Happy Thanksgiving to all my AMerican friends and clients!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

This is a portion of a sketch I did a few years back of our Thanksgiving feast - it's such fun to go back and look at them. Copyright Anne Jenkins #sketch #sketchbook

Remembrance Day

Lest we forget....

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Latest article in travel ezine

check out (and please click on the advertisers links!!) my latest art travel article on American Roads & Global Highways ... share if you can. Thanks!!

Unity in Columbus, New Mexico

Don't be fooled by the comments from Washington about the border... this is the real border, and it's uplifting. Be there... in New Mexico

The art of sculpture

My latest article in the travel ezine American Roads - enjoy and share! Thank you

The Art of American Craft Week

My latest art trails column in the travel ezine American Roads & Global Highways in online.  This time it's all about American Craft Week - a great celebration of all things hand made in America held every October. This year it is 1-16, so mark your calendars!  Here's the link for a taste of what to expect.

And I'd also like to wish all my American readers a happy and safe 4th of July!

©  Anne Jenkins - mixed media, burlap, handmade paper and acrylic paint. Sold.

The Art of Committees

Thank you to the online news source, Milford Live, for the article on my joining the steering committee of American Craft Week. It is an honour and a great experience.

Morning sketches

2016 Art Strolls guide to DE Arts

The Art of History

     February is Black History Month and I think it's an appropriate time to ask for help getting my art installation in to a museum. The museum which was interested has no funds. If you can assist...advise... introduce, I would be most grateful.
     This is an emotional installation - it was emotional to create, and it had an emotional affect on visitors during it's 3-month exhibit at the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, Del. And it is an important part of history which must not be forgotten or hidden.
     Learn from history. Click here  to experience the journey.

   

The Art of Family

My family around the world light a candle at 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve and toast family and friends. It's a moment that brings us all together across the continents. It's a joy to see all the photos on our family circular email on Christmas Day.  Makes us feel closer together instead of spread over 5 continents! My seasonal wish is for peace in 2016 to you all

© Anne Jenkins 2015 http://annejenkinsart.com   http://artstrolls.com

The Art of Simple Things

I wrote the piece I have wanted to write for a few weeks but am holding back on posting it while I wait for my emotions to settle. It is not good to publish a rant. SO I sat with a blank mind this morning and couldn't even decide what to sketch while I had my morning cuppa.

I decided to follow some way better sketchers than me and sketch my travel kit. The kit is fascinating to me ... it has changed but remained the same over the couple of years since I got in to this habit.

I started with just a medium sized travel palette. Then I got a really small palette which I love. I've had some watercolour pencils for a long time but never warmed to them. Then a friend gave me a couple of watercolour crayons and mentioned they had a richer colour tone to them. They didn't grab my imagination.

So the pencils and the crayons languished in a drawer in the mess that is my studio for a year or more. I took them out a couple of months ago for some reason and thought, "hmmm, why not give them another go?"

So I did and then I noticed how it changes a sketch. There's a different texture to all three, so you can complete a sketch with a multitude of lines, blends, thickness or depth. I am still learning how to use them. It's always a trial and error process with me. I never took instruction well.

And that to me is one of the great joys of art. New ideas or methods continually present themselves. It is intriguing to learn about them, to try them - perhaps reject them, put them away and then for no apparent reason, return to them.

So the world goes round.

The Art of Recipes

Okay sports fans - another change in direction... well, this is me and I do this quite regularly as I am sure you, dear reader, are quite used to by now. I did the "what I ate Today" illustrations for 3 whole weeks. A long time in my attention span orbit. And then I thought why not give recipes a try out. I have been following a few illustrators who mostly do recipes and some of the styles are charming or fun or downright yummy looking.
Here's a couple I tried my hand at and am rather enjoying the process... you actually have to think about it before doing it. Novel thought.
So- what do you like, not like, hate, couldn't care less or love about any of these?  Let the critique commence....
and - thank you!

The Art of Storms

So, we had another storm this past weekend...nothing too bad just lots of wet and windy weather. We stayed put and cooked and talked and enjoyed each other's company. It was a peaceful time. I continued journaling what I eat every day...it's turning in to an interesting and fun experiment. I think it is an excellent way to control what you eat on a regular basis. I just lack a lot of self control ..here's our meals for Saturday and Sunday because I really don't have anything profound to say right now.

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The Art of Struggle

I've been struggling lately, too many balls to keep in the air and not enough incoming funds! Okay, all avenues seem to hit a brick wall these days. Can't seem to lose the weight I need to lose. No inspiration to sketch or create...just trying to make a buck and mostly failing. Bah! HUMBUG. What the hell, I just hate a pity party.

