Boobies

I just returned this week from the Galapagos Islands. This is a sketch of the famous Blue Footed Booby bird. Actually there are a couple of other boobies on Galapagos - the Red Footed Booby and the Nazca Booby. These birds are seen on many tourists t-shirts dancing in pairs with the slogan "I Love Boobies" or "Hooray for Boobies" written beneath. But most people agree that the origin of the name is from the Spanish word bobo, which means "clown" for their large colorful feet and perhaps their peculiar antics during courtship which is better seen in person than described here. 

Mahatma Gandhi

Another portrait... These are all part of the Influential People series which started with Daniel Quinn a few months ago. I first learned about this extraordinary man in the 1982 film "Ghandi". I was 20 years old, and having grown up in a very strong Methodist and Southern Baptist environment, I was just beginning to open myself up to understanding other religions and new ways of thinking.

Although Gandhi grew up Hindu, he drew inspiration from many religions including Buddhism, Theosophy, and Christianity. Ghandi dedicated his life to discovering Truth. He tried to achieve this by learning from his own mistakes and conducting experiments on himself. He called his autobiography "The Story of My Experiments with Truth". Gandhi summarized his beliefs first when he said "God is Truth". He would later change this statement to "Truth is God". 


For me, Ghandi opened up a door into a new world. I left behind the dogma of Christianity that I had held onto and began to look for the Truth.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Lately, I've been doing watercolor sketches of old black and white photographs. It's kind of fun imagining the colors and in the end you get something that brings an old photograph a bit more life. This is from a photo taken of Renoir in his studio sometime around 1912 .

The Story - Mother Teresa

Paris to Austin

My nephew, Ben Foster, is a film maker and last summer and fall he had an amazing movie called Strings in many film festivals around the country. You can see a trailer for it here on his website. Anyway, as it worked out, if we shuffled our flights around just a little we could make it to the Austin Film Festival to see it with the rest of my amazing family including my super-talented singer-songwriter sister, Jen Foster. So from Paris we flew to Boston (see sketch on left), and then from Boston to Chicago, then on to Austin. Whew! A really long day but nice to be back in Texas with the family after a long three weeks away. The sketch on the right is from my brother's back porch - a nice view of the hill country from his home outside of Austin.

Back in Paris

Collioure Church

Port Vendres

These sketches are from Port Vendres. I wanted to see this place because I love the watercolors of Charles Rennie Macintosh and he lived and painted here in his later years. There is a self-guided walking tour of the sites he painted so Valerie and I did that. You can see in the photo to the right that he painted the fort in Collioure too. It was fun to try to figure out exactly where he sat to paint. I think he took some artistic license where he needed to so it was cool to see how he handled that. The two sketches above are somewhat influenced by my walking tour. 

Life is an Ink Painting

“Life delineates itself on the canvas called time, and time never repeats; once gone, forever gone; and so is an act once done, it is never undone. Life is an ink-painting which must be executed once and for all time and without hesitation, without intellection, and no corrections are permissible or possible." 

"Life is not like an oil painting, which can be rubbed out and done over time and again until the artist is satisfied. With an ink-painting any brush stroke painted over a second time results in a smudge; the life has left it. All corrections show when the ink dries. So is life. We can never retract what we have committed to deeds.”

D.T. Suzuki

The idea for this post comes from one of my favorite bloggers - James Gurney. He always has an interesting entry and usually every day! He's on the list on the right side of my blog. 

Collioure