Reflectons in Florence...

Find the architecture in the puddles...love painting puddles, love looking at the sky in them...love photographing them...

New Book Soon to be Born....

This is the subject I am presenting at the National Art Education Association Conference in New Orleans later this month. It's a book I wrote

that contains design teaching problems for elementary and middle school students, with some humor and fun to get the creative juices flowing. With luck, it will be out this fall!

Study of...

Sometimes we don't look at things closely enough. If we do, we see things others don't. And one of the jobs of an artist is to point the way. What you see here may not be what caught my eye, but no matter. I made you look (the child's gleeful shout) and my work is done for the moment.

What is in the eye of the beholder....?

This is a detail of a vintage shirt....of bananas. Hmmmmmm. What do you see?

Babies--(Drawing by Julia Schmitt Healy)

Read a tweet by a woman who has decided she doesn't ever want kids. Never ever. She was an only child, never around babies, see herself as spoiled, etc. Well, that is one person who shouldn't have kids--unwanted kids are everywhere. The question is, how do you get people who haven't thought about what having kids means start thinking? I have to say I'm somewhat weary of sob stories about unemployed 22-year old single women with three or four kids wondering what they are going to do?

In my mind, it always boils down to education. You can't change someone's family circumstances, but you can educate early and give kids the information they need to make smarter choices in their lives. And you have to target the parents, as well. The world is not what it was in the 1950's with Mom at home with milk and cookies. It is messy. Education can't clean up the mess entirely, but it can neaten things a bit.

Masks on my curved office wall...

I find them compelling, scary, disturbing, silly and impossible not to buy. I don't so much like to wear them and I frighten easily if other people wear them, but on a wall? They make me very happy.

Stuffed Watercolor of the Past--"Squeeze My Muscle"

This is treated muslin, painted in watercolor and trapuntoed from the back to make it three-dimensional. There is a squeak toy in the bicep and, when you squeeze it, it makes that sound that only squeak toys can (think dog toy). When it was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, a museum guard told me someone laughed so hard, she wet her pants in front of it and they had to get a custodian. True or not, it's a great story.

I have always been interested in popular culture--especially since I grew up an outsider in my born-again (hypocritical) family. Muscle men back in the day were really a part of the underworld. There were also homosexual overtones, I think, in some quarters.

The attraction for me was this idea that you could shape and form your own body, like an artist might in her studio. Body culture as we know it today, did not exist. So the idea of body-building, tattoos and scarification were of interest. Piercing had not yet caught my radar, and it still creeps me out a bit, because I can't take my eyes off the piercing and move to other parts of the face. I get stuck. So these are the meandering thoughts of the day...