Day 37 One of my joy's.

I have never considered a child's face as easy to paint or draw. Their features are different then an adult's. This is one of six joy's of my life. My daughter's youngest.

When any of my grandchildren were born I have to say I fell in love with each of them. The first one was an amazing feeling. I literally felt like I was on cloud nine. It was an experience I never expected to have. I have felt this will all of them.

I talked with this little guy the other day. I phoned his mother and he picked up the phone. I said hello, who is this (knowing it was my grandson, hoping he would tell me). He said as clear as day Hi Gramma, and yelled to his mommy it was me... It's always a great joy to see and hear all of my grandbabies. I get to Skype with them and sing songs with them. I love to do that. Everyone is precious.

Today's portrait is $37 if you want a painting of my joy .. email me. iwilldream4ever@aol.com
See you tomorrow.

Day 36 of 100 faces in 100 days

Today's face is painted on something different. I was at my dad's last Sat. and my sister and I went through some tall files out in the garage.. yes in the garage. There were two and they were full. Newspapers and file after file of bank statements and memorabilia. I have to say though that my mother had organized stuff. Everything was in a folder. This means that the type of folders changed over the years. This face today is painted on what appears to be a divider of sorts. The hole on the left held it to the bar that was often on the bottom of the file drawer and the black tab on the upper right is just that a tab for placing a card that would describe the contents of items following it. It is made of metal. It's very heavy duty. If you look closely you can see that it says .. Oxford and it's made out of a very heavy paper that has a slick surface. They just don't make them like this anymore and I really love the feel of it and the weight.

After painting white acrylic on it is has a fantastic tooth for pencil work .. I hadn't intended on drawing but when I saw how the pencil reacted to the acrylic I just decided to go with that and I have to say I did love the way that it worked. I also noticed that the time factor became an issue. It is much faster to cover an area with paint then a pencil point that is about a sixteenth of an inch. I do have a jar of graphite but it's in storage somewhere .. who know's. So ..it doesn't have the intense black that I like but .. but this face seems to be ok with this smooth surface and light touch. It's all my experiment so I'm happy with that. And I let the green color of the divider show through.. I will use this again. I have more haha .. i'm sure that's no surprise!! I will go back to the sewn wrapping paper and envelopes and letter's and old calendars .. just had to try this out . It was calling me.

Ok so if you would love to have this beautiful face on your wall .. please email me at iwilldream4ever@aol.com. Today's portrait is $36. Have a fantastic day!!! Thanks for stopping over.

Day 35

Day 35 and I am sure it seems redundant but I'm still here. Still getting faces done. For a long time I have needed to consistently schedule time for me to paint. I needed to make a commitment to my self to do this. I chose the faces because that's what I love to paint. I love the eyes. I think at this point I feel the pull to create larger pieces. But I will wait till this challenge is over. I do other things too... like rusting fabric and hand stitching. Embellishing jeans in a hippie sorta way and printing on fabric with bleach. I am itching to do those things too. My day seems to get filled up fast even though I am making every day. I try to balance my time with creating and just trying to get out of my head. Which usually means hitting the thrift stores. I have to say .. while I do enjoy companionship I do enjoy my own time, more than ever in my life. While hard things settle down I can focus better on improving things in my own space. Today's face is painted on an old calender in my mom's stash and a sample card. When my mom and dad were finally enjoying the empty nest my dad took a job overseas. I think my mom was the happiest woman in the world to be always on the go traveling. This time it was far from Africa just as interesting and alluring. They moved to the orient. They lived abroad nearly ten years. I'm sure my mother felt like she had won the lottery, being so close to Hong Kong where the shopping was available twenty four hours a day!!! She would write home about all that was available. We enjoyed many wonderful gifts from them while they lived there. She also added to her collection of fabric only now she could be very selective and buy the best fabrics so she would be a little discerning and ask for sample cards and she saved every single one she got, I think. Sure seems so! haha. So today's face is a bit more textural with this sample card.. the pieces stick up from the page about an eighth of an inch and they are brightly colored only subdued by the black paint I washed over them. Painting the right eye was a challenge so it came off looking better than I expected.

If you would like to own this piece of art .. it's price today is only $35. Email me if you would like to own today's face at iwilldream4ever@aol.com. Hope you have a wonderful day!!! See you later.

Day 34 and sometimes life is serious

Day 34.

