I love to see people smile. My hope is that my art catches people off guard, and makes them laugh in unexpected, silly ways. Much of my art includes animals, and I think by portraying their beauty and devotion in playful ways, it will bring awareness to the need for all of us to take loving care of all the animals in our beautiful world.

Each month, I will answer a question in the hope that it will encourage you, the reader, to expand your awareness of your own artistic nature. Just play and have fun, like you did when you were a child! I will also reveal the story behind my art. For each featured piece in my “Double Feature” you will learn how the idea came to me, and see the fun I had creating each piece.

I want to encourage you to have fun, and feel free to be playful in life. I truly believe, when we feel happy, we can reach out and share that happiness with each other and with animals. Good things will naturally happen when happy people open their hearts.

Cheers!

My husband, Mike, and I recently traveled to Arizona with our son and his family. One of the fascinating places we visited was the Walnut Canyon National  Monument. The Sinagua people lived here from about A.D. 1125 to 1250. Sinagua is Spanish for “without water”. They were young people, hardly anyone lived past 40. They grew up fast, by the time they were teenagers they were probably parents. Food and water were scarce. They hunted the game in the canyon and farmed corn and squash on the mesa above.

We climbed the 260 steps down and back up to see the remains of  the homes, rock alcoves really, carved into the steep walls high above the canyon floor. (Whew, that’s a lot of steps, but the Sinaguans probably did it several times every day.) The rooms were tiny with low ceilings.  You can see in the photo my grandaughter, Haley, 11, can easily touch the ceiling.

All of the more than 300 cliff dwelling rooms in Walnut Canyon were built in these natural alcoves. The massive limestone overhangs made a perfect watertight roof. They piled up rocks to create walls to divide the spaces into rooms.

Many of the rooms were used to store food and water for the hard winter months.  Other rooms were for sleeping  and some for cooking. The doorways were so small that I had to bend down to go through, and I’m short so the Sinagua must have been very small people.

When the Sinaguan people  deserted the area they left behind  pottery, woven mats and tools that they had used. Much of it was pilfered away in the 18oos by visitors to the area. However enough remained  to give an amazing record of what their life was like and this outdoor museum remains a precious link to their culture.

The ceilings in some of the rooms are black with soot from their cooking fires. Because there was so little water, especially in the hot summer , they collected snow melt in great pots to last them through  the dry seasons.  Just to the right of center and about a third of the way down from top you can see three rows of openings, tiny black holes that are the cliff rooms.  This shows how inaccessible the dwellings were. The canyon where they hunted was far below, out of sight in this photo, and the mesa where they farmed high above the dwellings. The photo below is a closer view of the homes in the cliff walls.

No one knows for sure why the Sinagua left the area, perhaps disease or famine.  Nevertheless, they left a fascinating legacy that filled me and my family with awe of a way of life so difficult, in a place so rugged and dangerous that one misstep could send you tumbling down hundreds of feet into the rocky gorge. And yet they survived in this beautiful canyon for over a hundred years.

If you are in this area  near Sedona, Arizona, it is certainly worth a visit.

All of our art projects  were theater related. One day we made toucan masks. After completing their masks they paraded through camp squawking and flapping their arms. It was quite a spectacle.

We built minature theater stagesets out of cardboard shoe boxes, created comedy and tragedy masks, designed playbills, drew all kinds of facial expressions, and even wrote and illustrated storyboards as if they were directing their own play. What a great learning experience for these kids.

At camps they practiced other skills including stage combat, singing, improvization, voice projection, stage presence, dancing ,foreign accents, monologs and skit writing and performing.

I only work with the art aspect. But at the end of the two weeks the kids showed off their new  acting skills to a very appreciative audience of parents and friends.

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