I was invited to join three artist friends on a trip to the Long Beach Peninsula in SW Washington for three days. We packed up our art projects, comfy clothes, scads of food (and my portable latte machine), and hit the road on Tuesday morning. Besides myself, the bandits included
Tory,
Suzanne, and Debi. We're all artists and all members of the
Portland Art Collective. It was a grand three days.
ASTORIA
Our first stop was Astoria, where we had lunch at
T Paul's Urban Cafe, then hit up
Lunar Boy Gallery and
Cargo, with a stop for lattes at
Astoria Coffee House. Of course we also popped into
Riversea Gallery.
VINTAGE HARDWARE AT THE ASTOR HOTEL
This little, I mean BIG,
store was a fun discovery!
DOTS AND DOODLES
Astoria's amazing art store,
Dots and Doodles, is always worthy of a stop. We had so much fun with the owners and their little dog, too!
LOW KEY WEST
Over the bridge we went and deep into the Long Beach Peninsula to Ocean Park. We arrived at Suzanne's beautiful beach house, located right across the street from the ocean. Such a warm and comfortable home. Tory and I shared a room and we even had our own bathroom! We got the latte machine fired up and eased into our art making by looking at a large selection of art magazines first.
JAMMIE DAY
Wednesday was our designated
jammie day - all day, all he time. I
abided. Making art, going to the beach, even to the grocery store to return and rent another movie.
BEACH WALK
THE ORANGE BEACH CHAIR
ART-MAKING
I worked on several
Fearless Faces during my art-makin' time, also moved forward on my journal for the
Sketchbook Project.
POST SCRIPT
We are fortunate to have a big old house in Astoria that has been divided into an apartment and a studio. The upstairs studio is vacant, so we swung by to have a look see. Well, four artists looking at a studio in Astoria with a view of the bay? We went crazy planning for converting it to a little apartment to use for visits to Astoria . . . we even had ideas of how to convert the closets into sleeping quarters. Alas, the timing isn't
quite right to undertake something like this, but we came
this close and plans are underway for a future conversion.