So... I decided to follow the advice of a wonderfully cheerful Dutch artist, Koosjekoene, and true to Dutch character, is straight forward and takes a simple approach. She says when you have no inspiration to draw, draw what your meals and all you eat on a daily basis. Why not?

I started yesterday and you know what? It is also an excellent way to see what you are eating or perhaps eating too much of... and it is fun! For the few minutes I sketch I don't think about anything else, my mind relaxes and it helps the soul. And this after just one day.

It certainly doesn't cure my ills but every little victory counts.

Now, if I could just win the lottery...

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The Therapy Art

This coming Saturday, 29 August, it will be 10 years since Hurricane Katrina arrived and sent our lives in to turmoil and fear. You might find it strange to "fear" since we were safely in our dear friends home in Houston. But the fear wasn't for us ... not only were we safe, but we had friends and family calling from South Africa and around the world to offer help and comfort. When we got to Houston, my friends kindly let me phone my sister in South Africa and she alerted people we were safe and gave the number to a special few.

What we feared was what happened to friends we couldn't find for a few days. Fear while watching the drowned Gulf Coast and thinking where are they? Our phones weren't working well but our text messages got through. I must put a plug in here for Virgin Mobile USA... a day or so after the storm hit, we got a text saying something like, "You are probably going to need more than usual, so here is an extra bunch of minutes free for a month. Be safe." not all carriers were that friendly or helpful.

Finally - locating some took weeks and weeks - but we all found each other again. I remember one day I got a text from friends we thought for sure were lost, I started screaming "they're alive, they're alive" to no one in particular. The day I was in the Museum of Art and got another text saying "I'm okay" and burst in to tears.

The houses and stuff/possessions lost weren't top of my list, it was the lives that mattered. And then just as we were getting our breath and starting to think straight, along came Hurricane Rita. But that is another story.

I am interacting more with friends from our time in New Orleans this week since we're sharing our individual Katrina therapeutic art and memories. But I am finding it hard to cope with the constant reports about Katrina on the media. Some reports have me in tears, so I often just turn the radio off. But still, the memories are crowding out just about everything else at the moment.

We've moved often in our lives, singly and as a couple. Some one asked me how many times, and I lost count while trying to work it out! But I have always moved on my own terms, when I want to and why I want to. I loved living in New Orleans. I fit in there so well.

Yes, it is a self-absorbed place where they believe they are the best of everything in the world. Who cares if they are or not? So what? You don't always agree, you just need to go with the flow and live it. We did. We made life long friends and enjoyed it all.

And we weren't ready to leave.

So, that is the reason why even 10 years after the traumatic event, I still in a funny way grieve for it. Have I moved on? Yes. I don't dwell on it. It often pops in to my head but I'm not obsessed with it.

But it feels like unfinished business in a way. I knew we would leave New Orleans one day. It's a given. We move on.

But not that way. It is not an experience I would wish on my worst enemy.

The Art of Reality

I've just been away on holiday in West Virginia and I am having trouble getting back to reality. Okay - I am having an awful lot of trouble achieving this reality crap. We enjoyed a blissful 8 day stay in a isolated cabin in the hills, pure silence and peace. The cats were with us and loved it too. Yep, they told us, this is a good spot and settled down as though they'd been their all their lives.

We ate excellent meals in the cabin or at quaint restaurants...visited farmer's markets...explored old towns enjoying a renewed energy. We also toured Civil War battle fields.

Spent an entire day at Antietam. Okay - that's not so peaceful when you start reading the gruesome numbers of the carnage... how do you get your head around 23,000 deaths in 12 hours?

Lee enjoys exploring battlefields. I grow weary of the stupid destruction man reigns on each other. So he wanders off and reads all the plaques and things. I sit and sketch. Then we move on to the next area and repeat. It works well. He doesn't feel rushed and I am not bored.

At Antietam, one of the worst attacks and counter attacks took place in a cornfield. Now looking at cornfields take on a whole new meaning. Just next to this cornfield is an old farmhouse with barns and out buildings. I sat on a stone wall to sketched the house because it was so atmospheric.

It had a row of white towels on the line to dry. It made me think perhaps this is what it would have looked like when taken over as a field hospital. But, in reality, it probably would have been over run with wounded and dying men, thick smoke from the guns swirling around and noisy as all get out with cries of pain and shouts for help.

It seemed so incongruent sitting there in this now peaceful park on a hot summer's day with birds flitting about. The battle was held around this time of year and those young men wore woollen gear and slogged through hell. The thought of the discomfort and the whole slaughter aspect seem impossible.

The saddest thing of all - men have been killing each other in some form or other in war since time immemorial. And it has gotten us no where. Have we learned nothing? I often wonder how we got designated the most intelligent of the species?

See... reality is a difficult thing to deal with at any time.

