duck duck GOOSE

When I came home from the hospital with my bouncing baby boy so many years ago, I found a bottle of cold duck in my fridge –a gift from my mother.  Not champagne.  Cold Duck.  This particular variety was a blend of port & champagne.  I never asked her why, and I’ve never had it since.  But, after a pregnancy free from alcohol for both myself and my husband, it only took a glass a piece to make us a little giddy and able to let go of the fears and stress of being a new parent, if only for an hour or so.  It is a fond, silly memory that I treasure.  When I came across this work of today’s AAAD Artist of the Day, Vivienne Strauss, it put a smile on my face.  The perfect complement. (continues below)

A self-taught painter with a background in Philosophy, Vivienne Strauss works predominately in oil and watercolor. Her paintings often migrating around the humor of being human – shared dejection, things left unsaid, false arrogance, disbelief, inspired irony. She is an observer and chronicler, in the actual world in which she exists and in the world of characters she creates, exposing, with precise wit, the subterranean elements lying in wait beneath the deceptively quotidian.