Artist and poet Judy Dykstra-Brown, whom I’ve written about here and here, made a catalog of her retablos for an exhibit, and it’s now available on her blog as a free downloadable e-book.
The story of three girls evacuated from Germany in 1939.
Free e-cookbook. The author is Australian, so some of the measurements may be unfamiliar if you’re American. There are recipes in here I will definitely try.
I love these little vignettes this artist creates, starting with items you might find in your own home.
Novelists, have you ever participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)? It’s basically committing to spend the month of November writing 1667 words every day so that by the end of the month you have a 50,000 word first draft. I’ve participated twice (though I never reached the 50,000 word mark). I won’t be doing it this year, but if you are, you’ll probably want to spend October working on an outline or a pre-synopsis or at least making some general notes for your story or some world-building or character development. But if you’re not in the habit of writing every day, maybe during September you could try daily creativity prompts to get your juices flowing.
I’ve been following Judy Dykstra-Brown’s lifelessons blog for more than five years, and I have found her to be incredibly creative and funny and intellectually stimulating. I’m so pleased that she agreed to be interviewed for ARHtistic License.
ARHtistic License: In 2001 you made the decision to move from California to Mexico. Why there?
Judy Dykstra-Brown: Many years before, I had met a man in China who told me that I should be living in San Miguel, Mexico. He had been there and knew lots about it and we had talked many times as we were travelling together. I kept this in the back of my mind as a place it would be good to retire to once I’d traveled to more far-flung places. My husband was 16 years older than me and we operated on a frantic pace, driving all over the U.S. to do shows and putting in long days at home creating. His sculptures got bigger and bigger—some of them weighing over a ton, and our setup for our shows was 12 hours long, our teardown 4 hours. We were always the first ones at shows for setup and the last ones there for teardown. I could tell Bob was wearing out and had tried for a few years to convince him to retire, but he was convinced we would starve if we didn’t do shows. I, on the other hand, knew that every penny we made ended up being spent on new tools, supplies and art studios. (We had 7 on our property, with Bob building a new one every two years, not to mention buying or building new tools for the new mediums he ventured into, pulling me along after him. So, I finally said I was moving to Mexico for a year and he could move down to the first level of the house where my jewelry studio was and rent out the top story and send me half the money. In the end, he came with me, protesting all the way. The first week, driving down and driving around San Miguel, he hated it. By the eighth day, he was proposing we buy a house there! This was after he was offered a job teaching sculpture at a new art center in a hacienda outside the town. So, that was our plan until after 8 weeks in San Miguel, we took a little side trip to Ajijic and Bob fell in love with it.
Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown
AL: Unfortunately, Bob was unable to move to Mexico with you, because he passed away suddenly. Your book Lessons from a Grief Diary, which you co-wrote with Dr. Anthony Moriarity, details your journey through your husband’s cancer diagnosis, death, and its aftermath. It draws from your journaling during that time, with additional insights from Moriarity, a clinical psychologist. What made you decide to share your pain? What was it like to have a co-author?
JD-B: After 8 years mourning my husband, I ventured out into the world via Match.com but after a number of months, realized I was not going to find a match there, so switched to OkCupid. It was a very different site back then and drew many creative people. It has since been purchased by Match.Com and so has dropped all the features I loved, but the real point is that this marked a change in me and I actually met a number of very interesting men, some of whom ended up coming down to Mexico so we could meet in person. It was at this point that I gave a talk for a local lecture series that talked about my process of grief recovery. Tony, who was in the states at the time, did not hear the speech, but he heard about it and asked me if I could send him a transcript. I did, and it was he who convinced me I needed to write a book about it and asked if he could write alternating chapters.
The co-authoring worked out very well. I handed chapters over to Tony as I wrote them, he wrote his replies and I edited them. He had about every book on the grieving process ever written and so we compiled an annotated reading list at the end of the book that in itself is a valuable resource.
