Growing Wild Plums – Painting 3

Painting #3:

A scene from our living room out on the hill. Always a loyal good dog nearby. Art and color everywhere. My mother’s paintings 🖼 on the walls. She won many art prizes over the years. Her iris paintings even won best in show. I would sit and try to make art like she did, but my paintings looked different. I’ve always had my own style and I’m lucky to have an artist mom who encouraged me to paint in my own way. This painting is the closest thing to how I remember that room in my childhood home. This is how I see the world.

About the series:

My new artwork series is a meditation on my childhood growing up off-the-grid in rural Iowa. My goal is to write a children’s book using this series of 20 paintings as the illustration for the book. Thank you to the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation – BeWildReWild – Community Artist Grant for your generous support of my project.

https://bewildrewild.org/artwork-paintings-childrens-book

Blessings,

Emily Lupita

Http://EmilyLupitaStudio.com

Third Painting In-Progress: “Painting at the Table”

My series continues with the third painting now in-progress. It started as a sketch from my memory of using my mom’s art supplies to paint at our big table in the dining room.

Then I made several new sketches and came up with the final dimensions.

Here I’m adding in my Lupita character at the table and adding in color. These are all sketches I use as guides to then make the final painting.

About the series:

My new artwork series is a meditation on my childhood growing up off-the-grid in rural Iowa. My goal is to write a children’s book using this series of 20 paintings as the illustration for the book. Thank you to the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation – BeWildReWild – Community Artist Grant for your generous support of my project.

https://bewildrewild.org/artwork-paintings-childrens-book

Blessings,

Emily Lupita

Http://EmilyLupitaStudio.com

Pear Tree Sketch – 2 of 20 Wild Plums Art Series

When I was a child, we lived on this beautiful hill in rural Iowa. There were two gorgeous pear trees next to the garden overlooking the countryside beyond.

Mom put up a hammock from Mexico. My brothers and I would play and read and take naps out there under the twin pear trees. Our dogs and cats would join us.

Here are a few pictures and a (new!) video of my “Pear Tree” painting still in progress.

My new artwork series is a meditation on my childhood growing up off-the-grid in rural Iowa. My goal is to write a children’s book using this series of 20 paintings as the illustration for the book. Thank you to the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation – BeWildReWild – Community Artist Grant for your generous support of my project.

https://bewildrewild.org/artwork-paintings-childrens-book

Blessings,

Emily Lupita

Http://EmilyLupitaStudio.com

Art Grant for New Book Project

It’s an exciting day! I’ve received a Community Art Gathering Grant from the BeWildReWild Fund at the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation. The grant is to create my newest children’s book – about growing up off the grid in rural Iowa. I’m filled with gratitude to have this opportunity.

The book will have a series of twenty watercolor paintings. Here I am with the very first drawing, all ready to paint. This one is, “Lupita Canning Corn.” These are the largest paintings I’ve ever made, by far. (The new paintings are 12×12 inches and I usually make 5×7 size.)

I’ve also added a new element to the Lupita paintings…a background. I’m experimenting with gauche paint for the background work. It’s challenging and exciting, both.

My favorite part of painting again is sharing the experience with my sons. The Captain is fascinated by Mama painting and joins me at the table to watch what I’m up to.

I’ll post updates on my new project here on my blog and also on my Emily Lupita Studio Facebook Page.

https://www.facebook.com/EmilyLupitaStudio/

Thank you to the Iowa Natural Heritage Fund for supporting my work!

Blessings,

Emily Lupita

New Book Published – Wonderful You

New Book Published – Wonderful You

I’m happy to share that my new book, Wonderful You, has been published. Hurray! Thank you to everyone who has purchased a copy and helped support my artwork.

Both of my books are now available in my Etsy Shop and also on Amazon here and here. You can also pick up a copy at The Local Exchange on the Historic Square in Marietta, Georgia.

May your garden be full of flowers,

❤ ~Emily Lupita

www.EmilyLupitaStudio.com

All content ©Emily Lupita Studio 2015

Year End Sale – Save 30% Off Everything in my Art Shop

Year End Sale – Save 30% Off Everything in my Art Shop – This Week at Emily Lupita Studio

 

Wishing you a Happy New Year!

❤ ~Emily Lupita

 Visit me online at

www.EmilyLupitaStudio.com

All content ©Emily Lupita Studio 2014

My “Writers Write” Series Interview

This Week At Emily Lupita Studio – My “Writers Write” Series Interview:

I’m delighted to have been interviewed by AndiLit.com about my creative process and new book as part of the “Writers Write” interview series hosted by AndiLit founder, Andi Cumbo-Floyd. I answer 10 questions ranging from thoughts on building a platform for writing to how books influenced my childhood.

I’m re-posting the first section of the interview here and it appears in full at this link.

Treasure This Sacred Space – A Writers Write Interview with Emily Lupita

August 9, 2014 by Andi

I absolutely love creative people who throw their creative energy into the work of other artists, and Emily Lupita is one of those people.  Please take a few minutes and enjoy her words and wisdom today.

