2011 Bear and Bird business card is off to the printer!

Beautiful painting by Tatiana Suarez, local Miami gal moved on to NYC!

Hello anyone and everyone who actually looks at my all too rarely updated blog! As some of you may know, I had a beautiful baby girl last May (born on my birthday May 20!) who is taking up quite a bit of my free time, not that I really had any to spare! I can't really blame her sweetness anyway, since I was too rarely updating this blog even before she was born! lol!

Anyway... blah blah blah, I resolve to make this better. It is such a useful tool to share with you all and it gets neglected.

I just sent the 2011 Bear and Bird business card off to overnightprints.com - they are pricey, but do such a great job! Free spot UV looks gorgeous and you can get rounded corners (totally not free). Rounded corners = baby safety...! Just kidding, I like them since they look purty. Every year since we started (this is going to be our fifth anniversary!) I've created a yearly card using some "Bear and Bird" artwork. I'll have to dig up the older ones to share here as well.

Photo by her equally talented man, David Iglesias.

This year's artwork is by Tatiana Suarez, who participated in our very first art exhibition back in February 2007! I loved her piece then and knew she was something special. It has been really quite amazing (though not surprising) to see her work blossom and develop more and more all the time. A Miami native, sweet & lovely Tati moved to New York over a year ago and she is missed! She has come back for the past two years and done really impressive murals for Primary Flight in Miami's Wynwood art district and has been showing steadily in galleries around the country!

The painting she did for me is extra specially special since it was commissioned as a birthday gift for me from my husband Tate. Tati was in the midst of doing a mess of paintings for an upcoming solo show, so she did a sketch of the piece for Tate to give to me as sneak peek of what was to come.

The night before my birthday, Tate and I plus a group of friends went down to Miami to hear our friends from Primary Flight speak at the MOCA - we then went out to an early birthday dinner at Michael's Genuine, which was fun and really yummy even though being REALLY pregnant it was hard to maneuver around the tight space and I had to pee a heck of a lot! :-p My favorite part was the petit fours for dessert... too delicious. Happy birthday was sung and we all said goodnight... driving home from Miami (about a 30 minute drive) the clock struck midnight and Tate turned to me and said "Happy Birthday!!!" --- literally at 12:01am my water broke. Insanity! I figure this kid always heard me say a million times that she was going to be born on my birthday and once she heard her cue... BAM! She was about 5 days early based on the estimated date of arrival. So we went home and packed and before we left for the hospital Tate presented me with the beautiful sketch you see here, with the promise of a painting to come. <3 I loved it right away.

After Rosemary Jane was born and we came home I emailed Tati and asked her to add a bit of rosemary to the painting to represent... well, you know! The painting came out beautifully, as you can see for yourself and represents such a beautiful change of things to come. We have a great lineup of exhibitions in 2011, I'm looking forward to experiencing them all - hopefully with YOU too!!

New business cards should be in before the new year, please come by and add one to your collection and mark your calendars now for our 2011 shows! :-)

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! xoxoxo Thank you for your support and patronage!

Rosemary Jane with Santa last week. She's 6 1/2 months old here! So sweet.