My last Friday night here in Des Moines, IA was positively electrified by the Parranderos Latin Combo (PLC) at Vaudeville Mews. Just last December at the Moberg Gallery I saw them perform – and even “illustrablogged” on it! These guys are going places, literally, check this out!!! Something tells me I’ll be seeing Fernando Aveiga and the PLC in the future.
As we prepare to move for the 6th time in 23 years, seven if you count our most recent move up from one upper-floor unit to another up even higher in this downtown loft building, we’ve been watching a lot of HGTV. We’ve been downtown lofters, something new for us, for nearly 4 years and have grown accustomed to panoramic views, elevators, and life without either Home Depot or Lowes. This will all change…or maybe it won’t.
Thought it would be fun to do a one, long, crooked line drawing, and then go back with just a little color. The subjects are the Parranderos Latin Combo, who performed last night at the Moberg Gallery in Des Moines, IA to raise additional money for their upcoming trip to record an album in San Juan, Puerto Rico with Grammy award winning producer, Ramon Martinez. My friend Fernando Aveiga, musician entrepreneur, animates this project in collaboration with a constellation of co-stars.
I go places during Savasana. Just today I took a spin around the block.
I joke about yoga, but in the year and a half since I started practicing it, it has come to mean more to me than words can express. Learning how to listen to the stories that my own respiration is telling me is, I’m sorry, I can’t resist, breathtaking. There’s so much more to yoga that I don’t like talking about it at all.
When Ann turned me on to Fifty Three Paper, my first drawings were yoga related. Here are a couple of examples:
I modified the following photo of one of my blocks and made a blank notecard of it. It was inspired by my first instructor, Paula at Shakti Yoga in Des Moines, where I’m a beginner-practitioner. Namaste to my other instructors Marialyce and Joseph.
This evening the image of an ordinary spigot came to mind, and I thought It woulld be fun to try drawing one. I searched Google images and found a blue-handled one. I changed the color of the wheel handle from blue to red to correspond to the spigot that I had initially imagined. There is nothing extraordinary about a spigot, except the name, which I’ve always liked for some reason, even before I watched the nervous and newly ordained Fr. Gerald, played by Rowan Atkinson, aka Mr. Bean, in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), utter a blessing in the “Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spigot.” Still, in the end, there is nothing extraordinary about a spigot no matter what color its handle is.
I’m drawn to ordinary things. Recently, I drew the cart used by residents of Whiteline Lofts in Des Moines, Iowa. That there is only this one cart makes it extraordinary in some ways, ways that call my attention; and if I’m not entranced by, let’s say, a spigot or something, then, I offer my undivided attention.
portfoliolongo 
