different is beautiful ....

oh my .... this pear fills me with extra joy .... it is laden with wonderful happy reminders .... 

first: i did the background with susan and ann and dionne when they came over to my house to do art in my basement with me ... and having friends to do art with is high on my favorite things list ....so it had a happy, happy beginning for this painting .... so that's the first joyful memory related to this piece.

and second:  i made it with the intention of it being a sample for my life is verb camp collage workshop .... so when i got to camp i showed my wonderful class what i meant by having a papered background, a light glaze of paint over it and then a texture from stencil or stamps ... in this one it is an alphabet stencil .... so this piece was sitting on my demo table .... ready to become something ... and a nice memory of my class of most awesome people .... 

and third: i was doing a different collage to put into the auction but i liked this background so much i just knew i could do it too .... and then while rummaging through my magic painted papers i found this pear ....i believe it was meant to go on another piece of art but didn't make the cut (probably for size reasons, or it somehow it knew it needed to be saved for a later piece) ..... and i thought it would look perfect.... and i held it up to katie in my class and said, sorta flippantly, hey, whaddaya think about blue pears? and katie (so kindly) said, if you 're doing it, it will be awesome! .... so that's a great memory: so kind katie! 

and fourth: blue pears are kinda different.... and camp is kinda different .... and i dig different ... so different is beautiful sounded right. i thought that up ... and then tried on (in my head and aloud) about 20 other ideas .... but came back to the first idea, different is beautiful .... there is something to learn from that, huh? so happy memory four is thinking of the perfect thing to say for this unexpected piece for the life is a verb camp auction.... that kind of speaks to the whole camp experience.

and fifth: saturday night, when the auction was ending, i was wearing a dinosaur costume (that's a different story) , and when i walked into  the meeting room, there was ANOTHER DINOSAUR ... a new friend was dressed as a dinosaur too. what are the odds? zero. the odds are zero. we so beat those odds.  so my new friend in a dinosaur costume ("i'm so happy to see you! i thought i'd be the only one!") jumped from new friend to soul mate .... and my dinosaur soulmate bought the blue beautiful is different pear at the auction. that's a big happy memory of dinosaur onesie joy!

so ... this pear fills me with extra joy .... it is laden with wonderful happy reminders .... that's an awful lot of goodness smashed into a 12x12 collage.