Destination: The World

I'm once again joining Erika at Bio Art Gal this month's host at Art Journal Journey with her theme New Year, New Adventures. 

I call this Destination: the World, but it might be called Plan ahead.

Instead of starting the letters in the middle, I simply started and didn't leave enough room at the end.

Now I know lots of my artistic friends would have grabbed their colored pencils and gone to town coloring in this image I found in a magazine.  I, on the other hand, don't like to color (or even grip a pencil) that much, so what you see is what you get.

It's obvious I hadn't learned to center the two words here, either.


For this page, I started with the leftover wrapping paper that came off my friend Scott's gift.  Taking a cue from my friend Chris, who colored paper using a stencil and dye ink, I did the same.  I failed to secure the stencil, though, and it slipped as I was coloring through the stencil.  My words were written using a blue metallic Gelly Roll pen.

Because this entry is a bit wimpy, I thought I would share a few photos from what I've been up to recently.

First, last Wednesday

I went to our library.  I was early and decided to 

look around the used bookstore.  Unfortunately, I didn't find any dictionaries or foreign language books, the only books I'm interested in right now.

It appears this was a very popular topic and, even though I was early, there was practically no room left in the room.  By the time the lecture started, people were standing in the doorway because there was no more seating available. 

Once I was seated, I took a photo of the topic, the Spanish Flu.  Seems flu is a big discussion the world over right now.

Most of the talk centered around the virus that causes the flu.  I thought of my friend Erika who would have enjoyed this lecture.  There was far more discussion of the virus and its variants

than there was of the HISTORY of the pandemic, which I was expecting.  Unfortunately, there was only about three to four minutes of discussion about how this professor thought the pandemic started in south central Kansas.  He never explained WHY he believed that, just that there was evidence that some of the records he found showed patients in a specific hospital were some of the first in the world to contract the flu.  Also, no explanation of where it originated.  All in all, I was not very impressed with his talk.

On my way home, I remembered I was supposed to take a photo of the Minisa Bridge, a lithograph I gave to my friend Sally for Christmas.

I had to park about a block away and walk to the bridge.  It was frigid and my hands were already shaking.

As I got closer, I realized I was not going to get the perspective the artist had.

Even though I tried to get the bridge and Jack's Drive In, a legend in Wichita,

I realized I wasn't going to get it all in one photo.

You can see the artist removed some of those telephone and light/electricity poles to make his painting more enjoyable, albeit less realistic.

Then we got snow.  We actually got it twice, but this was the first time.

I took photos of the rocks covered with snow,

and as requested, a photo of my large mailbox for Chris.  However, there is really no way to truly show the size without some type of standard, so that will have to wait for warmer weather.

Yesterday (Wednesday) I went to the African American Museum and heard a lecture by this well known Wichita artist, Verlene Maholmes.

When asked (not by me) how she made these, she said she was in the process of writing a book detailing how they are made.

Upon closer inspection, I realized these were painted fabric or canvas that had been stiffened and stretched onto the canvas and framed.  They are nicely done, though.

There was also another artist whose work was being shown, but I will share the rest of the photos I took very soon.

Thanks for joining me today at Art Journal Journey and a look at some of the places I have been this past week (from Wednesday to Wednesday).  And thanks for your visit and continued support of my art.  I am so incredibly grateful to each of you.