1. Tell me about your latest project.  

The Artist’s Alphabet: 26 Words to Encourage Creativity is a hybrid project that brought my love of painting and words together. It combines a collection of my “Lupita on a Journey” paintings with a painting I made of each letter of the alphabet. All the letters are connected to a word that I felt encourages creativity or represents an important aspect of the creative lifestyle. On the facing page of each painting / letter / word combo is the word’s definition, which I edited to better fit my idea of what each word means to me as an artist and writer. I designed it as a tool for children learning to read, but I also hope it can serve as a sort of colorful sanctuary for adults, a place where they can go to embrace the powerful versatility of a joyful child’s creative mindset.

The book is dedicated to my mother, artist Juana Maria Plum, and starts with a design I made of a favorite quote, “All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life” by M.C. Richards.

Signed copies are available in my art shop at http://www.EmilyLupitaStudio.com and unsigned copies on Amazon.

 

2. What role, if any, did books, writing, and reading play in your childhood?

Books, reading, and writing were central elements of my childhood. My parents, two brothers and I lived on a self-sustaining homestead in the countryside of rural Iowa. We didn’t have running water until I was seventeen and had almost no modern electronic conveniences, so our collective imaginations were the most exciting thing around and that’s were we spent most of our time. We read books, put on plays in the living room, and went on narrated walks into the wild landscape that surrounded us. My mother is an artist and we had a special long, rectangular table dedicated to painting and to all sorts of craft projects from making our own fishing lures to chiseling animal figurines out of wood. My father is a bardic poet who recites long stretches of oral poetry from memory, and some of my earliest childhood memories are of him teaching me to memorize lines from his poems by repeating them in rhythmic patterns while waving my hands like a conductor before an orchestra. When the two of them got together on a creative roll, it was a true wonder for their three children to behold and, still, I go back to those moments of wonder when I’m on the verge of creating something new.

 

3. What is your writing practice, your writing routine?

In the mornings I wake up early and sort of stumble downstairs to my art studio. I like this because it feels like I actually wake up painting. Once I’m through the mist and fully awake, I spend time working on my memoir manuscript, The Poet’s Daughter, for about an hour. It is a slow process that I’ve come to enjoy – etching away at it line by line for years. Each night I do a writing exercise where I open my Artist’s Alphabet book to a random page and write about how I want to manifest more of that particular word in my life. Some of my favorite words that keep appearing to me are gratitude, imagination, perseverance, and wonder.

 

4. Who are you reading now?

Right now I’m reading The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. Love, love, love. I’m also reading her Facebook page posts, which are excellent and seem to arrive just when I need the bursts of encouragement and words of wisdom.

 

5. What are three of your all-time favorite books? Why do you love those?

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This book was one my parents used to read to my brothers and me as children. I love the illustrations and how the timeless story speaks to readers of all ages. The Spanish version, El Principito, was the first book I ever read in Spanish, my mother’s native tongue, and opened up her world of language to me in a whole new way.

Dubious Angels: Poems After Paul Klee by Keith Ratzlaff (Anhinga Press, 2005)

In this beautiful book of poems, Ratzlaff writes stunning lines as a reflection of the angel artwork Paul Klee drew during the 18 months leading up to his death. Ratzlaff gives a voice to these angels and the combination of art and poetry together on the page is inspiring. I come back to this book over and over when I want to contemplate the larger questions, as Ratzlaff writes after Paul Klee’s drawing “Last Earthly Step,”

For we are a dream of instability

For we are a drama of horizontals

How we last and are last

How our hair goes disguised as a shroud in the little wind

Relics: Deep Mythic Image Poetry by Joseph S. Plum (Dreaming Deer Press, 2013)

As a child, I listened to my father recite his bardic poetry from memory and as I grew older, I would try to remember the lines myself and then run to my room to write them down so they were not lost forever in the forest of his mind. After decades of trying to convince him of the value of his art and how important it was (to me and many others) that his poems be preserved in the written form, my father finally agreed to let me type them out. This process took years and consisted of him saying the poems aloud in a trance-like state as I recorded him during different visits to my home studio. I then transcribed the recordings and went about editing the hours of transcriptions into lines of poetry. The final result is a manuscript of many hundreds of pages, with more added each year as my father continues his annual visits and recordings.

Relics: Deep Mythic Image Poetry is the first book created from this massive manuscript. Because his genre exists so far outside the modern arch of poetry, I created my own press, Dreaming Deer Press, in order to publish it. I have since published three books and have four more of his books in different stages of the editing process on my desk. These poetry books are the culmination of a lifetime of effort to record and document my father’s gift, and symbolize to me the power of perseverance and the mysterious bonds of love between a daughter and her father.

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Read the rest of the interview (10 questions in total) on AndiLit.com at this link.

Sending wishes for a beautiful week ahead,

~Emily Lupita

 

“Marietta Fountain” by Emily Lupita.
Sold at the MSAA Gallery – July Art Walk.

 

Visit me online at

www.EmilyLupitaStudio.com

All content ©Emily Lupita Studio 2014