Blog Posts

cats, cats, and more cats but in books not boots

1/30/2019

'Cats on the Page' opens at the British Library

I love cats, in case you hadn't noticed.

I do love dogs...just my experiences with dogs are limited to enjoying dogs that belong to other people, lol.

The link is about an exhibit held in England about cats in literature, specifically their illustrations. Cat illustrations from a few hundred years ago were included. If I lived closer, this would've been a definite exhibit to enjoy!

Smiles, with paint on my hands,
Angeline

Below painting is That is My Blanket Collage Cat, acrylics on wood panel, 6 by 6 inches, available for your home.

Topaz, the texan cat

1/23/2019

Topaz is the newest addition to the DB & SB home in Texas. She's also had the pleasure of adding her portrait to their collection, too! I had the honor of painting Stormy, Nakita, Cira, and Rascal before Topaz came into their lives.

If you'd love to have your Best Furry Friend painted just for you, you can review my free ebook How to Hire a Pet Portrait Artist that Works for You. The little ebook has all about what you might wonder about how to even start asking an artist to paint your BFF! You can get it by clicking on this paragraph.

As always, smiles with paint on my hands,
Angeline

Free Book: How to Hire a Pet Portrait Artist

Printer recreats exact copies of masterpiece artworks

1/16/2019

smart-news/new-technique-could-revolutionize-future-art-reproduction

This is all about a 3D printer that will re-create almost like for like reproductions of master artworks.

If I could use this printer, I'm not crazy about reproducing an artwork...but can you imagine if it can be used to make 3D reproductions of us, like photos but 3D?

Given the technology’s lengthy printing time and limited ink library, the chances of spotting a RePaint-generated replica in a museum gift shop, on a gallery wall, or in a book anytime soon are low. Still, the technique holds great promise, and once it’s perfected, you may find ostensibly indiscernible versions of Vincent van Gogh's “Starry Night” and Leonardo da Vinci's “Mona Lisa” popping up all over the place.

Of course, I wouldn't mind an almost perfect copy of Van Gogh, too, lol.

Your thoughts?

Smiles with paint on my hands,
Angeline

PS: The seahorse is a 2010 painting by me! It's encaustic paint on wood panel. Can you imagine if it was recreated with this printer? You can get the original - just please email me at angeline dot angelinemarie dot net if you'd really love it for your space. It's smaller than 8x10 inches.

LUXURIOUS Lucky cats and happy New Years

1/9/2019

I am having so much fun sharing these little Luxurious Lucky Cats with my email friends.

We're celebrating New Years and Chinese New Year 2019 from January 1st through February 5th. Every day, I'm sending one of these little Luxurious Lucky Cats via email. Just the title and the image. It's the only way you'll see the entire collection until February 5th, 2019.

Would you like to see the entire collection? Yay! Join my email list by clicking this sentence or the button below. They are all waving their paws, "thanks! We want to be seen! We want to send YOU good luck and fortune!"

Send me Luxury Luck Cats!

Happy mew year for cats day

1/2/2019

As many of us return to our day jobs, just remember it's still a great day!

It's Happy Mew Year for Cats Day and National Pet Travel Safety Day.

It's also the beginning of Adopt a Rescued Bird Month; National Train Your Dog Month, and Walk Your Pet Month.

How many did you know of these before reading this post, lol?

OH! I'm celebrating New Year's and Chinese New Years daily, via email, by sending a Luxury Lucky Cat to all of my email friends. Would you like to see them? Join my email list here, please, and make sure you get all of them, plus a free little ebook with all of these Red Lucky Cats!

Smiles with paint on my hands,
Angeline

About Red Lucky Cats

Charles dickens, a painted portrait lost, a christmas carol

12/9/2018

My dad loved author Charles Dickens' works. He gave a paperback copy of David Copperfield. We watched A Christmas Carol every year.

I thought it was sooooo cool that art and writing came together recently! A Lost portrait of Charles Dickens rediscovered in South Africa!!! The portrait was painted about the time Dickens was writing A Christmas Carol. Read on for more info, and, here's the original link: http://artdaily.com/news/109350/Lost-portrait-of-Charles-Dickens-rediscovered-in-South-Africa

Smiles, with paint on my hands,
Angeline

Lost portrait of Charles Dickens rediscovered in South Africa

Margaret Gillies RWS (1803–1887), Portrait of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), courtesy Philip Mould & Company.

