Wednesday 25 February 2009

MY FAVOURITE THINGS

When I received the blog award one of my commitments was to tell you of my 7 most favourite things in life. I have found this hard - because I can't pin it down to only seven!!! My life is so wonderful, I could mention family, friends, home, memories, painting, reading, exploring, blogging, teaching, music, philosophy/spiritual discussions - I could go on forever. I decided to choose the ones where I could add some images to break up all the text - so here goes......

1 Friends and Family - Spending quality time with friends and family - here's a photo of my daughter and her lovely girls. (Hope they don't mind me putting them into my blog)
2 Our Home - Looking around our lovely home, with each displayed object a memory of a friend, family or overseas trip comes spinning back to me - here's a photo of some figures I have on display on glass shelves by the fireplace dividing the sitting room from the dining room. From the top shelf - a figure from the Dominion Republic and a pig from a NOVA exhibition, middle shelf figures from South Africa and small brass elephant from India, lower shelf couple hugging each other in Willow and a lady and child both from my sister in law at different visits.

3 My life long partner - Sharing my evenings with my husband of 50 years after a lovely meal, sitting in our comfy room surrounded by my paintings, often reading, doing the crossword or Soduko, watching sport or a film. Photo of a corner of the sitting room - Oh yes I see Petal managed to creep in!
4 Painting - Planning a new painting and seeing it grow as if by another hand and mind. I will be posting images of stages of the latest oil I am doing for the riverside pub exhibition - probably tomorrow.

5 Reading good literature or biography - often sitting up in bed in what my girls call 'the princess room' all peaches and cream. I recently read the story part historical and part fiction of how the Mona Lisa was painted - it was brilliant bringing Leonardo and Medici Florence to life.
Photo of my art book collection in a corner of my downstairs art space.
6 Exploring new places. You will probably have seen the recent post of my trip to see the Priory at Walsingham. Off to see Venice in June when staying at Lake Garda.

7 Blogging - Reading your amazing comments and seeing how my work is received. So surprising how often a piece one isnt sure of turns out to get the most comments!! Your friendships mean so much to me.
May I say a big thankyou to Rhonda and Vicki for sending me this award, otherwise I would never have set time aside to realise what a very very lucky lady I am. Hope this long post hasn't bored you to death - Its probably the most personal one I have ever compiled.

8 comments:

Anita Davies said...

Wonderful reading Joan

Sandy Maudlin said...

WOnderful. Uplifting. Positive. So refreshing. Great way to start the day to read about your thankfulness for a full and blessed life! Hope you can travel this way someitme so we can paint together.

Angela said...

Not boring at all - I love that you added photos. What a good idea!

I understand how hard it is to narrow it down to seven - heck, it would be hard to narrow it down to 20! - as I'm still working on this myself!

(May have to steal your photo idea!)

Claudia said...

Hello Joan,
congratulations for your award and thank you for sharing this with us!

E-J said...

What a lovely home and family you have, Joan. Lucky, yes - but it surely cannot all be down to luck! Your grace, skill and warmth must surely count for a heck of a lot of it.

And OH, how I would love to rummage through that art book collection!!

"JeanneG" said...

It was wonderful to read about and see a part of your life. You should do it more often. I was just disappointed I couldn't "snoop" further by clicking to larger photos. Lovely to read your blogs. Thanks.

Robert A Vollrath said...

I'm cheating by taking a peek at your blog. I still haven't finished my title art.

Nice read but it's time for me to go back to painting lava:)

Joan Sandford-Cook said...

You all say the loveliest things - make my heart sing.