Shadowing Jesse

Jesse was sitting on a cushion on the window seat with his tail perfectly arranged and his best 3/4 angle facing me.  He was shaped just like a meatloaf.

Suddenly he stretched up and glanced out of the window, lost interst almost immediately, and trotted off to the kitchen.  here he is eating a snack out of his triple-decker ant-proof bowl fashioned by P out of our old good china dishes and Jesse'[s stainless steel normal cat bowl.  It DOES keep the ants at bay.

Next he went into my studio and hopped up on the ink slab on the printing table, a favorite spot of his, especially when there's a print to sit on, as in drawing 1339.  This is him in his stalking position.  He held it for a few minutes, staring at some insect on the floor near the ailing Meyer lemon tree.

Then he relaxed down and tucked his paw in and went to sleep.  I made a noise and he opened his eyes, then went right back to sleep.

Some of the Heart Collection

Below are two heart milagros, one from Italy on the left and a Mexican one on the right. Both are made of metal but in entirely different styles.  The Italian one is old, from an antique store.  The Mexican one looks new, but I don't know anything about it except that it has a little tag on the back that says it was made in Mexico.  Both hearts resemble chili peppers with their lopsided, rounded shapes.

The three hearts above are not milagros.  The two little ones are made of metal.  The one on the left always makes me think of the fairy tale of the tin soldier who gets thrown in a fire and nothing is left after he burns up except a metal heart.  I don't remember the whole story, but for as long as I can remember I have held a picture in my mind of that lumpy little metal heart, and this one reminds me of it.  The one on the right has a tiny woman holding some odd objects in her hands that look something like sparklers (although that doesn't make sense).  The big one at the bottom is a lovely lebkuchen that our lebkuchen-making friends mailed to us and that arrived today in a small cardboard box along with a poem and a drawing-- a Solstice/NewYear's/Bruce's Birthday celebration card.  Beautiful!  Decorated with pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, and home-made candied orange peel.

Milagros

 The elderly-looking Baby Jesus on the left is what you would call a milagro in Spanish, but I found it in Venice a dozen years ago, and I don't know the Italian word for such objects.  It's about 7 inches tall and very beautifully made of metal that has tarnished so that it looks like silver (which I doubt that it is).  I had just come from spending two weeks in a villa in Tuscany that had one of these attached to a wooden and glass cabinet in the kitchen, and when I saw its twin in a little flea marketey shop in Venice I bought it right away.  I took it home and nailed it up over the window over our sink in the kitchen, and there it still lives today, grinning down at me as I toil away on My Night to Cook.

As I was looking at the stiff Baby Jesus in his metal-- child form?-- I made a connection between swaddling clothes and Rusty Metal Child Forms:  and so I drew, once again, the child form and put a girl's head on it in the same position as the BJ's head.

Following the theme of milagros, I drew four others that I own.  I've seen milagros in Ireland at shrines and in Italy in churches, and even in Quebec in a shrine.  I have a small collection of metal heart milagros from Italy.  But these drawn here are very small and look like some Mexican ones that a friend in San Antonio once sent me.  The woman kneeling looks like she has a humped back, a popular milagro that is used to ask for help with back troubles.  Then there is the heart for asking for help with heart trouble (or maybe for a softening of the heart?), and then a child-like face with no obvious problem.  I guess it could be a general help with head or face issues.  The eyes and nose are pretty obvious.  I once visited an eye well in County Clare, Ireland, and saw a few of these hanging about.

Working Drawings for a Somewhat New Design

I've b een wanting a new bag, slightly wider than the one I've been carrying, but not so large as the iPad size one I had before that.  Finally I found time to make it yesterday in all the rain.  Last night I used it, and a friend spotted it and asked me to make one or her exactly like mine.  So today I made notes and drawings so that I can duplicate it.  I really like the way it came out and wanted to make a good set of working drawings, so here they are.  On the left is the front of the bag, and on the right is the front with the flap lifted to show the new half-compartment for phone and keys.

On the left here is the view looking into the main compartment of the bag;  and on the right is a detailed drawing of the back compartment.

This page gives the measurements for all of the pieces that need to be cut, allowing extra width and length for hems.  And if I can find the photo I just took with my phone, I'll drop it in below.

Found it, so now you can get an idea of the material, really great, sturdy, waterproof Lotus dog food with a Nicholas Wilton painting of a sheep on it.

Here's the back with two more sheep plus some fish and an apple at the top on the flap.  If you're interested in having a bag like this (or in any other material and any other size) got to my other blog, www.weRpiecework.blogspot.com and order it for $35 plus shipping through Paypal under bigger bags.  Put a note under special instructions telling me if it's this little 8 1/2 x 8 1/2" one, since this one's not on the blog yet (unless I get very ambitious in the next few minutes and update the catalog page of the blog!).  You can also FB message me for an order and also email at weRpiecework@gmail.com.

