Filming with Chicago Tonight

If you've never checked out the Plein Air Painters of Chicago's artwork, geesh, you must only be looking at the pictures on this blog.

Great news, Chicago Tonight is doing a little story on us! It airs on Tuesday, May 20th at 7pm. It will be during an art segment somewhere in the show. They did interview me but there's no guarantee they will use the footage.

The founder of the PAPC, Scott Tallman-Powers (that's us in the photo) even took time from his busy jet-set artsy lifestyle to come out and join us once again. This is the first time I met him in the 9 months I've been painting with the PAPC. He's a great guy and kick butt painter. He had some great critique info. I wish he was around more often. I know many do. Check out his stuff, it's phenomenal! Wow.

OK, back to being on TV. I'd like to brag that I worked my booty off trying to get CT to come out to film us. I got extremely lucky. My friend, Stephanie Zimmerman, aka The SunTimes' columnist "The fixer" gave me the number of a producer at the show that she knew and I took it from there. Five snaps up Steph! You rock. I put together some slick marketing info from some of the 50+ artists in our group and pitched my best fastball. It went before a committee at CT and we were accepted. I thought that would be the hardest part of all this. The hard part was trying to accommodate so many moving parts -- being the artist's schedules. We set dates and times, got canceled last minute once and rescheduled another (on our end) and finally hit a grand slam by filming yesterday in the blazing, glorious day!

Chicago Tonight correspondent, Eddie Arruza, and cameraman, Roy, joined us on a special paint out at Wicker Park on Tues, May 6. What a gorgeous summer day it turned out to be. I even got a little sunburned. We had plenty of our "painting rockstars" come out on a school day - many took off from work or just plain ol' called in sick. Gotta love artists. Nothing like giving your boss the hi-ho (I was going to say "the finger") and spending a summery, sunny day in the park. Trees and flowers were in full bloom and the water fountain was fountaining.

I got caught up in some administrative tasks but did get to paint a little. I had to calm myself down. Things can go wrong really fast with so many people and civic organizations.

Overall this was a momentous occasion for our humble group of painters. I hope you will tune in to see the segment! Better yet, be sure to buy up some paintings while you can still afford them! Chicago Tonight on WTTW (PBS) May 20, 2008 7pm. I'm the hot blonde who isn't painting.