LONDON.- The lost portrait of Charles Dickens as an emerging literary star at the age of 31, officially lost for 174 years, has miraculously turned up in a box of trinkets in South Africa. Painted in late 1843 by Margaret Gillies (1803–1887) during the same weeks Dickens was writing A Christmas Carol, it was last seen in public in 1844 when exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The portrait has now returned to us in time for the 175th anniversary of Dickens’ Christmas masterpiece, first mentioned by the author in a letter dated to a day he was sitting for Gillies. This evening, the art dealers Philip Mould & Company, who formally re-identified the portrait, will unveil it after an interlude of over a century and a half. It will go on display in an exhibition, ‘Charles Dickens: The Lost Portrait’, opening tomorrow and running until 25th January 2019.

Until now the portrait has been known only by a simplified black-and-white print, which has none of the brilliance of the original and was the frontispiece of a book entitled A New Spirit of the Age (1844). Edited by Richard Henry Horne, this collection of essays highlighted the great figures of the early Victorian period, from Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning to Romantic stalwarts such as William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley. Dickens was the first entry.

Despite attempts to locate the portrait during her lifetime, even Gillies herself was at a loss to know what had happened to it, reporting it unaccounted for in 1886. Dickens’ contemporary, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, had seen the original and remarked that it showed him as having ‘the dust and mud of humanity about him, notwithstanding those eagle eyes.’ When it was rediscovered a layer of mould was obscuring part of Dickens’ body. It has now undergone conservation work which reveals the stunning detail beneath.

Philip Mould has said: ‘This portrait adds greatly to our perception of the charismatic young blade that Dickens was at the time and is so different to the avuncular, bearded man we know from photographs. Unlike other literary portraits of the period, that can be formulaic, the subject fixes you with an arresting gaze, boring into you with the same eyes that recorded a wealth of material about his life and times.’

Dr Cindy Sughrue, Director of the Charles Dickens Museum has commented: ‘This discovery would have been remarkable in any event, but it is even more so because the portrait itself is exquisite. The skill of the artist is evident in the fineness of every brushstroke, in each strand of hair and the sparkling eyes that look right into yours.’

The lost portrait is also remarkable for being made by a professional woman, herself an important and overlooked artist and social campaigner. Well known as a miniaturist, Margaret Gillies painted a portrait of the poet William Wordsworth amongst others. An early supporter of women’s suffrage, she never married but co-habited with her partner, the pioneering sanitary reformer and physician Dr Thomas Southwood Smith (1788–1861). She provided the illustrations for a report by Southwood Smith for the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Children’s Employment in Mines and Manufactories (1842). These images provided a graphic and disturbing account of the exploitation of poor children in Victorian society; a radical subject for a woman artist to take up and work which Gillies executed anonymously.

Gillies shared with Dickens a passion for social reform and a deeply felt concern for those living in poverty. The sittings for the lost portrait, which started in late 1843, coincided with one of Dickens’ most intense and ground-breaking periods of social campaigning – the six weeks in which he wrote A Christmas Carol. Dickens first mentions the book in a letter dated the same day as one of his sittings. Initially intending to write a pamphlet about child poverty, he diverted to writing a short ghost story with a clear political agenda. A Christmas Carol catapulted Dickens to even greater fame and can be said to have saved his reputation, which was suffering from the poor reception of his most recent novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–1844).

Emma Rutherford, portrait miniature specialist and consultant for Philip Mould & Company, remarked: ‘To have a portrait of Dickens at this specific time – when his career was on a knife-edge – makes it all the more compelling. His future was uncertain – he was overdrawn, with a growing family and living beyond his means. Gillies seems to capture both vulnerability and confidence.’

It is unknown how the portrait came to be in South Africa, but research undertaken by Philip Mould & Company strongly suggests that it arrived via one of two sons of George Henry Lewes (partner to George Eliot), both of whom emigrated to South Africa in the 1860s. Both Gillies and Dickens were close to the Lewes family and Gillies’ adopted daughter was married to another of Lewes’ sons. The portrait was found at a general sale in a tray containing a number of antiques and everyday objects, including an old recorder, a brass dish and a metal lobster. Suspecting the portrait might be of note, its purchaser contacted Philip Mould & Company.

