Point Made

  Dancing Girl by Dion with Mark Knopfler on guitar. The Song There may be nothing quite as beautiful as a woman dancing. And there is no doubt having Dion's muse dancing to the song she inspired was genius. but when I heard this song, it made me think of my Dancing Girl I bought this painting from Appleton Painter, Lenny Nagler, and named it Dancing Girl . Lenny s a prolific producer of fine landscapes in oils and acrylics. He does this, he told me, "because paintings of people don't sell."  Yet, I have a number of his paintings dealing with human beings as subjects. In my opinion, Dancing Girl is the best painting he's ever produced, and I'm proud of the others I own. When I first took a serious look at this piece, I noticed his treatment of her figure and his decision to depict her from the back. The maturity of her body and the playfulness of her pose lends me to believe that she is happy, self-confident, and carefree. I also wish she would turn around, b...

 I'm hoping that all of us enjoy this holiday season in many ways it can be observed. While the gatherings of friends and families may be slightly bigger than 2020 because many of us have been vaccinated and are more comfortable with small groups, conditions don't allow us to throw care to the wind. I'm adding to this sketch I created. I don't know about you, but I will never take hugging the people I care about for granted again. From Camp Jeff from the shores of the Inland Sea.

 It's  2021, and it's going to be my third no-family holiday. The last one I celebrated was in 2018. Then, I was home for what turned out to be a brief time that I wasn't in rehab for my long battle with an infection in my left leg, which required removing my knee replacement and gallons of intravenous antibiotics. That year was a landmark year for a lot of reasons. First, Maria and I moved into a home she bought. It was the fourth move in four years. We moved from Milwaukee to Mandeville, Louisiana, back to Fox Crossing, Wisconsin, crosstown to Appleton, and uptown to the house on Mason St. Cruising into 2019, I found out my first bout of rehab did not produce the results we needed. I would go through another round of antibiotics, a third knee surgery, only discover a torn or severed tendon which required the fourth surgery. When I went home from rehab in April, I was gifted a trip to New Mexico to visit my daughter for my birthday.  Upon returning from New Mexico, I dis...

 I was treated to a Facebook posting by my Granddaughter's husband this morning. I showed Micka, my granddaughter pulling their son Brixton on one of those plastic sleds. A. J., her husband, is pulling their twins in another version of the same type of sled. They traipsing down a freshly plowed street in Minneapolis.  I looked out my window here in Milwaukee. There is no snow on the ground. We will be in the fifties for a high-temperature today. I checked the weather forecast for the next few days. We have an expected high on Thursday of sixty-five with rain. Climate change seems to be very picky on how expresses itself. The Painting is getting better. As Still Life (Acrylic) A Landscape (Oil)

 What's going on in the studio?  The studio is the table in front of the west window. The table where my computer is located. The laptop is also my streaming entertainment center and contains my current writing projects. The table is also where I eat the hearty meals I create, send and receive phone calls, sketch, and paint. As my regular readers know, I have switched my writing from long fiction to screenplay formats. I began by writing an original piece titled Two Many Wives . One man and two women decided to become married to build a family together. The story is not so much about society's acceptance of this lifestyle, but how the challenges of a domestic household are handled when there are more than two people involved. Then I took a Rom-Com I was writing as a novel,  Star Struck, and rewrote it as a screenplay. It's about a single man running a business consulting firm. His life is filled with the daily challenges of his growing business. His workplace mother ente...