Today I saw this face and I just had to paint those big hairy eyes. Those eyes just spoke to me about the seriousness that I feel sometimes. The past few days have been a mix of real soul searching and opportunities and moments of just letting things be. Letting life be what it is and trying to figure things out. Concentration......focus and a deep sigh. I don't have to figure everything out my self. I can just let go.
I have been reaching out to share this new journey I'm on where ever I can and so yesterday I had a wonderful reconnection with an old family friend. Or rather, my parents and his parents are old old friends from yes, when we lived in Africa. We met for the first time when I was in Washington DC attending a wedding of my cousins. My parents loved his parents and their children. I said we never met because when we were little we didn't really know each other, I am thinking he was still just a toddler by the time we left. I did play with his older brother when his mother would have us over. I always loved the smell of curry in her house and his mother's sweet soft voice. Always dressed in her traditional Indian clothing. She was extraordinarily beautiful, with beautiful dark eyes and black hair. We sent a few emails and yesterday we talked on the phone. Such a nice conversation. We talked about our lives and it was a pleasant exchange. Maybe as time goes on I am learning that the connections, where ever they come from, can lead to more pleasant memories in today, in the moments that happen now. So yes .. I'm grateful there are happy moments even when life can be serious. So this portrait is not about this family but, rather more of a reflection of me and how my brain concentrate's sometimes too hard. This face says it for me. I thoroughly enjoyed painting this face this morning.

Thanks for stopping over and if you want to have a serious face on your wall .. and hey my first landscape face. I thought about that .. all my portraits are portrait .. so this is a landscape portrait .. haha.

If you would like to have a landscape portrait of a serious face email me at iwilldream4ever@aol.com and go call an old friend it may surprise you!!  See you back here to morrow! Ciao

Day 33

Well nearly officially one third of the way done. Grateful now for this daily practice still having my mind on my daughter and asking for loving thoughts and prayers sent her way.

Today when I look at this portrait I get this sense of longing for that one place where I had so much joy in my life. I have found that when I have the opportunity to talk with people that have lived in the same part of Africa that I lived in as child. They have this longing remembrance as well. There was something that was almost magical about this place.

One of the frequent things that we did as a family, which we seemed to have the most time for while living there, was to go camping. In my whole life I have never been able to replicate that experience or sense of place. It is on my list of things to do before.

On many occasions my mother would come to our small American school and sign us out early on a Friday afternoon or morning!!! These times were always filled with so much excitement because we knew what it meant. A three hour drive to the coast and camping at the beach. The first two hours were the hardest. A steady and I mean steady, consistent drive of turning on switchback after switchback. The motion alone could cause your breakfast or lunch to come up if you were the least bit prone to that. Fortunately, none in our family had this affliction. But I can attest to the intensity of being in a van for a drive like that. We were three thousand feet above sea level. We had a long way down in short span of time. I was always trying not to look when you could see a mile down the side of the mountain and never see the bottom. By the time we got to the flat land we knew we were almost there.. we would sing like we'd been holding our breath and were finally able to breath and drive on the flat land, flat land, flat land. You would too if you'd seen it. Now it looked like we were on the desert. Dry, hot, and only a smattering of trees or dried looking bushes. Then the turn at the well on to north beach had us looking at the women that were there gathering their supply of water to carry away on mules. They always seemed to be wearing black, they had their faces covered, they would look at us as we passed by. Then we finally arrived. A long beach with no one in sight. The sea a few feet away with two feet of water for as far as it seemed you could see and in the distance the breaking waves. We set up camp and quickly took cover under a canopy of canvas to alleviate some of the heat of standing in the sun. It was one hundred and ten degrees in the shade and the only thing good about it was the breeze and the lack of humidity. You could get wet in the water and find some relief but you were dry rather quickly. I think the best part of all was getting our bathing suits on and never taking them off until we were on the way home a few days later. We had this beautiful desolate spot to explore for hours and hours. There were shells and these little crawling hermit crabs. They were a light gray in color and they were everywhere. They could not hide and so they would clump together in a big pile. They had these big eyes and they were in a variety of sizes and each had a different looking home to carry with them. My sister and I loved them, we loved them. We would collect them and take them into our tent and spend hours just playing with hermit crabs. I don't suppose there is enough time in the day to say all the things that we would do while we were at the beach on the Red Sea. These were the days of treasure and joy. At night it would be so hot in our tent we would beg to be out in the breeze. And so after much whining we would be on a cot under the stars with the sea singing a lullaby to us as the waves lapped on the shore. This was the magic of this place .. this is where the joy was made. This is where joy is long remembered. I'm grateful to be brought back to joy.

