It's A New Year!

Happy New Year to All!

Christmas was a busy season for me! As I know it was for you too!!! Why does so much activity and hecticity have to fall in the short period between Thanksgiving and New Years?  I wish it could be spread out a bit?!?!

I thank so many of you for your orders this Christmas season!  I hope there were a lot of happy smiles and memories evoked when family members and friends opened their gift Christmas morning. I shared a lot of them on Instagram and Facebook.  Check them out and would love for you to share :)

This new year I hope to broaden myself.  Hence this musing in my newsletter:

I went to the VMFA the other day.  I had let my membership expire. For me, being a member of the museum is a must. I remember going to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as a little girl with my grandmother. It was so exciting to get to see the mummies down in the catacomb exhibit. (Unfortunately that exhibit is no longer.) And the Faberge Eggs... And then to have lunch in the "members only" dining room was such a treat.  You no longer have to be a member to go to the dining rooms but the "members only" is a special memory I have because I was with my grandmother...

The featured exhibit is called Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss and the Cycle of Life. Directly from the literature availble it says: "At a cross roads in his career Jasper Johns found his way looking toward Edvard Munch's style and the VMFA presents a groundbreaking exhibition that examines how Johns' mined Munch’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s as he moved away from abstract painting towards a more open expression of love, sex, loss, and death."  

I enjoyed seeing the older pieces by Jasper John's that I was familiar with from my days as an art history student. The colorful croosshatch studies:

And his Savarin coffee can which combines the crosshatch. He also uses wood block which they say was used in Munch's pieces. (see the bottom of the painting.) Johns did a large series of the coffee can, many of which are included in the exhibit. (And I must say my photos do not do the pieces justice. The colors are so vibrant in real life.)

I love this one with the hand prints.

This self portrait of Munch was very inspirational to me. His simple brush stokes say so much!  If only I could be so gestural in my fabric art.  Perhaps something to work on???

This painting Munch painted later in life is symbolic of death.  So odd that if reminds me of the hospital ward in Madeline in Paris!!  Is my mind too childlike??? Or am I just drawn to happier things...???

If you are in the area, it is well worth your time to visit this exhibit.It is there through February 20th.