Tango

What do you do when you inherit grandma's dancing shoes?  Well if you have just jumped into learning the Tango, and you are a painter, you paint them.  This is on auction right now on my ebay site.  One of my favorite paintings.
To Bid

a cool video that features the music of my son, Dylan

http://vimeo.com/87413948

Jesse Aycock CD release March 7 Fassler Hall, Tulsa, OK, March 8th in Little Rock, AR

Watch the Currentland video Here

Purple Ribbon and Silver Coffee Pot

If you want a little peek into my classroom, you can find it in the silver coffee pot :-).  The class groaned when they saw this still life, thinking they could never paint the reflections on the silver.  I keep telling them, "don't concern yourself with painting a silver coffee pot, just paint exactly what you see... The values, and shapes etc and low and behold, when you stand back from it, you will find you have painted a silver pot.  What is always fun to me is that you get so caught up in finding shapes and correcting values that often when you stand back you are surprised that YOU are pictured in the reflection and you didn't even know you were painting yourself.  This painting is on auction this week on ebay.  To Bid

6x6 vineyard sketch

I actually painted the first one of these paintings on site very early in the morning at an Oklahoma Vineyard.  What a delightful day.  I painted while others picked and then around noon everyone broke for lunch prepared by vineyard bed and breakfast staff, complete with wine of course.  The original painting was sold several years ago but since then students who remember the original, asked for me to demo the process for them. Pictured below is a 6x6 sketch from which I created a larger piece. The painting on auction this week ( 16x20 oil ) is a product of that 2 day demo.  It is on auction this week on ebay.  To bid  
When you click the " bid" link above you also have a portal into all my other art auctions on ebay.  Enjoy my little gallery :-)

Red Roses against a Terracotta Wall

I had picked these roses from the garden and liked the effect of seeing them against my terracotta wall.  I was surprised that I liked it since I would not normally put those two colors together.  It has become one of my favorite floral paintings.  I have it on auction this week.
To Bid

A new batch of ACEO paintings on auction

At the request of one of my ebay art collectors, I started painting these little ACEO artist trading cards.  What a great idea for an affordable way to start your art collection and for us artists, a great way to introduce people to our work.

To check out this auction click here.  Bidding starts at $28.50 with no reserve.

Green Pears on Red and White Striped Cloth 6x6 oil

This is one among many daily and larger paintings on auction this week through my ebay gallery/auction site.  This began as a class project.... painting one object on a striped cloth.  My students breathed a sigh of relief when I mentioned that our next project involved only one object.  They breathed another kind of sigh as they saw the addition of the striped cloth rather than a plain backdrop.  heheheh
To bid

Garden " Bed"

Just an update.  I made this from an actual bed spring wooden form last summer.  The lettuce that I planted a month ago is coming right along under the protection and added warmth collected by the old window that rests atop it.

Last Night's Writing Theme, " Night sounds"

Last night Scott and I were sitting out back by the fire and had a bit of time before the Beatles retrospective was coming on the TV.  We decided to write something.  Scott's turn to pick the topic.  Night sounds.  He started off thinking about the sound of bugs on a hot Arkansas summer night but that Beatle thing was now in his head so he surprised me with the night the Beatles came on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Here is what I wrote:

Night sounds

I feel a slight chill as we leave the warmth of the counselor’s lodge and step out into the night.  Behind us now the sounds of conversation and laughter fade and the light from the windows ceases to light our way. 

I have spent the day in my swimsuit with my brother and sister sunbathing on the dock and playing in the water in front of the lodge which sits on the banks of a quiet, secluded lake in the Adirondack Mountains.  My mother and other counselor’s wives in bathing suits and sunglasses sit in lounge chairs  on the dock and keep an eye on us as we play.

A day in the sun and an evening by the fire inside the lodge has left me tired and longing for bed.  A loon calls from the lake and is answered by thousands of unseen insects in the deep forest that surrounds our pine needle path which leads to our borrowed two room cabin in the woods.  The path is thick and soft with hundreds of years of decaying wood, pine needles and leaves.  Even with my meager  sixty pounds  I can feel the path give and push back with each step.  The sound is quiet and comforting…. Until, to quicken our pace, our dad mentions the bears that might come out and bite our bottoms.  He punctuates with a pinch on the closest bottom which makes us all laugh.  We still quicken our pace as,  ‘you just never know…’  We are familiar with bears as one of our favorite weekend pastimes is to visit the town dump at night with others of like mind, where we watch them come out of the woods to feed. 

“ What would you do if you ran across a bear?” we ask our mom. “Well, just as he opens his mouth to bite me, I would stick my hand all the way into his mouth and down to his tail and pull him inside out.”  That answer was quite satisfying to all of us and we felt protected.  In our little world all stories have a happy ending and little children don’t ever get eaten by bears.

We come to an opening and we see the water pump up ahead where we always stop to pull down a paper cup and fill it with hand pumped, ice cold water.  We turn off the flashlight as the stars and full moon will now light our way.   The air surrounding us is crisp and clean. 

From across the lake we hear the sounds of a bugle playing taps and calling all to rest.

“ Day is done.

Gone the sun.

From the lake…

From the hill….

From the sky.

All is well…

Safely Rest.

God is nigh.”

In my bed in the same room with my brother and sister with mom and dad in the other room, I am safe.  I am loved.  All is well.

Avocado 6x6 oil on canvas

To Bid

Lucky Penny Dolls to Benifit Tulsa Arts and Humanities Council

A portion of the proceeds from the Lucky Penny Doll sales goes to support the work of Tulsa's Arts and Humanities Council.  To place your bid, Click Here

The story behind the dolls:

My husband, Scott, had had a heart attack and was recovering in the hospital.
After several days of little sleep, lots of worry, I was returning to the hospital after running to Scott’s office to call clients and cancel appointments. I parked my car and got out and in the quiet, had come to a more full realization of just how close I had come to losing my very best friend.

It was then that I remembered that strange old superstition, “pennies from heaven.” It is a silly, but fun and a little comforting, to think that if you find a penny on the ground it is someone that you love from the other side (Heaven) sending you a message of love.

Well, I started walking through the parking lot and said to my father (my dad passed away about 12 years ago from a heart attack), “Dad, I really need a lucky penny right about now.” Which made me weepy so I said to myself, “that is just silly, buck up and put on a good face. You can cry about all this later.” I did not tell anyone about my request to the other side of course.

So I continued on up to see Scott. My son, Dylan was there and about a half hour later he turned to leave. I saw him sneak some little flat thing onto the bottom edge of Scott’s bed. He didn’t know I saw him. I picked it up and said “Dylan, what is this.” He replied “lucky penny.” and walked out. He had left a penny that had been flattened by a train… his lucky penny. I couldn’t tell him what that meant to me at the time as I didn’t want to get emotional but later just told him and my brother in- law, Ed.  When Ed came to visit the next day he dropped a penny in my lap and said “I found that and 4 more in the parking lot.” I, myself, found another in the stairwell and 2 more at the Church studio, one being on an inaccessible little roof outside the lobby window, a day later. I just felt like it was a good omen, a message from the other side that all will be well and it has been.

When I was in the hospital with Scott, I worked on knitting a little doll. Inside the doll I put all the lucky pennies. Now it is our lucky penny doll.

I continue to find lucky pennies and have stored them in a special place and I continue to make these little dolls. Each one contains one of those “found coins.”  Each one is unique and of course, very lucky.      Margaret Aycock

Caution, all dolls contain a coin, and some, buttons.  Buttons and coins my pose a choking hazard.