The Sweetest Sounds, the Richest Reds, and the most Succulent Spring so far...(collaging, tree-gazing and wedding planning!!!)

A May Monday...

“What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.” 
― Kobayashi Issa, Poems

Hey everyone!  I had a wonderful weekend celebrating with my friends - what a bachelorette celebration!

 We started the day off with a West Village food tour - and of course in the village there was plenty of art to check out along the way...

Then we got trapped in a room for an hour and had to use some major logic skills to escape the room.

 Then a wonderful dinner, karaoke, and it was just a really fun night - which I needed!

Music...

If you haven't been browsing around my site amyoes.com - you should!  But there's a song that I recorded in the Singer section you can listen to called "The Sweetest Sounds" - I sang when I was 13 years old, but this weekend it felt especially relevant...

The sweetest sounds I'll ever hear

Are still inside my head
The kindest words I'll ever know
Are waiting to be said

The most and entrancing side of all
Is yet for me to see
And the dearest love in all the world

Is waiting somewhere for me
Is waiting somewhere, somewhere for me

Celebrating my upcoming nuptials with friends was watering the seeds of excitement that are growing and growing as I approach my wedding day!  All the images I'm getting in my head of wedding festivities, settling down, starting a home and starting to become more and more vibrant - which brings me into the studio quite often!

In the studio...

(But not for too long because the sun is truly emboldened with all its glorious yellows and oranges today.)

I put some gesso on a magazine page...

And colored it in with watercolor pencils and paints...

And finally found something to do with this collage I had made a while ago!

Cut up some painted paper I had made and cut out a girl for my collage...

 And there ya go...

 (I've created so much in the past few months and am so terrible at taking pictures - I am going to have these all photographed professionally very soon!)

Some outdoor inspiration...
I am so struck by how the trees are posing lately around my street - so dramatic and plenty of inspiration for the canvas!

A deer must have eaten away at the bottom of this one - but it looks like it's wearing a skirt now!

I love how this tree is split in the middle - really dramatic and heartbreaking...but also, it couldn't help reminding me of...

No?  I think so!

In the (wedding) studio...
Still working on my wedding inchies to put on the table settings...

I'd love for this wedding to have as much of a personal touch as possible - you only get to do this once!

Thankfully I'm not cutting it this close, but I found this fun link on Craft Gossip about how to DIY Plan your wedding in 28 days :)

And of course I'm trying to keep this as "classic" as possible, but believe me, I would love to have the quirkiest wedding ever - this article was great:

20 Cute And Quirky Wedding Bouquet Ideas

A baseball bouquet?  I know that'd make my dad happy :)

Of course then I could really get carried away and have a muppets themed wedding...

From the blog Three Boys & a Mom

From When Geeks Wed

But...I think I'll just stick with the romantic art as my personal touch :)  And some singing too!

 “To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.” David Viscott

Before I go...

I'm actually off right now to meet with The Discovery Museum about displaying my art there, but before I do go, I wanted to share a poem with you that I love by Philip Larkin, called (surprise surprise) The Trees:

The Trees by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf 

Like something almost being said; 

The recent buds relax and spread, 

Their greenness is a kind of grief. 

Is it that they are born again 

And we grow old? No, they die too, 

Their yearly trick of looking new 

Is written down in rings of grain. 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh 

In fullgrown thickness every May. 

Last year is dead, they seem to say, 

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Have a wonderful day everyone!