"Long Way Home" (now in a private collection) is in exalted company.

"Touching Source," from the Image & Spirit blog

"Long Way Home" was a personal painting. A painting speaks for itself. Or should.

Facebook! Amazing.

Chris and Rachel have been encouraging me to dip my toes in the water for, oh, only about two years now. ;-)

And my friend John Gilstrap has novels #6 and 7 under contract, and I've caught up with a few other old pals as well. It's great.

My sweetie took this. I'm more alive than I thought!

Recommendation: Sky Meadows State Park. With many thanks to the Mellon family, who donated this land for our use. What a lovely respite from - well - everything.

This is the first year of George Mason University's Festival of the Arts, and what a thrill for this artist to be part of it! A very nice reception last night at GMU's Center for the Arts Concert Hall, where I have two pieces hanging in a group show with the Fairfax Art League. Sales will benefit both organizations. What an elegant, distinguished venue, too, and a very warm welcome.

It was quite an honor to have both Kevin Murray, Managing Director and Casting Director of GMU's Theatre of the First Amendment, and Harold Linton, Chairman of GMU's Department of Art & Visual Technology, there to greet us. Thank you, GMU!

Below, yours truly beside her paintings, still toting around the daily plein air painting kit in the red bag, and with her antique Mickey Mouse skirt on.

"Vintage" may be a more fashionable word for antique garments; however, this one has passed the half-century mark. I think the Mickey Mouse motif appropriate, because I'm generally Goofy. As to the paintings, mine are "Last Light," the clouds over ocean, and "Offering," the still life of red onion and miniature eggplant in a handmade bowl. Thanks to my friend and fellow painter Arlita Kadar for the photo -

- and for the yummy,  healthy goodie that she gave me to try, which I of course had to photograph before opening the package. Look at all those beans and grains! I can't wait to try it. Arlita says the International Market has more.

 

"Last Light" (20" x 30", oil on canvas) will be available at the George Mason University Center for the Arts through June. Part of the proceeds benefit the Center for the Arts as well as the Fairfax Art League.

Also, I'll be painting at GMU's Festival of the Arts this weekend, in one of the Fairfax Art League tents. For more about the festival, see today's article in The Washington Post. The demonstration painting will be cherry-red nasturtiums peeking around the corner of an old brick wall ... unless I change my mind! 

Hurry, there's just a week left to see Artomatic!

Here's what you're missing:

Oh yes, lest I forget - There is grownup stuff too.  

"Lurking" is my favorite. Find the traffic cones (12th floor, northwest sector, space 12 NW B1) and you'll see! The show is up through Father's Day - and then, no more until 2009. This was my first sight of Artomatic, and it was a blast and a half. Can't wait for more!

And no, Sir, I don't mean maybe! Here he is, and I am so proud of him!

 

This is my firstborn, Joren Michael Combs. He has followed his own path all along. He's served as a missionary - in Florida, Lake Tahoe, and even Japan. He has taught English as a second language for quite some time, and has studied Japanese for many years. He has been a steadfast spokesman for his faith. And now he has graduated from George Mason University, with a Bachelor of Science from the College of Information Technology and Engineering! And I could not be more proud of him! Words don't suffice, of course - and that's why I posted a picture.

Here you see before you a wonderful and honorable man - of whom the world will hear much more. I am certain of it. YAY, Joren! We love you!

 

 

Remember your first job? I do. I went to work when I was thirteen - and I'd been itching for it well before then. My first employer was a wonderfully patient lady: Mary Catherine Hutchins, the chairman of the English department at Sidney Lanier Intermediate School in Fairfax, Virginia. One time she mentioned to me that along the course of higher education, she'd taken to signing herself "MCH." One of her professors, none too impressed by the then-pretentious trait of using initials - perhaps also making fun of how many women of that time shared her first two names - said to her, "OK, so you're Mary Catherine what?"

Mrs. Hutchins let me do my work - grading tests and even composing them - right alongside her, because she and I routinely took over the administrative conference room. Looking back, I think she chose that working circumstance on purpose. All the while I was making it tough on seventh-graders who didn't put their apostrophes in the right place (heaven help them; I was merciless), I was also listening, and absorbing everything I heard.

Back in those days, schools ran by merit. At least I think they did. Mrs. Hutchins spent every one of her spare minutes in that conference room. She went over the dealings of the day with the principal, Bill Costolo, and his assistant, Leland Smith; she taught me about all the ups and downs of keeping a school (or business) running, as an ordinary part of life.

Mrs. Hutchins knew that I liked French - both language and cuisine. I'd started studying the language in third grade, and had on unforgettable occasions visited French restaurants from age nine onward - thanks to a sympathetic teacher, Charlotte Oliver, and later Mrs. H. herself. I even lunched at the inimitable Sans Souci - twice. Mrs. Oliver and I watched the wall of mirrors assiduously in hopes of spotting Art Buchwald. I was so awed that I still can't remember a thing about the food, but to this day I believe I could paint a picture of the restaurant's interior. There was simply no finer place to be! Down the path I even tasted good French wine, and took a lesson from the chef of Le Diplomat about how to make coq au vin the right way. He was addressing six or so of us junior gourmands at my table, but I was the one eating up his words, and I knew, just knew, he was talking to me.

