Category: memories

Finished for Friday

The sunflower and veggie photos are exhausted. I was hunting for subjects for the next painting by looking through my photographs of this and that. Since I’m not visiting Greece again this summer I wandered to my pictures of our past trips.

It wasn’t such a good idea.

None of the scenes appealed to me as paintings. The photos I took of my view either had my family or other people in them, or they just work as a photograph.

But then I got involved looking at our family, where we were, what we were doing, family we were visiting with, the youth of my sons and their happy faces, their silliness, and who is gone since then.

Many memories live in the pages of those photo albums and rather than finding inspiration I found a sort of melancholy.

A little book of travel info peeked out of my bookshelf and I found a small photo of a Greek island I’d never been to before. The colors and shapes were pleasing so I went ahead and sketched that scene. It felt good to lose myself in the activity and to shake off the downer.

Kalymnos ©2012 Dora Sislian Themelis
12×9 Watercolor, Arches 140lb cold press paper

Done in twenty minutes start to finish, it’s a bright, colorful scene with none of the memories.

Gone Like the Summer Wind

Pop Posing for his Portrait
Honestly, I can’t remember what year I painted my father in this small watercolor.  I know we were on a family vacation at an upstate NY resort he liked to visit.  I had just started using watercolor paints after taking that horrible class. 
I brought my supplies along and painted who ever was sitting at the pool.  When we were young my pop would pose for portrait assignments for school projects.  He’d put on a far away gaze as if looking out into the world.  He would do that for a casual photo too, unless he was in a fun mood, when he’d make a silly face by crossing his eyes and sticking his tongue out to the side.
Today marks five years that he’s gone from us and I just needed to remember him here.  Five years, and it hurts like it happened yesterday.  He was very intense person and artist.  He loved all his family very deeply and had a strong art/music influence on us, his kids and grandkids.  As a huge Frank Sinatra fan and collector, we heard Sinatra in our house so often that my sister and I could sing in Frank’s style!  Frank’s music is piped in every department store I go to and when I hear him I say “Hi Pop!”  Here’s to you, Pop.
Frank Sinatra, 1966
Songwriters Bradtke, Hans-Mercer, Johnny Meier, Heinz
The summer wind, came blowin’ in, from across the sea
It lingered there, to touch your hair and walk with me
All summer long, we sang a song and strolled on golden sand
Two sweethearts, and the summer wind
Like painted kites, those days and nights, went flyin’ by
The world was new, beneath a blue umbrella sky
Then softer than a piper man, one day it called to you
And I lost you to the summer wind
The autumn wind, and the winter wind, have come and gone
And still the days, those lonely days, go on and on
And guess who sighs his lullabies, through nights that never end
My fickle friend, the summer wind