I found inspiration in Panama!

It has been a long time since I have posted because I was vacationing in Panama with my family. My adorable mother-in-law lives down there so the entire family went down to visit and to help her celebrate her 90th birthday. No, that is not a typo. She really is 90. She is an amazing woman and I was so happy to be able to bring the kids to her home to visit.
I love traveling outside of the United States. I always find inspiration for my art in the colors and patterns of different cultures. My baby brought home a nasty case of salmonella, but I brought home pieces of local folk art. These are molas. They are made by the Kuna Indians who live on the San Blas Islands of Panama. They are a relatively new art form that was inspired by ancient tribal body painting. They were originally used on the blouses of the women as part of the traditional tribal costume. Now, you can find just about anything made out of molas when you are in Panama. Most of the larger ones have complex geometric patterns, but they also use many motifs inspired by nature.

I bought a ton of these small ones to use in my work. I thought it would be fun to crochet beach bags and attach a molas to the front. My baby loves to look at them, so I thought it might also be fun to make quiet activity books for babies out of them.

I'm not sure what I will do with them yet, but I'm sure it will be fabulous. I will post pictures of my finished projects.

This is the place where I purchased most of the molas. This is Panama Viejo, which is a historic site which has a lot of ruins from the 1600's. There is a huge gift shop where local artisans sell their goods to tourists like me. I bought my molas from a Kuna woman who had a little shop there.

I was also inspired by the bright colors that are found everywhere in Panama. We were walking around my mother-in-laws neighborhood and Katie announced that she wants us to paint our house lime green with a purple fence. I don't know if I will go that far, but in my neighborhood, every house is a different shade of beige. I do think that we need to bring color back into American culture!

I loved the public transportation! OK, so I didn't like riding it so much, but I loved to look at the different buses. Each bus was painted with a different colorful mural. It was art for the sake of art. The buses here have murals too, but they are all advertisements for sports teams or plastic surgeons.

My last thoughts on Panama: I am happy to have had the opportunity to visit, but I am happy to be home. When I travel to a developing country, I realize how fortunate I am to have been born in America and to have never know the poverty that so many of the people in Panama live with every day. Now I am off to my studio (aka Raymond's dream TV room that looks like a yarn factory explosion) to create!