Life Is In The Balance

On September 9th, I had the wonderful opportunity speak with an enthusiastic group of Narrows Botanical Gardens visitors about the Life Is In the Balance series of drawings. I briefly discussed my academic background and related work from my fifty year career as a professional artist. There were questions about the materials used in the original drawings and how they were reproduced to be weather resistant. I talked about each one of the drawings in the order they were created and identified the plants and where they can/could be found in the gardens, when seasonally appropriate.     Photo:Luz Diaz The most informative for the visitors, and the most fun for me was to go around the gardens and visit a few of the locations where they could see the plants that inspired me.  As luck would have it, the milkweed seed pods were "ripe" and full of seeds. We reminisced about our intrigue as children with the floating seeds. We all had forgotten how soft they are. Photo: Luz D...

Chinese Redwood Grove at Narrows Botanical Gardens On Saturday, August 19th I taught a drawing workshop at Narrows Botanical Gardens in conjunction with my Life Is In the Balance exhibition. I was thrilled to welcome 15 participants to our drawing studio, inside a grove of Chinese redwoods in the Gardens. We had artists from 4 to 70 years old. My students from the Bay Ridge Center were well represented and a welcome addition.     I brought a number of drawing pads and pencil and as I introduced myself I handed out the supplies. The students first task was to open the tablet and write; My Nature Notebook and their name. I challenged them to  continue to fill the notebook with drawings from nature after they left the workshop.     For those who chose an alternative to drawing the trees (complex subject matter) I had a collection of natural object for them to draw. There was a cicada, a few seed pods, a small branch from the redwoods complete with pinecones. ...

I needed the break I took the last few weeks. I jumped into this series full steam ahead and needed a rest!  Very happy to have acted on my strategizing of the last few weeks and put pencil to paper today. This spring there have been an abundance of flowering trees in my neighborhood. They inspired me to indulge in a favorite pass time, writing haiku.                Cherry trees in spring                The flowers like falling stars                Bringing me such joy  Narrows Botanical Gardens has a number of blooming apple trees which did not disappoint. There are many flowering plants at the Gardens now but the apple blossoms really captured my attention. They are especially beautiful but maybe it's also in my father's memory I celebrate them now. He was a great fan of apples and apple trees. He nurtured many an apple tree in his days as a ...