New art, music, fun stuff

Link to my website: Claude Lyles Art Works

Reminder that you can click on photos to enlarge and pinch open even further.  March 14, 2019.

New Art: (finally)

I started five works in my early Feb workshop painting Plein Air (outdoor) with Morgan Samuel Price. I am not accomplished to finish in the 2 to 2 1/2 hours you have before the shadows and light direction change. So, worked on them in the subsequent weeks and finished them over the past week or so. They are in oil, the three smaller ones are canvas on board, the larger two are canvas pad which I will mount on board.  The first one was in my previous blog but I wanted to keep them together. I need to move on, so what you see is what you get. No mas.

9 x 12" statue in garden

9 x 12" Three Pots

Arbor, Naples Botanical Garden 14 x 11"

Bocce Balls, Naples Botanical Garden 9 x 12"

Delnor-Wiggins Pass St Park 11 x 14"

On my website you can see works from her workshop 2 years ago that I did in D-WSP. It is a nice beach with facilities if you visit. Naples Botanical Garden is well worth the $20 admission. Its relatively new, 5 or 6 themed areas, water, walking trails, and a good cafe. Highly recommended.  Ed. Note: After I started painting, two couples said "oh, look! Bocce Balls." They then walked over the terrace and started playing which is why the placement of the balls differs in the two pieces.

Tomorrow joining for the first time Lee Plein Air Artist group in Lakes Park. New colleagues and the closest group to my location. Hope it works out. 

Not My Art:

The Alliance For The Arts did not accept my submission for the All Florida Show. There were 664 entries. A neat occasion occurred last Saturday when the jurist spoke discussing what and why in regard to his selections. One item I have already noticed is BIG sells and they like to choose BIG for the shows and he admitted as much. So, I guess I will be painting BIG. To be honest, so many of the Florida homes have 10 and 12 ft ceilings so tall walls need large paintings. I get it. 

1st Place, Two Girls, approx 3' x 4'

This is very large, oil, might be 6 x 6 ft. 2nd place.

 These two are about 2' x 2', 2' x 3':

I liked this the best. It had a clear acrylic/encaustic finish over it.  Enlarge it. 

Painterly portrait

Individual wood and cement buildings on a multi-level platform. Supposedly, artist's asst needed 3 hours to instal. 

(A Little) Humor: 

So rather than donate $500,000 to USC and ask them to admit her daughters (and if they can't hack it, so be it) which would be the school's choice to do so, But Nooooo, she spends the same amount of money illegally bribing coaches or administrators through a fixer to accomplish the same thing, only now she could go to jail, will have a criminal record, probably lose her position in Hallmark Movies and probably pay a fine. And the already admitted fixer goes to jail. And the school coaches and administrators (rightly) lose their employment. Arrogant or stupid, or both? Include the other 50 or so indicted?

And, I am going through the cable show listings and I see that at 9 o'clock on consecutive channels two shows on the G Bush family...those are their cousin in Alaska that they never talk about, right?

Problem:

This in one month, now month-after-month, and these are the people caught or who turned themselves in, there are even more whom we know nothing about. And again in March. And again in April. And...  no one cares that this is going on? No one wants to fix it? Oh yea, and again in May, in June. Yikes!

Good reading: 

If you want some common sense reading  on our current craziness, written by a mid-80 year old Black economist, Walter E Williams, go to his link. Try his syndicated columns first to grab a good feel for what he has to say. Here is the link Walter Williams George Mason U dept of Economics You want to enjoy him while he is still with us.

In additions to his writing he has links to other worthy authors and the Quotations section references utterance from others, two samples chosen at random:

• “A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that … it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
  – Milton Friedman
• “We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office”
  – Aesop

Where Am I?
Some of my readers aren't sure just where is Fort Myers Florida. It is further south than many think it is. It is about two hours drive north to Tampa, two hours southeast to Miami, about two hours directly east to Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Ft. Lauderdale, etc. 

I marked the map with an arrow. Ignore the law firm ad. It is a great map to show our location. All on Interstate highway over 5 hours to GA border, 8 hours drive to Pensacola in the upper left. Jacksonville is in the upper right. Orlando kind of in the center; Gainesville and U of FL above that. It is a big state. 65,000 sq miles; 1,300 miles of shorelines. 21 million residents. Much of the land to our south and south east is The Everglades which is shallow swamp land; except for the coasts, most of the space you see below the big Lake O. Orlando has the 2nd largest college campus in the US - U of Central Florida. Three NFL teams, 2 MLB teams, two NHL teams, two NBA teams, pro soccer teams...lots to do. 

Reading: 

Air & Space magazine, Southwest Artist mag, starting The Power of Habit.

Watching: 
From our local library DVD collection we watched Leave No Trace...lots of stuff to think about including parent/child relationship as it fluctuates, PTSS affecting Vets, Government Agencies truly trying to help Vets and homeless, life in nature vs life with "things, and community vs isolation.

Picked up today: Incredibles 2 and the new A Star Is Born.

Watching: FL Rep

Next Week will be  Million $ Quartet about an impromptu jam session involving Presley, Perkins, Lewis, and Cash; followed in April by  a world premier: Native Gardens. That's it for the season. I was looking at the subscription for next year: Not sure if we will take all of them -
Always...Patsy Cline - all of her hits
The Fox On The Fairway - "Phenomenally funny"
An Inspector Calls - Tony winner
Alabaster - world premier
Barefoot In The Park - Neil Simon
A Gentleman's Guide To Love And Murder - Tony winner for Best Musical
Every Brilliant Thing - one man show
A Doll's Hose, Part 2 - "Smart, Funny, Engrossing"
Ripcord - High-stakes comedy about two woman of a certain age...