Amaryllises? Amarylli?

I love amaryllises, or is the plural of amaryllis 'amaryli?' Anyway, my this-year's bulb is the kind with red on the outer edges and a yellow-white inside. "Apple Blossom," I think. The first bloom opened Christmas eve, and the next on Christmas day, then two more opened the next day. This one will also have a 'bonus' bloom, smack in the center! A five-blossom one! It is very pretty.


I have been enjoying sketching it's growth. This is today's sketch. I did a more complex one, and decided I liked the simpler, quick sketch better. That is a good thing to know about my preferences, as I plan to undertake a fairly large sketching project with the onset of the New Year - but more about that later.


Over the years, I have captured a lot of Amaryllis images. The one above is a photograph, that I have used for card images.


This one is a fairly large watercolor sketch, from back in the days when I was painting in watercolor. I wasn't impressed with it at the time, so it is somewhere in a cupboard, but I am finding that I like it's graphic simplicity now.



And this is a 9x12" oil painting I did.


On a completely different topic, I painted with the Alzheimer's patients yesterday, for the last time this year. I didn't take them any source material to work from, and just suggested they paint a winter scene. Several of them actually were able to do something that was recognizable as snow, etc. This man's work always is a wonder to me. He paints with a great deal of intent and attention. He worked on this little painting for quite some time, and is almost finished with it in the photo. He cannot verbalize anything to me, though he sometimes tries. But when he was done, I told the activity director that it looked to me very much like a snow shovel, leaning against a workbench. She told me he had worked in construction most of his life, and then in a construction maintenance supervisory position. So he would be very familiar with both snow shovels and workbenches. The mind is a wonderful and mysterious thing. When my little art time manages to reach into a damaged memory bank and pull out a few familiar images that cannot otherwise be expressed, I feel very blessed indeed.