Sometimes older brothers are OK

When you're growing up, older brothers can be a real pain...but then when they get older, sometimes they can help fix your computer! (The computer that The Husband kinda screwed up...) :)  Thank you, bro!  Are these not the two cutest computer geeks ever?

Happy New Year

Happy New Year, artist friends!  Here are a couple of sketches I did while in Mexico. (I'm back in Colorado now and can't wait to get into my studio, but first there's still some visiting-relative time.)

The feet are The Husband's, as he relaxed on a sofa. About a 10-min. sketch.

The other sketch is from the Houston airport, where we "enjoyed" a 3.5-hr. layover...ughhhhhhh.  It was a young woman with her iPhone. It was maybe a 5-min. sketch.

Health, happiness, and creativity for us all this next year!

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Guavas

Painted 'em, then ate 'em.


(The photo is a bit glare-y and doesn't show the vibrancy of the orange accents.)

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

$115.00 - Guavas (Ready to Frame)

Whew!

Some paintings are (relatively) easy and some are definitely not. This one was firmly the latter. It's ironic to me how the finished painting (seen here) looks like it was done in a carefree, easy, quick manner, rather than via sweat and cursing.


But the problems started even before the paints came out. First we had to email our housesit hosts about whether they had a juicer, because there were two oranges in the kitchen (one not so orange-colored...see my painting a few days back) that felt heavy, a.k.a. juicy, and we wanted some fresh juice. After a spousal argument over whether the oranges looked moldy or not, we were instructed by the email response as to where to find said juicer(s). One was electric and looked frighteningly complicated, and the other was a little white plastic thing that you suppposedly put a little fruit wedge into and then folded it in half with some pressure. I'm guessing it was really for lemons, since your hand would get pretty tired making glasses of juice that way. The Husband tried it, and appeared to break the thing on the very first attempt. Fortunately, however, it was just a cheap thing and a little knob had come out which fit right back in. However, The Husband was giving up on the juicer.


I took a wedge, figuring we'd just have to eat the oranges instead of drinking them. I took a bite of the gloriously orange-colored fruit, and found it too sour to enjoy. However, it was so gorgeous that I took another wedge plus a half-orange to paint. Off I went to our hosts' open-air art studio.


Two-thirds of the way into the painting I started disliking the composition, which involved the single wedge the way you see it posted here plus the half-orange next to and slightly behind it. Four-fifths of the way through the painting, I was hating the composition so much, I decided to remove the half-orange altogether, leaving a lonely single orange wedge which was, however, strongly painted enough to stand alone.


Got rid of the half-orange (and got very messy hands getting rid of it in its painted incarnation), redid the shadow, and then spent a long time trying to recover the freshness of it, having gone too far at one point overworking it.

Whew!

$115.00 - Orange wedge (Ready to Frame)

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Mango

I was curious to know whether you could still get an object to look colorful even with a colorful background. I think you can! 

While I was painting this last night, I kept thinking that it had to be the most colorful thing I've ever painted. It felt like painting a parrot. What a sunset is in a mango.

$115.00 - Mango (Ready to Frame)

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Pair of pears

This is last night's painting, which I will also leave for my hosts here.  

I had purchased these pears at the Wednesday-afternoon tianguis (open-air market) here in Ajijic, Mexico, and brought them home to the housesit we're at. I washed them and gave them an iodine disinfectant soak, then found a gorgeous pumpkin-orange dishtowel and laid them on it to dry. As soon as I placed them on the towel, I knew I had my still life.

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Ripe and not so ripe

These are actually both local oranges, but one was a lot more ripe-looking (i.e., orange) than the other. This is yesterday's painting, which I will be leaving for our housesit hosts.

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Bluejay feather and small copper pot

Today we're in a different house in Ajijic, Mexico, housesitting for an artist couple. I'm in heaven--art everywhere and a million art books and magazines...how awesome. I won't even have time to get through all the art magazines in the next five days...oh, how tragic and yet how heavenly!

I just painted a little still life to leave here for my hosts, but need to wait 'till tomorrow to photograph it when it's light outside (I always paint at night; I'm a night owl who only feels mentally awake at night). So in the meantime, here's one from October. I only realized about halfway through the painting that the shadow looks like some kind of Native American spirit figure (or something...you know what I'm getting at). Interesting.

$105.00 - Bluejay feather and small copper pot (Ready to Frame)

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Tequila

Today was not an art day, but it was pretty interesting. We took a bus tour to the town of Tequila, here in Mexico near Guadalajara. We visited two tequila factories: the newest, Tres Mujeres, which is concentrating on organic 100%-agave tequila; and José Cuervo, which everyone has heard of, which is the oldest and largest factory. I don't like alcohol much, so the tasting sessions were rather wasted on me (so to speak), but a lot of other people loved that aspect of the tour! I did participate in most of the tastings (miniscule amounts) but really, even the smallest taste just makes me grimace violently and flap and wave my hands about.

We did eat some agave "meat" raw. It looks a lot like tough coconut meat but has almost no flavor at all. We also tasted agave after it had been in the steaming oven for a few days--that's the first thing done to it on the way to turning it into tequila. At that point (having been in a massive, deadly-hot sauna for a few days), it was kind of sweet and oily and a brownish color, and tasted a bit like a potent, fibrous yam.

The guy sniffing the vat in the pic and standing up against the wall is The Husband. Tell me, doesn't he look cute in the hairnet we all had to wear (verrrrrry attractive it made all of us, I tell you)?  I can't decide if he looks more like a rapper or like he's waiting to be attended to at a hair salon.

Life drawing

Yesterday my esteemed hostess, Isabel, also an artist, invited me to their weekly life drawing session here in Ajijic, Mexico with a local model, whose name was Cruz. I haven't tried figure drawing for a long time and never really got much training in it. My results were quite disappointing. The last hour I gave up on the figure and did two graphite head sketches I liked. Each one is perhaps about 3" x 3".

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com