The miniature will be on view to the public for the duration of the exhibition, which will also include a number of important loans from the Charles Dickens Museum pertaining to Dickens’ early career, his commitment to self-promotion and his fascination with celebrity and selfhood. His mirror and hairbrush will appear alongside his travelling writing box, one of his quills, a portrait bust from 1842 and a small portrait of his children, as well as a first edition copy of A Christmas Carol.

The intention is that the portrait becomes part of the permanent collection of the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street, the only house in which Dickens lived in London that survives. As the portrait goes on display, the Museum, which holds the world's most comprehensive collection of material relating to the life and work of Dickens, is beginning a campaign to raise the necessary funds to secure the future of the painting.

‘The discovery of this long-lost portrait of Charles Dickens by Margaret Gillies is truly thrilling,’ said Cindy Sughrue. ‘The Chares Dickens Museum is the perfect place to provide it with a permanent home, and today we are launching an appeal for contributions towards the cost of acquiring the portrait for our permanent collection.’

WHY I MAKE ART DROPS - & WHAT ARE THEY

12/9/2018

If you’ve followed me for a little while on Instagram or Facebook, you’ll know I drop art when I can, where I can.

I do label the backs of these tiny artworks with how to reach me - but it’s not important that I am reached.

What’s important to me is that with few resources created by me makes someone else smile. The hope that someone smiles is my main reason. We do need smiles in our lives...!

Think you'll never find one of my Red Lucky Cats? You can collect all of them here: https://bit.ly/2Pb69rg

In the meantime, I’m following @miami_weddings back with gratefulness that they smiled!!!

Larger Red Lucky Cat prints are:
Love
Brave
Adventure
Free
Marlins (baseball)

Smaller Red Lucky Cat are:
Save
Be
Have
Do
Fun
Save
Fate
Zen

RUSSIAN CAT MAKES PREDICTIONS

12/9/2018

Mi Abuela would watch futbol. I asked her why...she said it was the only game shown on Spanish television channels.

Andy and I have watched the World Cup. If Beckham does build a soccer stadium in Miami, Florida, then I'm sure we will attend a game or two every year. Not sure if we would attend a season, lol, as the Marlins already have us as happy season ticket holders.

I found this article about Russia picking a deaf museum cat as World Cup oracle because I thought it entertaining.

You can find the original article here by clicking on this sentence. The photo was also taken from the website. In the meantime, I also copied it here:

MOSCOW (AFP).- Russia on Monday named a deaf white cat who lives in Saint Petersburg's historic Hermitage Museum as its official prognosticator for the World Cup.

Achilles the Cat will hope to repeat the fabled exploits of Paul the Octopus and other "psychic" animals tasked with predicting winners of football's showpiece event.

"We will hold a special press conference and hand Achilles a Fan ID card," the Hermitage Museum's cat press secretary Mary Khaltunen told the R-Sport news agency.

The fact that Russia's most fabled collection of art has a spokeswoman for cats may be news to some.

But R-Sport says Hermitage Museum cats are legion -- and apparently football experts.

The cats were first brought to the Hermitage when Peter the Great made its Winter Palace into the new imperial home in the 17th century.

Empress Elizabeth of Russia eventually issued a decree demanding "the shipment of cats to the court".

The Hermitage was turned into a private art collection after Catherine the Great's death in 1796.

The Hermitage's Cat Museum founder Anna Kondratyeva said Achilles went on sabbatical and "put on a belly" after also picking winners in last year's Confederations Cup in Russia.

It was not immediately clear how well he did.

But the 4.7-kilogramme (10.4-pound) feline would have to be in top form to repeat Paul the Octopus's correct prediction of all seven German wins at the 2010 World Cup.

The octopus also correctly picked final winner Spain by settling its tentacles over the Spanish flag when it was lowered into Paul's tank.

Achilles's selection process will be less dramatic: the cat will simply sticks his snout into the winning bowl of food.

"Achilles was born deaf, which may explain his heightened intuition," R-Sport wrote.

© Agence France-Presse

Smiles,
Angeline

Just me

12/9/2018

Forward>>

cats, cats, and more cats but in books not boots

Topaz, the texan cat

Printer recreats exact copies of masterpiece artworks

LUXURIOUS Lucky cats and happy New Years

Happy mew year for cats day

Charles dickens, a painted portrait lost, a christmas carol

WHY I MAKE ART DROPS - & WHAT ARE THEY

RUSSIAN CAT MAKES PREDICTIONS

Just me

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