The only way to get better at something is to study.

Eddie Peña

Last weekend I stumbled across the Met Museum’s scrumptuous dinner-table display of courtly Austrian porcelains set with a colorful arrangement of sugarpaste flowers, gilded sugar-mold artichokes, bowls teetering with candy walnuts and apricots and blossoms and lacy sugar-”temples”. I felt like a kid staring at all those goodies, never wishing to touch any of that abundance, just eating it greedily with my heart.

When I was young it used to take me hours to walk home from school because I had to traverse a Bermuda triangle of candy-stores. The most dangerous of these was Café Vetter, which usually promoted a grotesque (and very German) pastry called tree-cake which, without getting too deeply into it, is baked in layers on a spit (I swear this is true!). I was indifferent to these strange logs, but pressed my nose against the windows with great intensity to take in all the details of the delectable world of marzipan mushrooms and sugar leaves and chocolate ants and birds and frosted flowers they set up around the trees. Sometimes there would be a harvest of marzipan cabbages, carrots, turnips and potatoes, at others you might come across Hansel and Gretel traversing a sugary winter-wonderland to reach a baroquely decorated gingerbread house. I will always love this sweet parallel world whose magic lays suspended in resisting the temptation of eating it out of of existence.

By the way, can you tell I haven’t had candy in six weeks?

I went downtown to draw the Yankees Victory parade up Broadway – the “canyon of heroes” on Friday morning. It was great fun to see the players go by on the floats: Matsui was reserved and cool, Mariano Rivera was suave, Damon played the crowd and Jeter was, of course, the heart-throb. But the best part of the Yankees parade was THE CROWD: they don’t call them the Bronx Bombers for nothin’! The fans were raucous and rowdy and having a good time! This drawing was made before the parade even started, we’d all been standing out there for about three hours already and they were getting restless. A cab driver somehow was able to drive down Broadway right before the start time, only to be jeered at and pelted with newspapers, confetti, and rolls of toilet paper.  A little boy managed to chuck a roll of t.p. all the way across Broadway and the fans cheered him so much that Dad lifted him up to receive the raucous adulation!! Good job! A most satisfying morning, for sure. See more drawings from the day here.

- Veronica

Just a drawing…

This drawing was inspired by, and drawn in, the English rose garden at Epcot.  It was just fun to draw roses and butterflies and caterpillars and then imagine a beautiful lady sitting in the middle of the garden.

There were moments in Greece where I found myself melding the reality with the myth. I couldn’t help recalling all the stories of Hera, Dionysos, Poseidonas, Irakles, and so on. It really does help, though, when your guidebook (yes, I used a guidebook and I’m Greek. Oxymoron, anyone?) tells you exactly what “occurred” and where. These weren’t figments of Homer’s imagination, they were actual events! So, in Santorini, we came face to face with the world of Atlantis. It really did exist you know! : )

With this drawing I was imagining how Santorini was created. How where those structures built? Did they require alot of labor? Or did they spring out from the earth after the volcano eruption, like Athena from the head of her father? Hmm, not hard to imagine at all. -Despina

The Plaka is the oldest section of Athens, but it is an exceptionally vibrant area filled with shops, restaurants and many people. Here is a reportage drawing I made while eating some Greek salad.

To see more of my drawings from Greece, click here

I turn the page and there I am, in an instant, back in time staring at an awe inspiring example of nature’s way … There HE WAS, an eleven foot! salt water croc named “Sweetheart“ . His size suggests he lived to be anywhere between 70 and 80 years old. Some even say it’s possible that he was hatched in the late 1800s and was already a large adult by the time the first missionaries made their way into the north of Australia. A page from my travel journal in the city of Darwin, in the Northern Territory … (seen from this side of the hemisphere that’d be ‘down under’). It’s where I learned that a ‘mob’ was more than one, and I was (and hopefully always would be) called a ‘Shiela’.

G’day mate! enjoy -  Michele

"Hope for our future"

“Our hope are our children.  Giving our children better choices will give them a better chance to be the people they ought to be tomorrow.”

“The Game of Life” by Eddie Peña

I’m so used to getting yelled at by the personnel of the Met Museum in NYC that it was a borderline surreal experience to visit the Louvre in Paris, where the guards are supernaturally friendly, and the collection putsany new world museum to shame (sorry, no exceptions). What a boon for those lucky Parisians, and what a source of annoyance for anyone who has ever felt judged by a French person (you know who you are). But in some cases their interestingly casual relationship with what we often over-preciously treat as sanctified relics of genius goes a bit too far even for my taste.

I winced when I saw Milos’ Venus displayed at eye level without any protection in a room filled with eating (eating!) tourists who posed for snapshots by draping their arms and greasy fingers around Venus’ helpless torso. The floor of the room actually was littered with food wrappers and empty soda containers! Let’s not forget Venus has no legs to run away, and no arms to slap a would-be violator. So my suggestion to the Louvre: We love the friendliness of your guards, but please protect your treasures from those who can’t tell the difference between a great work of art and a dime-store celebrity!