Thank you!

Last weekend's debut showing at Jamaica Plain Open Studios was:

1. exhausting
2. fun and exciting
3. very gratifying
4. all of the above

No wrong answers there. Thank you so much to the many old friends and new who stopped by and said very gracious things about my work. Fourteen paintings woke up to find themselves in new homes on Monday, and for that I'm grateful as well as a little wistful. They may have "left the nest", but they will be missed for the joy they gave me in the making and for what they taught me.

Thanks too are due to my battery-mates at the First Baptist Church: our hostess with the mostest and a spectacular photographer Ashlee Wiest-Laird; Ginny Zanger whose monotypes set a great standard; Richard Youngstrom whose mosaic creations made for a lively presentation all weekend. The sculpture studio's terrific Polar Bears, Annie Cardinaux's wonderful patchwork landscapes and Alicia Fessenden's pottery held down the fort outside. Thanks much for the cheerful encouragement and the fine example you all set of "how it's done".

And truly: thanks are due to the frisky folks at Moo.com whose Mini Business Cards were a surefire attention grabber. In the midst of so much larger art vying for attention, something about our evolutionary biology and those cones in our eyes that give us peripheral vision made nearly every passing potential patron stop in their tracks and zoom in for a look at these things, about a third the size of a regular card:

Finally, here is a peek at a last minute effort to create some "smaller inventory" for the show. This scene is from the pond at Forest Hills Cemetery here in Jamaica Plain, not far from the final resting places of playwright Eugene O'Neill, and the poets Anne Sexton and e.e. cummings (among others)...

That half sheet of Arches was cut into nine rectangles for the show. A patron could find one they liked or build a triptych. They look great framed too:

Even the smallest painting can change the course of the future!