Busy as Ever in the Summertime!

I missed my June post, and the 4th of July has passed! Wisconsin has been the recipient of very unusual weather, just as many of you have had. Floods and many rainy days have been followed by cool weather and only a few hot days. Our Art Studio is in a large manufacturing building, with two floors converted into Studios. Jay and I have it fixed our Studio to the point that we each are enjoying many mornings or afternoons there. With a fan, and window ventilation, it's been quite comfortable most days. I love hanging out there, and working with my photos, matting, backing, and framing them. It's fun to chose which ones I'll put up in Spectrum Gallery this time. We are having a Nature and Garden Show starting this weekend and running through August. When Debbie and I went to Vegas a while back, I also was able to get some really good fruit and vegetable stand pictures. This one is entered into the Garden show!

We have enough inventory now to have visitors! It was great fun to have Ania and Missy come up and look around. They found pictures they really liked, too! You can come, too, if you're in the area by arranging a time with me. Here is a picture of the girls deciding which photographs they liked the most. And the next photograph is yours truly, in my favorite spot, matting and framing a favorite piece of mine.

I'm happy to report that Jay encouraged me to enter some of my pieces in the Wustum Art Museum's Multi Media Summer show, and we were BOTH lucky enough to each have one chosen I am so excited to be IN a Wustum Show! We'll find out later in July what the judges thought. The show will open the end of July, so if you're in the area, stop into the Racine Wustum Art Museum http://ramart.org/ . They have a very high quality show on right now, featuring area teachers, students and accomplished artists. Here is yours truly, happy as a lark in my studio area, matting and framing one of my new photographs. Soon I'll have the web site going. It's not an easy task for me, and I am procrastinating, but the sooner I get the site up, the sooner I can have more exposure of what I am thoroughly enjoying!

The photography shoots are really enjoyable. I've been to San Antonio, the Caribbean Islands, California in the San Francisco and Sacramento areas. Closer to home, we've made trips to the Chicago Botanical Gardens and to the Boerner Botanical Gardens in Milwaukee. Right in the Racine area, I've had some very good photographs taken at Hawthorne Hollow, a local nature preserve, and in Milwaukee at the Art Museum there. If you haven't been to the Milwaukee Museum, you're missing a real treat! The architecture is boggling, and there is so much more than one picture can show.

I hope you take time to enjoy where ever you find yourself this week, the sites, the people, and all the living things around you! Namaste!

Memorial Day Weekend is Upon Us!

Finally, I'm back. It's been a long time since I felt like coming back to my Blog Spot, but decided today is the day! I've tried sharing with you deep into the night, but it just isn't working: too tired! So, my sharing will have to be done on an occasional morning! It's Friday, cool and sunny in WI. Our warm weather really hasn't hit us yet. We still wear jackets! The tulip trees have lost their bloom, but the lilacs are beginning to open!

The Art Studio space is coming along well! We've moved into our permanent spot, where I've been able to spend time matting and framing my recent photos. A number of them are hanging in the Spectrum Gallery on the Lake! To the right is a picture of the old DeKoven Center where Spectrum is located in Racine. We have a small co-op of about 12 lovely artists, many photographers, a few sculptors, a bead artist or two, and some mixed media artists. If you're in town, I can open it and give you a personalized tour. Otherwise, we're open on the weekends. Check us out at http://www.spectrumschoolandgallery.org/. Denise is a wonderful owner and manager of the Art School and has given our group the space for the Gallery and coop. My children actually took art classes there when they were youngsters. We were all young then! Ha!

Last evening we had an interesting meeting on Black and White Photography, with good participation from members and the public. My beloved Canon S200 camera broke two days ago, so I was interested in what the photographers had to say about kinds, qualities, and pricing of decent cameras for a person truly interested in furthering an interest in the field. I'll be shopping soon, using their input and will be looking at Nikon and Canon (my favorite) options.

Here are a few of the photographs I have hanging in at Spectrum and also at our Studio!

A Florist putting out his morning flowers drew me in, with my friend Stephen, as we walked near the Castro section of San Francisco on an early March morning. The florist was eager to talk about his beauties! First, I saw a large collection of fresh daisies, and enjoyed the way the daisies were arranged: a light-colored row followed by a darker row, which highlighted both very well. There were many more colors and rows in the grouping, but I chose this close-up photo, and love the colors! I took many more photos of the flowers he pointed out!



The next one is a Black and White I took last year in Germany at the Marien Platz in Munich, when Al and I took a group of high school students on a week's tour of German speaking countries. I'm enjoying the black / white photography of architecture, trying to get a good balance of light and dark that highlight the lines so well.




This last picture is one of my favorites, and started out as a really poor photographic image. I had a long session of Photoshop Painting, and ended up with a beautiful "digital painting". There is actually nothing left of the original photo. I was engrossed and "driven" to complete the process of filling the image with my vision and my own energy! THAT was enjoyable!


My next big feat is to get my http://www.wildbloomarts.com/ site operational. Again, I've tried working on it in the wee hours of the night. Now, I'm going to dig in and get my art onto my web page within the next few weeks I hope.

It's Memorial Day weekend, and aside from visiting my mother, spending time with my family, and taking a day trip to the Chicago Botanical Gardens, my mind will be on sending some good energy to our young men and women in the Middle East, and wanting them back here as soon as possible, with medical and school benefits that show we cared about them! Enjoy your weekend, love the ones you're with! Mary

TODAY'S PHOTO, a womanly naughty/nice image, is hanging in one of our newer city restaurants in the downtown area. I asked one of the gals who was working about the tarp and if it was vintage. She said yes, that it was a tarp or advertising canvas for one of the several circus companies that used to tour from city to city. The artist who signed the large canvas was P Barnett, with whom I am not familiar; another late night search! M.

