Mini Texas Road Trip

As I mentioned before, Sean and I went up Longview, Texas a week or two ago to see our friends Kate and Luis. I had such a great time talking to Kate about her upcoming year as a teacher and taking silly pictures with Luis. I hope they can come to visit us in Houston soon. While we were there we stayed at Kate’s house on her families ranch. I loved seeing all of the horses, cows, chickens, dogs and other wildlife. Part of me would love to own land and have some animals, but they are also a lot of hard work and time. I think I’ll stick to my city dwelling life for now. Here’s a link to some of the highlights of the trip: Texas Trip

We also drove over to Hawkins Texas were Sean’s grandfather and great-grandfather are buried along with other family members.

And as a surprising treat while we were driving back home on one of Texas’ may back roads we spotted this! Sean and I both love peacocks so we pulled over so I could take a few pictures.

It was definitely a fun little trip!

Visit to Waco

Over a week ago Sean and I went to Waco for a few days and then drove up to Longview. It was fun to go on a mini road trip to start off summer. Waco was fun, but as I drove to visit one of my favorite little antique shops I was horrified by this image.

Last summer this was one of my favorite buildings to drive by. It was the Sanger Avenue Grade School. Originally built in 1904, the building had been empty since the late 70’s and many of the windows had been boarded up. Even though it looked a little worse for wear it was fun to think about what it must have looked like inside and what a beautiful place it would have been to go to school. I had always meant to take pictures of it, but always seemed to not have my camera with me when I drove by. Well, I found out that this past October the school was burned down by arsons. Luckily they have been caught, but what is left breaks my heart. I regret never taking pictures of the school before. This experience has further reinforced my recent goal to keep my camera with me and to not be tentative about taking more pictures. The owners haven’t decided what to do with the remains of the building yet, but I hope they choose to keep it around in some form. Even in ruins it’s still a beautiful building.

Here are some pictures from the Waco Tribune’s article about the fire. The top right show the school after it had been abandoned. I liked the architectural detail of the towers. Sorry these are small, they were all I could find.

After I got home and was looking at the pictures I took I realized in this photo of the back of the school there is a desk with a sewing machine on it just outside the door. I wish I had realized this when I was there so I could have investigated further, but know it’s just kind of a funny detail.

Workshops @ the MFAH

Today I went to the MFA Houston for a mini art teacher conference. I was able to do a workshop with Armando Rodriguez on print making and Peihong D Endris on Chinese watercolor painting. Both were a blast and above is an example of a Dry Point print I made. I really liked making the print and I hope to do more of them. The dry point was very easy to work with and a quick clean up. Here are some others from the class.

And here we are working away.

The Chinese painting was not as hard as I thought it would be, I usually get a little inpatient with watercolor. Here are a few gold fish. She also taught us to make bamboo, frogs, and butterflies.