Mrs. Hutchins and I hatched a great plan. We would start a publishing company - she suggested the name of "Prime, Inc." (sound familiar? I guess it occurred to someone else, too) - to review restaurants in the Washington, D.C. area. We'd put those reviews together into a self-published book. This was 1974, and no such thing existed. All of our restaurant jaunts were for research - of course!

I worked for Mrs. Hutchins for a few years more. Then my own life diverged. I went to college, played radio, married, and had a couple of children. I missed her all that time, but was ashamed of the path I'd taken. Radio was fun, but as for the rest of it, I felt downtrodden. Mrs. Hutchins always used to tell me, dead serious: "You can do anything you want to do." I'm afraid I did not live up to that. Or, perhaps I did. I've never forgotten the friends I made along the path. And the men who were once those two little children of mine, have amazed me. (Their little brothers are amazing, too.)

Something impelled me to get back in touch with Mrs. H. By then, she was a terminal cancer patient. She told me the story of how she had contacted an oncologist, having felt a large lump for more than a year, but never had time (because of caring for her own mother's final illness) for an appointment. Eventually there came a day when Mrs. Hutchins simply could not get out of bed. She called the oncologist and told him this. He said, "Meet me at the hospital. I have already arranged for surgery."

After she'd lived through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, my father took me to visit Mrs. Hutchins at her home. The doctors had no further treatment to offer her. Long before surgery, the tumor had penetrated her chest wall.

I had the children with me for part of the visit, and then my father took them and tried to keep them happy in his car. I wasn't half so good at keeping little ones amused as I am now. My visit with Mrs. H. was a hardship for my father. Eventually he came inside the house to tell me that we  had to go. I babbled something to Mrs. H. about seeing her again soon. Mrs. H. and I both knew it would not happen.

I stared around the room, remembering so many things there. The carpenter who was nearly blind and thus didn't realize that the bright yellow Formica he installed in the remodeled open kitchen was not the cream-yellow Mrs. Hutchins had sought. The tamales she had made for me, with corn husks that she went to San Antonio to get. The Ramos gin fizzes that she and LCDR Hutchins introduced to me, with no small delight.

Mrs. Hutchins had two beloved children of her own, older than me - I heard about them almost as if I knew them. But she always made me feel as if I were truly special to her. Magically, at the same time, she treated me as her peer. In many ways we were on the same wavelength - and in  more ways, she was patient with me without ever letting me realize it.

Before the visit, she had requested, and I had brought her - my mother helped me shop for these things - a basket of needs that otherwise had gone unaddressed: nail clippers, a small mirror, a comb, a few things more. My mother and I took great care selecting these things. I knew Mrs. H.'s tastes, and she liked beauty as much as I did. I found a cut-glass bowl to hold some of the sundries; a mirror that I thought she'd like.

Mrs. H. was not able to get up from her chair, but she was happy to see the basket of things she'd requested. I did not, in my mid-twenties, understand that for her, having a "good time of day" meant only that she could reach out far enough to pick up the mirror and make sure that her hair was combed. That was as good as her days got. I only remembered how beautiful she looked. I really had never seen her more lovely. She had on a white cotton cutwork gown, and she bore an aura of delicacy that I had never seen in her. And, the same steely strength that always made me feel safe around her.

A year or so later, I was visiting my parents, and read in a school employee newsletter that Mrs. Hutchins had died. I refused to believe it. I insisted vigorously that there must have been some error.

I miss her truly; I always will. 

Once upon a time, I knew a delightful fellow - a true polymath, a Renaissance Druze, if you will - named Rabih. A decade and a half ago, on Rob Howard's Compuserve Artist's Forum, I was musing about the various red earth colors that Old Holland offered in oil paints. Rabih was a regular there. I did not have much money to spend, and was particularly perplexed about whatever difference there might be between English Red and Venetian Red.

A few days later, there arrived at my door a pristine, precious box - containing a brand-new tube of each - from Rabih! I was overwhelmed. What a very kind thing to do. I wrote to him in thanks, and he said only, "Well, I was at the art store and they had both ... It was a small thing." Not to me!

Not long ago, I wrote to Rob asking whether he knew what had become of Rabih. Now I see that the news is very much our loss for not keeping track. This is a good story! I like the ending. Rabih has a great op-ed in the LA Times - and a brand new book.

"When something is @ss-backwards, everybody knows it." - Jeff Porcaro, quoted in Modern Drummer, 1983

"What are the reasons why
Nothing stays the same?" - Steve Lukather,  a song lyric, 1986