My mom is an artist - a really good one! You've met her before - she was the 83-year old lady zip-lining through the rain forest in Costa Rica last March with us!
She has been drawing or painting and creating as long as I can remember, and she starting taking oil painting classes at least 25 years ago. The Senior Center in her town has several excellent classes and the teachers are professionals. She started with light houses they had visited and little English cottages and has grown in skill and widened her scope to encompass pretty much anything that takes her fancy! 
A year ago she was invited to do a month-long 1-woman art show in the Center's art gallery and she got busy preparing for it. The opening reception was Oct 5th and the show has received great reviews! Hubby and I and went down to help her set up all the food for the reception and a lot of people came and ate and oo'd and ah'd over all the artwork! It was a lot of fun and a great success! (The only bad part of this was my total lack of thinking ahead that I may want to use these photos I took - they are not at great angels or in perfect lighting, but you get the idea!!)
I'm really proud of her - at an age when a lot of folks just sort of curl up and wait to die, she is excited about her life and about truly living every day of it. She is a widow now, and although she misses daddy every day, she doesn't want to miss anything that might be new and interesting. He didn't want her to stop living life just because he wouldn't be there to share it with her.I'm proud to say she is my mom!