Carvings and Prints

This  morning was as dark as 6 PM and chilly and rainy.  I looked outside around 8:00 and saw Genghis and his family trudging down the puddle-rich street to walk the dog.  They walk in a group every single day, but I've never seen them do it so trudgingly as this morning!

I drew the child form on a piece of rubber eraser stamp material in preparation for making a stamp out of the design,  This was an extremely slow and exact measured drawing, something I haven't done in a long time.  In order to get the proportions just right I had to measure and compare, drop plumb lines and sight along horizontals.  I just used a drawing pencil and drew right on the piece of rubber, erasing mistakes as I made them.

Here's the carved stamp.  I used a set of linoleum cutting tools to cut away the areas that would not get printed, the spaces between the lines.  I am counting both these steps as drawings!

And here's a print of the stamp.  Now I can use it in combination with the girls (I made stamps of all of them already for another project) without having to draw the thing every time.  I'm pretty happy with the way this came out.  It's a little too big to fit in my current sketchbook, so this print is on a piece of drawing paper.  The print is about 5" tall.

Here's a proof or trial print of the stamp before I trimmed the figure out of the background.  It reads like a negative print with the dark background.  The only real difference between the proof and the print above is the absence of background in the final print, which turns it into a black line or positive print.  This should be number 1317.

Uniforms and Child Forms

Still playing around with those girls and the rusty child form.  All of this is just messing around.

And some more.  I feel like I'm finally getting the child form proportions more or less right.  It really is a cage.  Next week I'm going to do some monotypes of these images to loosen things up.  I'm also thinking about carving the child form out of a piece of rubber eraser stamp material and printing it over the drawings, tiling it in the background, combining it with monotypes of the girls with their head dresses, in the boat.

And while I was drawing and painting, Jesse played under my drawing table with a dried Japanese lantern flower, then did some grooming, and finally went to sleep.

Corrective Shoes

Jesse has been having a hard time dealing with our below zero weather this week.  He's a life-long outdoor cat who comes inside to eat and sleep and socialize a bit, but he really comes alive outside, and he has never used a litter box.  So all week we've been going outside with him for a few minutes at a time and then scampering back inside with him as soon as he gives up and races back to the door.  Today it finally warmed up enough for him to have an outside day.  Drawing 1301 shows him on a really cold day hunkered down on our screened porch looking woefully outside.  Drawing 1302 shows him from the rear looking like a meatloaf.

 Then this morning Ghengis sauntered into the backyard, and Jesse demanded to be let out.  Ghengis is really a gentle cat, but he and Jesse have had their differences, mainly over who gets to go inside Ghengis's cat door and who gets to sit on Jesse's porch railing.  Today they seemed to have reached some kind of accord.  The drawings on the right show Jesse watching Ghengis.

 Here's Ghengis on the left, and then Jesse on his high porch railing perch watching Ghengis stroll freely in the backyard.  We were encouraged that there was no hissing or growling at all, and also no torn up ears or tufts of hair missing.

 Switching subjects here, I spent some time tonight drawing Corrective Shoes, as they seem to fit into what is veering toward the general topic of Correcting the Flaws of Children, or, Dealing with Original Sin.  There seemed to be a big emphasis, when I was growing up, on straightening children up:  their teeth, their table manners, their handwriting, their feet.  Girls with straight hair were given Tonette permanent waves, really a torture.  Girls with curly hair had to put up with having their hair wound into ringlets.  No part of the child was left uncontrolled.  We were like little plants being espaliered or topiaried.

I found a picture of myself and three other neighborhood kids when we were around 3 or 4 years old.  We are all dressed in party clothes, fluffy little dresses and bows, but we're also all wearing heavy duty Corrective Shoes, those stiff, ugly, hot, embarrassing things that doctors told our mothers we needed and that our mothers hauled us down to Sears to the shoe department (with the fun fluoroscope machine in the corner) in order to buy.  We could never buy tennis shoes, regardless of how much we whined and moaned, because we had knock knees and vague other problems that made it necessary for us to wear Corrective Shoes.

On the right is my husband's actual Corrective Shoe, mummified.  His mother took his shoe and had it dipped in bronze to make a book end.  The outside is coated in a thin layer of bronze, and the inside is the mummified remains of the little shoe, and it is a Corrective Shoe!  It has an arch lift remnant as well as some other odd forms still inside.  The main features that it has, which all Corrective Shoes had, were high tops and laces, and the requisite leather uppers and sturdy soles.