My long summer hiatus

As a creative person I tend to have very fertile times and sometimes a long lasting dry spells. I seem to be in one of the latter this summer. I've been enjoying gardening, finally getting to those nagging projects around my house which been ignored for a very long time in an effort to be in the studio and I've done a lot of traveling starting with our annual week in Rehoboth Beach,  Delaware. I wish that I could say that it was a really great week but we had pretty nasty weather for four out of the seven days that we were there. The best part of it was being with my family particularly my daughter Jo and her boyfriend Ben. Here's Ben and I out enjoying first time oysters and shots of Jamisons while Jo and her dad had a special Fathers Day dinner together. 

Artistically, I did nothing except to visit the Rehoboth Art League. There was a very interesting exhibit there by photographer Annaliese Tassano featuring her photos of live models dressed as mermaids and submerged into a huge water tank. They were very beautiful and mysterious, though they also conveyed an overwhelming feeling of confinement which made me a bit uncomfortable.

In this one, a "manmaid"joins the mermaid in the tank

July took me back home to Lockport, New York to visit friends and attend my high school reunion. I didn't have time in my whirlwind trip to visit any museums or galleries. Most sadly, I didn't get to  the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo which is home to a world-class modern art collection. I did  have time though to ride past and appreciate with new eyes the beautiful architecture in Lockport and in Buffalo where I also used to live. I found a new appreciation for the stunning mansions lining streets in both cities and for the vast array of beautiful Victorian painted ladies that had made little impression on me in my youth.

I lived in the upstairs apartment and yes, I painted in the turret!
It is unbelievably the same color that it was when I left 26 years ago!

The following weekend, I jetted off to Houston for a wedding  and visited a few museums and an Outsider Art attraction. That will be part two of this post as there is a lot to tell. As I post this it is early August and though I tried to go back to black and white painting last week with some new materials that I have never used before (water soluble oils and clay board), I still haven't found my mojo. I wish there was a pill for that... but hopefully, my motivation will return soon on it's own. :0)