Thank you for stopping over.. of course i love to know your thoughts and read your comments. Please don't be shy. If you would like to own today's portrait email me at iwilldream4ever@aol.com. Today's portrait is $33. I hope you find some joy in your day today. See you tomorrow.

She's on my mind .....Day 32 of 100 faces painted in 100 days.

Today is Day 32 closer yet to one third of the way through. As I go through the process of decision making I find that it is always a process of concluding the work. When is the right time to stop? So the joy in it is being able to experiment in front of you. Someone told me I was brave. Not for the painting I think as much as the words I write. But there is also something that feels intimate in a way to reveal my paintings as well. I paint my heart out in front of  you. Whether you see it or not or read the words or not, that is what I'm doing.

Sometimes when its time to write a post the idea of what to write comes clearly in my head. Other times there are just experiences that force their way into my day and I can't stop thinking about that.

I tend to notice that the stories emulate something from the portrait. Each one is it's own self portrait without looking like me.

Today I'm tired. I stayed up skyping with my daughter. I have to tell you .. I LOVE skyping with my grandchildren and all of my kids. I feel like I get to spend time with them but can't hug them or touch them. But I love seeing them and taking them all in. I sang lullaby's to my grandchildren last night. I watched my daughter cook in the kitchen. We cooked together even though we were six hundred miles apart. I love my daughter. I want desperately for her to be happy and feel joy. I love my daughter. I know that mother daughter relationships can be complicated. I know that I was not a perfect mother and I don't know if I have ever met one. I know that some of my actions as her mother don't feel good to her. But I love my daughter. I can tell you that when she was born she was the third baby I gave birth too. I can also say that I wanted her to be a girl before she was born. I can also tell you that the day that she was born and I found out it was her, I felt like a little girl on christmas morning. I kept waking up and realizing that I had a girl and I would feel a gush of warmth on my heart. I felt instantly in love with her. Did I tell you I love my daughter? Suffice it to say that she is on my mind, i can relate to her right now even though she is far away and doing what I did thirty years ago .. i guess it weighs a little heavy sometimes and that is what you see in the face. So I'm thinking of her, sending her love from my heart and surrounding her and her family with love thoughts and love vibrations and love healing. Maybe if you read this you will send them to her also.

So .. if you would love to have this face on your wall .. email me at iwilldream4ever@aol.com and let me know. I appreciate your comments and your support. It's an amazing experiment so far!!!  And go tell someone you love that you love them. I'll see you tomorrow...

There's a What? Day 31 of 100 Faces in 100 days.

I'm finding that the stories are just about as much fun as painting the faces. I am not looking for perfection and as with painting and time and daily practice the writing will hopefully get better. I'm excited to see the evolution of this process as I go to the very end.

Today I decided to tell you a story that has a bit of humor in it. This is as most have been a story about something that happened in childhood. When we first lived in Africa we lived in an apartment on the second floor. There was a large covered patio off of the kitchen and went off to the side of the living room. There was a concrete block wall and a balcony with railing on two sides. I don't know if  most men love to shoot a BB gun but it seems like a thing a man would like. Remember I'm a girl who has an older brother who I seemed to compete with from time to time. If he wanted to shoot a BB gun then I wanted to shoot a BB gun. And so I did. My dad would put a small can against the wall on a stool with a big cardboard box behind it and we would practice shooting the can from a great distance. The patio was very big. If the BB's didn't go into the cardboard box and it ricocheted off the wall they wouldn't go very far. My father was always careful. Most of the time we would do this out in a field far away from anything. There was something really fun to me about feeling the weight of these tiny metal balls. I liked holding them in my hands and feeling them all rolling around my small fingers. It didn't take many to fill my hand. You could even rub them between your hands and they would fall on the floor and bounce around for great distances and I would collect them.  Hear the humming of child here .. being silly and happy. For reasons I can only believe were due to my age I put one of the little beads of metal in cup of my ear. It could sit there without going into the ear canal. I could take it out with my finger. It seemed fun to me .. i liked how it felt trying to take it out. By now you know where this is going. As it likely would, a BB went falling down into my ear canal.

