Charlottesville : The Cityscape of Change

It's a hot hot day, but nice none the less when you consider the colder weather we just got through. I was able to enjoy a full week of work. I actually enjoy my job and I don't regret being on the job from day to day. My best enjoyment besides painting is jumping on my bike and riding off to the gym, working out and then riding on back home. A cool wet shower is what follows. I use to hate "jocks" who enjoyed such things as exercise but today it's my turn and it's not a bad lifestyle to be "into". The joy is that it makes you feel good for doing it, for being active can actually make one "feel good". Another side benefit is good health. Health problems seem to go by the wayside when one exercises regularly and for a good enough amount of time per day or as I do every other day. For I believe the body needs a slight amount of rest between workouts, so I take every other day off to rest myself. It seems to work for me. …

The 23rd CPRCNA in Ocean City Maryland this past weekend was awe inspiring for me. The speakers were of the best quality and shared very highly motivating spiritual principals of our program with we who were willing to sit in a workshop. I enjoyed the main speaker as well on Saturday night. I've been in a room with over two thousand Recoverying Addicts before but there were many more than that in attendance during the main speakers talk with us. The main speaker was from the west coast and brought with him a new version of sharing with the experience of having worked our program for many many years, and he was by no means perfect, no he was very real with us. Nothing could have been more helpful to me last weekend than to hear how he's done it. He's been sponsored by men who quite literally wrote the Basic Text, and help found NA in California back in the early 1950's. And you know, he was very youthful in his attitude and approach to 'what it takes to …

Then I went to U.Va. to see their exhibit of modern European art such as some Picasso prints and others from that era, I had a good time and stopped in to see if my good friend Phil was at home. He's in a new building over their at the art school, it's going by the name of Ruffin Hall. It's nice. I had a guided tour of the four or more story building. The art showing was inventive and fresh. It was a welcome change from what it was before they had the room to move their arms around so they didn't bump into each other as they painted. One can see the new exhibit areas are wonderfully big and roomy. I saw some huge portraits of street people that must have been ten feet in height all done with pastel, charcoal and some tempera or acrylic paints. The thing about it was that it was street people painted upon cardboard which is very appropriate due to the fact that many homeless sleep on such material and make signs with it...it was impressive to see these …

In as much as spring has come to us here in these foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, its nice to have a cool day once in a while to remind us of what season we are leaving behind. It was a very cold winter for some of us. A little bit to the north of us it was a very wet snowy winter but thankfully we missed most of the white stuff here in Charlottesville, Va.
I have been working on my art during this past month and I have one painting which I will be sharing with you on this edition of my blog. It is an imaginary landscape and it was done to entertain myself while I spent some afternoons indoors here in my apartment. I have been inspired by trees lately, it seems to be a bit of an obsession for me this past winter. I painted a good number of small landscapes featuring a few trees in there various states, some where dead and others were bear while some others were full with leaves. Many were done with a yellow, orange and deep red sky in the background so that the…