Unlike in the Spring of 2020, on the first of this month of April 2021 we got to say, “Happy Opening Day” in the U.S.A.  ~ Baseball is back for the fans ( ...socially distanced style. )  Here are some hometown baseball players from seasons past that I painted:

​“Number Eleven and the Four Elements”

Blog Link:
​ 'Number Eleven and the Four Elements' featuring Barry Larkin - Chrissy Breslin Schroeder

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“Bench Number Five ~ The Earth is a Baseball”

Blog Link:
Bench Number Five ~ The Earth is a Baseball - Chrissy Breslin Schroeder


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The Flame Throwing “Cuban Missile”

Blog Link:
​Hope Springs Eternal on *Opening Day* - Chrissy Breslin Schroeder

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“Colorful Success” = “The Big Red Machine”



See and read about more paintings and memories of some more of Cincinnati's Championship teams in other blogs including:

“My Wire-to-Wire Summer with Twelve Stars and A Piece of American History”

and

”Opening Day Delay”

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Sometimes I pull out a sketchbook just to relax and/or to clear and focus my mind. It’s a form of meditation I guess that can often release old stresses or grief and reveal new layers of insight or hope and renewal for me. ...Or sometimes like in this case, it can be mostly just fun.

Today I pulled out my sketchbook after doodling in an old calendar a little Polynesian girl wearing a head wreath that I saw in an ad. Being motivated to see and find the simple childlike joyfulness, sincerity, and wonder in life (especially after living through these seriously troubled times in the world and more than a year of an ongoing global pandemic), I recreated the girl in the style of a cartoon. I then meandered with doodling throughout the rest of the page while not thinking too much about what it was I was drawing.

When I put the sketchbook down, I reviewed the simple drawing of the young girl and found the figure endearing as if being captured with a sense of awe. Then I looked at the whole drawn page of doodles and reflected further on some of my many perceptions. The round imagery roughly outlined that resembles a figure eight mostly made me think of interpretive forms of the earth & sky and an awareness of the powerful cyclical, interconnected and recycling nature of nature.

During this season of this year especially, when the celebration of the earth’s recreation can be found all around on painted eggs and in all that is finding the power to bloom, I like to see the youthful drawing of the young figure reflecting the renewed spirit of springtime. The renewed spirt of springtime with a fresh appreciation of the awesomeness of the force of life and its great potential rediscovered as well as a perception of the concepts of the globe’s circular flow as bringing a healing reflective wash that resurfaces endless growth and the returning view of life as new once again.
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My old f​acebook pages have come around to “Time-hop” share again my painting and some posts with my artwork as well as a little bit of information I learned about the origins of the annual “Ides of March”, the day after “Pi Day”, on the calendar :

...Also used this artwork in the blog "The Color of Winter is in the Imagination".

Spinning-out some spring vibes... { 30’ x 15’ canvas }

This is some artwork that I started playing with around New Year's, at the beginning of this new year January 2021, but I did not get around to finishing it until this week.

It is a composition where I reimagined various images, figures, postures, fashions, designs and layers of patterns to create the painting pictured which includes the reflection of ancient universal and eternal concepts of sacred geometry. 

One of the photos includes an owl painting of mine that I have had floating around my studio space for years that inspired me to add an owl figure in the piece.
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Some other new year paintings and reflections that I have blogs about on this website and one of my baseball blogs that also reflects on geometry and includes links to more baseball art: 

January 2016: "Process Pictures from January 2016 Painting"
Process Pictures from Jan. 2016 Painting - Chrissy Breslin Schroeder

January 2017: "January March"
January March - Chrissy Breslin Schroeder

January 2018: "Air to Water: The Revolution of Ten Koi"
Air to Water: The Revolution of Ten Koi - Chrissy Breslin Schroeder

January 2020: "Facing 2020 in 12 Streams"
Facing 2020 in 12 Streams - Chrissy Breslin Schroeder

December 2020: "Welcome 2021"
Welcome 2021 - Chrissy Breslin Schroeder

Baseball Blog: "The Timeless Charlie Hustle and The Geometry of a Rose"
"The Timeless Charlie Hustle" and the "Geometry of a Rose" - Chrissy Breslin Schroeder

     I just came across this sketch folded up in a stock of old sketchbooks, designs, ideas, etc. that I must have been playing around with a long time back... The subject is my mom when she was a young lady.  ~  I'm thinking that at the time I just folded it up because I didn't think much of the artwork or really give it that much effort ( or maybe I just never found the time to finish it ), but I like it now and am reminded of what a kindhearted beauty she was.

