Cedar June 11th, 2008
I am really enjoying painting this series! This should be it for sunflowers, at least for a little while. There are other things on my list of things to paint that I really need to get to.
Again, these are all 16 x 16″, oil on hardboard panels.
Moonbright
Russian Mammoth
And, I think my favorite one so far out of the whole series is this one:
Italian White
Here’s what this artwork looks like in a room:
I just got a new page up on my website that will be helpful to a lot of people. Before, interested buyers had to click on every thumbnail on the gallery page to see which paintings were sold or not. Now there’s a page where all of my available artwork is shown in one place!
Go to ArtByCedar.com/AvailableArt.php
And for Art By Cedar at clearance prices: ArtByCedar.com/Clearance.php
Father’s Day is this Sunday. This year I will actually get to see my dad on Father’s Day! This never happens because we live so far apart.
So much of who I am came from my dad (my looks, my values, and a big chunk of my personality), and I just want to take a moment to explain why he is so awesome.
He is a natural teacher. When I was growing up, he taught me countless skills, including how to read, cook, drive, think critically, and be resourceful and enterprising.
Unlike most fathers, my dad was self-employed for most of my childhood and was therefore able to work from home. When I was little, I took it for granted that he and my mom were both always around, always available and attentive. Now that I’m grown-up and understand that this is not the norm for most American families, I see what a huge gift this was to me and my four siblings.
My dad is charismatic. He has a loud, booming laugh that is so distinctive that anyone who knows him can recognize it immediately from across a great distance. My dad has an abundant sense of humor that has infected us all. We laugh a lot in my family.
One of his defining traits is his creativity. He builds cool things. He comes up with innovative solutions to annoying problems. His mode of thinking is relentlessly creative. One of the things my dad taught me, mostly through his own example, is how to think creatively and follow through with a creative plan. How to solve problems as you go. If I had grown up in another family, I probably would not be an artist.
Case in point: here is a picture of my dad’s mailbox, a giant amanita muscaria mushroom, which he made.
Here’s a poem I wrote back in college, about how fun it was as a child to have a dad like mine:
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The Theft of the Golden Banana
Daddy took us to Allan Brothers Coffee Company
where beside the hot bronze bench outside,
a golden banana, (embedded into the cement sidewalk,
we guessed, by a whimsical construction worker)
sat wedged, a gleaming delicious jewel.
We conspired, giggling anew with each visit,
about how we would steal it. How we would arrive, 3 am,
rapidly like black bats, leap from the car with crowbars,
and deftly chip our prize from its rocky bed,
how in Daddy’s hands it would light up the night.
We all knew that really the golden banana
was not something you could steal. So we got
a real banana, soft, perfectly arched, and Daddy used it
to make a mold, filled with our own goopy mix of cement.
That afternoon on a piece of plywood in the supple grass
we broke the banana out of its plaster shell, sanded it down
and misted it with shimmering gold spray paint, smoothly,
three coats each side. Daddy and us brought it
to the Allan Brothers Coffee girl, pony-tailed behind the counter,
and we told her, grinning, that we stole it from the sidewalk.
“See look,” and we held up Daddy’s crowbar and the girl
round-eyed, aghast, said “Oh my God you didn’t.”
And we erupted into gleeful rolling seizures, Daddy loudest,
with people turning from newspapers and conversations.
Other dads played catch with their kids, maybe watched movies.
“Sometimes you have to make your own golden banana,” Daddy said.
Now friends smirk at me, amused, and say “Why are you so weird?”
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