Sunday Brunch at Blue Lemon with @PaintDeez and @Balbert3, Artistic ubuntu

Artist Gordon Skinner has a piece, John Lennon - Picasso Style ("As a Garbage Pail Kid," featured at Blue Lemon in Westport, Connecticut. Blue Lemmon is a restaurant with a fondness for up and coming artists in southern Connecticut and a tremendous supporter of the Beechwood Arts community. Yesterday, the restaurant hosted a delicious brunch where Beauty Makinta, Lynn Winslow (summer instructor for the ISI) and I met with Alisha Smith of Gear Up and her boyfriend, Howard. We sat with Gordon, his friends and family, and Bob Albert. Gordon, although nervous about public speaking, did a phenomenal job.

Skinner's been actively working on a new collection and although he has another show in Brooklyn in a couple of weeks, he's hoping to move his latest pieces into galleries as early as October. Jeanine Esposito, the coordinator of the brunch and organizer of Beechwood Arts displayed at Blue Lemon, described Gordon's work as highly original. "It's different, alive, and captures everyone's attention. It speaks and wants to narrate its story. You keep wanting to come back to look at the layers again and again."

Lynn, who is working with teachers this summer, asked Gordon if he'd be willing to do an art/writing workshop with young writers this summer and I'm hoping he will agree. His talents will surely inspire creativity with the adolescents we are working with.

And as Beauty and I drove away, she laughed to herself, "Ubuntu." I asked her to explain.

She stated all the people gathered for Gordon's celebration of artwork today were connected by a community of like-minded individuals. "It's Ubuntu," she explained and I love that she lives by this philosophy, too.