21/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

A hike, a picnic, and some time to draw. The simple things in life.

a celebration

this weekend we celebrated olivia. she's turning four. the party was small, easy, and very low key. i didn't go for pinworthy details, complex menu items, or labor intensive decorations, not that i don't choose that route frequently. but sometimes, burgers, a simple craft, homemade cupcakes the kids decorate themselves, and my sanity still intact, perfectly fits the bill.

this week is a busy one. i'm wrapping up a few projects and i'm moving my blog over to wordpress. i've worked in wordpress for years and build client sites there, so it's a lot easier for me to use. i'll let you know when i make the switch. the energy and stress i saved on the party will be used up on the site design this week, i'm sure. 

hope you have a great week ahead!

20/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

This is the girl's artwork from the week. Most weeks I cull through a collection about this size, saving this, tossing that. Many items are pinned to the rotating collection on our big metal board or hung on the walls. But most of it goes in big boxes that are stored in the basement. I've been wanting to create a photobook of all their artwork, but wonder even if I did, would I really be able to throw away the originals? I still have a lot of my childhood artwork and school projects, but rarely look at them. I'm not sure what the point of saving things other than the most special pieces. And those paintings I have hanging on my walls permanently. I feel like a coffee table book of their art might get the most use and enjoyment over the years. What do you do with all of your kids artwork? 

s: drawing of a house, s, heart box, watercolor leaves & trees, a card for me, a robot, a rainbow, a nature study, a rainbow. 

o:  a water color painting, an O, a heart box, a drawing of cells at the micro level, a few swishes of the brush and her name, a ladybug, scribble scrabble, two doughy treasure pancakes, painting, egg carton flowers, sticker page, drawing for nana. 

19/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

s: a small canvas painted in the garden

o: not sure what this is, but i like it. my favorite part is when your name runs into your artwork you just add the last letter on to the beginning. aolivi. ah, the freedom kids have. 

18/52: Art that moves

This week, all my mama art energy went into Olivia's class project, so that's what I'm showing here. 

...

Not long after I first met my husband, we went to a friend's wedding where he gifted the bride and groom an old school bed vibrator and a roll of quarters! I thought it was such a clever and fun wedding gift. This week, I found a new use for those bed vibrators we had laying around. Olivia's preschool teacher had mentioned that the kids were really interested in moving arts. So, I dug out the "magic fingers," a bag of quarters, my drill, paints, and a canvas and headed to class.

The set up was actually really easy. I simply mounted the vibrating part of the unit to the bottom of a small table and then set the canvas on top. A few kids at a time came up, excitedly dropped a quarter in, and began to paint. The project was a success and the kids loved it!

The painting came out beautifully. I am going to frame it and it will be auctioned off at the end of the year class party. The theme for the evening will be, Shake, Splatter and Roll: Art that Moves.

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This week I loved the light and dark of this photo that captured little Bo marching down the hallway. 

17/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

years ago, in the midst of a major restoration on the house, we built this fort under our porch. it's a little space where the girls can go and to play, create, or just get away. it's a place of their own. 

there is something totally freeing about being able to draw on walls or places that are normally off limits, don't you agree? in their fort, anything goes.  

s: a self portrait at my piano recital.

o: a picture of me wearing clothes.

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link love: last week i loved rebuca's portraits of her children, especially the middle one with the fence in the background. the lighting and quality of the photos are just beautiful. 

16/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

This week I watched the Dove's Real Beauty Sketches ad that has been going around. It made me feel something, not sure entirely what, but it did made me think. As one of five sisters and the mother of two young girls, body image and self worth are something I think about often. One of our most memorable and poignant women's group meetings was on body image and the topic seems to come up frequently when I am together with friends. Unsure of my initial reaction, I started to google people's responses to it. Of course, I found many. One that I came across was this response by Jazz Brice on her Tumblr, Jazzy Little Drops. She makes some insightful points and it's worth a read, just as the Dove video is worth a watch. My personal opinion lies somewhere in between.

This morning I woke to Sienna handing me a picture she drew of herself. She was so proud of it, she loved it! And I love that she is still completely free of this issue right now. I want to do my best to ensure that my girls grow up as self-assured, compassionate women, who have an expansive definition of beauty, who whose primary focus is not their body, and who have a self-love and self-worth that no one can ever take away from them. 

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s: "This is me. A happy girl with her cat."

o: It's been a hard week for this little one, sick and a full of tears. "I don't want to make art," followed by a foot stomp.

Last week I loved these three sisters. This looks like a fun bunch and I love their caravan!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the ad and the article. What did you feel after going through both. Thought provoking, right? 

15/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

As I type in 15/52 this week, late sunday afternoon which is becoming the norm, I'm wondering how I'm going to keep this project up all year long. What I'm finding is that since starting Kindergarten, life's really changed. Our midweek leisure time evaporated. Schedule took over, homework filled free moments, and similar to what happens to me when I get busy, creating usually gets sacrificed. Since Olivia is home with me many days of the week, there's a bit more time for her creative endeavors. On top of the busyness, Sienna and D were gone camping all weekend, so I documented one of her older works this week.