Bob Brown, Judy’s husband of fifteen years, in front of a gallery showing his work
Lamp by Bob Brown. Judy describes the lamp: “I looked everywhere for a photo of my favorite lamp, but I don’t think one exists, so I shot one of it in my house. It’s not well-staged, but I just wanted you to see this lamp. Bob went through many phases, as did I. I liked this one best. They got weirder and weirder. This lamp was all Bob’s baby. The only thing I did was to make the paper and use it to create a cocoon for the spiral element. The ball on the spiral cord and the palm leaf bird are not part of the lamp. Someone hung the ball on the lamp for fun last Xmas and I never took it down. The bird is hanging from the curtain rod. The horsehair is part of the lamp, however. When they trim the tails of the horses in Bali, they keep the hair and weave it into strings. We brought some home with us. A string of it forms a necklace on the lamp as well. The huge head is one Bob carved in Bali, which is a story of its own.”
AL: When you started your blogin 2013, your initial intention was to help people through grief, but your focus soon changed to sharing your life, and encouraging people through your life lessons. There’s a lot of positivity and humor on your blog, especially in some of your poems. You have over 6,000 followers. What do you hope readers will take away from your blog?
JD-B: I hope it makes them laugh and think and take risks and realize that even if the way we experience life changes as we age, an excitement with life need not wane. Even limited to your own house and yard, nature and just the fact we exist with all our complicated inner workings is such a miracle that even the observing of it can be enough. Having a way in which to express this amazement is a huge help as well, be it art, writing, music, dance, or even volunteering, interacting with animals or thinking about your long incredible life.
Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown
AL: You are one of my very favorite poets. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been delighted by a turn of phrase or an unexpected twist in your poems. Your meter and rhymes are impeccable, and the words flow like music. Where did you learn to write poetry like that? When did you start? Who are your influences, your favorite poets?
JD-B: When she was young, my mother kept a rhymed journal. We absolutely loved having her read it to us. Everything was perfectly rhymed and metered and hilarious. When my mom passed away, I asked my sister, who lived in the same town where my mom had lived, to send it to me and she told me that my mother had decided it was silly and burned it years ago. I was so disappointed. She also wrote humorous plays for her women’s club to perform at state conventions. My friends and I performed one of them for a talent show once.
Well, long story short, whenever someone in my family deserved teasing, she and I would sit down and write a rhymed poem about them. Some appreciated it and others didn’t, but we certainly enjoyed writing them. I think as a result of this that an ear and eye for rhythm and rhyme just grew up with me. By the time I got to college, where I took every creative writing and journalism course that was offered, rhymed poetry was not in “style,” so I wrote mainly short stories. Later, I studied screen writing which wasn’t my bag and substituted a poetry class and joined a writer’s workshop in Hollywood. Everything that had drained my soul in the TV world was healed when I started writing (still unrhymed) poetry, and with one 5-year hiatus (which is another story that I’ll tell if another question leads up to it) I’ve been writing poetry ever since.
I started writing rhymed and metered poetry on my blog when I started following word prompts on WordPress. I’ve been thinking (and even occasionally dreaming) in rhyme ever since. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of writing a poem in my sleep, grab my computer from the bookcase headboard of my bed, jot down as much of it as I can remember, and go on following where it leads me. I think the reason why I prefer to write in rhyme is that it limits my choices and makes it easier not to “block.” I write one line, then run through the alphabet to find every word that rhymes with the last word I’ve written, pick one and make a sentence that leads up to it. It is a game that creates an end product that is as much a surprise to me as I hope it is to the reader. I absolutely love the project. Poet friends have told me it is keeping me from writing more serious work, but I notice most of them are not writing much at all. I write one or two poems a day and have for the past 7 years. I love waking up in the morning and doing so. Can’t wait to feed the dogs and cats and then jump back into bed to write. I sleep with my computer plugged in on the headboard of my bed. It is the last thing I do before I fall asleep and first thing (after feeding the animals) I do in the morning. I have quit all activities that occur before 2 pm in the afternoon to devote myself to writing in the morning.
Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown
AL: You’ve authored one book of poetry for adults. Any chance another poem collection will be coming out? (Please, please, please.)
I actually have poems selected for several books, but I keep putting off doing the final formatting. I think the first one will be poems about family and growing up in the same town I was living in in Prairie Moths, my first book of poetry.
I also have two autobiographical books that have been finished for years—I just can’t make myself do the final edit and I hate the business part of trying to find an agent or publisher. I will probably self-publish them—if I ever get around to it. I have another book project that involves my humorous poems about aging, but it is a book with a twist, and I’m not telling what that twist is!
[Note from Andrea: All you agents and publishers out there, here’s your chance to snag a great client!]
Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown
AL: You’ve written several books for children. Are they all in verse?
