TY KANAE

I recently had a birthday...accompanied by lots of fun activities.  One of those was a dinner, hosted by daughter Louisa Reynolds Smith at Fiola Mare in Georgetown.  It's an extra-special place and we were joined by long-time friend Kanae Watanabe.

As a further treat, Kanae brought macarons from Laduree, a french bakery also in Georgetown.  Those are the best!  So, I made a little thank you card painting and shared them with the Smiths.

Mystery

Here is something very unusual for me.  I began this many years ago when I was in Trails End Art Association in Gearhart Oregon.   It is an exercise of flooding the paper with watercolor and then picking out some images.  For those who care about color, it was alizarin crimson and indigo blue.  I am not sure where the apparent yellow in the image comes from but...hey...OK.  Recently, I took it to my Capitol Hill Art League critique group and got some ideas about improving it.  Unfortunately, I don't have a "before" picture.  Their suggestions were great and now I consider it a finished painting....though there is still a high level of mystery about what is going on.  In this case, I like that.

TY Smith family

Peter, Louisa, Griffin and Sophia recently took a trip to the West Coast, including the San Juan Islands.  In Friday Harbor, they visited Palindaba Lavender and brought back some special lavender treats for me.  It was quite a bounty---lavender and chocolate candy bars, lavender sugar scrub, traditional lavender oil and a treatment stick that is a lavender balm.  All wonderful.  I particularly like the treatment stick which is a natural (and fragrant) antiseptic.  It is, as they say "ALL GOOD."  I don't think I had ever tasted lavender and chocolate bars before.  The white chocolate one was particularly tasty>

I made a little painting from the photograph of the farm that is on the Palindaba brochure as a thank you!!!!  And thanks, Smith family, for thinking of me when you were there.