Instant holiday de-stressor

Another pastel

Here's Adam, who was trying hard not to fall asleep while he sat for us. He'd been posing for different artists since 9:30 in the morning and had been up most of the night before with his 3-year-old, watching the first snow and playing with dinosaurs. So the intensity you see above is him saying to himself, "Must. Keep. Eyes. Open!"

Blue

I've been sitting in on a pastel class at the National Arts Club lately. Pastels? What? I know, that's what I said to myself, too, but there was an opening in a class and an invitation and in the midst of the strange trip the last six months of 2010 have been for me, saying yes was the path of least resistance. Yes to chalky, hard-to-control pastels! Why not! And the surprise is, they're fun. You get to make a big mess. The colors are all very intense and don't only offer up sherbet-y pinks, blues, and greens. It's also the closest thing to painting without using paint, and that's really weird...and fun.



This is Tania, the woman who sat for us on Tuesday night. Tania was awesome. She sat very still for three hours (with a few breaks, of course) and then disappeared downstairs, to the second floor, where there's always some kind of party going on (last week it was a big to-do for Jules Feiffer). She started playing incredibly intense music on the grand piano near the bar down there; it turned out, she's a kick-ass pianist. "Of course," she said, when some of my fellow students expressed surprise. That's what I thought, too, after I listened to her play for awhile: "Of course."