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!

A Little Mid-Winter Color

These are some of my recent works produced in the still life class (they're both oils on 9" x 12" canvas board). It's really fun to plop down these bright reds and oranges here and there as appropriate. The colors and shapes are challenging, trying to balance one against the other and make the forms "read" with just color. In nature it's much harder to find these colors. We're using bright tungsten floods to light the still life--the amazing thing is to see the actual colors of the objects, what is called "local color" and then see them in the dramatic light of our set-up. It's the difference between night and day!

If you are interested in buying either of these, just send me an E-mail and I will be happy to sign them & sell them at a great price for you. I need to keep funding my art education and this is a fun way to do it.

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.

Dreaming of Weeki Wachee

Cool Morning in Weeki Wachee, oils on canvas board, 9" x 12"

On my last morning at Weeki Wachee I had special company: a young red-shouldered hawk perched on a branch directly on the other side of the river from me for well over an hour while I painted, giving me ample opportunity to photograph him. He was trying to warm up in the sun, I suspect, and scouting for a meal. It was a chilly morning, just above freezing, and the dry air barely misted over the stream. Just as I was finishing my painting, the hawk finally took off and circled around several times with his typical "Keer-keer" cry.

Now that I'm back in Maryland winter, I dream of Weeki Wachee and Florida. How I would love to be like our migratory birds and spend my winters in Florida!

Goodby to Weeki Wachee

Golden Afternoon on the Weeki Wachee, watercolor, 14" x 11"

 I painted this watercolor through two different afternoons, finishing on our last day on the Weeki Wachee River. It was time to start packing for the long trip back home, my palette was clean and oils were packed away. The chill of the morning had warmed to a lovely afternoon, so I lingered on the sun-washed deck as the afternoon shadows lengthened, wishing I could stay forever... I like to think my sketch evokes something of Winslow Homer's watercolors of Homosassa. The golden light of sub-tropical Florida enchants us artists throughout time. Good-bye, Weeki Wachee. I hope we will return soon. 

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6/26/09 - This painting has been selected to be in the WCA-DC Southeast Regional Show to be exhibited at the Edison Place Gallery in Washington, DC during September of this year. It's going to be a great show, don't miss it!

Painting the Weeki Wachee

Morning Mist on the Weeki Wachee, oils on canvasboard, 14" x 11"

The last few mornings the temperatures have been downright chilly, at about the freezing point. At night, the moisture condenses over the warm water of the river forming mist. In the early morning, the sun's rays filtering through the trees light the mist as it wafts over the stream for a lovely effect. One morning two young men in kayaks paddled by as I was painting. We chatted for a bit and although they went by too fast to pose, I tried to memorize their figures so I could include one in my painting.

The Weeki Wachee River is full of mystery... local legend has it that this was the spring Ponce de Leon believed to be the Fountain of Youth. You will certainly feel more youthful after a vigorous paddle on the Weeki Wachee River.

Manatee Luv

I'd never seen manatees in the wild before this trip to Florida's Nature Coast. Yesterday, while I was looking at some riverfront property, the realtor pointed out to me a baby manatee and its mother swimming along the bank (first photo). A closer look revealed a yearling calf and two others, one a pregnant female, for a total of five manatees swimming up the Weeki Wachee River.

Today it was cloudy and chilly, so we decided to drive up to Homosassa and visit a wildlife park on the river. They had an amazing variety of mostly native animals, some which I'd never seen: red wolves (once native, now bred in captivity), all kinds of birds such as ibises, flamingos, wood storks, roseate spoonbills, sand-hill cranes, white herons and pelicans, hawks and owls, foxes, a Florida panther and two bobcats, black bears and even a hippopotamus that was donated to the park after being used in a film. All the animals that are able to survive in the wild are free to come and go as they please; only those that can't make it on their own are kept in captivity.

The highlight of our visit was the manatee feeding. A park volunteer gets in the 72-degree water of the Homosassa Spring and hand-feeds sweet potatoes to six captive manatees. Other volunteers drop heads of lettuce and cabbage leaves in the feeding area. There is an underwater viewing house where visitors can see the manatees feeding underwater along with thousands of native fish such as large-mouth bass and tarpon.

Just outside the captive area one can see many other wild manatees on the river. Looking from an observation deck I counted about seven or eight, and one baby swimming by. They winter in these warmer spring-fed rivers because they cannot survive in the colder temperature of the Gulf water. These manatees have so much "awww..." quotient--everyone loves them!

The Weeki Wachee Mermaids

Weeki Wachee Spring was at one time famous for its underwater show; it's still advertised as "home of the living mermaids." The brainchild of a former Navy frogman, Newt Perry, who worked a lot in show biz (he was a good friend of Johnny Weismuller and trained the crews as well as doubled for Tarzan in the underwater scenes), the mermaid show has been going on since 1947. Perry taught his teenagers to do stunts such as eating and drinking underwater, using only air hoses to breathe, free-dive to the bottom of the spring at 117 feet below the surface, and specially to perform graceful ballet moves that look beautiful in the crystalline water of the spring.

In its heyday, Weeki Wachee Spring was the setting for underwater scenes in movies such as "Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid" and Esther Williams movies. ABC acquired it in the 1960's and built the present Underwater Theater. Before Disney attractions overshadowed it, the shows were quite elaborate and even Elvis Presley visited it. There's a photo of Elvis with his underwater fan club.

Today the kitschy roadside attraction is a Florida state park, and the show would have closed a few years ago it if hadn't been for the dedicated work of former mermaids who organized to save it. The retired mermaids, ranging in age from forty into their seventies, still perform as volunteers once a month and the lady who lives in the house next door is one of them.

We went to see the show yesterday (they only have it on weekends these days) with David, who is down here for a long weekend. The mermaids are still beautiful but the show and props are a bit seedy; whether another cultural shift can yet bring it back to its former glory, no one knows.