Watercolor: Books and Coffee

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Books and Coffee 3.5×3.5 watercolor and ink on paper  sold

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A gaggle of housemates have moved in – four legged and two legged – so we’ve been moving furniture, making beds and settling in. And then, visitors arrived for the weekend from the east coast and the mid-west to make the atmosphere even more festive, so we’re beginning the new year with long-tabled dinners, squeezey seating on the couch, and playing on the floor with babies. Early in the morning, while the house was still dark, I took a steamy cup of coffee into the studio to sketch this little moment with ink and watercolors. It started as a doodle on an envelope while I was on the phone, on hold the day before. I admit to being influenced by the children’s books I’ve been reading to two little pumpkins. How has your first month of the year been unfurling?

It’s lovely to sketch small paintings like this with morning coffee

Doodle on the left, ink drawing on the right.

Art Quote
In November 1864, a thirty six year old English painter named Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a friend of Whistler and Fantin-Latour, arrived in Paris for a short stay. Accompanied by his redheaded mistress and model, Fanny Cornforth, Rossetti rented a room in a hotel in the Rue Laffitte and then visited an exhibition of Delacroix’s paintings and did the rounds of the china shops. He also visited one of Delacroix’s favorite haunts, the Jardin des Plantes, a zoological garden on the Left Bank. It’s collection of beasts was only slightly more impressive than Rossetti’s own, since the painter’s house in Chelsea was home to a kangaroo, a raccoon, several peacocks, a wallaby, a chameleon, a gazelle, a woodcock, various monkeys and parakeets, a raven, an armadillo and (until it died after eating one of Rossetti’s cigars) a wombat. ~Ross King

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2 thoughts on “Watercolor: Books and Coffee”

  1. Love the painting, and the description of the house full of people. As for the Rossetti quote I realize my own menagerie is small by comparison. Two cats and a dog. Nothing.

    XOXOXO Barbara

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