Amanda Dunbar

How the sausage is made 🎨

What do you do when you’re waiting for a baby to be born? Clearly, it’s time to teach yourself a new skill to keep your mind occupied. (🤦‍♀️)

So, I decided to learn to sew bags, and made myself a new hospital duffel and matching cosmetics bag. Whaddya think?

Progress on my !

Headway is being made on my ! I decided to hand quilt the whole thing, mostly because I wanted to keep changing thread colors as I go. There is also something incredibly meditative about sitting for a few minutes and hand stitching something with love and intention at the end of the day. (And frankly, machine quilting stresses me out. )

Happy Father’s Day, everyone!

On one of the final days of my "post a painting a day for the month of May" to celebrate , I thought I would post a painting from my private collection, "After Michelangelo, the Pieta" (2006, oil on canvas, 60"x 48"). This one is sort of "the ultimate mother," wouldn't you say? I am not Catholic, but I am an art historian, and the first time I got to see Michelangelo's masterpiece in St. Peter's it was a downright religious experience. I was there studying abroad for the summer, and the task of the day for my drawing class was to choose a sculpture in St. Peter's and to do a sketch. Being down for a challenge, of course, I chose *the* sculpture of St. Peter's. Anyone who has had the privilege of visiting knows how hard it is to get in front of this sculpture for any length of time, but somehow, it ended up just being me and the Pieta for almost an hour. The guards offered me a reverent protection from curious tourists who wanted to take photos of me drawing, and in that hour, I felt I learned more about Michelangelo than I ever could from any textbook. It was truly a remarkable experience, and so I brought those sketches home and made a full length painting from them. It is still a memory that gives me goosebumps.