P. Buckley Moss e-newsletter

Dear Friends:

It’s only two weeks ’til our Summer Celebration weekend July 8-10 at the P. Buckley Moss Museum in Waynesboro, Virginia! It’s going to be such fun! The Summer Celebration will combine elements of a Museum Open House and Barn Show, Chapter Training for chapters of the P. Buckley Moss Society, a Collectors’ Convention, and a Moss Dealers’ Meeting all rolled into one fun-filled extravaganza. The theme for the event is Mardi Gras in July, and there will be a Mardi Gras Dinner Dance and Auction to benefit the P. Buckley Moss Foundation for Children’s Education on Saturday night. The auction will include, among other things, one or more quilts featuring my hand-painted fabric centerpieces. There will also be Mardi Gras Gift Bags that attendees may purchase for $20 each. The gift bags will be filled with donated items, and one extra lucky bag will contain a certificate entitling its owner to a framed miniature watercolor. The bidding at our fundraising auctions is lively, and we all end up in stitches from laughing as we egg one another on. For more information and to purchase tickets, please contact P. Buckley Moss Galleries, Ltd., at 1-800-430-1320 or 804-725-7378.

The Foundation for Children’s Education held the first of three sessions last week for its Summer Art Enrichment Program. Session 1 was for four- and five-year-olds, and this week’s session is for six- and seven-year-olds. The theme for all three sessions this year is This Land is Your Land; This Land is My Land, based on the Woody Guthrie song. The opening lines of the song are “…From California to the New York island; From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters…”, and the children are learning about our wonderful country through the song and their paintings, which depict cityscapes, the red wood forest, seascapes, and the desert.

These children are part of the group of 24 four- and five-year-olds who participated in the Foundation’s Summer Art Enrichment Program last week. They are standing in front of their red wood forest drawings, while singing This Land is Your Land and holding up scenes from across our country. They sang the song for their parents before dismissal one day, and the parents were very impressed.

The weather was so nice in Waynesboro, VA, last week that the children had their snack outside and time to play every day under the trees next to the Foundation office, which is on the grounds of the P. Buckley Moss Museum.

The teachers (Leslie Allen and Sharon Morris) and Foundation staff will host an art exhibit at the P. Buckley Moss Museum at the end of the three-week program for all the students’ family members to see what great work the children have been doing. This year’s exhibit will be held on Friday, July 1, from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

I had a wonderful dinner Sunday night with friends Dick and Bonnie-Lou Binnig and Peter Coppola at The Moon Under Water. Bonnie-Lou was the high bidder on a framed Poised Felines that came with dinner-for-four at The Moon Under Water. She bid on the package this past March during a fundraising event for Big Cat Rescue that was held in conjunction with my show with the Finn Gallery here in St. Petersburg, Florida. We had such a good time laughing about things.

L. to R.: Peter Coppola, me, Bonnie-Lou Binnig, and Dick Binnig. Bonnie-Lou is President of the Moss Pelicans Chapter of the P. Buckley Moss Society, and Peter and his sister used to be dancers for Tommy Dorsey. Peter may come up for our Summer Celebration and dance with us.

My friend Mary Wyatt Allen and I went to the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, on Tuesday. They always have something interesting, and this time we enjoyed their “Beyond Bling: Voices of Hip-Hop in Art” exhibit. It was all New York street art, where kids had painted great, big pieces on subway trains, walls, and buildings. It’s such fun to see young people’s art and what’s happening in the city. The displays were accompanied by hip-hop music we could listen to with headphones.

The investment that John and Mable Ringling have put into this museum is amazing. It has the most beautiful and well-maintained buildings and gardens, incredible exhibits of famous paintings, and trolleys to take visitors from one area to the next. They even have a theater and a restaurant, which is excellent.

My membership with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts came with the North American Reciprocal Museum Program, so I have free admission to participating museums, and the Ringling is one of them.

The Fourth of July is just a couple weeks away, and I’ve been thinking about our soldiers and was inspired to start the painting pictured below.

My inspiration for this painting is our soldiers and the Fourth of July.

Love,
Pat

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