Saggy Soul

To me absolutely nothing is better than coming across something totally unexpected in the woods.  M and I were happily clopping along the trails in the woods near Dam Pasture when what should we see but an old rusty black paint bucket turned upside down on a post with a strange little painting on the side.  It looked at first like drips of whitewash.  When we turned the can upside down we were able to read letters:  SAGGY SOUL, and the little runic figure resolved into a ghost or a small woman.  A fantastic find, which we left exactly as we found it.  It looked like a petroglyph in many ways.

Silent Duck Grooming

I went for a long walk this morning.  My plan was to  stop at each mile and do a drawing of whatever showed up to be drawn, take a little break.  But then I missed the signal on Map My Walk when the first two miles were up, so I didn't do any drawing until I checked and saw I had gone 2.5 miles without a break.  It was beautiful along the river, and at the 2.5 mile place there was a silent group of ducks busily grooming themselves while floating in the water.  A large tree was down and crossing the river just upstream, and the water was very smooth and unruffled in the ducky place.  I threw out my plan and drew ducks in all their grooming attitudes.  These ducks were mostly white.  It was so quiet I could hear the soft splashy noises they would make from time to time.  To clear up my eyes I drew the smallest interesting things I could find nearby:  a leaf hopper on a spike stem of river cane and some shriveled up berries.

More Difficult to Draw Than Hands: Jesse's Jack

Jesse's favorite toy these days is a kind of poisonous  blue rubbery plastic jack, a little larger than a metal jack.  The other day Neenah commented that hands are hard to draw.  Well, to me, this jack is harder to draw than a hand! I thought it would get easier and snap into good proportions if I drew it over and over.  It didn't.  Maybe I need to add some more dark colors to the darker blue shadowy parts.  I've stepped on the thing a million times.  Jesse never seems to get tired of throwing it up into the air and batting it around.  Sometimes he carries it in his lips into another room and hides it from himself under a chair, then pounces.

Mummified Insects from the Tomb in Our Sunny Front Window

Today I found a little cache of mummified insects-- several stink bugs, a tiny wasp-like creature, a pretty little moth, and a few lady bugs--in the space between the screen and the parting stop of the bottom sash of our bedroom window.  The sun beams in this window all afternoon, and these guys are crispy and bleached, but still beautifully articulated and detailed.  I'm thinking I might collect them in a tiny jar and pack them in the mummy's outer tomb.

Chicken Yard Dance

A and I took a 4 mile walk at midday today, and the chicken yard provided a nice excuse for us to stop and enjoy the dappled shade under a chestnut tree while we sketched chickens.  These chicken drawings are all basically gesture drawings as no chicken ever stayed still for more than a second or two.  On bottom right a rooster has jumped on top of a hen, and even that only lasted 3 seconds.

More of the same.

After the  break we headed up along the trail by the pond to the meditation hut, shown in partial view above left.  Great walk, but we are looking forward to cooler weather!

Long Day, Short Post

Here's Maya showing me how to blow on a flute.  She will be learning how to play a flute in the sixth grade band this year.

Good Greeney Things to Look At

Continuing on the theme of good things to look at, at top left is one of F's eternally green figs.  Her fig tree is laden with healthy green leaves, bursting with plump little figs;  but sadly, not a single fig has started to ripen.  Today we dissected one of the greenies in hopes that it was simply a green variety and that the inside would be lusciously purply ripe.  No such luck.  it was tough as old leather to cut open, and the inside was white-cream-pale green and filled with dry immature seeds.

The little clay head of a pre-Columbian figure had a hole drilled in its forehead, probably started life as a bead.  I don't remember its provenance, but I still love to look at it.  It has sat on the back mantelpiece for years and years.

The green pre-Columbian man wearing the crocheted hat came from the museum store at the Knoxville Museum of Art.  It reminds me of many similar clay figures in the Meso-American Native Peoples rooms in my favorite museums.  The crocheted hat, which appears by itself on the right, was made by my friend Ann's mother when she was in her 80s.  Ann and I had asked her to make us thirty or so tiny hats and scarves for an intervention we had planned for a collection of amateurishly taxidermied birds that were housed in ancient, neglected cases in the humanities building at the college where we were teaching.  Ruth happily made our hats and scarves, and after Ann and I had completed our installation, I slipped one of the extras into my pocket and put it on pre-Columbian man's head, where it has rested for the past dozen years or so.