Really Missing Something!

I just posted a new blog post to my website! HOWEVER, it was missing something important, the form you needed to stay up to date with my shenanigans.  

Unfortunately, Blogger stripped my post of my form. (Hate it when that happens.) 

So, if you are interested in staying in touch please consider joining my subscription list by filling out a subscription form on my website!

You'll see a form that looks like this one but bigger and not blocked by Blogger! Grrr.

Missing Something?

I just posted a new blog post to my website!

Did you miss it?

Unfortunately, I don't think my new site can notify you when a new post goes up. 

So, if you are interested in staying in touch please consider joining my subscription list by filling out this handy dandy form below.

Goodbye and Hello

The other day a friend send out a Facebook message asking for her friends' contact info as she had managed to lose it all. She blamed technology. I couldn't resist pointing out that she was using technology to solve her tech problem.

Shortly thereafter I suffered my own glitch. I could no longer update my website! Horrors! Like my pal I cursed the internet and, well, turned to technology to solve my tech problem. Crow doesn't taste all that bad if you put a little lemon on it.

www.lissabankspaintings.com

Long story short, I'd planned a nifty summer sale so that didn't happen and I have a big show coming up in a couple of weeks and desperately needed an operational website so I flew into crisis mode. The good news is that I've designed a brand spanking new website with all new bells and whistles that, at this point, I'm praying works as I'd hoped!

The site is now live and though I'm discovering a few things need smoothing out and I still have a punch list that continues to grow, I'm excited for its new functionalities like... a way to purchase paintings online (yay!) and cool slideshows and a new place to publish these blog posts!

Sorry Blogger but this will look nicer and everything will be in one place. SO, I invite you to visit my site! I'm not sure how or if you will be notified of new postings as you do if you've subscribed to this site (just added that to the list) but I think it will be a nice experience.

Onward!

Solstice, Birthdays and Flowers

I don't think it's my imagination that spring has been memorably rainy this year. It is raining now as I type, a downpour actually. Since our summer is short here in New England the natives are restless for their time in the sun: beaches, cookouts, and general frolicking about. We yearn for it come January. March brings glimmers of hope. April routinely disappoints. But May and June are glorious. Just not this year.

As a result my garden is flourishing, though with an even ratio of weeds to flowers. Inside it's been a different story, here the flowers have bloomed.

Solstice © Lissa Banks 2019

I love birthdays. Seven years ago I celebrated a belated, but significant, one with family and friends in my backyard. It was pretty special. Everyone was there. Music played, festive lights hung from treetops and  twinkled in the bushes, and little vases filled with every sort of red flower lined the long, long table where we ate and toasted and laughed. The next morning I found all those little vases crammed on a small table on my deck. It was spectacular. I ran to get my camera and tripod and snapped as many photos as I could. I wish I had gotten more. Those photos were the beginning of what has become my obsession with painting flowers.

The first three works, Red Party Flower I, Red Party Flowers II and Red Party Flowers III, commemorated the party and opened the gates into a deep exploration into flowers, and particularly tulips. Nineteen paintings in total.

It's fitting that I finished this, the 19th floral, today as it marks the summer solstice, pouring rain notwithstanding. A time when not just New Englanders celebrate the moment when the sun traverses the northernmost arc in the heavens. The demarcation from one season to the next, a celebration of light and driving out of demons it marks a day of transition for me this year as well. This will be my last tulip portrait for a while.

It will be interesting to see how long I can stay away. They are the demons I have a hard time driving out of my studio.

I invite you to visit my website where you can sign up to receive now and again emails that will keep you up to date with where I’m showing, when I post these musings, and when I am offering special sales and promotions! My site is secure and I PROMISE never to sell your information.

  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original. You can purchase prints for sale at  FineArtAmerica.com.

Pas de Deux

He wondered out loud, what is love now that we are in the last (two, dare I say three) decades of our lives? I said that I wasn't sure, but what I did know was that it was different from the deep crushes of middle school and beyond that, the urgent, hormone-fueled passion of the reproductive years.

Pas de Deux © Lissa Banks 2019

Deeper into our lives we accumulate scars of disappointment and betrayal. These cast a shadow of suspect on others' intentions and cultivate cynicism. Small accomplishments build strength and independence over the years. Eventually we learn who we really are and, with that, what we want and what we won't accept. In short, we narrow our parameters as we broaden as human beings. It's both the gift and the curse of getting older; as we long for connection it becomes easier being apart.