Plop..

just that fast and I gasped .. oh no.

I bent over and wildly starting shaking my head. No parents were around but they were nearby, so there was still time to remove it before they noticed what I was doing. Hopefully, before I got into trouble. I could almost feel it there but no matter what I tried, it would not come out. I thought about telling my parents, but I was way to embarrassed to tell anyone that I did such a silly thing. I went about the rest of the day and night, bath time, bed time, morning, getting ready for school and breakfast, kind of perplexed by this conundrum I was in. I went off to school.

I think best friends must exist so that we have one person to tell our secrets too. Somewhere in the class I noticed that my hearing was being affected by this little metal bead in my ear. Sounds sort of echoed. I could hear my self talk in my head when I spoke out loud. It started to get annoying and then I worried that I might have to hear this sound in my head forever. So I leaned over to my best friend and said " I have a BB in my ear." she asked me "what?" I said it a little louder but tried not to say it too loud. I was way too embarrassed. "I have a BB in my ear!"  (this is where you look at today's face) She repeated what I said and then asked a question. "How did you get a BB in your ear?" I told her I accidentally put it there. She looked at me with very serious look and said "You better tell the teacher." Being afraid of what might happen to my ear I walked to the teachers desk and told her very matter of factly that I had a BB in my ear and she looked at me in the strangest way. I am sure that it must have been one of the oddest things she had ever heard in her life. That's how she looked at me and then, as if to remove my interuption, and with some disdain, she told me to go to the clinic. I put my books away and went to the clinic and had to tell the whole thing again to the school clinic nurse. She had no way to look into my ear and so of course she called my mother. I can tell you that at this age when I think about that event I find myself laughing hysterically about how all the adults in my life took this interesting bit of news about a BB in my ear. When my mother arrived the school nurse relayed the information to her and seemed to imply that I was telling a story. That I probably just wanted to go home. I didn't expect that. I don't really remember anything that my mother said to me on the ride to the base hospital. It was a short two blocks from the school. I don't recall her questions which I'm sure she had or any scolding or chastising me for having a BB in my ear because she was probably trying to think of how to teach me a lesson or why I was trying to tell a story so I could leave school. I do remember laying on a hospital examining table and hearing the doctor say "well yes there is a BB in there" and with a serious tone in his voice said "we have to get that out of there." I lay there feeling a wee bit vindicated for having not lied about having a BB in my ear. Then the doctors carefully put a vile of thick oily substance into my ear. I remember there being at least five adults in the room around that table looking at me. I heard my mother exclaim that oh, she could scoop the thing out with her fingernail while the doctors were being so careful to remove this floating piece of metal from my ear. Finally .. relief. There seemed to be a sigh of all the adults as if I was having a serious procedure. I couldn't understand the fuss really, but I was relieved too.

Then the best part is last. My dad must have gotten a call from my mom telling him what was happening. As I stood in the hallway with a cotton gauze pad on my head, while the oil drained out, my dad walked up to me with plain face and asked me. "How did you get that BB in your ear?"

Now, mind you, I had no intention of telling the embarrassing truth of what I did, so I thought for a long minute and said, " remember that day when you and my brother were shooting the BB gun upstairs on the patio? Well I was sitting in the Volkswagon in the back seat waiting to go with mom somewhere and I think the BB ricocheted off one of the can's and came all the way down to the car where that little tiny hole is in the window(this really existed) and it came right into my ear." He looked at me with a look that was half smiling and yet trying to remain slightly serious. With a question mark on his face he had a laugh and said "Really?" He told me that it was quite an amazing story. He may have asked if I was sure that's what happened and I said "Yes it's what happened" feeling a tiny bit of pride at saying something remarkable and relieved that he wasn't mad at me. We left and they took me to lunch and then home. And while I always knew the truth and they did too, it's always been a funny story to tell. A testament to my vivid imagination. All I can hope is that it gave you a laugh.

Today the portrait was painted with air of "you have a what in your ear?"

Thanks for stopping over and reading and following my face challenge and today's portrait is for sale for $31. If you are interested in it please email me at iwilldream4ever@aol.com. It is approx. 8"x10" and is painted on old letter's, envelopes, and wrapping paper that my mother saved and I have sewn together and used as a canvas. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.