Happy Valentine First Year Anniversary

Today marks the first year anniversary of Maza Studio Blog. My very first post was on Valentines' Day of 2008 (Dreaming of Spring), and little did I dream then where this venture into the blogosphere would take me. I've sold a number of paintings through this blog and received comments and Email from so many parts of the US as well as a few countries abroad... It's fascinating to see how information still travels at the human level through cyberspace. Eighty-four posts later, some of which became mini-essays and/or evocative vignettes, I've started to blossom as a writer in other sites too, doing op-ed essays for Cubanology Biweekly.

A word of thanks to my subscribers and followers--it's your thoughtful feedback that keeps me going when the going gets tough.

Today I mailed back my Moleskine sketchbook to Art House Co-op in Atlanta after filling it with funky, true-to-life ball-point pen and prismacolor pencil sketches. The image above was my last entry in the sketchbook. The theme for Sketchbook #3 project was "Everyone I Know" and we had about one month to fill the notebooks and mail them back. The sketchbooks are supposed to be exhibited in numerous venues all around the country. In the DC area they will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Georgetown on March 3. I'm hoping mine will be among those selected for DC. It's filled with very amusing drawings of people I see in my peregrinations, with telling scenes documenting these past few weeks--some lucky buyer will have a chuckle with it.

To top things off, I had my first sale of the year today--the painting of the Dorsey House Garden was acquired by a lady from Burtonsville who claims the Dorseys among her ancestors. She told me she had done a Google search on Dorsey House and found my painting on this blog, which she liked enough to contact me.

Not bad for Maza Studio Blog's first year. Here's looking forward to the next year: Happy Valentine's Day!

Anatomy of a Cartoon

A Cuban blogger friend, Tomas Estrada Palma, recently started cartooning and posting his cartoons. I was so impressed by his drawings that I contacted him so we could do an art exchange. I found out he lives relatively close-by, so we set up a meeting to allow me to do some sketches of him for a cartoon. He was kind enough to agree to do one of me (see link above).

Tomas has the singular distiction of being the great-grandson of Cuba's first President, so I was a bit surprised that he was not fluent in Spanish--sadly, this is a common phenomenon among second generation immigrants and beyond--but he did share some stories about his family and I really enjoyed meeting him.

His greatest aficion seems to be politics and argument, so I drew two sketches of him from life, trying to distill what I think best defines his character, and then had to wait all week before I could find the time to do my cartoon. I finally got to it today and here it is.

This is one of the drawings in my sketchbook for the Sketchbook Project put on by Art House that I hope will be exhibited in Atlanta and DC as well as a number of other venues. I understand it will be shown in DC at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Georgetown on March 3 & 4, 2009.