JD-B: Yes. My illustrator just finished the illustrations for a third one. The illustrations are sitting to my left waiting to be scanned and formatted. I just keep putting it off.
AL: You collaborate with illustrator Isidro Xilonzochitl. How did you meet? Why did you decide to work with him? Describe your process as a team.
JD-B: When I moved to Mexico 19 years ago, I had thought I was moving here with my husband. Unfortunately, two days before we were to move down to the house we’d bought here, we went to our doctor’s office to get the results of physicals we’d had the week before and discovered my husband had pancreatic cancer. He lived for 3 weeks. And so, when I actually moved down to Mexico two months later, I was moving alone to a place where I knew no one except for my real estate agent! Since I was interested in art, I started making the rounds of galleries and one of the first artists whose work I was attracted to was Isidro. I bought several of his paintings and through him I met a number of young Mexican artists who formed a group called ARCOC. I was adopted as their sole female comrade and we put on several art shows, art experiences for kids and art contests for kids. When I started my poetry reading series, it was in a coffee shop Isidro and his partner at that time opened up on the ground floor of his studio. We’ve been friends ever since.
I actually wrote most of the children’s books years before but had done nothing with them. I asked if he’d be interested in illustrating them and he said yes. His partner at the time, Kristina, had grown up in the states and so she translated them to him for illustration purposes. I set up the books, minus illustrations, and the two of them collaborated over how he would illustrate them—with hilarious results, I think.
Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown
AL:Which poetry journals did you edit? What did you look for in poetry submissions?
JD-B: I ran a reading series at a local coffee shop here in San Juan Cosala, Mexico, for two years. I also edited an anthology of writing by high school students when I was a teacher in Cheyenne, Wyoming after coming home from Africa. It was entitled The Spiral Notebook. In L.A. I was one of the editors of The Sculpture Garden Review, which was not, despite its title, an art journal but a poetry journal. I also ran a reading series at the art center in the San Lorenzo Valley near Santa Cruz, CA. Recently, that entire valley was evacuated due to fires and at least one of my friends lost his house, others won’t be able to go back for a year until water and electricity is restored. So sad.
The ten women in a women’s writing group I started here in Mexico also published an anthology entitled Agave Marias, stories and poems about crossing borders and breaking boundaries. That anthology is available on Amazon, as are all of my books. Oh. An interesting sidelight of Prairie Moths was that some years after I published it, I got an email from a man in Oregon who said, “I am the youngest boy in your pictures of your grandparents standing in front of their homestead with their daughter and her 8 sons.” He was a cousin, at least 20 years older than me, that I had only met once when he passed with his family through South Dakota on their way back to Utah, where they lived. I believe I was 10 or 11 then. We started up a correspondence after his first email to me and he invited my sisters and me to come to their family reunion and we all went. I came from Mexico, one sister from Wyoming and another from Minnesota. It was fabulous. Only two of the first cousins were still alive, but there were at least a hundred people there who were their descendants. Since then one of the first cousins and one of the first cousins once removed has passed away, but I’m still in touch with the one who wrote to me, who is now in his nineties.
What I look for in poetry is originality, word choice, and heart. Although I presently write mostly rhymed and metered poetry, I mainly do so because somehow the prompts force me to. I don’t know why. It is also a sort of game I play to keep my mind working. I used to do crossword puzzles. Now I do metered rhyme. I really do think as we grow older that it is vital to exercise our minds.
Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown
AL: What advice would you give to a beginning poet?
JD-B: I think many beginning poets think that poems should rhyme but with almost no exceptions, I encourage them not to try to rhyme. The thing we need to learn to do is to follow where our mind leads us—to write without editing and without stopping—just to write what comes and to edit later. Then, to edit remorselessly. It is important to get to that place in ourselves that we wouldn’t necessarily get to through reason or careful plotting.
AL: Can you define retablo for us? When did you start making them? How did you begin?
JD-B: The retablo is a frame or shelf enclosing decorated panels or revered objects above and behind an altar in a church. In Mexico, it is a box which contains a figure, photo or painting of the Virgin Mary, Christ or some other saint and sometimes little votive offerings or objects. Most homes have at least one. I took the idea but it quickly evolved into themes that were not religious. I tended to work around a certain theme. One year it was saints, another it was famous artists, another Mexican legends, traditions or places I visited. I have created one for each family member or friend who died. I’ve even done one on the Coronavirus.
