Feet, Hands

Today's drawings all seem to me to go with the rusty child form-- for their stiffness, their relation to bodies and body parts, their air of oldness and oddness and poignancy.  The two metal shoe lasts, one in child size and one in women's size, were used in shoe repair.  They functioned like a sort of anvil when slipped inside a shoe that needed heels or soles or heel caps replaced.  I use mine for studio weights, but I keep them on a window sill and enjoy their silhouettes with light coming in behind them.

On the right hand page are some hands:  I bought the mannequin hand at the top from a mannequin shop in the garment district in NYC.  It was an older model and priced to sell fast.  I could not tell it from the newer model, however;  the difference was too subtle for me to discern.  The two tiny hands were made by my friend Loy as part of an art installation.  They are impossibly small and perfectly articulated, made of bisque-fired porcelain clay, and they live on one of my bookshelf edges in a small matchbox.

Rusty Child Form Redux

I don't buy things at Tobacco Barn very often, but when I do I never regret it.  Yesterday I went back over there to check out some details on the child form, and I made a deal with myself that if there was a child form left, I would buy it.  It took a bit of searching in the increasingly chilly space (which is impossible to heat with its acre or so of space and three story high ceilings and perpetually open barn doors) but I found it!  And now it's sitting on the brick apron of the little fireplace in my studio, looking perfectly at home.  So I had a festival of drawing it, and it is way more complex than I thought after quick-sketching it at TB.

I still haven't got the proportions right.  It doesn't look child-shaped though, more like a miniature adult with wide shoulders and a pinched-in waist.  It's only about 3 1/2 feet high and has a white wooden knob where the head would be, maybe for hanging on a hat?

I experimented with different ways of attaching the girls to it, first just a uniform, then a couple of girls-attached-to-rusty-child-forms.  They look too tall, and I want to try again tomorrow, then do some layering, maybe draw the girls first and then trace the forms lightly over them, or just five forms with girl heads, lots of ideas.  I love the tag that says "rusty child form."

Ridge Top Patterns

It was too cold to stop and draw on Singe Cat Ridge yesterday, but we managed to bring down a bag of interesting finds, which I drew today in the warmth of the kitchen.  On the left is a tightly furled pine cone, variety unknown to me but unlike any pine cone I've seen at lower elevations.  These trees were stunted and distorted from the high winds that are so often blowing up there.  To me the landscape looked like a bonzai dish garden, trees covered with lichens and  twisted, and the cones as big and round as baseballs.  The patterns on the cones were perfect spirals yesterday when they were icy.  But this morning when I went to draw them, the heat of our house has relaxed them a bit and gaps were opening up between rows of scales.

On the right is a stripped cone, obviously discarded by a squirrel.  It looked like a corn cob after being eaten, with just a tuft of empty scales at one end.  I could see the squirrel holding it by the two ends and eating it.

On the left is a smaller cone that remained tightly packed all day today, and on the left is the first cone after seceral hours in the house, now with gaps between every row.

At the top is a large acorn that has been cleaned out by something, maybe a squirrel with very long teeth. At the bottom is a case from acorns from a cinquapin oak.  These acorn cases remind me of chestnut cases only softer, and the tree finder said the cinquapin oak was mostly destroyed by the early 20th century chestnut blight.  There are still a few of these around here apparently.

Patterns on Food

Standing in line at City Bakery this morning I couldn't help drawing the patterns that had been made across the tops of the loaves of bread.  Each kind of bread had its own pattern.  I just drew the patterns.  Then I looked below the bread into the desserts case and saw great swirly patterns on a key lime pie, drizzles of icing on top of some eclairs, and even specific patterns on the different kinds of croissants. I also threw in one cake pop that didn't actually have a pattern, but the same arrangement of swirls and sprinkles was on each one.   Someone was having fun in the bakery this morning!

