Leaves

Since I would rather draw than cook, while waiting for the corn water to boil this evening I raced outside and drew as many different leaves in the patio garden as I could.  Then I spotted two silver tips that were made to use as the ends of string belts and that were delicately engraved with leaf patterns.  The ancient card that the tips came on has a little bag for the tips and instructions for putting them on your string belt.  The tips cost 30c.  So beautiful.

Jesse, a Bride and Groom, and Artifacts

Last night I managed to do a few gesture drawings of Jesse but I never got around to posting them.  They are just lazy sketches, and of course he was in more or less constant motion.  These first two happened while he was staring out into the firefly-dense woods from our back porch.  The little daylily bud was in a vase on the table nearby.

Same scenario, only more motion, including a down dog stretch.  And a final drawing to close out the pretty little blue journal.

 Tonight I grabbed a handful of things from a shelf in my studio.  The one above on the left is an arrowhead that a friend in Indiana found in his backyard and gave to me many years ago.  It's around 3 inches from tip to tip, unknown date.  The little stone knife to the right my son David picked up from a newly-plowed field near the archaeological site on campus a bunch of years ago.  I brought it to the archaeologist the next day and he said since it was out of context we could keep it.  He estimated its age as being perhaps 3-4000 years old.  Astonishing!

These two would make a good bride and groom on a wedding cake I think, better than the usual simpering couple!  The guy is from a building set from long ago.  He has Lego-like hands but P said he is NOT from a Lego set,  and he would know.  He doesn't have a nose but he is manly with his whiskers and cap.  The Minoan snake goddess replica is from the New Orleans Museum of Art gift shop and is a favorite of mine.  The crinoid at the right we found at Lake Michigan.

From the Midden

The things that I drew today all came from various middens.  At top left and just below are two drawings of an odd little buckle-like thing that F found in a dumpster at a construction site in her neighborhood.  Since she and I are always on the lookout for good reusable repurposable material, she brought home several of the little metal things and many of the woven plastic straps that the metal things were used on.  The intriguing thing about these buckle or clamp things is that they're made out of a single twist of heavy wire;  by threading the straps through the clamps as in 5100, you can make an adjustable strap.  Elegant!

The other objects came from our family's portable junk drawer or kitchen midden:  our junk basket.  There is no way the diaper pin at bottom left would have survived the 36 years since it was purchased-- two cross-country moves, and then two cross-town moves.  It is paleolithic in our family history-- the last surviving diaper pin from the 1970s, when cloth diapers reigned and the only way to hold them on the baby was to pin them with one of these.  I always tried to find this particular blue duck variety at the grocery store.  You had to run it through your hair to pick up a little oil in order to slide the pin through the many heavy layers of cloth while the baby was writhing and rolling over in his attempts to escape.

The straight pin and the safety pin came from someone else's midden, a bottom drawer of one of my antique sewing machine cabinets.  And the silver stick pin with its really pretty calla lily was tossed in with about a thousand old buttons in a button collection someone gave F and me to use on our wallets and bags.

The rectangular object at top right is a Cuisinaire rod from the late 70s.  Do they even use Cuisinaire rods in kindergartens these days?  This one survived in the junk basket, it's yellow wooden surface just a little bit dingy.  I remember stepping on Cuisinaire rods in the dark, sort of like stepping on Legos these days.

Questions at the Charnel Ground

Why do we scold Jesse for killing a baby bluebird but give him a nice chin scratching when he deposits on our front porch the body of a fat mole?  Why is it gross to watch flies land on the mole's carcass and begin to lay their disgusting eggs while I'm drawing it but beautiful to contemplate the precise architecture of a seed pod that allows new life to begin?  Why is the iridescent green of the flies' bodies creepy while the iridescent pink of the nigella seed case reminds me of delicately painted porcelain?  Why do I delight in the design of the nigella pod with its thin membranes and perfect seed release mechanism yet shudder at the mole's over-sized baseball-glove-like front paws and tapered snout?

