Miss me yet? "Life" won over again in the last few days and I have made only very slow progress on my Harvey House painting. My head, however, is plotting new paintings since my visit to the Los Angeles Art Show on Thursday! It was good. An artist friend of mine came along and I enjoyed a dialogue on all things artistic and artful. We spent several hours absorbing the beauty and studying the skill of top artists throughout the world. We discovered new favorites. Quite often, I found myself wondering why a particular piece was selected for this show.

It was fun to hear a lot of languages along with English spoken with all kinds of accents. I even began feeling not accented enough :) Obviously, to be interesting in the American art world, you need to be a bit exotic.

It seemed that oils, other than in the Chinese section, dominated the show. The Chinese had a large percentage of works on paper and I found their large abstract ink paintings on rice paper fascinating. I saw a couple of watercolors in traditional/historic art section (plus a gouache by Van Gogh). All of it rubbed in the (usually unsolicited) advice that I get from people: 1) switch to oils and 2) paint big.

I found myself drawn to figures (mostly in contemporary traditional and modern sections) and to abstracts. Of course, I already discovered that I like both last year when I went through an exercise of clipping images that resonated with me. Now I just need to figure out how to reconcile them in my own work...