I remember junior high dances: the crepe paper and fruit punch, teachers clustered on the perimeter and mobs of girls and mobs of boys eyeing each other with longing and fear. Cheap cologne and perspiration filled the air as damp hands touched and couples stepped tentatively into the center of the room. Awkward gyrations were met by giggles and taunts offstage. The music stopped and if you didn't like your partner you'd run back to your gang and recover from the humiliation. If you did, you stayed and danced again and again. A date at the movies might be planned. St. Christopher medals exchanged. Such was budding love... for a week or two.

When we pair off into marital bliss we learn about a new, deeper kind of love. The kind that allows for compromise and sleepless nights and changes in plans. There's sickness and health and not everyone emerges unscathed. I'm not sure who are the lucky ones, those who celebrate anniversaries of nuptials longer than a life well-lived or those who switch gears and go solo.

We dance the dance throughout life. With suitors and blind dates and girlfriends and boyfriends and spouses we dance the graceful, inspired, painful, disappointing, sensual, desperate, heartbreaking, dutiful, chaotic, blind, uplifting, affirming and transcendent dance. A pas de deux for our lives.

I invite you to visit my website where you can sign up to receive now and again emails that will keep you up to date with where I’m showing, when I post these musings, and when I am offering special sales and promotions! My site is secure and I PROMISE never to sell your information.

  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original. You can purchase prints for sale at  FineArtAmerica.com.

Perfectly Imperfect

Modern social media is full of it. People proudly showing off their abs, their glutes. Perfect family photos, never crying chidden, tidy houses, fabulous vacations, happy marriages. I do it too. I post pictures of the finished product, not the messy process that comes before.

The casual eye digests this and can't help but compare our imperfect lives to these seemingly idyllic ones. There are no unpaid bills, no threatening health concerns, no unreasonable boss in those images.

Perfectly Imperfect © Lissa Banks 2019

Right now my lawn is about a foot tall. The spring rains and my mower in the shop have left me with a mess that I am a little embarrassed by every time I walk up the drive.  But I've noticed that when I walk through that burgeoning meadow I can see that it's made up of graceful grasses whose seed heads brush my calves and cheerful buttercups and nodding violets. Little toads pop up now and then to give me a good start. Birds and squirrels plunder its bounty. Yes it's a mess, and it's also perfect.

I've spent hours looking at this single tulip. Its grace and gentle colors. It's perfect just the way it is. But a random deformity caused a petal and leaf to merge, another petal seems to have wanted to cleave in two, its center spine oddly thickened, a few age spots beginning to form. It's hardly an ideal specimen. What it is is unique and graceful and fully possessed of the essence which is tulip.

Maybe we could take a lesson from this beauty, that all beauty is not perfect, that all perfection is not necessarily what we think it is and that finding beauty and perfection in the messy part of our lives is just as worthy as the perfect post.

I invite you to visit my website where you can sign up to receive now and again emails that will keep you up to date with where I’m showing, when I post these musings, and when I am offering special sales and promotions! My site is secure and I PROMISE never to sell your information.

  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original. You can purchase prints for sale at  FineArtAmerica.com.

Kite Day

It had been a long hot day in July, though a perfect day to fly kites, which is what we'd done.

After the Kites © Lissa Banks 2019*

After a long drive, and a long search for a parking spot, and sunscreen in somebody's eyes, and experiencing a little of the kite enthusiasts' world, and many unsuccessful attempts to launch our own kite, and meeting a friendly little dog who seems to have changed our flying luck, and piling back into the car we landed at a clam shack in Warren, Rhode Island. Everyone was thirsty. And everyone had every reason to be cranky and tired, after all, the only bathroom options were the two portapotties that had been sitting in that long hot July sun all that perfect day. You do what you gotta do.

But for a brief moment there was not just sibling comity, but downright love and adoration. The kids mugged for the camera and for each other. They, with their hat hair and grimy faces and thirsty mouths rose above it all and were perfect for each other, and for me, their grandmother.

*For some reason this image isn't a very good translation. Guess you've just got to see it in person!