When it rains it pours, but when the sun shines, it’s blindingly beautiful.

Thanks to Rob Destrube and his wife Cheryl, and help from my friend Maria, I now have a grand total of 35 print-quality digital images of my paintings. I can’t thank them enough; I could never have afforded to do this without their generosity and kindness. What is more, they are very encouraging and open people who support the art community at large. I am so lucky to have met them.

I can now upload these images and have a website worthy of submitting to galleries, and I can make high quality giclee prints as well! This is good because not everyone can afford original paintings. I am thrilled. Now I’m fumbling around in this website, figuring out how to upload the images properly! Stay tuned!

I am trying my hand at organizing a little art group, sort of a “Stitch N Bitch” without the stitching. I’m pretty excited about it because I recall the Zen-ness of my high school art class.

It was the great equalizer; people from all walks of life are creative in their own way, and I loved listening to the class dorky musician suddenly find something hilariously in common with the class stoner. And then proceed to free-associate in a monotone, while sculpting for an hour or two about crazy stuff such as:

“Hey, Mr. Pleece-man, don’t arrest me…that’s not pot, that’s doughnuts. I got the munchies. Here, have a jelly.”

To this day, I have no idea what Jason Botkin was rambling to Matt Turner about, but I do know that it cracked Matt up, and the whole thing cracked everyone else up. To me, that’s the beauty of producing art. It gets you out of the logical side of your head and makes you think differently, and it makes people get to know each other on a different level.

I did promise to show some in-progress photos, but got so into the painting that I didn’t want to stop to fiddle with the camera. Here’s the only snap I took.

My studio, like most places in Victoria this summer, is scorching hot, so I moved outside to paint yesterday. Beacon Hill Park provided plenty of shade and beautiful things to paint. I wanted to do a full painting in one go but was thwarted by my loss of light. Instead, I managed to block in the large areas of colour, and a tentative composition, and if the weather stays fine (ha!) I’ll go back and finish it today. I will post some photos of its progression to completion next week.

Later folks!

Erica

My paintings are being shown at a local Italian restaurant called La Piola.

They use food from local farms, one of which is in trouble. The Land Conservancy of BC is trying to purchase Madrona Farms so that it will be used to produce local organic food in perpetuity.

I approached the manager and the chef of La Piola about doing a fundraising event using my art (and possibly their food, but I don’t know that yet) and giving a portion of all the proceeds to the Land Conservancy in order to save Madrona Farms.

They are pretty pumped about the idea. It seems like a 4 way win situation:

The Land Conservancy gets a donation.

La Piola gets some PR

I get some PR and some money

Some lucky person gets a painting and the knowledge that they helped sustainability along, just a little!

What do you think?