The Connection

The Connection
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
18" x 24"
Reprints available on Fine Art America

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not with your brain.

-Mark Twain

?

hmmm...

but it does seem that the brain is at least somewhat involved

?

being that all of those parts of ourselves are connected through a tangled web of blood and cells... and become intertwined with others.

Go ye heros, go to glory,

Ye shall live in song and story,

go to immortality.

...if such poor love as mine
can help thee find true peace of mind,
take it,
it is thine.

-Gilbert and Sullivan

Sight

Sight
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
9" x 12"
Original available on Etsy
Reprints available on Fine Art America

You were my heart's desire before you were known to me.

I beheld your features with my soul ere I saw them with my eyes.

-Ovid

The Heart

The Heart
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Pencil on Paper
8 1/2" x 11"

I feel like my heart has expanded lately as if it can't be contained by the form of my small body. I have torn down fences, those barriers I had been limiting myself with. I can breath in and hold everyone I love there.

I am full

supersaturated

overflowing

(and don't you dare call me a dairy product!) I am as serious as a heart attack.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. 

My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

-Dalai Lama

A Strange Story...

Addie, Age 10
Artist Unknown
Pastels on Paper

Once when I was about 10 an artist asked to draw my picture while I was visiting with my grandparents.  She created the picture above but my grandmother told me that it had been splashed with water.  I thought the picture was destroyed.

Flash forward twenty years...

My Mom found the picture among my grandmother's things.  Did my grandmother think that it was too much of a boost to my ego to have a portrait of me? 

Why did she choose to hide it?

Censorship is the height of vanity.

-Martha Graham

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

-Oscar Wilde

???

Sketchy

Sketch for the painting, 'The Container'
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten

Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.

-David Grayson

Hope

Hope
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten

A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.

-Stendhal

Absence diminished mediocre passions and increases great ones,

as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

-Francois de La Rochefoucauld

New Paintings for Etsy...

Riding the Wolf
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas 9" x 12"
SOLD on Etsy

This painting sold from my Etsy store on Friday! 

One friend commented that she looks "courageous and at peace with herself."   I like that assessment.  You would think that a person balanced precariously on a wolf would exhibit some fear... fear of falling or fear of the wolf himself.  (Rather like the gingerbread man riding atop the fox's head to cross a river only to be gobbled up.)  But she is balance like an expert California surfer. 

How can we ride the waves, the wolf, or our lives with balance?

I just added these paintings to my Etsy Store as well...

Dreaming of Spring
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas  9" x 12"
Available for $150. on Etsy

Pandora's Box
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas 9" x 12"
Available for $150 on Etsy 

Path in the Woods
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas 9" x 12"
Available for $150 on Etsy 

The Embrace

The Embrace
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech

when words become superfluous.

-Ingrid Bergman

Sigh...

Tonight is the Night!

For any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing,

whose end, both at the first and now, was and is,
to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature.

-Shakespeare

Tonight is the night! 

Our paintings are hung for the "Reflections" show. 

Join me, Beka Nimtz and Marie House for a lovely evening...

Friday April 6th 2012 6-9pm

Fletcher Place Art and Books

642 Virginia Ave.  Indianapolis, IN 46203

Reflections on the Canal

Reflections on the Canal
Copyright 2011 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
16" x 20"

The Wind is the breath of the earth. 

Into every corner it unfolds and reaches;

without choosing between high or low,

exalted or humble,

it touches everywhere.

-Song Yu

This painting of the Broad Ripple Canal in Indianapolis will be featured in the "Reflections" show opening this Friday night!

Join us for wine, cheese, live music and fresh paintings...

April 6th 2012 6-9pm

Fletcher Place Art and Books

642 Virginia Ave. Indianapolis, IN 46203

The Greenway Path



The Greenway
Copyright 2011 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
16" x 24"

A hush is over everything,

Silent as women wait for love;

The world is waiting for the spring.

-Sara Teasdale

This painting of the Broad Ripple Canal in Indianapolis will be featured in the "Reflections" show opening this Friday night!

Join us for wine, cheese, live music and fresh paintings...

April 6th 2012 6-9pm

Fletcher Place Art and Books

642 Virginia Ave. Indianapolis, IN 46203

Canal Greenway Bridge

Canal Greenway Bridge in Indianapolis
Copyright 2011 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
 9" x 12"

All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.
-Marguerite Young

This painting will be featured in the "Reflections" show opening this Friday night!

Join us for wine, cheese, live music and fresh paintings...

