Ice Cream Cones

I finally finished the last painting from my painting class this spring. The assignment was to copy somebody else's painting, and I did one of Wayne Thiebaud's ice cream paintings. I liked the exercise - it took the pressure off! I am not currently signed up for any classes...I need to remedy that.

Weeks 3 and 4 of Painting Class

We spent two weeks on this painting. It feels so good to be painting again! I wish it didn't take signing up for a class in order to get me to do it. So here is my fantasy - a painting club. Surely there are other folks out there who need a structured environment to get going, but don't necessarily want to pay the $$$ for classes... I think it would be great to meet two or three times a month, and a different person could come up with the assignment for that week's meeting. Any-hoo, I am determined to either find such a thing, or else create it.

Week 2 of Painting Class

This was the second painting we did in class, also done in just two hours. While we still had to paint white styrofoam, there were at least a few other colors thrown in. For me, the highlight of tonight's class was when my brother's band came on the radio. I got to freak out and say, "That's my brother!", etc. Yay!

Week 1 of Painting Class (and other news, such as the Latest on America's Next Top Model)

I'm taking a painting class, and this was our first week's assignment - we had to paint a still life of a bunch of white, styrofoam shapes. Utterly uninspiring. But I got through it, and here it is.

On to America's Top Model - after hearing about the recent episode that had the "girls" posing as victims of violent murders, I turned to the internet to check out the pictures myself. I googled "America's Next Top Model", and expected to find tons of sites responding to this episode. Instead I had to dig through pages of speculation about who would win the show, etc, before finding any evidence of shock or disgust. Hmm.

I'm sure I could go on for hours about how disturbing I found the episode itself, but now I am distracted by the fact that there were so many people blogging about the show without seeming remotely startled by those pictures. When I finally got to the responses that I was looking (and hoping) for, I saw a few references to Jean Kilbourne's argument that the more images we see of violence against women in the media, the more we become desensitized to it. Then the images of violence lose their shock value for us. I guess we can see Jean Kilbourne's argument in action in the world of ANTP blogs.