Susan Kennedy Art

My husband of twenty-five years and I were off for the weekend celebrating our anniversary and decided to hike the trails of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. We were headed back down from the top of Clingman's Dome when we saw this black bear twenty or thirty feet away from us and another couple, off the trail. He was browsing in the blackberries and stopped to stare at us. When he started coming toward the trail I dropped the camera and started backing away and noticing that I was the only one in flip flops... fortunately he was pretty young and didn't want to get in to a thing with a bunch of tender pink people. Yaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

It's always a delight and a shock, somehow, to get back to watercolor and remember its power. The paper is such an element in this medium, almost a character in the plot of the painting. Layer too much, fiddle just once, use the wrong colors, scrub too much, and you can watch your beloved floral breathe its last right under your very eyes. That's why one gets so crazy about the medium: it's a cruel master, but a very beautiful, challenging, demanding and fascinating one. I love love love it! You can see my items at my website!

This is awesome!

My new diet! Make a pot of soup and eat it all day instead of marshmallows!!Gonna lose those ugly 15 pounds. My version of making soup is putting a can of this and a can of that in a pot with dried onion and leftovers. How good the soup is depends on the leftovers. Now off to paint... you can see my items at my website!

What a strange day. Everything's changing and the kids are getting old. I am too. : ) Susan you can see my items at my website!

Another treasured family photo: we were in a rowboat in the Okefenokee a few years ago, and as we rounded a bend, this amazing hollow tree greeted us... it looked like a monster face to us. Made me feel for Snow White, who thought trees were scary too. susankennedy.com

I LOVE this photo. I never even noticed it at the time, I was just happily snapping photos at Yellowstone National Park many years ago, and LO AND BEHOLD, when flipping through boxes of photos from that trip -- decades later -- what should appear before my shocked eyes but this snapshot of BIGFOOT crossing the road. Way too late to launch a search party, research team, or anything else. I laughed my head off. Can you tell what the subject of the photo really is? Its feet are really too small to actually be Bigfoot. But it is indeed a living creature. susankennedy.com

I love this friend's ideas. Not only is she building a business which promotes the integration of gratitude and appreciation into corporate culture, the items she uses in her baskets and gifts are always hand-made artisan items. It makes me so happy! I feel like sounding bells of alarm that American culture has got to not only embrace core values which will build up and not tear down BUT ALSO that we have got to support businesses and arts which have some intrinsic craftsmanship and value. If we keep buying the cheapest goods made at the cheapest factories, we will not only do ourselves out of jobs and markets, we will be supporting huge corporations which use their power in the market to pay the smallest wages and destroy local small businesses. If I sound like I'm preaching, I guess I am. I have the point of view of an artist who is competing with mass produced art. It's why I'm so excited about Fair Trade businesses, The Arts and Crafts Movement, Art, and businesses ...

You don't see something like this every day... I actually snapped this shot as we were barrelling down the interstate in West Virginia. That tree on the left looks so solitary, the fog so mysterious and somber. Makes me want to paint a painting, or make a jigsaw puzzle out of it, I'm not sure which! By which I mean, it's so dramatic, it almost crosses over into the category of trite. Can't put my finger on why.

Thought I'd put a link to this extremely cool online gallery. Lori is very inspiring, and her watercolors and drawings bridge the gaps between fantasy art, illustration, and realism. Her sense of color is surprising and invigorating, and I hope you enjoy checking it all out. Incidentally, you click on the title of this post to get to her site. Sorry to have grabbed your image, Lori, but I do love it so much.... click here, too

Wow, they never stop...maybe in the morning it's some other gargantuan bug besides a cicada. I should know this. The grass is dead, the kids are leaving. I truly hate August. Check out my art which is usually much more uplifting that this post: susankennedy.com

This little photo never fails to make me laugh. When I was a teenager and was waiting on tables, some regular customer who used to pay me to do his mending (I'm too busy to mend these days : ) proudly brought me this masterpiece. I don't remember his name, wish I did...if you're out there, you with the holey shirts, send me a note, I'd like to give credit for one of the more bizarre landscape shot I've ever run across. I'll let you guys supply the imaginary events leading up to this remarkable scene. And yes, that is a pig charging the viewer with a pile of burning tires in the background. He escaped just in time, according to him (the photographer, not the pig). My brother-in-law Steve, also a photographer, titled this image "Apocalypse Sow."