Now, where shall I go on holiday next? Definitely not near a battlefield thanks.

the farmhouse next to the cornfield, Antietam, Maryland

The art of sketching

Last time I wrote about my green quiet place. So this time I'll write about one of the things I thought about while there.

Sketching.

The thing is I have become a devotee of sketching. Most artists start their careers learning to draw, then sketch and then paint and move on to big canvases etc etc. Well, not me. I started with watercolour house portraits and then moved straight on to large canvases. I never did learn to draw or sketch.

Then I met my friend Rosemary, a journaler par excellence. Check out her website. I hadn't thought of painting like this before since I couldn't see a way to make money out of it. As a professional artist, when I paint I want to make money....I don't paint for fun.

We took a trip up to Maine in 2013 and I bought a journal on a whim... and promptly fell in love with chronicling our travels in my new little watercolour journal and now I do it all the time. I traded up to Moleskin watercolour journals and pretty much use them all the time, unless it's my own homemade ones. I use left over strips of 300lb paper which is glorious to paint on. I tie it together with string and it looks super cool.

Once I started really getting in to it I had to think of ways to make some income from it. So I started using a mix of my sketches in with my photographs when I do my travel writing. Then I used quite a few sketches when I produced the Art Strolls in Delaware online magazine.

So as I sat contemplating my navel, I thought well, it's working a bit. I am making some money from my sketches. So for fun, I decided I'd share some of my sketches and travels in a magazine form. Not for money but for the sheer joy of sketching and travelling. A couple of my favourite things.

Another of my favourite things is food. But I have never had much success with painting food. So this year I made it a mission. Paint some foodie things every week, daily if possible, til I got the hang of it. I'm still working on it. Who knows where it will lead.

But here for you dear readers... is my magazine. Get yourself a glass of wine and enjoy your trip with me.

Bon voyage!

The Art of New Lines

I've been busy the past couple of weeks trying out new things... always good for the soul and it keeps life fresh.
First off, take a look at my website please.  I have added a store - with a check out cart and all. So smart am I!! I have a few giclees left over from popular series. I've had them tucked away when I got the idea to have a summer sale on my website ... the first three are up. I am so glad Weebly makes life so easy for web building and even I can do my own store!! I will add more giclees and small originals over the summer when I get them photographed and sorted out.
I wanted to make a little book on my travel sketches for my family but it morphed in to a magazine. I figured, so why not make one and use it for a little shameless self-promotion. Someone has to do it. I launched it today... voila,  here it is ... my latest magazine

The Art of a Special Place

It's been a while ... I know, I know. Life got in the way.

I seem to be writing this with monotonous regularity on this blog.

So - I have decided, I obviously cannot keep up a weekly blog. I shall attempt twice a month. Is that a deal, dear readers?

I've been pondering now for 2 days, since I received a gentle reminder I hadn't written anything for quite some time, over what to write about. I have had an awful lot on my mind lately. I guess in an effort to deal with it, I have taken on a lot of chores or projects, etc. It doesn't help I have a half baked approach to most things coupled with a short attention span... you get the drift.

Then last night Lee had to go to a business mixer thing downtown, so I got out some nice cheese - a touch of Gambazola, herbed goats cheese, a tart Havarti with 2 slices of homemade bread, a proper Dijon mustard and a handful of sherry toms. I poured myself a glass of deep red Cabernet and settled down. I gazed out the window in comfortable solitude and looked at our canopy of trees.

We have two very large trees - an oak and a maple tree - in our backyard with a very bushy lush hedge around the porch. All was quiet. The cats lay next to me in quiet companionship and we were swallowed in to the dense, peaceful green.

Time in this house has not always been kind to us but I do love the back garden. It's a jardin savage but it's our private shield of green with lots of birds.

The birds on the suet feeder provide daily joy and entertainment. The starlings are the terrible hooligans we love. The dazzling blue jays are raucous. The bright crimson cardinals don't have a care in the world The red breasts are huge. I still, after all this time in the U.S., can't get over how big they are compared to our dainty plump English robins. The delicate wee nuthatches and chickadees look tiny and sweet. One of my favourites is the woodpecker who lives in the oak. He taps away on the tree and every so often, partakes of the suet. Apparently they have a fondness for suet. He is beautiful... simple coloring, black and white with a brilliant dash of red.

And joining the crowd of entertainers is the large squirrel who also lives in the oak. He can't get to the feeder, or doesn't try to, and he doesn't bother with the birds but he knows he drives the cats crazy. So he runs stomping his feet on the roof and then leaps along the branches of the oak before wiggling his butt at the cats who crouch down low in the attack position and chatter at him.

I always feel better after I've spent some quiet time in our green canopy. So I thought I'd tell you about it. And here's a photo I took of part of it to post on Instagram last night as it soothed me. I hope you all have a happy solitude place to go to when needed.