oil painting --- Mother & Daughter

The light bulb may have gone off, but it didn’t illuminate much. It was September. Schools had already started, yet it never occurred to Wells that she might have a problem enrolling late, much less getting accepted at schools where people applied a year in advance. She called the MFA first. They laughed and hung up. Undaunted, she called the New England School of Art and Design.
“The secretary was at lunch,” she says, “so Mr. Cox, who ran the school, happened to answer the phone.”
Instead of laughing and hanging up on the fledgling artist, Cox invited her to the school. Naturally, he wanted to see her portfolio; naturally, Wells had no idea what a portfolio was. He told her there was an entrance exam composed of exercises, such as drawing a cereal box in perspective. Safely cushioned by her cocoon of naïveté, Wells told Cox she would be back in an hour. She went to a coffee shop and completed the entrance exam on her writing tablet. An hour later, she was back on Cox’s doorstep.
“It gets really weird here,” Wells says. “Someone had just dropped out, and by the time I got back, Mr. Cox and arranged a place for me to live, a part time job, and a partial scholarship.”
So there she was, still oblivious to the miracle she had achieved but happily enrolled in a commercial art school, despite the fact that she’d never been in a museum in her life (she burst into tears during her first visit to the MFA) and had no idea of basics, such as the fact that paint came in tubes.
One benefit of her serendipitous good fortune was the focus of a commercial art school on drawing.
“This was the era of abstract impressionism,” she says of the sixties, when the only palatable realism was an Andy Warhol soup can. “Schools like the MFA focused on art rather than craft, but I had to learn to draw. I had life drawing three hours a day, five days a week, for three years.”
Though she is a realist who counts Titian, Vermeer, Rubens and Van Dyke among her teachers, no one appreciates abstraction more than Wells. “Underlying all good art is good abstraction,” she says. “Composition starts with a good abstraction. Then you sneak into the painting and add the realism, then sneak out again.”
She graduated with honors in 1965 and went right to work as a commercial artist. She worked steadily for five or six years, then got married and had two children. Once her children were in school, Wells found a career working with brain-injured children. She didn’t think twice about abandoning her art career, didn’t fret over the loss of it for the next twenty years. Then she found herself a single parent and knew she wanted to make a living from her brush, but she had been out of commercial art for so long that she couldn’t get work. So she became a sign painter.
“I painted a truck for a friend,” she says. “It was beautiful, but I didn’t know anything about the proper paints, so when he went to pressure wash his truck, the paint washed off.”
Back to school, this time to the Butera School of Art. She finished the two-year program in less than a year and, in 1986, again graduated with honors

“I was a sign painter’s sign painter,” she says. “They knew I could draw, so they’d subcontract to me for, say, a four-foot cheeseburger on the side of a roach coach, and they’d do the lettering.”
She met her current husband, Peter, a retired architect. But while her personal life blossomed, her professional life was failing. A recession hurt her sign-painting career, and she found no work at all after she and Peter moved to Peterborough in 1990.
Wells had always loved painting portraits; as a sign painter, she had once painted a used car dealer’s face on a blimp. She told Peter she wanted to try to make a living, estimating it would probably take her two years to get established.
In October 1992, Wells took a weekend portrait workshop at the Sharon Art Center. That workshop marked the first time in her life Wells had ever sat down to paint on a canvas. Aside from signs, she hadn’t painted or drawn in twenty years.
“I couldn’t believe what I saw coming off the end of my brush,” she says.
She continued studying with Numael Pulido, whom Wells considers the greatest painter she’s ever met, at the New England School of Classical Painting in Greenfield. Despite all the training, she still wasn’t confident enough to undertake commissions. Then an artist friend from Belgium arrived on her doorstep with a plea for Wells to help her finish 22 paintings she had committed to a European exhibition.

“Mother & Daughter“ won the Richard and Mary Schroeder Portrait Award from the Copley Society of Boston in 2002. Her portrait of Zabie Nields won first place in the Portrait Society of America’s 1999 competition, and she won the People’s Choice Award during the 1997 Regional Jurors’ Choice Competition at the Thorne-Sagendorph. It’s an impressive record for someone who only started painting portraits eleven years ago.

What will matter

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no days, no hours or minutes. All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else.
　　Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance. It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed.
　　Your grudges, resentments, frustrations, and jealousies will finally disappear.
　　So, too, your hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists will all expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away.
　　It won’t matter where you came from, or on what side of the tracks you lived.
　　It won’t matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant. Your gender, skin color, ethnicity will be irrelevant.
　　So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?
　　What will matter is not what you bought, but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave.
　　What will matter is not your success, but your significance.
　　What will matter is not what you learned, but what you taught.
　　What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage and sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example.
　　What will matter is not your competence, but your character.
　　What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone.
　　What will matter is not your memories, but the memories of those who loved you.
　　What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.
　　Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident.
　　It’s not a matter of circumstance but of choice.

what men would do if they had a vagina for a day

10. Immediately go shopping for zucchini and cucumbers.9. Squat over a hand-held mirror for an hour and a half.8. See if they could finally do the splits.7. See if it's truly possible to launch a ping pong ball 20 feet.6. Cross their legs without rearranging their crotch.5. Get picked up in a bar in less than 10 minutes ... BEFORE closing time.4. Have consecutive multiple orgasms and still be ready for more without sleeping first.3. Go to the gynecologist for a pelvic exam and ask to have it recorded on video.2. Sit on the edge of the bed and pray for breasts too.1. Finally find that damned G-spot.