1.31.2009

Next Wine & Paint Party!

The next Wine & Paint is one your won't want to miss! We will be painting "Bessy the Cow"!



No need for any prior painting experience - just come, unwind from your day's stresses, and paint. I will demonstrate, and you will paint your painting in the next 90 minutes. FUN!
I supply all you will need - you just bring your wine, libation, whatever drink of choice. I will have some nice cheeses and crackers, bottled water and coffee available.

Details:
Wednesday March 11, 7 - 9 pm
Claire Kayser home studio
All supplies provided
BYOW (wine, not whine!)

Fee: $85
COLOR CAFE students: $75
Class limited to 8 fun ladies!

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1.25.2009

A GREAT CHARITY OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU!

In this new spirit of responsibility, giving and feeling of connectedness I want to share an opportunity of giving and recieving for you! Please click here for those details!

Here's a peek:



1.21.2009

... and the WINNER IS...


Jenn Dougherty!!!

Thanks so much, Jenn, for becoming the next follower of my blog! You win a free spot in my next Wine and Paint Party on March 11! It will be fabulous and even more so having you!

Thanks, thanks, thanks!

PS: That Aretha hat really works for you!

1.19.2009

SURPRISE!



In an effort to get you who only READ my blog and don't comment or have not become a follower, I am offering a reward to the next person who becomes a follower! I guess it benefits those who live around the twin cities most, but here it is:

Attend my next Wine and Paint Party FREE!
Wednesday March 11
7 - 9 pm



Yes, simply become a follower by clicking on the follower button on the right side where the other followers are, and get yourself set up! It's very simple and won't take but a minute! That's an $85 value for FREE!

Email me to let me know you've done the deal!

Best of luck,
Claire

1.16.2009

Andrew Wyeth 1917 - 2009










One of my favorite artists ever, Andrew Wyeth, dies at age 91! I consider his work to be the best watercolor work I've seen. Very inspiring and interesting life! Read on about his life in the article below from The International Herald Tribune. The article is long but worth the read. Read all of it here.

Andrew Wyeth, one of the most popular and also most lambasted artists in the history of American art, a reclusive linchpin in a colorful family dynasty of artists from tiny Chadds Ford, Penn., whose precise realist views of hardscrabble rural life became icons of national culture and sparked endless debates about the nature of modern art, has died at his home in suburban Philadelphia, The Associated Press reported.

He was 91.

Wyeth gave America a prim and flinty view of Puritan rectitude, starchily sentimental, through parched gray and brown pictures of spooky frame houses, desiccated fields, deserted beaches, circling buzzards and craggy-faced New Englanders. A virtual Rorschach test for American culture during the better part of the last century, Wyeth split public opinion as vigorously as, and probably even more so than, any other American painter including the other modern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth's was rural.

Because of his popularity, a bad sign to many art world insiders, Wyeth came to represent middle-class values and ideals that modernism claimed to reject, so that arguments about his work extended beyond painting to societal splits along class, geographical and educational lines. One art historian, in response to a 1977 survey in Art News magazine about the most underrated and overrated artists of the century, nominated Wyeth for both categories.

Art critics mostly heaped abuse on his work, saying he gave realism a bad name. Supporters said he spoke to the silent majority who jammed his exhibitions. "In today's scrambled-egg school of art, Wyeth stands out as a wild-eyed radical," one journalist wrote in 1963, speaking for the masses. "For the people he paints wear their noses in the usual place, and the weathered barns and bare-limbed trees in his starkly simple landscapes are more real than reality."

John Updike took up the same cause 25 years later: "In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, the scorn was simple gallery politics; but resistance to Wyeth remains curiously stiff in an art world that has no trouble making room for Photorealists like Richard Estes and Philip Pearlstein and graduates of commercial art like Wayne Thibauld, Andy Warhol, and for that matter, Edward Hopper."

A minority opinion within the art world always tried to reconcile Wyeth with mainstream modernism. It was occasionally argued, among other things, that his work had an abstract component and was linked to the gestural style of artists like Kline, de Kooning and Pollock, for whom Wyeth expressed general disdain. It is true that especially some of the early watercolors of the 30's and 40's, in a looser style, inclined toward abstraction. Contrary to what detractors and some supporters said, his style vacillated over the years, which suited neither those who wanted to say he stayed in a rut his whole career nor those who championed him as a model, as one art historian put it, "of continuity and permanence in the face of instabilities and uncertainties of modern life."