April 6th 2012 6-9pm

Fletcher Place Art and Books

642 Virginia Ave. Indianapolis, IN 46203

6pm on the Broad Ripple Canal

6PM on the Canal
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
16" x 20"

This painting featuring the Broad Ripple Canal will be featured in the "Reflections" show opening this Friday night!

Join us for wine, cheese, live music and fresh paintings...

April 6th 2012  6-9pm

Fletcher Place Art and Books

642 Virginia Ave. Indianapolis, IN 46203

The Container

The Container
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
9" x 12"
Available on Fine Art America

When you look down into silence, you see no friend;

When you lift your gaze to space, you hear no echo;

It is like striking a single chord-

It rings out but there is no music.

-Lu Ji

To Love and be Loved...

Cross Stitch created by my Mother the year before I was born.

Need I say more?

(I love my Mommy.)

Time

Time
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
12" x 16"

Time keeps on slippin' into the future...

No wait! I hate that song.

How about...

It is my feeling that Time ripens all things;

with Time all things are revealed;

Time is the father of truth. 

-Francois Rabelais

or...

People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.

-John Wanamaker

The Lake

The Lake
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Ink and Watercolor on Paper
9" x 12"

Let your love flow outward through the universe,

to its height, its depth,

its broad extent,

a limitless love without hatred or enmity.

-Buddha

Butterfly

The Butterfly
Copyright 2001 Addie Hirschten
Watercolor on Paper

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

~Rabindranath Tagore

Lovers



Lovers
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
18" x 24"
Prints available on Fine Art America

All kinds of marvelous things go on,

I don't see how anyone who has looked, and seen,

can do ought but say,

'where I stand, wherever I stand, I am on holy ground.'

-John Wood

Cellular Structure

Cellular Structure
Copyright 1999  Addie Hirschten
Oil on Wood
24" x 24"

Society does not tend to encourage people to tell the truth. Society in general is interested in sustaining itself and that includes whatever fictions, facades or hypocrisies it needs to sustain itself. That imparts stability but at the same time if you go with that you never get improvements, corrections of injustices and so on. You need the words of the rebels, the artists, the people who will not accept reality as it is presented. You need both forces for civilization.

-David Cronenberg, Recorded on Fresh Air

Eyeballs are Important

So I totally made a huge mistake on one of my paintings last week.  I forgot an entire eyeball on a person's face. 

How, how, how could I have overlooked such a thing? 

AND I didn't notice until it had been up on the web for several days....

Before

So I fixed it....

After

It reminds me of one of my favorite Oscar Wilde quotes,

To look at a thing is different from seeing and thing. 

And one does not see anything until one sees it's beauty.

She was beautiful without her eye, but I was the one who was blinded?

A Drink of Water
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
9" x 12"
Prints available on Fine Art America

Sunlight

Sunlight
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Ink and Watercolor on Paper
9" x 12"

The soul speaks in image.

-Carl Jung

The Garden of Love

Blake's Garden of Love
Copyright 2011 Addie Hirschten
Watercolor on Paper
14" x 17"
Prints available on Fine Art America

I laid me down upon the bank
where love lay sleeping...

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen,
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
-William Blake

A Drink of Water



A Drink of Water
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
9" x 12"
Prints available on Fine Art America

“What makes the desert beautiful," said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

The Language of Nature



Path in the Woods
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
9" x 12"
Prints available on Fine Art America

Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious;

but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet,

and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

-George Eliot

Excess

Lifting
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
12" x 16"
Prints available on Fine Art America

In matters of art I confess that I do not hate excess. 

Moderation never seemed to me to be a sign of vigorous nature. 

I like these excesses of health, these outbreaks of will which inscribe themselves in works like inflamed asphalt in the heart of a volcano. 

-Charles Beaudelaire

A Mathematical Equation

A Mathematical Equation
Acrylic on Paper
11" x 17"

Love and you shall be loved. 

All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

-Emerson

Happiness

Cross Stitch made by my mother, age 10

I am easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. 

My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.

-Thoreau

De Colores

De Colores
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
18" x 24"
Prints available on Fine Art America

De colores, de colores se visten los campos en la primavera

Y por eso los grandes amores de muchos colores me gustan a mí

-De Colores, Traditional Spainish Folksong

Passion is a powerful spring.
-Emerson

Dreams and Reality

Dreams and Reality
Copyright 2012 Addie Hirschten
Oil on Canvas
30" x 40"
Print available on Fine Art America

You can design, create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. 

But it takes people to make the dream a reality. 

-Walt Disney

And just because I feel the need to temper the relative purity of Disney:

Don't dream it, be it.

-Dr. Frank-N-Furter

Do you want the backstory?  Visit:

http://www.artistaddie.com/2012/01/dream-of-india.html