Individual Lupine Pods Really ARE Individual

Drawing these lupine pods reminded me of the potato drawing game.  I used to use an exercise in drawing workshops wherein everyone would pick a potato out of a pile and go off alone to draw the potato in such detail that the potato would be intimately known and able to be recognized by the person who had drawn it.  No one would believe me when I would tell them that they would be able to recognize their potatoes after drawing them.  Meanwhile I would number some blank sheets of paper from 1 to however many people were in the workshop;  and I would make a list and put a person's name next to each number but not show anyone the list.  I would lay the numbered sheets of paper out in the center of the room while people were drawing.

When people finished their drawings, I would take their potatoes from them and place them back in the basket.   When all were finished and the basket was once again a bunch of boring old potatoes, each person would then go dig through the basket and try to find her/his own potato.  After they thought they had found them, I would tell them which numbered sheet of paper to put their potatoes on: " Mary, put yours on number 1";  "Tom, put yours on number 2," etc.  I could check against my list to be sure everyone had put his or her potato on the correct numbered sheet.  No one ever picked a wrong potato, and after everyone had found the potato she/he had drawn, we would match them with the drawings and prove that they were the correct potatoes.

The point of the exercise is that drawing improves vision, presence, focus, and knowledge.  In addition to producing some lovely drawings of potatoes.

RIP Little Bluebird

Jesse, reverting to his cat nature, killed one of the two baby bluebirds that we've been watching all spring and summer.  Every morning the two parent birds would sit on the power line that goes across our front yard with their two babies and take turns diving down to the front lawn and swooping back up with food for the babies.  We  noticed the babies flying up and down a couple of weeks ago and wondered how much longer it would be until they all took off.  Jesse would sit by the front door licking his chops, but we wouldn't let him out until the birds had finished their morning routine with their babies.  We can't have bird feeders because of bears, so we rarely get to watch the same birds every day.  Last night Jesse stayed out all night, and at 6 this morning he came in with the dead little bird.  So sad.  When I drew it I noticed it still had pin feathers.  I buried it in the front garden and have had a hard time liking Jesse all day, even though I know he's just doing what cats do.

The raspberries are starting to come in.  These are wild ones from the Jones Mtn. trail.  I think it's interesting that what feels like soft fuzzy stickers all over the berry cases and stems are actually millions of tiny anthers that pierce the skin of the case that is like a nut case, and each one goes straight to one tiny ovary (see 5084).  The little bumps all over the berries are the ovaries, each with a seed inside.  I need to study a bloom to see where the stamens are and where the anthers are in the bloom stage.

Progress

I was thinking through parallels between painting and carving, and I realized that I'm going to have to see whites first because that's what happens when I carve-- a piece of the block comes out and the resulting space ends up white in the print.  No outlines in the beginning.  So I started with some heads of wheat that is ripening in the field below our house.  It was really easy to cut away the lights and leave traces and tool marks in the shadow areas.  I might have let a few more tool marks in 5069, but it's okay.  I actually like the tiny single wheat berry with its long whisker because the marks are stiff and bouncy like the wheat.

This afternoon Jacob and I went downtown to check out an abandoned building that he has been wanting to photograph.  While he was inside photographing I sat on a rock under a tree in the somewhat cool shade and drew the exterior.  A policeman came and asked me what I was doing, said he thought I was maybe shooting up some heroin.  He looked at my drawing and then walked on, didn't tell me to leave or anything.  When Jacob emerged a few minutes later our meter was up and we headed home to put some images together.

This is the best carving that I did tonight, all done by removing lights.  The white outline on the right I did at the very end.  This way of carving feels very good now.  I know I need a lot more practice, especially on bigger blocks.  I may actually free-carve the giant block I'm getting ready to carve for a steamroller print event at Asheville BookWorks in September.

Here's the composite that Jacob and I made this afternoon, his photograph from inside the old building, and my charlotte carving from last night, put together in Photoshop.