A new item from Allan

Doesn't he do beautiful work? Okay, I'm biased, being his wife and all, but I love how well he creates a sense of dimension on these calla lilies. There's even a sense of the slightly fleshy texture of the flowers--my parents have a huge bed of calla lilies outside their house and I used to play with them as a child.
Actually, when I was about 5, one of my favorite games to play by myself was "magic potions", which was basically inventing ways to process substances and imagine what a mixture of them, with the right spell, could do. The calla lilies were one of my favorite things to work with because of the interesting textures within them.

and here's a little poem I wrote about a form of "magic potion" that I have long been skeptical of:



The masquerade begins.
Glimmering promises of beauty
In colors bright or shy,
Perfectly matched,
Tantalize the eye.
Photographs like romantic dreams
Gaze at you,
Or romp through sunlit fields.
Like a gypsy tune,
The call of magic,
Your youth recaptured,
Your wishes fulfilled,
Sing the ads,
The catalogs
Of a billion-dollar industry:
Cosmetics.