Metal Animals and Garrison Keillor

It was a day of miracles and wonders in a way.  This morning at the acupuncture clinic I noticed for the first time a beautiful bronze sculpture of a crane standing on a tortoise's back.  I whipped out my sketchbook and settled in to draw, but halfway through they called my name and I had to finish from the legs down from memory.  I am NOT good at drawing from memory, but somehow this time I was pretty good at doing it.

Then this evening P and I went to a Thai restaurant downtown for dinner and I noticed high up in a wall niche by our booth an odd metal incense burner shaped like a foreshortened horse.  I had only a few minutes to roughly sketch it and had to finish it from memory tonight.

 From dinner we walked over to the civic center to see Garrison Keillor on stage.  Our son D and his family had given us tickets for xmas.  We found out that our seats were in the orchestra section, so we followed a line of people who were better dressed than we were and sat down in very wonderful seats, close to the stage and a little off to the left.  Drawing 4181 shows the view from my seat of the stage as it was set up with two benches and a microphone in the middle.  Soon some people came into our row and told us we were in their seats.  We checked our tickets and it seemed we were in the right seats, but that the other people had been sold tickets for the same seats.  So we found an usher who looked at our tickets and said the other people were right, these were their seats;  ours were actually in the orchestra center.  Amazing.  This felt like being bumped to business class.  Drawing 4282 shows the view from our close-to-front-row center seats.

Garrison Keillor was brilliant and wonderfully funny.  He held the audience for nearly two hours by himself, talking casually, sort of like a prolonged News from Lake Wobegon.  I so wanted to draw him but it was too dark to draw.  So as soon as we got home I drew him from memory.  I think it's no longer hopeless for me to draw from memory!