Where do mail geeks go on vacation?

The National Postal Museum, of course!

It's Max's spring break and we are visiting my sister in Northern Virginia.

Today I went to the fabulous postal museum in Washington DC and couldn't resist posing with Mr. Zip.

By the time I get home I will have missed six days of mail.

I'm having withdrawal symptoms.

Thankfully I brought an absurd amount of art supplies, and since my sister conveniently has a paint-encrusted folding table in her basement, I made myself at home.

 My primary art-mission of the week was to finish a series of canvasses she commissioned several months ago.  One pleasant evening later, and here they are hanging on her wall:

(each one is 5"x7")

It's funny to me that she orients them horizontally, when I created them vertically.

It's all in the eye of the beholder, as they say.

Here are close-ups of all three pieces, oriented the way I see them.

With this mission accomplished, I spent quite a few glorious hours exploring lesson 1 of my Jane Davies Extreme Composition class.  The assignment involved exercises with line, the relationship of line to itself, to other lines, to the page, and to the background.

I made dozens of studies.

(here they are piled up on my sister's kitchen table)

I am LOVING this class so far.

After the various exercises in the lesson, I created this series using a "vocabulary" selected from my studies.

 I could happy continue to explore these exercises for weeks to come.  In fact, maybe I'll do just that while my sister is at work tomorrow.

This has been a wonderful vacation.

Some people want tropical beaches or European cities, but I can't imagine anything better than this: laughing until I cry with my family, long hours of art making, and a national love letter to the postal system.