Wonderful quote - Laughter

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

-E. E. Cummings

Large Mixed Media ...watercolor, napkins, silk leaves

Wonderful quote - Be exceptional

"Be exceptional.

Make tremendous efforts to be extraordinary.

What a privilege to be here on the planet

to contribute your unique donation to humankind.

Just make sure you do so..."

-Shelby Lynne

Wonderful quote

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

-Leo F. Buscaglia

Wonderful quote - Letter

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere

without moving anything but your heart.

-Phyllis Theroux

Wonderful quote - Don't listen

Don't listen to what they say, go see.

Wonderful quote - Magic

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”

-Roald Dahl

Wonderful quote - Dreams and Hearts

"There are so many fragile things, after all.

People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."

-Neil Gaiman

Wonderful quote - Survivor

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

-Author Unknown

Wonderful quote

"If there are no dogs in Heaven, 

then when I die, I want to go where they went." 

Will Rogers

Quote - War - Buddha

The Buddha said “In a battle, the winners and losers both lose.”

Wonderful quote

“Life is filled with fantastic little things

that happen constantly.

Don't take them for granted.” 
 -Lilly Sein McElroy

Wonderful quote _ Life

“A single event can awaken within us

a stranger totally unknown to us.

To live is to be slowly born.”

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Wonderful quote

Today is a perfect day for lying down and staring at the clouds,and realizing how beautiful life truly is." Unknown

Commitment to Art

Wonderful quote - Love

“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. 

You know that your name is safe in their mouth.” 

― Jess C. Scott, 1: The Intern

Wonderful quote - Life - Maya Angelou

“I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. 

Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.”
― Maya Angelou

Wonderful quote - Life

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
― George Bernard Shaw

"Chances are that if you’re suffering, you’re believing a thought that’s not true." ~Laura Katleman-Prue

Wonderful quote - Unlived Life

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Quote Loving LIfe

Be in love with your life.

~Jack Kerouac

Art

What an artist makes of painting is not so much a matter of freely choosing among a variety of options as it is a matter of making the most of a few intuitions that are absolutely one's own. Every time a painter paints we want to see what those intuitions are.

Jed Perl

Art of painting

I believe that the art of painting, and the painting itself, should convey a feeling of serene satisfaction and inner harmony."  

 - Paul Horiuchi

Quote Picture Poem

A picture is a poem without words.

Quote Afternoon

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

- Annie Dillard

Quote - life

She had always felt

that the essence of human experience

lay not primarily in the peak experiences, 

the wedding days and triumphs 

which stood out in the memory like dates

circled in red on old calendars, 

but, rather, in the unself-conscious 

flow of little things--the weekend afternoon

with each member of the family

engaged in his or her own pursuit,

their crossings and connections casual,

dialogues imminently forgettable,

but the sum of such hours creating a synergy

which was important and eternal.

~ Dan Simmons

Making Art

For me, making a piece of art is about the moments of life; being aware of them and being grateful for them. My collage paintings reflect some moment that otherwise might fly by while I am thinking ahead or behind.

I experience poetry in much the same way. Poetry I read and am taken in by is often a window into the life experience of another person. I can resonate with that moment. I think that’s why I like haiku so much.

When I write a moment rather than paint it, I don’t worry about rules, or shoulds, or making something pretty. I try to capture a moment so I can look at it in contemplation.

Here is one of my poems. Although it has a sadness, it also reflects love and honoring the moment, at least in my eye.

Poetry

In response to a poem by David Whyte

What to Remember When Waking

i believe that poetry at its best is found rather than written. traditionally, and for many people even today, poems have been admired chiefly for their craftsmanship and musicality, the handsomeness of language and the abundance of similes, along with the patterning and rhymes. 

i respect and enjoy all that, but i would not have worked so hard and so long at my poetry if it were primarily the production of well-made objects, just as i would not have sacrificed so much for love if love were mostly about pleasure. what matters to me even more than the shapeliness and the dance of language is what the poem discovers deeper down than gracefulness and pleasures in figures of speech. i respond most to what is found out about the heart and spirit, what we can hear through the language. 

best of all, of course, is when the language and other means of poetry combine with the meaning to make us experience what we understand. we are most likely to find this union by starting with the insides of the poem rather than with its surface, with the content rather than with the packaging. 

too often in workshops and classrooms there is a concentration on the poem’s garments instead of its life’s blood. it may be that the major art in poetry is the art of finding this shining—this luminosity. it is the difference between a publishable poem and one that matters.

Linda Gregg

Poem quote

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

~David Carradine

Poetry Quote

Poetry is just the evidence of life.

If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

~Leonard Cohen

~Brenda Ueland

Quote - Things

I have always loved things, just things in the world.

~Leonard Cohen

Quote - Tea & Trouble

"There is no trouble so great or grave

that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea." 

-Bernard-Paul Heroux

Quote - Winter

"The leaves fall, the wind blows and the farm country slowly 

changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools. 

~ Henry Beston, Northern Farm

Quote - Comfort

"There is nothing like staying at home

for real comfort." 

-Jane Austen

Wonderful quote

"We are the music-makers,

and we are the dreamers of dreams."

-Willy Wonka

Quote - love

"When love is not madness,

it is not love." 

-Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Wonderful Quote - Love

"To find someone who will love you for no reason,

and to shower that person with reasons,

that is the ultimate happiness." 

-Robert Brault

Quote - Creative Life

"To live a creative life,

we must lose our fear of being wrong." 

-Joseph Chilton Pearce

Quote -

"The hardest-learned lesson:

that people have only their kind of love to give,

not our kind." 

Mignon McLaughlin

Quote - picture

"The best thing about a picture is that it never changes,

even when the people in it do."

-Andy Warhol

Wonderful quote - Love

"Live by the sun, love by the moon." 

-Unknown

Wonderful quote - Suffering

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.” 

-Ben Okri

Wonderful quote - Love

“If you enter this world knowing you are loved

and you leave this world knowing the same,

then everything that happens in between

can be dealt with.” 

-Michael Jackson

Wonderful quote - Dream

“Get excited and enthusiastic about you own dream. This excitement is like a forest fire - you can smell it, taste it, and see it from a mile away.” 

-Denis Waitley

Quote - Home

Home is the one place in all this world

where hearts are sure of each other.

It is the place of confidence.

It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and

suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear

in self-defense, and where we pour out the unreserved

communications of full and confiding hearts.

It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out

without any sensation of awkwardness

and without any dread of ridicule.

-Frederick W. Robertson

Wonderful quote

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything, I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning." Rainer Maria Rilke.