A Memory of Our Photo Shoot in Old Sacramento

Good Evening! FINALLY the snow is gone, and tomorrow, for the Brewer's Baseball Team and all the fans in SE Wisconsin, it should be a good, good day, in the high 50's. I can't wait!


Today was spent with my son Jay, first taking me out to eat a OUT OF THE PAN on State Street just east of the Root River Bridge, in Racine. The food was OUTSTANDING: I had a most wonderful beef, tomato and blue cheese bruschetta. Jay had a great looking shrimp barbeque sandwich. Mine came with some great side veggie mix and his with a wonderful spring mix walnut and cranberry salad. I would definitely go there again.


Speaking of good places, when Bev and I were in Old Sacramento, CA for lunch at an English Tea Room we enjoyed a combination of dainty sandwiches, scones and dessert samples and a great carafe of tea for each of us. We enjoyed every morsel!


Besides a great lunch, we got to browse through the Chamber of Commerce and felt like we had slipped back in time.







We saw toys, tools, travel boxes, pony express bags, documents, paintings, and this great looking actual stage coach that was on display. This fancy stagecoach was probably very ornate for the day. Perhaps the rich and famous rode in here?

I didn't know that the Pony Express had only been in operation for 18 month! Certainly, it's had a lot of historical coverage for that short period of time! As we left Old Sacramento, right off the downtown area, we looked once again at the Pony Express monument, which I enjoyed.

I have fond memories of that day with my friend Beverly, both of us with cameras in hand, and with satisfied taste buds as well! Be well, Mary

First Day of Spring!

Well, here I am, ready to tell you tell you what's been happening in the last month!

Most timely is that, although it's the first day of Spring here in SE Wisconsin, drat! You'd never know it! The tips of the earliest blooms were just showing in some gardens near a structure, in parts of our area. Then, we hear we're going to get blasted!! Right at the moment, I just got home from a short road trip on our Interstate 94 roadway from the Milwaukee area, and saw a four car pile-up, not to mention several cars using poor judgment.

Most of us were traveling about 35 miles an hour, even in the fast lane, as the storm got itself going this morning. We're going to have from 8-10 inches by tonight and maybe more by morning. If you don't believe we're having erratic weather patterns due to our modern lifestyle, I would differ with you. All over the world, very unusual weather seems to be the "norm" now, and we're no exception!

The status of WILD BLOOM Arts is good! My son and daughter-in-law and I have opened our first Art Studio in a renovated business complex, and I'm meeting many Artists who have rented there for years. I hope to get to know them better and enjoy the art they are creating. My son is experimenting with a melted wax technique, in addition to being a Jazz Guitarist - check http://www.jaymollerskov.com/ - and teaching lessons. My daughter-in-law will be sewing Renaissance fashions, inbetween her job as an Elementary Music Specialist and landing a part in Racine Theater Guild's next production. My younger son also wants to come up and work with us, perhaps on his taxidermy painting. I am working on framing my first set of black and white photography choices, which I will bring to a Coop Gallery I joined last month. More on that later. My husband is in the process of getting ready to leave for Costa Rica in three days, and will hopefully bring back some good photographic memories!

Along with this blog, which I anticipate posting on in the least once a month, I am also working on my first website, http://www.wildbloomarts.com/ - right now in construction - which will eventually feature many of my art pieces. Problem is, creating this is a slow process. I'm hoping to have it up and on the web by the end of April.

A few weeks we returned from San Antonio, which was beautiful along the River Walk where we stayed.

Then, after that I was in San Francisco and Davis, California, with side trips to Santa Rosa and Sacramento. In each of those locations I was able to complete some great photography shoots. In addition, visits to the Annie Liebewitz Photography Show at the Legion of Honor, and to the Asian Arts Musuem, both in San Francisco were very enjoyable, and of course, who could miss Chinatown!

If you've never been in Davis, CA, there is a very lovely Arboretum walk along the UC Davis Campus that was beautiful, and two hours away is Old Sacramento, nestled right in the downtown area of Sacramento, and long the river! In Santa Rosa, we also had fun touring the Charles Schulz Museum, visiting one of my favorites: Snoopy!! Hey, Bev! Hey, Steve! I wanna come back to that warm California weather and all that healthy, fresh cuisine!! WONDERFUL!

We didn't have even one day of rain, nor fog. How unusual is THAT in a full week? The view of the Golden Gate Bridge, The Persidio Park, and Chrissy Fields, and Sausalita were crystal clear on every shot! Back to reality for me, Friends, to about 6 inches of quickly falling snow so far. Oh well, although we've now had 5 months of winter weather, each day IS beautiful in it's own right, that's for sure.

Arriving in Blogdom

Welcome

Having just arrived here with all of you, I suppose this is an artistic step in itself, deciding to join in, finding a color and template to use, what arrangements will be most satisfying to my delivery and in connecting with you, and finally deciding what to put out "there" and how to start! The first step is the most difficult, eh? Even this little bit was time consuming, but not very important.

The most important things to me in this space from now on are self-expression, promoting health and well-being, hopefulness, and peace. Actually, if I do any one of these successfully, it will be worthwhile and make me happy.

"Welcome to my Wild Bloom World!"

http://wildbloom.blogspot.com