Wyeth remained a polarizing figure even as the traditional 20th century distinction between abstraction and avant-gardism on the one hand and realism and conservatism on the other came to seem woefully inadequate and false. The only indisputable truth was that his art existed within an American context that encompassed on the one end illustrators like his father, N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell, and on the other end landscape painters like John Marin, Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt and Fitz Hugh Lane.

One picture encapsulated his fame. "Christina's World" became an American icon like Grant Wood's "American Gothic," or Whistler's portrait of his mother or Emmanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware." Wyeth said he thought the work was "a complete flat tire" when he sent originally it off to the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1948. The Museum of Modern Art bought it for $1,800.

Wyeth had seen Christina Olson, crippled from the waist down, dragging herself across a Maine field, "like a crab on a New England shore," he recalled. To him she was a model of dignity who refused to use a wheelchair and preferred to live in squalor rather than be beholden to anyone. It was dignity of a particularly dour, hardened, misanthropic sort, to which Wyeth throughout his career seemed to gravitate. Olson is shown in the picture from the back. She was 55 at the time. (She died 20 years later, having become a frequent subject in his art; her death made the national news thanks to Wyeth's popularity.)

It is impossible to tell her age in the painting or what she looks like, the ambiguity adding to the overall mystery. So does the house, which Wyeth called a dry-bone skeleton of a building, a symbol during the Depression of the American pastoral dream in a minor key, the house's whitewash of paint long gone, its shingles warped, the place isolated against a blank sky. As popular paintings go, "Christina's World" is remarkable for being so dark and humorless, yet the public seemed to focus less on its gothic and morose quality and more on the way Wyeth painted each blade of grass, a mechanical and unremarkable kind of realism that was distinctive if only for going against the rising tide of abstraction in America in the late 1940's.



1.11.2009

Want More Happiness?

There was a great article in the Pioneer Press Life section about couples and parenting that I think is a must read! It happens to be written by my friends Carol Bruess and her coauthor Anna Kudak of What Happy Couples Do and What Happy Parents Do. Wildly popular books written by two great gals from the twin cities!!! They are working, now, on one about sisters that will be sure to delight those in "sista relationships." Look for it within about a year! See their site here.

What Happy Couples Do: Belly Button Fuzz & Bare-Chested Hugs--The Loving Little Rituals of Romance
What Happy Parents Do: Ninety-Three Cents and a Little Humpty Dumpty--The Loving Little Rituals of a Child-Proof Marriage


I have talked so much lately to friends about reconnecting with their husbands and trying to be the best they can be in relationship. I feel like Tom and I have reached a higher peak of happiness in our marriage of 13 years, and it feels great!. I have been reading another book, too, that is a great 40 day journey to love your spouse with purpose. It's called The Love Dare. Check it out at Amazon!
The Love Dare


All of this philosophy falls in line with living life to the fullest - each and every moment.

DO!

1.08.2009

Sick!

Well, I guess I can't complain after our whole family has not experienced sickness in about 3 years now, but that all just ended at 3:00 am this morning. Grace got some kind of stomach virus, yeah, I'm sure the one that everyone else seems to be getting. She didn't realize that she needed to throw up, and I didn't either, and it unfortunately - VERY UNFORTUNATELY - happened on the side of her bed. Tom and I spent about 45 min. cleaning up everything while she heaved a couple more times during the process, this time in the right place. Yeah! I'm happy to report that she felt like a million dollars by 11:00 am...

I think Tom and I have had a touch of some form of it, too, but have suffered from sleep deprivation at least as much.

Hope you're spared!

I'm heading to bed now!

1.04.2009

Flattered!

Oh, and a nice lady in Canada who goes by the name Liberty blogged about Carole and me a few days ago! She was so kind to feature us that way. Check it out here! You will certainly love her blog--she garners a huge readership, and you'll see why when you pay her a visit--sharp, clean, artsy, interesting. Go see her!



Great photography, too! (writer, photographer, stylist & illustrator, Michael Roberts here. (Michael is Fashion and Style Director for Vanity Fair.)