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s: This is my favorite painting that Sienna has done. She painted this a few years ago when she was four. It hangs in our dining room. She has always loved painting and gravitates towards big canvases. When entertaining, people always comment on the piece, amazed that she painted it, and as with most abstract art, always offer opinions on what it is. Care to take a guess? 

o: Little o and I painted a few times this week. She prefers paper, making smaller detailed moves and watching the brush swish around. She's a delight in the studio. 

sienna's piece: a moose in a river. 

14/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

“And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered.” Nicholas Sparks

s: India, our cat

o: A collection of treasures, in abstract.

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52 project links: Nothing better than catching kids in moments of concentration. Except maybe their feet. Love xx. 

12/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

s. this is one of my favorite pieces sienna has painted. it's gone through many iterations, having been primarily bubble gum pink, but she finally feels happy with this. inscribed in pencil she wrote, dad, olivia, mom, sienna. this painting will hang in our house forever.

o. a cat, sitting. olivia's perched right the age where abstract scribbles become real life drawings. beautiful to see, but watching them grow up is always a bit bittersweet for me.

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52 project link love: This week I fell for the photo of little Sylas coloring in a box. The light, angle, and every little scribble is perfection.  

11/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

this week, a glimpse into their process of making art. the girls love to create. paint, draw, glue, stack, staple, construct, they do it. they do it together and they do it alone. every week i have one on one time with each girl and we often find ourselves painting side by side. i relish the time because we are both involved in something we love and we are doing it separate but together. watching their process and seeing them quietly concentrate and engage in what they are doing is pretty amazing. you can see it in these pictures and feel it too.

s. in the studio.

o. en plein air.

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52 project link love: i can't get enough of this family. what would it be like to have a brood so big. i wonder and sometimes wish.

10/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

s. a stable.

o. a sculpture.


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52 project link love: blog a la cart and her early morning capturings. there is such purity in the morning.

the edit

i'm a collector and truthfully a bit of a scavenger. little passes my eye without me needing to inspect it and possible collect it. whether it's a visual inventory of things to examine later in memory, journals of jotted notes, words, intersection names, old driftwood, beach glass, magazines, rugs, chairs, and books, i love to collect. after collecting comes my favorite part, curating. i'm always putting those collections to work. mixing, aligning, displaying and arranging unexpectedly. 

this weekend we wandered the beach. the girls came home with pockets of found objects. this is all part of their daily haul of treasures, as they call them, which come from playgrounds, school, sidewalks, nature, and friends houses. jewels, tiny taped pieces of paper, shells, rocks, wood, flowers, stickers, and stuffed animals, all find their way here. on our last hike, sienna brought home a huge branch. 

the family is quite used to opening the door to a rearranged house. sienna is starting to get the curating portion of the process. what still alludes them both, is the edit. they are attached to every little item they find, so i tend to "edit" when they are not home. i've started to talk to sienna about how to really look at a piece. roll it over in your hand, be discerning, ask yourself what about it speaks to you, and what do you plan to do with it. i had her watch this beautiful short selby film, we talked a little about the story that an object has, where it came from and what it means if it comes into her life. she wanted to watch the beginning of the film again. she loved the big display case and the look of the pieces lined up. she also wanted to know if she could have a zippered leather clutch for collecting her treasures, that way she wouldn't bring home too much. i think sienna's discerning eye is developing just fine. hopefully she doesn't move on to collecting beautiful bags anytime soon. 

8/52

"a portrait of my children's artwork, once a week, every week, in 2013."

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a few months ago, my husband started his own company, which means resources have been tight. last week, after a long shopping hiatus, we both needed a pair of shoes. stacked up on the recycling bin, the girls have never passed a box they didn't love. this week it's all about the diorama.  

s. periodically, where the wild things are, hits the nightly rotation. sienna likes the book but always wants max to be a girl and the monsters to be ponies in a magical land. go figure. from the beginning of the project, she knew that she wanted ponies and shells, "cause those are my thing, mom." on the tails of the book, she wanted her room to turn into a forest, but of course she needed a nightlight. after finding her girl, she decided that since chandeliers are on the ceiling and mary poppins had a tea party up there, she'd like her girl to be up there too. 

o. olivia watches sienna's moves a lot. since sienna put something on the ceiling, she wanted something there too. strawberry shortcake was way to big to fit in next to the elephant, so she settled for her tights. good compromise. this diorama is so olivia. it's filled with everything she loves. hand painted shells in stacks, that bracelet bought at the dollar store with coco, her animals which generally live on her windowsill, and most importantly, her coveted bouncy ball collection. add in dad's old minnesota license plate, string, because she loves it, and a pink straw as a "binocular" like in jake, and there you have it.