Covid-19 Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown. For more photos and information about this piece, check out this article on her blog.
AL: Any more funny stories you can tell us about your work? (See Tuesday’s post for the previous ones.)
JD-B: When I was in Peru, I bought a few small oil-on-canvas paintings of saints and the Virgin Mary, thinking I would turn them into retablos. I worked for a long time on one of the Virgin, adding first tiny beautifully crafted wooden musical instruments. I didn’t know why but then I started adding little books and pages of poems taken from a miniature book of poetry, pen nibs and other objects associated with music and poetry. When it was finished, Isidro’s cousin Eduardo was at my house for some reason and he saw the retablo and said, “Huh. Santa Cecilia!” I said no, it was the Virgin and he said, no that it was definitely Santa Cecilia. After he left I consulted Google and sure enough, it was Santa Cecilia, patron saint of poets and musicians! She had somehow attracted to herself the exact appropriate symbols.
Santa Cecilia retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown
To close this interview, I am adding links to a few more of Judy Dykstra-Brown’s poems (and photographs):
When I first started blogging more than five years ago, one of the first blogs I discovered was lifelessons–a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown. I took part in blogging challenges, and so did Judy. As I perused other responses to the challenges, I often found Judy’s, and often they were poems–very good poems. I was hooked.
When I asked Judy if I could interview her for ARHtististic License, I was thrilled that she agreed. I knew she was interesting, but I didn’t realize the depth of her genius until I read her responses. Frankly, she sent me so much material that I soon realized I couldn’t squeeze it all into one article and do her justice. So I’m breaking it into two parts. If by the time you get to the end of this article you’re dying for more, you’ll have to just click on the link above to her blog until Saturday, when Part II will appear here on ARHtistic License.
Judy with her husband, Bob Brown, in front of their booth at an art show. I think it’s interesting how alike their faces are. Look at their eyes, cheekbones, and smiles.
ARHtistic License: You have worn many hats: English teacher, television production, artist, poetry journal editor, photographer, author, and blogger. Did I get everything?
Judy Dykstra-Brown: I was also the curator of shows for an art center.
AL:You have lived in interesting places, including Australia and Ethiopia. What took you there?
JD-B: From the time I was a tiny girl, I wanted to travel. When I was 11, I asked my folks if I could go on a tour for teenagers organized by Seventeen magazine. Of course, they refused, but by the time I was in high school I was driving all over the state to All State Chorus, district MYF meetings for the church we belonged to, and basketball games. I was the youngest of three daughters and they had sort of worn out in terms of driving kids, so I was given a lot more freedom than my sisters. Finally, during my junior year in college, they agreed to let me go on World Campus Afloat—a college campus on a boat that sailed around the world, stopping at a number of ports during its 4 month journey. They thought it would get travel out of my system, but I couldn’t wait to graduate and go back to my favorite place on the trip: Kenya. I absolutely loved Africa, but the only two places in the world that advertised that they would hire a teacher with no experience were Isfran, Iran and Australia. So I actually emigrated to Australia and taught there for a year and a half before taking off to travel through Timor, Bali, Indonesia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and finally—Africa. Due to a series of misadventures, I ended up staying and teaching school in Ethiopia for a year and a half while my travel companion went on without me.
Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown
AL: You were a television production assistant. What shows did you work on? How did you land that job?
JD-B: I did P.R. and publicity for The Bob Hope Specials on NBC and also for his specials in Denmark and Tahiti.
I was studying film production and Screenwriting at UCLA and participating in an actor’s studio as well, thinking I needed to know all sides of the business, but after working on a couple of documentaries, I became disillusioned with the dynamics and decided to take a poetry class to regain my soul. I took two semesters from an excellent poetry teacher at UCLA and then heard about a charismatic actor and poet, Jack Grapes, so switched to his weekly workshop. There I became friends with a woman who was an assistant in charge of public-relations and publicity for Bob Hope. At that time, my income suddenly dried up when a company who bought a ranch I had a share in defaulted on their loan payments and we had to repossess the ranch my sisters and mother and I had inherited when my dad died.
