Endless Pods, Seeds, and One Sleepy Cat

 Oh when will these seed drawings end??  Every day I decide to draw something else, but then I find myself with a pocket full of great seeds that cannot be resisted.  At least today F's cat Montana got herself drawn, such a great still cat who sleeps with her head upright and never moves while I'm drawing!  The astonishing seeds are rose hips from, I believe, knockout roses;  dehiscent pods from a euonymous (sp??) bush, so fluorescent pink and orange that they look like cupcakes that you would buy from Sam's Club;  and a flat, maroon pod from a purple version of a scarlet runner vine.

Above is a gondola-like scarlet runner bean pod, emptied out and with the three beans that were inside lined up beneath.

Crazy Hair

Everybody loves my grandson N's crazy blond hair.  He looks like The Little Prince with his flaming hair ablaze all the time.   I have never seen it combed or plastered down ever.  Here are two sketches done from photos of him.

Tonight P and I arrived at a restaurant in pouring rain.  P had on a hooded rain jacket, and when he pulled the hood off and sat down his hair looked like N's.  N looks a lot like P anyway, but P's hair is usually all combed and spiffed up.  I like it like N's, crazy and wild!  So here's a drawing of P, reading the menu and then chomping on chips and salsa, with his crazy hair.  I had to draw super fast as he was NOT posing for these;  hence they're (all four) only approximations of the people, but the hair is right for sure.

Little Seeds Magnified

J and I went for a short time to the bird sanctuary this afternoon, and I collected some of the many seed heads in the pollinators' meadow.  The biggest surprise was the pokeweed plant, which had, in addition to the usual glistening purple berries, the seed heads that form from the berries.  They look like miniature blackish-gray truck tires (see drawing 3239, top left).  I don't know the names of the other plants from which these seeds came.  They were all in the stage of dispersing seeds, though, and fascinating in their geometry and clever trap doors and dehiscent seams.  At top right is a print from an eraser carving that I made of one of last week's buckeyes in its case.  It's pretty flat compared to the drawing, looks more like a stack of pancakes with a pool of butter melting on it.

And here's a print from a carving that I made of that little moon from Chiusi Citta, chiesa di San Francesco.  Love it so much with its sneer and its droopy eyelids!

Curious Seedless Persimmon and Other Saturday Things

So after learning last week that persimmon seeds are used by some people to forecast the winter weather, I went to Whole Foods in search of some persimmons of my own to see what the seeds look like.  This morning Maya and I cut both of the two persimmons in half, and found exactly nothing---  seedless persimmons!  They did have eight grooves arranged in a nice pattern around the whitish centers, but not a single seed.  Apparently there are seedless persimmons just like seedless grapes and seedless watermelons.  Is this a GMO thing?

After our failed seed exploration, we did some drawing and rubber eraser carving, making a sheep logo to put on the tags we're making for our teething sheep.  We've decided to call our little teething toys project Chompos.   Maya drew and carved and printed this one. 

At the bottom left of the sheep page is an opened pod from Japanese iris;  and next to that is a armed goddess figure, this one African and made of bronze.  It hangs from a bead necklace that I bought at the NO Jazz Fest from an African booth, probably in the early 80s one time when we went back for Jazz Fest.

More Armless and Two Powerful Ones

Here are two more blobby little kiln goddesses from the armless posse, one based on the stiff white [death] goddess and one sort of Venus of Willendorfish.  This second one actually has two slashes across the tops of the breasts for arms, but no legs and no features on the face or even a real face.  

These bottom two are voudou pacquets, power figures based on African and Haitian ones that are in the Brooklyn Museum as well as the Met.  I made them along with a few others a few years ago and keep these two and one other in a ceramic boat that I also made.  I love these figures.  I had never made anything like them before, although I was born on a tiny street near the banks of Bayou St. John in New Orleans and grew up a few blocks away, also near the bayou.  That bayou was a place where voudou rites were held, and it was also an escape route for slaves in earlier days.  My own French Catholic grandmother sprinkled holy water every night while facing north, south, east, and west so that all family members were protected no matter which direction they lived in.  I can remember being splashed with water when I spent the night with her while my grandfather was away on a business trip.  I had no idea what she was doing, but she walked over to a window and said prayers and sprinkled holy water while I peeked out from under the covers.  Then she paraded to other windows to do the other directions.  She kept her holy water on an alter in the bedroom.  I think she would have liked these pacquets.  They're filled with stones, bones, other materials. 

Armless

I have a large collection of armless goddesses.  They aren't actually a collection, but more of a posse that has gathered over the years on a shelf in my studio.  What's the deal with armless goddesses?  Only one of these is a reproduction of an older figure, the one on the right which is a Cycladic stiff white goddess reproduction.  The others I either found abandoned in studios or I made over the years.  Tomorrow:  more armless women.  What are they saying?? Why do I like them so much?

Seeds Redux

Today and yesterday were seed days again.  I'm working on a print with a seed theme and was trying to make a drawing that was in black and white, no grays, so that I could carve it as part of my big woodblock.  I started with the buckeye in its case at top left, but that one depends to much on some shades of gray and very fine texturing.  Then I redrew it using blacks and whites only with a few dots (which should be easy to do), and I think it works fine.  So tomorrow I'll take my sketchbook to the xeroxery at the UPS store and enlarge it and transfer it to the woodblock.

Then I copied a drawing of the moon that I had drawn six summers ago in Chiusi Citta in Italy, a small fresco in the chiesa di San Francesco, dating from the middle of the 16th century.  I love this little moon, which carries its phases sort of like a head scarf in folds around its face.  It reminds me of the buckeye in its case, so I plan to add it to the woodcut diagonally from the buckeye in the composition.

At the bottom are a few nuts that are lying around on the porch table.  The half shell at bottom right was thoroughly cleaned out by a tiny animal, maybe a chipmunk.

Today I went to my critique group this afternoon and did these drawings.  First is a vase of dahlias, then my friend A's lovely pendant of a beaten metal heart with a window out of which peeks a copper face.  At the bottom is my friend M's okra book, a journal sketchbook okra garden record that she is turning into an artists' book for the upcoming seed show in Barcelona.  And on the right, a dahlia bud.