The Art & Poetry of Mary Coleman

I have been drawing recently. It’s pretty rough because I’m so rusty but I’m sketching from stock images of nude models I got off Deviantart fifteen years ago. There used to be a lot of artist models on there allowing you to download all their images for free and I’ve kept around 500 pictures for the past 15 years, moving them from computer to computer and now they are on my iCloud. The photos are pretty high quality images for being so old.

I’m trying to paint from my head. Again, very rough because I am so out of practice not using a photo as a reference. Not sure how long I’ll do this for because I’m not enjoying it very much. I’m almost ready to start another PPE painting, albeit a much smaller piece this time.

If there wasn’t so much tension between Russia and America I would love to visit Moscow. I always wanted to see Red Square and Russian culture intrigues me. Also I would love to visit Pompeii to see the ruins of the Roman city there. Paris would be lovely for the art museums and I’d go to the catacombs. Prague to see the bone church, London for the history museums, and Edinburgh in Scotland for the architecture. Madrid would also be a destination for me as I would like to see Goya’s paintings and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights at The Prado. Amsterdam, Bruges, and The Hague interest me too. I’d love to see the art there as I love the renaissance painters from that part of the world (I’m not a huge fan of Italian Renaissance art and I much prefer the Northern European work).

I don’t know if I want to do anymore international travel unless necessary however. Traveling locally stresses me out enough. Going back and forth from New Zealand is really hard and I’ll probably have to do that again at some point because my mother-in-law lives there and it’s my husband’s home country.

Being in a country where I don’t speak the language really scares me though. I’m a quiet tourist and I hate bringing attention to myself so I’d hate to ask people questions in english just expecting them to know my language. So yeah, as much as there are places I want to see, I don’t want to go someplace where I can’t speak the language and be one of those obnoxious Americans just expecting everyone to speak english.

There’s also the fact that no one likes Americans overseas, and that’s something that prevents me from going far. I don’t exaggerate when I say we are considered idiots in most foreign places. Even when I was living in New Zealand where english is the first language, they weren’t overly fond of the USA. I never got people being outright rude to me, but I felt the dislike as soon as I opened my mouth and they heard my accent. I learned to talk really softly so that it wasn’t as noticeable and people started asking me where I was from instead of asking me if I was American.