This will be my final blog of the year 2024.

Last month I announced that I finished all thirty-six chapters of the rough draft of my book and placed them in the capable hands of my editor, Dorion Sagan. Every serious and competent writer should have not just a serious and competent editor but someone who understands and even intuits what the writer intends to say, and helps the writer say it even better.

In putting together the book, it became quite clear that I had two major mentors early in my life: my uncle, Philip Kaplan, and later Jane Kastner, Education Curator at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum.

am thrilled to announce that not only have I finished the last chapter of the rough draft of my book, but that I have found the best of all possible editors: Dorion Sagan, a gifted science writer and the son of Lynn Margulis and co-author on many of her books.

Electric Beings is about energy, especially electromagnetic energy (e.g., light and colors) and thermal energy (heat).  There’s no doubt today that the nervous system runs on electricity.

STEM curriculum becomes STEAM: Science, Technology , Engineering, ART and Math. Fifty years after the Alvarado Arts Workshop, it was time for me to be involved again as an artist in the schools, this time bringing art into a Developmental Biology classsroom.

A trip to San Francisco brings back memories of the 1970s and working as an artist in the schools and community.

Two new exhibits: ScienceWorksMuseum and Belle Fiore Winery. And a new video animation from the Oregon Fringe Festival.

Mother’s Day in Rome: the feminist collective Lotta Femminista stages a large exhibition in popular Piazza Navona next to Bernini’s Four RIvers fountain. The exhibit showed how women are depicted in advertising and in the real world.

I am honored that The Center for Humans and Nature has published an article about my work in its latest issue. The article is titled Life in the Cosmos: Micro and Macro and features some of my favorite paintings. The Center’s mission is to “explore and promote human responsibilities in relation to nature — the whole community of life.”

Upon reaching my 80th birthday last year, I embarked on my Legacy Project with the goal of producing a book containing my favorite and most important works with related writings: blogs, autobiographical stories, philosophical musings, and why the arts are essential for human well-being.

The last part of my pilgrimage took me to Bilbao, then Rotterdam, and finally to Amsterdam.

While visiting Liceo Scientifico Leonardo da Vinci in November 2023, two of the school’s lively young journalists interviewed me. Click on the magazine’s banner to read what they wrote.

In the film La Vacanza, the script called for a Countess. The film director enlisted me to play the Contessa Americana alongside the protagonists played by Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero.

This painting is an allegory that tells a story: the Ancient Egyptian Goddess of the Sky, Nut, forms a protective arch over the 17th century woman astronomer who is gazing at Saturn through an early telescope. She is Galileo’s daughter, the Catholic nun Suor Celeste, whose name in Italian means Sister Sky.

Each year the Community Church of Boston hosts a memorial ceremony in honor of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants who were wrongfully executed by the State of Massachusetts in 1927.

“We must stay, open-eyed, in the terrible place…” from May Sarton’s poem “The Invocation to Kali”