I had quit teaching a couple of years before to come to CA to write the great American novel (still unfinished nearly 40 years later.) My friend had not had a raise in the 6 years she’d worked for Hope, plus no health insurance, and when they wouldn’t give her a raise, she quit. Her boss asked if there was anyone she could recommend to take her job. Knowing I was suddenly without a means of support, she suggested me. Her boss asked about me and she said I was a poet and studying film production, but the thing that really earned me the job was that I had spent a few years traveling through Australia, Indonesia, Asia and Africa after I’d graduated from college, ending up in Ethiopia where I got a job teaching English in a local school and had a number of adventures.
It turned out that the man hiring me was a travel writer for the L.A. times during the 5 months a year when everyone in the production company was laid off because there was no show in production. So, I got a job in publicity and P.R. not because I had any experience in those fields but because of my poetry and my travel experience. I was actually at a poetry conference in Napa when I got a phone call from my friend and her boss interviewed me over the phone. At the end of our talk, he asked me to come in for one week on a trial basis when I came back to L.A., and I ended up working there for 3 years until I married and moved to Boulder Creek.
Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown.
AL: When did you begin making art? Do you have any special art training?
JD-B: I started doing art when I had writer’s block and Jack Grapes, who headed up my writer’s workshop in Hollywood, forbid me to write and told me to do art instead. I insisted that I didn’t know anything about making art and he said, “That’s why I want you to do it. You know too much about literature and writing and that is getting in your way. You’re too concerned about what you ‘should’ be doing. I want you to do something you don’t know how to do!” So I went to a variety store—what we once would have called a dime store, and just bought a bunch of silly stuff: confetti, a rubber mouse and other assorted things. The summer before, the man who became my husband and I went on a driving vacation through Europe and I was amused by all the various little disposable aluminum jam and butter receptacles and I’d saved them all. I cut them up into three-dimensional shapes and took my poems and cut them in thin strips and made little figures out of them and glued them to heavy watercolor paper along with the things I’d bought. They were totally silly but I had such fun making them. I remember the first one I made had the title “Party Mouse Wants To Come Play But Can’t.” It included a rubber mouse and the confetti with a little fence around the mouse and I don’t remember what else, all glued to a Morilla block. At any rate, Jack had told me to bring them to next week’s workshop, but I was embarrassed and just left them in the car. When my turn came to present, he asked me if I’d done the art he told me to and I said yes, but they were dumb. He asked where they were and I said in the car and he told me to go down and get them. So I did, and they passed them around the circle.
At the end of the session, a woman came up to me who had a gallery in L.A. and she asked if she could exhibit them there. I was too embarrassed and said no, I wasn’t really an artist, but within a few months, I had married Bob, who was an artist and also a poet. We moved up to the redwoods and I fully intended to go back to teaching. I had taken and passed the CBEST test and planned on applying to teach the next year so Bob could stop teaching and do art full time. In the interim, I was doing little collages on stone and he said if I was going to do collage I needed to learn more about joining than simple cold joining. He talked me into taking a silversmithing class and that class led to another and another with the result that I never did go back to teaching and I ended up making my living making silver jewelry for the next 14 years. After my second class, he entered two of my pieces into the CA State Fair and I won first prize for them. I was astonished. He also entered me in an art fair in Oceanside. I was so embarrassed, but was delighted when people bought the jewelry. I took a photo of every person who bought a piece of my jewelry that day! Ha. Later I became a papermaker and made washi shades for all of my husband’s lamps, then started making art lamps myself as well. I didn’t go back to writing for 5 years. By then I was the curator of an art center and curated a show called “The Poet’s Eye, The Artist’s Tongue” which wedded art and poetry. I wrote a poem to go with another artist’s painting and then ended up doing several other art pieces that involved words which lead to starting a reading series at the gallery. And Jack was right. I came back to writing from a completely different slant after that.
Jewelry by Judy Dykstra-Brown.
AL: Do you have any funny stories about your work?
