comes to paperwork. Maybe that’s why my painting got covered with sand…