Unofficial Piano Recital

Well, Thailand is full of surprises... and lately they have come in many great stories. The past three months I have taken maternity leave from university teaching. One day Tone told me that while I was gone, the Univ. main library has done extensive renovation to one of their wings and add more R&R space for Univ. people. One of the addition is adding a grand piano in the main hallway. I was so thrilled and also did not fully believe that story until this past Saturday, Tone and I stopped by the library. We both gave our unofficial recitals to passersby. This is my first time playing in public so I totally shaken. I did attempt to play two songs: Canon in D major and Ballade pour Adeline. I felt so good to play it I hope they keep that piano for as long as possible and I hope to practice more and come back to play it more often.

After Tone and I was about to leave, another young Thai mathematics major student sat down and played Beethoven Sonata No.8. He blew us away. It is like you will never imagine in a million years that a young man in a t-shirt and jeans will be able to give a concert hall quality classical music. I am sure that this piano will bring many great stories to the campus.

The Wild Pair

Here is what I did today for the WDE on Wetcanvas, a 10x14 inch acrylic inks on background and the watercolor on the swans. I have not used acrylic inks for almost two years, and the last time I used it on a tiny ATC card. So this time I find it difficult to handling the acrylic ink background as wet-on-wet since the ink dried up super fast. Anyway, I am happy with the result. Photo ref. is from http://morguefile.com/archive/display/92960

The High Life

This is a 5x7 inch watercolor (Holbein) & India ink on the back of 140 lb. coldpress Lanaquarelle block. Ref. photo by TheDesignspace.net.

The Nutcracker

I have been very busy these days due to my 10 Wk old baby. I have not had a chance to do a big painting yet. I am glad to be able to do small sketching or drawing here and there. Here is my pen & wash experiment, which is a quick 30 min. pen & wash size 3x4 inch in my Thai 80 grams. sketchbook. I use Faber-Castell 0.1 Ecco pen and Holbein watercolors. The ref. photo is provided by ArtbyJune on WDE of Wetcanvas.

I found the book "How to Keep a Sketchbook Journal" by Claudia Nice very informative for me to get start in pen and wash.

Wat-Arun and Wat-Pho

These are life sketching done as a part of our Bangkok Sketchers group outing on May 30th. We had three artists from Penang, Malaysia to join our trip. Wat-Arun (shown in the first two sketches) is also known as Temple of the Dawn on the west side of ChaoPhraYa river and Wat-Pho is CheTuPon Temple on the opposite east side of the river. Wat-Arun is famous for its tall stupa, which makes its grand statement against the morning sky of Bangkok. On the other hand, Wat-Pho is famous for the reclining buddha, and the first place to teach Thai traditional medicine and Thai massage. We had fun that day and it had been quite a turn out with so many Thai sketchers.