JD-B: When I was making jewelry, I remember feeling as though it was a very self-indulgent pastime. Prior to moving to California, I had been an English teacher for 10 years and felt that although I loved being a metal smith, it wasn’t really a job that was of benefit to anyone else. I think I had been doing shows for about three years and every time I did a show within 50 miles or so of San Francisco, one woman would always come and buy at least one piece of jewelry. Then two and sometimes three pieces. Then during one show, she came up to me and said, “You know you have changed my whole life.” Puzzled, I asked how that could be, and she said, “Well, you know I’m a nurse, and every year I go to this convention of health workers and because I’m not very outgoing, I never really used to meet anyone, but then three years ago, I wore one of your brooches, and people kept coming up to me and asking about it and because you always told me the stories behind the pieces, I had something to talk to them about. Pretty soon, every time I’d go to one, people would come up to see what new piece of jewelry I had, and eventually I knew lots of people and because we’d already broken the ice, we always had something to talk about”. My husband Bob always did say that he thought art could change the world, and I guess after that, I believed him. Never again did I question the worth of what I was doing.
About the above photos, Judy says, “These are some of the hundreds of vases Bob made so we could do shows together–me selling my jewelry and him the vases. I only have one–the carved dragon–only because the lady who bought it gave it back to me after he died. I’m looking at it now as I keep it on my desk.”
JD-B: Okay, another story. When I started doing shows, my husband Bob, who was a sculptor, decided he wanted to do something on a smaller scale than his very big sculptures so he could do shows with me, so he started making incredible ikebana vases out of wood, stone and bamboo. Each vase he made was unique and I would do an ikebana arrangement in each one. After a few years, those vases grew into huge lamps and I started making handmade paper lampshades that looked more like big sails or big cocoons than traditional lampshades. Some of the large lamps were rather expensive and there was one couple who would come to every show in San Francisco, Sausalito and the surrounding towns in the bay area. They would spend a long time looking at each lamp, but never bought anything. Finally, after three years or so, the man came to a show in Sausalito and bought three of our most expensive lamps. As I wrote up the order, I couldn’t help but ask why, after all these years, he had finally bought not a lamp, but three of them!
Because, he told me, that entire time he knew he was going to divorce his wife and he didn’t want her to get the lamps in a divorce settlement! And, the plot thickens. We delivered the lamps to his house, then went back to do two more days of the show. The day after the show ended, there was a Cirque de Soleil show in San Francisco, so we spent an extra night at my friend Sharon’s house in Berkeley so we could go to see it. The tent was so full that we couldn’t find three seats together, so Bob sat in the front row in front of the stage and Sharon and I sat in seats far away higher up in the risers on the side of the stage. During one performance, clowns started drawing people from the audience to come up on stage and Bob was one of the first people they chose. Now I must explain that Bob had a Santa Claus beard and long white hair that came to his shoulders. He loved wild Balinese-print batik pants, and red high-top suede sneakers. He was a handsome man and although rather quiet in private life, on the stage he came alive. Accustomed to performing his poetry in public, he was much more at ease center-stage than he was fighting it out with the hoi-polloi in real life. So, of course, the clowns made much of his hair and clothes, but Bob gave them back tit for tat and the crowd was laughing as loudly at his quips as those of the clowns. So, when they sent the rest of the people back to their seats, they kept Bob up on the stage for another 5 minutes or so.
The show ended and as Sharon and I stood in front of the tent waiting for Bob to find us, who should stroll up but the big spender who had just purchased our three lamps! He was with a very pretty girl and when he saw me, he came right over to me and asked where Bob was. I explained and he said, “Well, there’s someone here I have to introduce him to!” Turns out that before the show, as they were sitting in the audience, he started telling her about these fantastic lamps he had just bought, describing Bob as this eccentric character. She asked why eccentric, what did he look like, and just then, he looked up and the clowns were pulling Bob up to the stage. “He looks like that!” he said. “That’s the man!” The girl would not believe him. It was just too much of a coincidence to be true. We were in a town where neither of us lived, not even the town where he’d purchased the lamps. The chance that we would run into each other was just about nil and yet, there was the object of his story, up on the stage at Cirque de Soleil! And just then, Bob strolled up, and the girl was finally convinced.
Above are some of the beautiful lamps made by Bob and Judy. Click on an image to enlarge it.
Do you agree that Judy Dykstra-Brown is an amazing artist and a captivating intellect? Be sure to check back on Saturday for the conclusion of this interview.
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Pigma pens and watercolor. My first attempt at a ratablo.
I am participating in the Index-Card-a-Day Challenge. During June and July, I intend to do something creative every day–a little something, just big enough to fit on an index card. Visit ICAD 2016’s Facebook page if you would like so see what other participants are doing.
If you like this post, please spread the joy! Share on all your social media.
ARHtistic License 