We LOVE research and learning as a way to get inspired and boost ideas and creativity!! So, Kenzie and I are going to be sharing the inspiration that we collect here in our second newsletter…. once a week!!!

Here’s how it works:

We provide the inspiration. You interpret it however you wish… any medium, any size. It is meant to inspire lettering and floral art combined together. But, you can:

• Just do the florals, just do the lettering, or combine them together.
• Use the provided quote for your piece or select your own.
• Use colors from one of the inspiration images or select your own favorites
• Create the floral art… as a still life in a vase, a single flower, a border, a pattern, a bouquet

Hope you will create with us and post your work at #wordsandwildflowers2024 and tag @lorisiebert.studio and @snippetsofwhimsy

We will be checking and sharing some of our favorites. AND… there may be surprise guest judges and PRIZES!!!

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Quote of the week:

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

— E.E. Cummings

Inspirational Artist of the Week: Lydia Corbett

In the 1950s, Lydia Corbett was introduced to Pablo Picasso at Vallauris on the French Riviera. At this time, Picasso was breaking-up with his wife Francois Gilot, and Lydia’s presence brought a new and positive phase to his work. She became the model for a series of forty works of art. She was known then as Sylvette David, but changed her name during this period. The ‘Heads of Sylvette’ a series of moulded metal sculptures which Picasso worked on through this time, introduced a new major innovation in this work.

In 1968, Lydia decided to move to England and gave all her creative energy to painting. She has been exhibiting ever since and has had numerous shows in London, Europe and Japan. The Anthony Petullo Foundation, one of the most influential collections in America, has a collection of Lydia’s watercolours. In 1993 the Tate Gallery staged a major exhibition of Picasso’s sculpture and paintings. A documentary film on Lydia, and her friend and mentor, was shown on BBC2 at the same time.

Lydia’s beautiful paintings in both oil and watercolour sparkle and take on many subjects. Her fluid lines bring new life to these familiar themes, infusing them with warmth and sunlight. Her ‘assured and gentle approach to the human figure’, as one critic put it, recalls the work of Marc Chagall.

Her pictures are highly distinctive and immediately recognizable. She is very much an international painter and has many fans in the UK and abroad.

Hand lettering Inspiration of the week: Julia Warhola (Andy Warhol’s mom!!)

Julia Warhola was born Juliana Justina Zavaczki to a peasant family in the ​Rusyn​village of Mikó, ​Austria-Hungary​ She emigrated to the United States to ​Pittsburgh​, ​Pennsylvania​.

Julia enjoyed singing traditional Rusyn folk songs and was artistic. She loved to draw, and her favorite subjects were angels and cats. She also did embroidery and other crafts, such as bouquets of flowers made from tin cans and crepe paper. During the Easter season, she decorated eggs in the ​Pysanka​ tradition.

As a widow, she moved to New York City in 1952 to be near her son Andy.He often used her decorative handwriting to accompany his illustrations such as the book ​25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy​ (1954).In 1957, she also wrote and illustrated her own book called Holy Cats. She won awards for her lettering, including one from the ​American Institute of Graphic Arts​ for an album cover for The Story of ​Moondog​, featuring the musician ​Louis Thomas Hardin​ in 1957.

In 1966, Andy made a movie called Mrs. Warhol (it was filmed in color and played for 66 minutes). The film featured Julia in her ​basement apartment​ in Andy’s house playing “an aging peroxide movie star with a lot of husbands,” including the most current spouse, played by Andy’s lover Richard Rheem.Andy follows her with his camera as she goes about her daily domestic routines.

We LOVE research and learning as a way to get inspired and boost ideas and creativity!! So, Kenzie and I are going to be sharing the inspiration that we collect here in our second newsletter…. once a week!!!

Here’s how it works:

We provide the inspiration. You interpret it however you wish… any medium, any size. It is meant to inspire lettering and floral art combined together. But, you can:

• Just do the florals, just do the lettering, or combine them together.
• Use the provided quote for your piece or select your own.
• Use colors from one of the inspiration images or select your own favorites
• Create the floral art… as a still life in a vase, a single flower, a border, a pattern, a bouquet

Hope you will create with us and post your work at #wordsandwildflowers2024 and tag @lorisiebert.studio and @snippetsofwhimsy

We will be checking and sharing some of our favorites. AND… there may be surprise guest judges and PRIZES!!!

