Totem Animals and Charlottes; BPAC Meeting Notes

Here are totem animals and Charlottes from last night.  I'm liking the way the charlottes wear their totem animal heads.

All the charlottes basically look alike;  so it's interesting to give them different animals based on their subtle differences.  On the right above are meeting notes from tonight's Book and Print Arts Collective meeting.  One of the members was teaching us how to spin shifu paper thread (with secret messages embedded).

This secret message business appeals very much to me.  I have made the thread before but tonight we talked about actually sending someone a message and having them unweave and unspin to reconstruct the message.  

Floodscapes, Ominous Light

 Walking along the recently flooded west River Trail late this afternoon I am most interested in the shapes, shadows, and light as they shift and reconfigure constantly.  There seem to me to be three colors-- ochre for the dead grasses, Payne's grey for medium shadows, and blackish green for the deep shadows and looming clouds

I sketch the four squashed-together scenes while walking past and through them;  the two on the bottom require a pause along the trail.  It is very dramatic with the light, the sky, the shadows, and the rain-swollen river racing past.  A new trail has been deposited on top of the old one in places:  whole deposits of brown leaves have been washed away and in their place is now river sand.  The trail-side vegetation (grass and wild onions mostly) is bent almost flat in places and looks like hair with comb tracks.

A Pocketful of Seeds

I know the pod on top is from an agave plant, and the three triangular seeds fell from that pod.  The others are mysteries that somehow ended up in my coat pocket and survived the trip home, where they ended up on my drawing table.  Not the most exciting post , I know, but as usual, a great joy to look at and draw.

In Which Kate Poses, Grooms, Smiles, Yawns

Kate is D and H's small mop-like dog.  She's a cute dog, but she has a sharp, piercing bark when she wants attention.  I'm not completely comfortable around dogs, but I've grown to really like Kate.  I can scratch her tiny pointy head and she doesn't try to bite like Jesse does;  I can pick her up and she squirms and scrabbles but never scratches.  As a non-dog-fan I'm clueless about breeds of dogs, and I'm not even good at recognizing dogs.  Today Kate and I were alone in the house for a while, so I decided to really look at her, and the best way for me to do that is to draw her.  At first she looked like a mop head.

 Then she fell asleep, and I had the chance to really study her.  I noticed that her long wavy fur parts into little sections over her ears.  When she woke up she stared at me for a few seconds and I was able to sketch her face with my eyes and I noticed her straight, shelf-like bangs that D cut the other night while we were visiting.  I also saw her collar pendant.

When she started grooming, she looked like Jesse only a bit less elegant.  Jesse stretches out his rear leg like the yogi that he is;  but Kate kind of buries her head over her stubby little back leg with her other three legs splayed out.  She looked up and smiled, and that is something Jesse has never done.  Finally she unhinged her jaw and made a tremendous yawn, baring her overshot lower front teeth.  The last and only other time that I drew Kate she was wearing her wedding dress and dancing with L.  She was all mine today, and I really enjoyed seeing her.

Preliminary

I made these little stuffed dolls a few years ago to go in a boat for a show in which the curator wanted the work to be done in an unfamiliar medium.  For me at that time, working in three dimensions was new.   Now I'm starting a collaboration with a friend across the world, and these little dolls with their totem animals on their backs may be the seed to something new and unfamiliar.

Paperwhites: Antique Marbles

It's that paperweight time of year, but this year's single bulb is slow to do anything.  It has been sitting for over a week in its little pot of daily-misted soil.  I think these things do better in a shallow bed of stones and water.

I love these old marbles from an antique store in Goshen, Indiana.  They're made of some kind of rough ceramic and look like miniature globes.

Garbage Night Painting

Tonight is going to be our weekly garbage night, and in preparation I was pulling some past-the-eat-by-date fruit out of the fridge.  It made me think of the creepily lush17th century Dutch still life paintings of decaying food.  According to Simon Schama in his wondrous book The Embarrassment of Riches, these paintings, called desegregation (unfortunately this keyboard has no accent marks for the e's) or "coming apart,"  are meditations on the constant flux and movement of life even in death.  So here are two limes on their way to turning back into soil and then into some other plant and four grapes on their way to fermenting in the compost heap and turning into the insects that get a little drunk on their winey juice----