I made this abstraction in Photoshop of selections from photos I made this year. I moved jagged selections around to fit like a puzzle. I masked and brushed and erased edges till it flowed. I changed hues to create a feeling of benign breeze. Can you tell we live on the Gulf and visited the West Indies this winter? Enjoy!
These exotic birds are residents of Jungle Gardens in Sarasota, Florida. In some cases the backgrounds were quite distracting, so I employed Photoshop or Lightroom and my imagination to give them a new context.
Sculptures on the Ministry of Agriculture
Sculpture of Diego de Velazquez, Spain’s leading court painter of the 17th century Golden Age
The Atocha train station where we took the luxurious fast train to Cordoba
Motorcycles and scooters are very popular and suitable to the narrow streets of the historic districts
September 19 is universal Talk Like a Pirate Day where I saw several pirates of various ages
For subscribers, if you only saw a small portion of the photos posted in the last blog, here are the three photos downsized for email.
Addition to the Art Museu Thyssen-Bornemisza
Elevator Addition to the Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofia
I recently made my first visit to Spain. I was fascinated by the way art and design styles over Spain’s long history are combined, intermingled and found adjacent to one another. Sometimes the result is harmonious and other times I perceived a disruptive clash as the rational and emotional sometimes conflict.
The addition to the Thyssen-Bornemisza art museum is contemporary without a strong visual relationship to the primary building, an early 19th century palace.
Neo-classical congress sits next to a contemporary building.
The Museo Reina Sofia (Queen Sofia Museum) was built in an old hospital. It has an addition of a glass elevator in the front and a contemporary addition on the opposite side. The museum houses 20th and 21st century art.
Merry Christmas to all Christians! I showed this new photo collage to colleagues at the Venice Camera Club and was encouraged to make it into a Christmas card. Too late for prints and mailing for this year I decided to share it with you via email. To me, she looks like she has emerged right from the stained glass. I hope that this image brings you joy and courage to express your most loving concerns for all of humanity.
Summer afternoons in Florida are a nice time to visit museums, tour a garden, swim in the pool or the Gulf, have a leisurely lunch and take a few photos along the way. The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg and the Ringling Museum in Sarasota both make fun day trips.
The Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg breaks out of the box with both glass and rock.
The Dali Museum glass wall/ceiling brings light into the core of the museum. The painting galleries surround the core with walls separating the strong natural light from the controlled gallery lighting.
The architecture of the Vinoy Hotel hearkens back to a more decorative style.
Gordon Huether is a sculptor and painter with a studio and gallery in Napa, California which I visited last summer. The hot colors of the glass inside the cool metal express the tropical heat with a sense of contemporary sophistication of a city that welcomes new art forms.
This beautiful rose, blooming in the July heat, is part of Mabel Ringling’s rose garden.
This maiden has stood so long in Mabel Ringling’s rose garden that she has begun to grow lichens on her fair complexion.
In the center of Mabel Ringling’s rose garden stands a wrought-iron gazebo. Looking straight up to the clear blue sky reveals its pattern, which echoes the structure of the garden itself.
In between rain storms that have given us over 13 inches of rain in the past week, the plants in our garden continue to bloom!
This Gardenia has been blooming since mid-April.
Many bees visit the agapanthus.
This monarch sipped pentas as if they were cocktails.
This butterfly enjoys the pentas as well.
I like how the sky shapes compete with the canna lilies for my attention.
Jody’s amaryllis bloom close up reveals such beautiful colors.
Jody’s amaryllis flowers are spectacular.
Double red hibiscus blooms continue to enchant me year after year.
Ascension explores light energy without form
To me the light is like flames, wings, petals, waves and clouds–always moving, affected by surrounding colors, joyous and playful. My watercolor painting is installed behind glass and therefore reflects images around it, which makes the matting seem much more complex than when seen locally. The paintings on the sides are dimensional, with layers of water color collage rippling out. Its installed dimensions are about 40″ x 80.” Usually I add paintings to the gallery, but when I updated the gallery software, it no longer accepts my uploads, so until I can find some remedy, I’ll just introduce you to my creative expressions through new posts.
A bird eats sugar from my hands
In spring 2009, while we were sailing in the Exuma chain of the Bahamas, we anchored at Wardrick Wells at the Land and Sea Park. Wild birds flew onto our sail boat and perched on the life lines. After a little while they hopped into the cockpit. Then one explored the cabin. We shooed her back to the cockpit. We had seen birds resembling these in the British Virgin Islands feeding at an open bowl of sugar. We brought out some sugar to the cockpit and she immediately started nibbling. I then handed the camera over to Randy, put the sugar in my hands, and Randy took a few photos. He was concentrating so much on the bird in my hands that he ignored the background: the inside of the cockpit. Wanting to learn Photoshop in 2009, I decided to merge the bird in hands with our view of the colorful water and sky. Somehow the picture was lost. I stumbled upon it this week while rationalizing my photo libraries. I wasn’t happy with the masking, so I started over, re-masked the foreground and finally found the directions on how to re-merge them. Now I just have to keep using/learning Photoshop so I don’t have to start over!