Yelp!

http://lindas.yelp.com

Because I need to write more...and no one is paying me to do so at this very moment...I discovered Yelp.com (thanks to the L.A. Times) and have spent the last week yelping nearly 70 places in Fullerton and in the greater U.S.A. This site is a good way to find that hole in the wall restaurant you have been hoping for right in your zip code.
It is such a good site...the reviews are so HONEST. No one is getting paid to write. They don't censor negative viewpoints. This is such a wonderful tool if you live in a city that yelp covers...alas for my friends in Cleveland you are not in yelp land yet...but they tell me it may happen in a few months...e-mail them about how urgent it is that Cleveland be yelped.

Filtered Floral

I was unhappy with the result of my early AM painting and decided to run the piece through some photoshop filters. I like it better now.

Tropical Flower on Black

This flower took me several days to paint. I put the Payne's Grey Backgroundin last. The flower is mostly wet on wet, but the background was done dry.

Pink Lemonade

My 9-year-old painted this photo at the end of a very hot Southern California Day. It looks really good to me too...

9-year-old's Clouds

My daughter who will be in 4th grade in the fall has really taken to painting. She really likes everything I did last semester at Fullerton College. This is her version of Clouds...mine was posted months ago. Hers is done in Crayola Washable Paint - a birthday gift from me.

Tropical Flower

I went out yesterday and bought new tubes of permanent magenta and permanent rose and needed to paint something with them. This tropical inspried flower is all that I could think of late last night.

Kosher Salt Tree Leaves

I've always had a problem with making trees look like trees. This seems to help: Kosher salt the leaves. This is just a little post card size painting I was experimenting with. The colors of gree in the leaves are Hooker's Green and Sap Green. The Trunk is Van Dyke Brown and Lamp Black. The background is Cobalt.

I like how this turned out. I may have to do some Kosher Salted Forests in larger scale.

Stripes

I painted this early today. I don't like it a lot - that is why I'm posting it small.

Good words to live by for writers and artists

The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996.
QUOTATION:
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
ATTRIBUTION:
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Irish dramatist, novelist. Worstward Ho (1984).
BIOGRAPHY:
Columbia Encyclopedia

Rousseau

On NYTimes.com you can find a good article on a great artist - it is published today then will likely be in archives:

Art Review
Henri Rousseau: In Imaginary Jungles, a Terrible Beauty Lurks

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: July 14, 2006

Crystalized Flowers

Here are some flowers I painted at 2 a.m. They were Kosher Salted as usual. Once I scanned them I decided to apply the crystalize filter in Photoshop.

Not my favorite painting, but I decided to post it anyway.

Kosher Salt Sunset

I think I mentioned before that orange is currently my favorite color. Here is a sunset done wet on wet with kosher salt. Several shades of orange are involved, a couple pinks, and scarlet. I painted this just after midnight.

Simple Floral

I painted this just an hour or so ago --- mid-afternoon. I rarely paint at this time of day unless I'm in class. I painted A LOT of florals like this for two years in Shaker Heights art class. I have unfinished dining room chairs I keep meaning to paint in this style....hmmm...

I did paint something at 5 a.m. but the cat sat on it at 6:15 and ruined it. Humorous for some members of my family but NOT FOR ME!!

We had to chase the cat down and get the watercolor paint off his rear.

Red Flower

More early AM Kosher Salt Flowers...

Kosher Salt Floral

This is another kosher salt wet on wet piece I did in the wee hours of the A.M. today. It is sort of an abstract arrangement of lilies and some yellow/orange flower.

Purple Kosher Salt Cubism

This cubist piece was Kosher Salted on after it was done in a wet on wet style. A really different take on my other cubism. I did stretch the piece to fit the horizontal dimensions that I wanted. It was painted about 3:30 a.m. this morning.

Magenta Sunflower

This is not wet-on-wet. I decided to paint differently at 5 a.m. This flower is somewhat like the flower at Monet's Garden's in Giverny - but not really the same color in the center. The petals are the same color - almost. I just felt like taking a break from the ultra abstract.

Laguna Beach

Another early morning painting - same deal wet on wet cotton paper watercolor with kosher salt...This one is inspired by the water as seen from the cliffs inLaguna Beach yesterday.

Kosher Salt Roses

Here is a early morning wet on wet all cotton abstract piece...I had red roses in mind. The painting is liberally kosher salted. I actually changed the dimensions of the origninal a bit in publisher.

Fire

My favorite color of late is Orange. I paint a lot of wet on wet watercolors on the Arches paper in several shades of orange and scarlet with some yellow mixed in. This is painted wet on wet and kosher salted.