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Quote of the week:

Use your voice for kindness

Your ears for compassion

Your hands for charity

Your mind for truth

And your heart for love.

Inspirational Artist of the Week: Kari Christensen

Kari Christensen was a leading Norwegian ceramic artist, born Feb 1938 and died 5 Feb 1997. She was educated at the National College of Art and Design, Oslo between 1956-1961. Between 1961 and 1965 she was employed as a designer at the Alumina factory (Royal Copenhagen) where she was one a group of 6 designers who worked on the Tenera range developed by the then art director Nils Thorsson. In 1967 she set up her own studio in Oslo. She was also a visiting lecturer at the National College of Art and Design.

Hand lettering Inspiration of the week: Howard Finster

The Reverend Howard Finster was a religious outsider artist. Because Finster realized that his congregation did not remember his sermons even minutes after he had finished, he published religious songs and poetry in local newspapers in the 1930s and hosted a radio prayer show in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He claims God charged him to illustrate his religious visions in 1976 when “A warm feeling came over me to paint sacred art.”

Finster began building his everchanging environmental sculpture, Paradise Garden,on swampy land behind his house in the early 1960s. Composed of walkways and constructions made from cast-off pieces of technology, the Garden assembles individual monuments to human inventors into an all-encompassing “Memorial to God.” Much of the building material in the garden was accumulated from Finster’s television and bicycle repair businesses and his twenty-one other trades.

We LOVE research and learning as a way to get inspired and boost ideas and creativity!! So, Kenzie and I are going to be sharing the inspiration that we collect here in our second newsletter…. once a week!!!

Here’s how it works:

We provide the inspiration. You interpret it however you wish… any medium, any size. It is meant to inspire lettering and floral art combined together. But, you can:

• Just do the florals, just do the lettering, or combine them together.
• Use the provided quote for your piece or select your own.
• Use colors from one of the inspiration images or select your own favorites
• Create the floral art… as a still life in a vase, a single flower, a border, a pattern, a bouquet

Hope you will create with us and post your work at #wordsandwildflowers2024 and tag @lorisiebert.studio and @snippetsofwhimsy

We will be checking and sharing some of our favorites. AND… there may be surprise guest judges and PRIZES!!!

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Quote of the week:

“I dwell in possibility.”

― Emily Dickinson

Inspirational Artist of the week: Françoise Gaime Gilot

Françoise Gaime Gilot (26 November 1921 – 6 June 2023) was a French painter.​ Gilot was an accomplished artist, notably in ​watercolors​and ​ceramics​, and a bestselling memoirist of the book Life with Picasso.

Gilot’s artwork is showcased in more than a dozen leading museums including the permanent collection of the ​Metropolitan Museum of Art​ in New York and the ​Centre Pompidou​ in Paris.​ In 2021 her painting Paloma à la Guitare, a 1965 portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3 million at ​Sotheby’s​ in London.​

Gilot first made her mark in the post-War milieu of artists who redefined the European artistic landscape; her career then went on to span an impressive eight decades. Delving into the realms of mythology, symbolism, and the power of memory, Gilot’s work explores complex philosophical ideas with spontaneity and freedom.​

Gilot is also known for her romantic partnership with ​Pablo Picasso​ as well as her later marriage to ​Jonas Salk​, the American researcher who developed the first safe polio vaccine.​

Hand lettering inspiration of the week: Photo taken by me in my travels

We LOVE research and learning as a way to get inspired and boost ideas and creativity!! So, Kenzie and I are going to be sharing the inspiration that we collect here in our second newsletter…. once a week!!!

Here’s how it works:

We provide the inspiration. You interpret it however you wish… any medium, any size. It is meant to inspire lettering and floral art combined together. But, you can:

• Just do the florals, just do the lettering, or combine them together.
• Use the provided quote for your piece or select your own.
• Use colors from one of the inspiration images or select your own favorites
• Create the floral art… as a still life in a vase, a single flower, a border, a pattern, a bouquet

Hope you will create with us and post your work at #wordsandwildflowers2024 and tag @lorisiebert.studio and @snippetsofwhimsy

We will be checking and sharing some of our favorites. AND… there may be surprise guest judges and PRIZES!!!

