Raritan Avenue in Highland Park, New Jersey, watercolor on paper by Leora Wenger, 2011
Last night I did this sketch of a block of Raritan Avenue in Highland Park, New Jersey. Can anyone who has been to Highland Park guess which block it is (between which street and which street)? I hope to do more – this one has a lot of grays and blues, and I used some yellow straight from the tube which seems to pop. That’s OK for a sketch, but I want to work on more details.
If you have been to Route 27 also known as Raritan Avenue, you will know there are usually tons of cars. I used photos from a few hours before the 2009 Memorial Day Parade, when the street was clear of cars.
My friend Julie sent me her painting of her lemon tree to post on this blog. Julie, who lives in Hashmonaim, Israel, writes: “All of the fruit on our three citrus fruit trees are ripe. We also have an orange and a pomelo tree.”
This is one of the trees in her backyard. I took this photo in June 2008, when we visited her family.
Detail from Radish Kale, watercolor on paper, 2011 by Leora Wenger
On My Blog
Elsewhere in the Blogosphere
This week Jill and I went to see Ilana Shafir at Rutgers. You can visit her beautiful website and read my review from when she spoke in Highland Park two years ago. Her daughter, artist Leah Zahavi, lives in Highland Park.
My friend Debbie wrote about the Rambam movie we saw last week. I wasn’t as enthusiastic as she was about the movie, but I thought the story was well-written (it was written by Robert Avrech of Seraphic Secret). Maybe I was a bit judgmental of the graphics; I would have liked a Shakespeare-like presentation instead of the stiff drawings.
Mason Resnick put a pasta recipe and photo on his wife Lori’s blog. Today I went to visit the Asian market in Edison he mentions, H-Mart; I bought some varied mushrooms and other produce. Maybe next time I’ll bring my camera and take a few photos for a blog post. I had a good laugh when I met another friend there, also there for the first time.
Felisol talked about her illness, ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis). She related her difficulty with (and expense of) some alternative therapies. And then in the comments she speaks of how T’ai Chi, Qigong and Feldenkrais have been helpful, as have been her friends, family and prayers.
If you haven’t seen it yet, visit the Purim song by Maccabeats on Mrs. S.’s post. Esther is adorable, and the astronauts are cute, too. Catch the calendar scene.
Radish Kale Nuts Parsley, Watercolor on paper, 2011 by Leora Wenger
Finally, after several months of not painting, I took out the watercolor paints yesterday. You can see some inspiration from this photograph of radishes, kale and nuts; the clementine on the left was in a different still life, and I decided that bit of orange would add to the painting.
There are the famous windows by Chagall at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. And then there are the Chagall-style windows that my daughter (above image) and other students at her school created and displayed at the recent art show. Many paintings were on display. One technique her art teacher uses is to learn about an artist, and then the students create works similar to those of that artist. Some of the paintings, for example, had the red, blue, yellow and white rectangles of Piet Mondrian.
Purim, the Jewish holiday of costumes, festive food, hamantaschen and the Book of Esther, falls this year on March 20. We have begun preparing our annual oatmeal containers that we decorate, fill with edible treats and hand out to a few friends. My daughter created the scene above; I scanned it into the computer, and we plan to print it in a variety of sizes to paste unto the containers.
If you are celebrating, have you done anything to get ready? Any thoughts on the upcoming holiday? Questions?
A drawing by my daughter: what does this ballet dancer and Ancient Egypt have in common? Perhaps someone who knows ancient Egyptian history can help. Or maybe you are familiar with some midrashim related to parshat Shmot? (I’m not, but I gather that’s how my daughter got the idea).
Pumpkin, detail from watercolor painting of Three Squash, 2009
Or any other holiday or reason to gather and eat. I like collecting recipes. Maybe one day I’ll actually try some of these.
Two of my children have paintings on display at the Highland Park Public Library in November. These are not the ones in this post; my son, who did the paper airplane landscape above, has tall, surrealistic pencils on display.
My daughter has fuchsia flowers painted on a bright blue background at the library. The ice cream painting above may look familiar to loyal blog readers; yes, the students copied were inspired by my painting of ice cream from last spring. Thanks for coming up with that flattering idea, Jill Caporlingua, and for being a devoted, creative and energetic art teacher.
