The Brushed Circle and The Nude

We visited friends in Guerneville over the weekend; we had a wonderful time and, on the way home, we visited artists in Graton, Sebastopol and Santa Rosa as part of Sonoma County Arts Council's ARTrails open studios.  Our favorite artist, whose work is really stunning, was Mario Uribe, whose studio is in Santa Rosa.  Uribe works with Japanese characters (kanji) and papers and base layers of painting, and then overlays a circle, the Zen symbol enso, painted with brushes of all sizes, like these:

His circles? Amazing. Here is a photograph of a postcard of "Red Enso with Kanji," from 2010:

The red in the original is deeper ... but you see why we thought the work so striking!

I am thinking that the "Odalisque Series" that I am working on will be, for me, like the Uribe circles, a drawing or painting over a painting. I have just finished "MIMOSA: Matisse's Seated Nude Visits (one of) Schiele's Two Women in the Hills Above St. Tropez" (world's longest title!) and here it is:

We have been thinking about our winter trip a few years ago to St. Tropez. We drove into the hills above the village and walked around, taking in the smells and the breezes (the mistral had not yet arrived!) and then found lunch at a small family-owned restaurant, where we had a wonderful dish of Provencal spaghetti and meatballs. We asked for the recipe, and my husband made it again for us last night. The meatballs (small!) were ground beef, eggs, breadcrumbs, oregano, chopped chives or scallions, Herbes de Provence and salt and pepper. The sauce was tomatoes, red peppers and/or zucchini, olive oil, white wine, onions, garlic, and sugar. Try it!