Friday with friends

more thumbs today at the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

bald eagle and prey (duck)

water, birds, trees
a perfect refuge!

random scarecrows

delightful gestures

I am fortunate to have good art friends. Today we spent time at my favorite spot, the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. Sketching, talking, laughing, enjoying the landscape, listening to bird calls, more talking. It was a fantastic day.

How about you?

Filling up

Calder Cow

Sargent "Leon Delafosse"

Paint. Paint. Paint. I can be driven when I am pursuing art. Push. Push. Push. Things flow and it's a joy to be in the studio or out in the field. Then, without warning, I am dry. Parched of ideas and energy. Not that I love art any less. I just need to be recharged.

Spending time with art friends is one way I fill up. Even better is spending time with art friends on an all-art adventure. That is exactly what I did.

A day trip north to the Seattle Art Museum to see the Michelangelo exhibit and Calder exhibit. To stand in front of Michelangelo's drawings of the human form that date back to the mid-1400s is nothing short of amazing. It made me want to draw and to draw more. One hundred times or more. There's a nice series of lectures about this exhibit on the SAM website if you are interested in seeing/hearing more about this exhibit.

In another special exhibit, the whimsy of Alexander Calder. I LOVED the cow. A bit of wire bent like a three-dimensional contour drawing. Udders and all. A delight!

Of course, no trip to SAM is complete without adequate time to admire the Sargent portrait of Leon Delafosse and the Robert Henri portrait of the dancer. All four of us stood for a long time looking at these two masterful paintings. We would walk up close to inspect a brush stroke, then step back to see the strokes come together to form a hand or the fold in the skirt. Close again to see how he did that, back again to admire the perfect effect.

The timing was just right to zip over to the hills of Kirkland and peek at Casey Klahn's "River Series" exhibit at Northwest University. It was lovely to see in person the paintings that I have admired on his blog. I enjoyed that very much.

Then, a short drive down the hill to the Howard Mandville Gallery for a look at their small works show. We watched the sun set over Lake Washington, the Seattle skyline in periwinkle silhouette

with a lemon yellow and soft orange ground.

Now I feel full to the top. And I'm ready to paint again.

How to you replenish your artistic energy?