Artnotes: Bowling with Shorty

Bowling  at Laurel Lanes  LFP  12 x 12"  

 Yard Frieze  Laurie Fox Pessemier  12 x 101"  30 x 254cm

Firefly in the Library  LFP  acrylic/paper  17 x 25"  42 x 63 cm

Hey, Shorty, how’s it going?  We’re having a whopping thunderstorm – and when I was small, my mom, Shorty, used to tell me “the angels are bowling”.  We all spent a fair amount of time at the bowling alley, so I can testify that the sound of the ball and the scattering of the bowling pins is the spitting image of thunder.  Lightening?  That’s a strike, for sure.

I have never been as grateful for rain as today, after several weeks of hot, sunny weather.  This is the perfect rain:  soft, steady, penetrating the dry earth.  Blair and I will get out there with the shovel after this and plant a few sheltering hedges around the back yard.   Despite watering, my smaller specimens, like lobelia, withered on a particularly sunny afternoon.

For the first time we are focusing our summer in Italy.  Formerly, we traveled to the USA, which we all loved – but this year we can spend “project” time at this house.

Our first and foremost project is to organize all of our artwork, get it onto selling website, and away we go!  We have chronicled more than half of what we have here in this big house.   I think I am going to choose a web-based art selling venue called Artstorefronts.com.  It has a “print” option for paintings that I could sell over again and for less; framing is also possible.  There’s the opportunity to let people see how a piece of artwork would look on your very own wall.  It sounds and looks fabulous, but I am not really sure it’s worth the extra investment.

Blair’s project is to get his drivers license.  He takes the test at least a dozen times a day.  He improves regularly, but isn’t perfect yet.  Driving rules are written in a complicated Italian grammatical style – our difficulties are more in understanding the words than remembering the driving rules.  I say our difficulties because I try to study, but I am not sure I am going through with the exam.  I have great difficulty with left and right, and much of the test, written and practical, involves direction.  It isn’t free, either.  It will cost more than 1000 euros each to get a license.

A firefly was flying around our library the other night.  It went into the bathroom and corridor, before Blair opened the hall window to let it out.  Our house is very dark at night and it was so beautiful -- magical, in fact.    For years, I lived in the city and thought it was all happening there.  It wasn’t.

I have been walking, and gardening, but most of all pursuing art work.  Ours is an indoor/outdoor house with wide open doors on three sides.  It never gets too hot inside, except maybe at night.

On Wednesday we had hardly-known guests arrive.  We had met the woman more than ten years ago, and never knew her husband.  They had visited Venice, trained and then drove up from Bologna.  We had a terrific visit, over lunch at the Faro restaurant and a visit to a 10^th century church and Montecorone.  She is a great supporter of my art, and an artist herself (part of the mosaic).   I was just finishing up my garden frieze, and thinking how neat it would be if everyone could enjoy summertime painting here.