     Marian Gabriel { "Mimi" } Fox Breslin ( 1933 - 2003 ) :

​Link to July 2018 blog and artwork: "High Summer ( 2018 )" - Chrissy Breslin Schroeder

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Here are some pictures of the joys found in 2020 and my painted Christmas gifts that I surprised each of my sons with since both of them got a new puppy this past year. 

In February 2020, my Joey, who loves to spend as many winter weeks as possible in the mountains skiing, got a Bernedoodle he named "Gigi".  - -  And then around Thanksgiving, my Sam, who is loving life living in Chelsea, Manhattan, got his French Bulldog named "Sprout".
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*Sprout* the Big City Dog:

{ Sprout's painting background is based on one of Sam's spontaneous texts to me of the wonderful settings found in his neighborhood of Chelsea, Manhattan.  In particular in this case, it was a texted photo of a beautiful garden with tall sunflowers growing right along the side of the road that I remembered and reviewed for inspiration in the painting of Sprout. }
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    A picture of Joey & Sam after opening their Christmas gift surprise. ( The artwork in the background of this photo is my brother’s acquired painting by my Great-Grandpa, William P. McDonald, of my great aunt. )

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When my boys were younger, there was an era when I painted dogs all the time. I used to call my home studio space the dog pound because when you walked into the room all you would see were so many dogs… all kinds of dogs each with a different expression staring down from the stacked rows of shelves encircling the room.
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Here are a few images of some of my old dog artwork that I was able to find on my current computer. ( There are many more pictures of my dog paintings, but they are on an old computer file. )

A “Redbone Coonhound”.   (…haha, that is what my photo file’s label says it is.) :

I remember creating all kinds of various background designs, patterns, and abstractions in the paintings...
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​This one appears to take some inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright...

​This one I created to donate the artwork to a fundraiser for my sons' high school. ( The school building constructed in 1960 is made with tan colored brinks that are distinctive of that time period. - - I believe that was my inspiration for the layering of the tan rectangular abstractions behind the dog. )

   These hooks… During my “dog period”, as my son once jokingly called it, I crafted stock loads of these wall hooks with many different pictures of my dog art and sold them at art shows, etc. Here are a couple pictures of the wall hooks I was able to find in my photo files.  Similar to my St. X Golden Retriever, one of them is a drawing of a Cincinnati Reds theme dog that I sold with my baseball art when painting baseball players later replaced my subject of dogs. 

​This old snapshot of a collection of painted dog tiles is looking like what we would call a ‘Zoom’ meeting in 2020…

A while back, I painted this guard dog canvas sitting on our fireplace mantel.

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An old painted canvas with a dog subject just created out of my imagination.

​     ....And finally and most memorable to me is a little oil painting of our beloved family dog “Moxie” when he was a puppy. Our family got “Moxie May” as a rescue dog the May Sam turned 9 and Joey turned 6 and he stayed loyally & lovingly by our sides until after both the boys were well off to college. ~ Here is a photo of a wall in our new home with the Moxie puppy painting looking at us through a stream of captured sunlight.

    This time of year, amongst other things and happenings in the particularly tumultuous current affairs of the world today, inspired me to do a study of a statue that is now in front of my old high school.  Being that statues of war generals and the like have necessarily been a controversial subject of late in the United States and elsewhere, my attention was drawn to reflect on the statue now in front of the school I attended.  The statue as stated on the gold plated plaque in front of it is called "Our Lady of Victory".  I'm not sure when the statue was installed there, sometime between the 1980's & 2020 I guess since it was not there when I attended the academy.

My favorite feature in the sculpture of the divine feminine is the cosmic element of the Christ child standing on top of a ball of stars.

"Our Lady of Victory"  { pencil on paper drawing ~ work in progress }

I was attracted to the statue subject after thinking about creating some artwork to donate to my high school's annual fundraiser auction as promised to my fellow Ursuline Academy of Cincinnati 1985 classmate who is chairing this year's UA Ultimate Auction.
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with - Tides of Eternity Art by Chrissy Breslin Schroeder

The completed original artwork on 11' x 14' fine art drawing paper with framed mat that will be auctioned at Ursuline Academy's Ultimate Auction in February of 2021 :

   On this Autumnal Equinox of 2020, here's an 11" x 14" canvas I just painted.  I call the painting "Fall Fair" and created it by incorporating different elements from various different photos found in an old magazine collection along with some of my own improvisions. 
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