Returning to a Celestial Dancer

The background was painted five years ago, and today I determined to finish the painting. Nightfall has come, and no. Perhaps tomorrow. She is one of my Celestial Dancers. Why do I resist her?

My apartment is small; my two children, son, 22, daughter, 18, live with me. That is my dining room table, yes.

We make room for our art, we have to.

                                 

Navigation buttons for website

I've put my website buttons (that I use as a 'signature' in each blog post) in a table ( that you can't see because I gave '0' border to the lines so they are invisible) to see if they line up better at sites that link here. The html I used at the site has the images sit in a nice row, but I notice that places like Facebook put each image on its own line underneath the post. I'm hoping the invisible table solves the problem.

While the spacing between icons isn't quite right, it's close enough, and, if the table works, I can fiddle with that later. Also, probably I need to add another webpage & link - so there is an 'intro' page, and a 'recent paintings' page. So far, I haven't been able to figure out how to arrange the 'intro' page the way I'd like - though I've tried a few things, none of them have worked.

There is much writing that I have yet to add to the site as well - though that'll be embedded with links to unlisted pages in the website here & there.

:-)

Julie McGregor's Art: A Spectral Mine

Julie McGregor's art is figurative, richly coloured, with dense backgrounds of oil embedded into the canvas. An heir of the Impressionists and the Group of Seven, she takes the palette further, exploring the nuances and depths of her subjects, their beauty, their slight asymmetries, the way they are contained in the multi-coloured brushwork she has sculpted them out of. Not just thick light revealing the features of her figures, but the surfaces glow with jewel-like dabs and dashes giving the sense of a spectral mine illumined from within by its precious ores. In all of her works an inner power emanates, as if from the energies of the earth itself. Check out her paintings. Beautiful.

Julie McGregor is a Toronto artist and jazz singer.

                                 

Tea Ceremony finished, & awaiting a poem...

The india ink sketch could have gone in different directions, left white, coloured with pencil, painted in any number of styles. It was soothing today to colour in pencil. Green, and more green. While I'm still not enamoured of her face, it's okay. All this piece needs now is a poem. When I do that, I'll crop it tighter.

I chose the unforgiving path. No pencil sketch to begin with, only India ink. Then coloured pencil and inks. Nothing loose. No approaching it. And no way back once begun.

A decision made, to use the green pencil, the red ink, to go over a black line, cannot be undone. The mark is on the paper. Accept what is unfolding.

In this world, of the tea ceremony, the moment of connection, soothing satiety, the pouring of life, there is no room for hesitancy.
_

And there I was, after a busy weekend, cooking our Thanksgiving feast on Saturday, cleaning  and shopping yesterday, telling myself, today is my day to relax. Which lasted all of 10 minutes before I was occupied with the Tea Ceremony sketch, and which took me through the afternoon with email breaks and uplifting videos at YouTube.

Lovely day, all in all.