We brought lunch from the bakery up to some friends at their house near Burnsville.  After we ate we helped them decorate some lebkuchen that they had made around the time we made ours but had never gotten around to decorating.  I drew three of my favorites.  Then we went for a couple-of-hours-long hike up along a ridge near the Parkway called Singe Cat Ridge.  I made a quick sketch of the ridge along which we trekked (at the top of the page).  It was very high up with some steep slopes falling away on either side of us.  The cold weather felt a lot warmer after we had been climbing for an hour or so.  We picked up some wonderfully patterned pine cones and cinquepin oak cases, which I am just too tired to draw tonight but will get to tomorrow.  Stay tuned.

Rusty Child Form

Yesterday at Tobacco Barn with Maya I saw one of my favorite odd things, a form that I believe was used when sewing clothing for children.  I've seen these things at TB before, strange wire and wood things that look like bird cages with legs that end in wooden shoes, like old-fashioned prosthetic devices, like topiary forms.  The tag says "rusty child form."

I've drawn the child forms a number of times.  They haunt me, along with the girls.  And the animal heads.  So there's nothing to do but meld the child forms, the girls, and the headdresses, and see where they take me.  I drew these in pencil and white gouache with a small bit of rust-colored watercolor.  There's a little bit of black pen on the first drawing.  The girls are from my kindergarten class picture.

Donkey! Sheep!

Driving to a meeting this morning I went the back way, which took me past a pasture on campus that I haven't seen in many months.  As I rounded a curve I saw what I thought were sheep!  We've never had sheep on the college farm before, and I was more excited than you would expect someone to be who lives in a rural area.  You have to remember that I grew up in New Orleans and never saw rural things until I went to Michigan one summer during college to work at a horse camp that was attached to a farm that had actual corn growing in fields.  I watched the corn all summer, but I never saw ears of corn develop.  One day I told another counselor that the corn crop looked like a failure because the things on top had never turned into corn ears.  After that the other counselors would take me for field trips in the evenings to see rural things:  asparagus patches, cows, sheep, chickens, cherry trees with cherries growing on them-- I felt like an alien on a new planet.  I've never gotten past the deprivations of my urban upbringing, and I still get ridiculously excited about rural things.

So you can imagine my added excitement when I spotted, far back in the field, a black horse-like thing with big un-horsey ears.  I decided to come back after the meeting and draw these animals.  In the afternoon I had Maya with me, and we pulled up to a driveway across from the sheep and horse-thing field.  Right away the not-horse came from deep in the field to visit with us.  It had enormous teeth and made a honking sound.

We decided it must be a donkey!  Maya called the donkey over to her so that it would keep its profile facing me and I could draw the drawing on the left.  A woman pulled up and told us the donkey's name is Salula.  I drew Salula twice head-on, and decided one of those girls from yesterday's drawing is going to have a donkey head dress.

The rest of the drawings are from my meeting notes from this morning's meeting.  The cat is Michelle's big ginger Jesse--lookalike.

 Below the cat are Sara's banana that never got eaten and my glasses, from which I am weaning myself.

On this page are Mike's book, Allison's Kleenex box, and a bunch of our cups, all pretty ceramic ones.

Drawings from Limbo

I'm starting out the new year in that interesting space between art projects where nothing has clarified yet or even suggested itself as a possible subject.  This situation used to make me very uncomfortable, and I still feel a little too eager to grab onto something, anything.  But I'm practicing staying with the uncomfortableness and watching with soft curiosity to see what presents itself.  In the meantime, this daily drawing is a great help.  Today I grabbed a little sculptural piece I did a few years ago and that I've translated into monotypes and prints already, even a book last year, but still don't feel 100% finished with.  I've played around with putting totem hats on the girls once before, but they didn't work out; and this morning these new hats seemed right.  Not sure what's going on, something about all the thoughts and stories in my head all the time?  The girl on the left is wearing a wizard's hat or a party hat;  Next to her a very busy, never-pausing pecking baby chick has taken over.  In the middle is a bunny-in-the-headlights, and next to her is a judgmental, hectoring hen.  On the right, a frightened lion.  The duck/ boat seems unperturbed, keeps floating along as though on a lagoon on a lazy afternoon.