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Quote of the week:

“If you wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

― Toni Morrison, “Song of Solomon”

Inspirational Artist of the week: Josef Frank

Frank was of Jewish ancestry. His parents, merchant Ignaz (Isak) Frank (1851–1921, ​Vienna​) and the Vienna-born Jenny (1861–1941), were originally from ​Heves​ in ​Hungary​. He designed his parents’ grave in the old Jewish section of ​Vienna’s Central Cemetery​(Group 19, Row 58, Grave No.52).​[1]​ He studied architecture at the ​Vienna University of Technology​. He then taught at the ​Vienna School of Arts and Crafts​ from 1919 to 1925. He was a founding member of the ​Vienna Werkbund​, initiator and leader of the 1932 project ​Werkbundsiedlung in Vienna​. In 1933, he ​emigrated​ to Sweden, where he gained ​citizenship​ in 1939. He was the most prestigious designer in the Stockholm design company ​Svenskt Tenn​(Swedish Pewter), recruited by the founder of the company, ​Estrid Ericson​. He remained in Sweden after 1945 despite attempts to return him to Vienna. The ​Vienna Circle​ manifesto lists three of his publications.

Hand lettering inspiration of the week: Picasso

Lithograph from 1959 by Pablo Picasso

Only a couple spots left!!!

I’m heading back to the Dordogne region of France again to teach!!

August 26 – September 4 2025!!!!

This experience was dreamy!!! Harrison and Katel at Perigord Retreats REALLY know how to cater to their guests. The food is outstanding!! The day trips are completely magical and SO INSPIRING. And the time with kindred spirits is PRICELESS!!!

Want to come with a friend and create memories to last a lifetime????

We LOVE research and learning as a way to get inspired and boost ideas and creativity!! So, Kenzie and I are going to be sharing the inspiration that we collect here in our second newsletter…. once a week!!!

Here’s how it works:

We provide the inspiration. You interpret it however you wish… any medium, any size. It is meant to inspire lettering and floral art combined together. But, you can:

• Just do the florals, just do the lettering, or combine them together.
• Use the provided quote for your piece or select your own.
• Use colors from one of the inspiration images or select your own favorites
• Create the floral art… as a still life in a vase, a single flower, a border, a pattern, a bouquet

Hope you will create with us and post your work at #wordsandwildflowers2024 and tag @lorisiebert.studio and @snippetsofwhimsy

We will be checking and sharing some of our favorites. AND… there may be surprise guest judges and PRIZES!!!

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Quote of the week:

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”

-Dr. Seuss

Inspirational artist of the week: Evelyn Ackerman

Evelyn Ackerman was born on January 12, 1924, in Detroit, Michigan to Jacob Lipchinsky (later changed to Lipton) and Sara Turetsky. Evelyn graduated from Central High School in 1941, and began at the ​University of Michigan​as an art major. Then, in 1942, her father died and her three brothers entered the military. With her mother in need of help, she transferred to ​Wayne University​ as a fine arts and art history major. There she was introduced to the German Expressionists, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Klee, and Matisse by her art history professor, Dr. Ernst Scheyer. After completing her BFA degree with distinction in 1945, Evelyn completed her MFA degree in fine arts in 1950.

After retiring from ERA Industries, Evelyn spent a year and a half creating a 40-piece series of cloisonné enamels with silver wire on copper completing the project in 1979. The series Stories from the Bible was donated to the permanent collection of the ​Renwick Gallery​, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.​[3]​

Over the years, Evelyn collected antique toys and dolls. She authored articles and published five books on antique dolls and toys. Her successful pattern books for dressing antique dolls, the first that were based on research and were authentic expressions of the dress of the period, were reissued. In the 1980s, she volunteered at the ​Los Angeles County Museum of Art​ of Art Costume and Textile department and wrote a monograph on nineteenth-century dress and an extensive glossary for a catalogue of eighteenth-century costumes and textiles.

Handlettering inspiration of the week…

Photos I shot in Oaxaca this past February. I LOVE to photograph wall murals and typography!!!