nerd’s eye view

Artists with Big Hearts

December 9, 2008 – 11:46 am | by nerd's eye view

When I was a bit less webby, a bit more analog, I made a lot more art. You may not know it because of my nerd cred, but I went to art school. Sure, I make my living in the land of digital, but the visual is where I come from. Mostly, I do photo work and write, but I was a painter, through and through, until my decision to buy a home made me give up my studio space. I messed around with collage work at the kitchen table in the foreign office a few years back, but my hands have been close to clean for an embarrassing amount of time now. I do have studio space at our new house and some day, I’ll get it set up for painting again. I’m looking forward to that.

There’s a lot of great travel stuff in the raffle prizes for Passports with Purpose, but there’s artwork too and, in a nod to these friends of my former self, I wanted to highlight the artist contributors.

Artist, writer, photographer Lola Akinmade offered up one of her pastel paintings. It’s bright, it’s lively, and full of color. The piece that’s in the raffle is here – she’s shipping to North America ONLY (Canada, US, Mexico) so heads up on that. If you’re curious, you can see more of her work here. I love that in addition to the amazing stuff Lola does as a traveler, she’s a painter too – it gives me hope that I’ll get back to it some day.

Lia Hadley does goregous photocollage work and she’s giving away five sets of her images as postcards as part of the raffle. She sent me a set when I blogged about postcard revival and while I know I should send them out into the world, I’m still keeping them for myself.  She’ll send them wherever you want  – and yes, that means to five different addresses, if you choose. There’s more about Lia’s prize here.

Over the past week, we’ve added a bunch of new prizes to the list – we had some latecomers and folks we did not want to turn away, so if you bought raffle tickets a week ago, you might want to do so again. And if you’re still trying to decide what to pitch in for, think about some artwork. Stuff that’s made by hand, stuff that helps you see the world through the eyes of others – that’s good inspiration for travel.

You can buy raffle tickets for Passports with Purpose until December 29th. The prizes are listed here. Yes, if you want, you can just make a donation. The donation site is here. And you know what’s amazing? If you Google for “Passports with Purpose” (use the quotes), you’ll find all kinds of stuff about us, in places like Wend Magazine, The Perrin Post, Intelligent Travel, Vagablogging, and so much more.