Elegant Woman in Pink, painting by my daughter, June 2011
My daughter painted this elegant woman in pink in her art class with teacher Jill Caporlingua. Jill has a Facebook page for her students’ art work – if you go to http://www.facebook.com/gallerychaos2, you can see many paintings by a variety of students of all ages.
If you or a friend has a small business, you can learn how to put up a Facebook business page by reading Ease of a Facebook Business Page.
And I usually wait until Friday to link to other bloggers’ posts, but I did so enjoy these drawings for Jewish months by two of Mrs. S.’s children.
Roof of house and second floor, too
I have been painstakingly working on a project to illustrate three roofs (typical of Highland Park house roofs). Before Pesach (way back in March?) I photographed many of the roofs on our block. I’ve been sketching them, and I finally “put up” one roof today in Illustrator (using the pen tool), and here is the result. My plan is to do three of these, each one unique but about the same size. Then I will play with them in Photoshop, adding color, texture and details. And maybe a watercolor look with a Photoshop watercolor brush or two.
As you, the readers of this blog, are my cheering squad, I decided I would share with you this one black and white frame of a roof.
Salad Bowl watercolor on paper, June 2011 by Leora Wenger
Thanks to everyone who inspired me to paint by responding to my Simple Summer Salad Hunt. Results of the hunt (and feel free to add more salad ideas to this post) will be posted next week. A funny anecdote on this painting: my husband was trying to figure out if we have bowl that looks like this blue starred bowl. I told him no, I just made it up. Poetic/artistic license.
My watercolor is of Raritan Avenue, between North Third and North Second Avenues. One of the stores is Jerusalem Pizza. The one on the end, by the big tree, used to be Charlie Brown’s, which went out of business. A new restaurant appears to be opening in its place. Here is a sketch I did prior to this watercolor.
A continuation of my Raritan Avenue studies – here is a photo on top of a drawing. I worked on adding watercolor to the drawing today. I plan to post the watercolor in the middle of this week.
This is same as above, converted to black and white. One can see the lamppost in the drawing doesn’t match with the photo – no matter, it matches in the “finished” watercolor.
Raritan Avenue in Highland Park, New Jersey, watercolor on paper by Leora Wenger, 2011
Last night I did this sketch of a block of Raritan Avenue in Highland Park, New Jersey. Can anyone who has been to Highland Park guess which block it is (between which street and which street)? I hope to do more – this one has a lot of grays and blues, and I used some yellow straight from the tube which seems to pop. That’s OK for a sketch, but I want to work on more details.
If you have been to Route 27 also known as Raritan Avenue, you will know there are usually tons of cars. I used photos from a few hours before the 2009 Memorial Day Parade, when the street was clear of cars.
My friend Julie sent me her painting of her lemon tree to post on this blog. Julie, who lives in Hashmonaim, Israel, writes: “All of the fruit on our three citrus fruit trees are ripe. We also have an orange and a pomelo tree.”
This is one of the trees in her backyard. I took this photo in June 2008, when we visited her family.
Detail from Radish Kale, watercolor on paper, 2011 by Leora Wenger
On My Blog
Elsewhere in the Blogosphere
This week Jill and I went to see Ilana Shafir at Rutgers. You can visit her beautiful website and read my review from when she spoke in Highland Park two years ago. Her daughter, artist Leah Zahavi, lives in Highland Park.
My friend Debbie wrote about the Rambam movie we saw last week. I wasn’t as enthusiastic as she was about the movie, but I thought the story was well-written (it was written by Robert Avrech of Seraphic Secret). Maybe I was a bit judgmental of the graphics; I would have liked a Shakespeare-like presentation instead of the stiff drawings.
Mason Resnick put a pasta recipe and photo on his wife Lori’s blog. Today I went to visit the Asian market in Edison he mentions, H-Mart; I bought some varied mushrooms and other produce. Maybe next time I’ll bring my camera and take a few photos for a blog post. I had a good laugh when I met another friend there, also there for the first time.
Felisol talked about her illness, ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis). She related her difficulty with (and expense of) some alternative therapies. And then in the comments she speaks of how T’ai Chi, Qigong and Feldenkrais have been helpful, as have been her friends, family and prayers.
If you haven’t seen it yet, visit the Purim song by Maccabeats on Mrs. S.’s post. Esther is adorable, and the astronauts are cute, too. Catch the calendar scene.
Radish Kale Nuts Parsley, Watercolor on paper, 2011 by Leora Wenger
Finally, after several months of not painting, I took out the watercolor paints yesterday. You can see some inspiration from this photograph of radishes, kale and nuts; the clementine on the left was in a different still life, and I decided that bit of orange would add to the painting.
There are the famous windows by Chagall at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. And then there are the Chagall-style windows that my daughter (above image) and other students at her school created and displayed at the recent art show. Many paintings were on display. One technique her art teacher uses is to learn about an artist, and then the students create works similar to those of that artist. Some of the paintings, for example, had the red, blue, yellow and white rectangles of Piet Mondrian.
