My dear friend Claudia has been very invested in making Tiny Houses and knows my love of such things. So here is one that Claudia made for me! The loft space is my studio. See more of her work here.
Another Friend-Made Surprise
Time Capsule
I have been coming to the Hill School as an artist in residence off and on since 2009. It has been a few years since I have been on campus so when I arrived in the classroom, a box (see below) was on the supply table and Mrs. Nelson, the art teacher, suggested I go through it.
Opening this box was like opening a time capsule. Several years of examples and lesson plans filled this box to the brim. I was really awe struck to see time recorded in such a concrete way. I photographed some examples for below.
The above are just a few of the examples of the many printing techniques we covered over the years. I am sort of glad to have reacquainted myself with many of these techniques and am happy to have an example of a step by step reduction lino example that I will be able to share in an upcoming post.
‘Beets me!’ Sketches
The title for this post may seem a bit odd but the following pages from my sketchbook all started with stained parchment paper from cooking beets and a few scones. But ‘Scones me’ is not an expression and, therefore, a poor title for this post. Anyway, The richly colored pieces of parchment I could not throw away. I attempted to iron them between sheets of wax paper, sort of like what we did with autumn leaves as kids. But the wax paper would not stick. The result was additional paper stained with marks from the beet stained paper. So I had lots to work with. What I decided to do was to just tear random pieces of paper and arrange them on different pages of my sketchbook. I ended up with nine pages of these papers. Then I went back in over the course of a few days and developed images based on what the shapes made me think of. It looks like there are 3 categories here: hens, maps, and landscapes. So I will group them below according to the resulting categories, rather than the order they are in my sketchbook, which is random.
Ok – the hens first
Next – the maps. I have to wonder if somewhere they were influenced from all the sad news. Possibly hoping for neighboring places that got along well, no conflict.
And now the landscapes. The last one I don’t think is done yet.
A Wonderful Gift (and letterboxing too!)
Yesterday I met my friend Alice to go letterboxing, which we do occasionally. As we were getting started, Alice wanted to show me somethings she recently made. One was a book about a park in her neighborhood. When I met Alice, she was working very hard on a committee trying to save the park from bulldozers and they were successful. I was not surprised that they were successful, but I was very surprised and moved when Alice presented me with the book!! It is a very complex double accordion book with windows. To represent the park, Alice used a tree stamp over a gelatin print. It is very lush because the layers are built up and you get a sense of being in the woods. Figures dance among the trees and three tiny birds observe. The book is playful and joyous which is no doubt how people will feel at this park. The text gives a brief overview of the history of the park. I felt so very touched to receive such a special gift. The full book is spread out below and I have a detail underneath. My photos do not do it justice.
There were a few coincidences about this day. First, the trail we were walking to find some of the boxes is the same trail we walked at the very beginning of the pandemic. It was probably about the same time, maybe almost to the day, that we set out in a very bewildered state of mind. Another coincidence is I seem to remember Alice presenting me with a gift on that day as well – a rubbing that you can see here .
As for our letterboxing experience, we were successful with three of the six boxes we hunted. Our excursion involved some steep hills, lots of wet leaves, and questionable digging around what is called SPORs. In the letterboxing community, we learned that this means Suspicious Pile of Rocks. One box we could not find was supposed to be situated around the base of an ‘interesting tree’. Alice pointed out that all trees are interesting but then, set back a bit from the trail, was a tall Beech tree with limbs springing out that were almost spider like. The base of the tree was buttressed. While looking for the box, a barred owl flew into another near by tree. We decided that the ‘interesting tree’ and the owl spotting more than made up for not finding the box. And if this wasn’t enough, we came across a Little Free Library where I acquired a practically brand new copy of The Bhagavad Gita. And to top it all off delicious falafel! I think it will be a day I remember fondly for a very long time.
The Birds
I was going along in my sketchbooks happily drawing funny shaped houses and buildings and out of nowhere, birds crept onto the pages. These are very different from my Dirty Birds series that I did back in 2003/2004 when I was obsessed with, mainly, pigeons but other common urban birds as well. Clicking on any of the four images will open it in a separate window.
The one in the upper left is the first drawing and the one in the lower right is the last. For reasons I do not know, my favorite is the large white bird all by itself with its shadow, probably because of the simplicity of it. Do you have a favorite?
For comparison, here are two from the Dirty Birds series, which are very different from the birds above. To give a sense of scale, these are on full sheets of paper. The one on the bottom, Foraging, would barely fit into my car! I briefly referenced this series of work in another blog post where I was recapping how I ended up in the visual arts.
The Round Houses
A few weeks ago, I was posting lots of building sketches where the buildings were very elongated rectangles (you can see them here and here). Then I decided to try using one of my brush pens to see if I could change the line. What resulted were buildings that had softer, organic shapes. Here are the results below.
Garden Sketches
Sorry if you are opening this post expecting a quaint garden scenes complete with water features, statues of St. Francis, and a rainbow of color but instead you are finding these:
The great thing about sketchbooks for me is that I never know what is going to appear. For the top piece, which I will call Tomato Volcano, I just wanted to glue stuff. I have a small tray of things I have cut out from prints and other interesting scraps of paper and found some leftover tomatoes from my I Was A Tomato Farmer book. I was attending a Zoom meeting and figured I needed to do something mindless so I could focus on what was being said. Result: tomatoes being flung from the top of a volcano! Next it was time to play with some micro metallic gel pens I have and a blue brush pen which resulted in this building with a garden growing up the side.
I also worked on a Zine for a few upcoming teaching projects. I will share that in a future post.
Week Ending: March 4, 2022
Well this week was challenging so I am going to start off with something that I am very happy about and that is the salad of the week. Actually, it is not really the salad “of the week” in that I made another salad, a beet salad, which I have made several times but this time I forgot to leave the beets separate so of course everything turned red. It tasted good but looked kind of funny. However, this one I am happiest about – a basic Waldorf Salad. It is something nobody thinks about much but actually it not only is pretty easy but it is made out of crap you most likely already have in your refrigerator. I substituted raisins for grapes and I like butter lettuce (also called Boston lettuce) for this. For my dressing I did a 2:1 of plain yogurt to mayonnaise (not Greek yogurt), a bit of lemon, dill and cardamom. I think it would also be good with crumbled blue cheese but I did not have that so I put out a brick of cheddar cheese to have with it. We do what we can, right?
Ok, I am not a food writer so what else? Well, at work, I finished another box of plants. Two boxes left which means less than 600 specimens left. If you are coming onto this blog for the first time, you can see what I am talking about here. But no poison ivy this week! Yay!
Oh, I virtually attended a presentation of my friend Marlene Adler’s book that she illustrated on Purim. You can see more of Marlene’s work here as well as with other organizations with which she is involved. Afterwards I had a mad desire for Hamantash and went on a recipe search. My friend Cindy has sent me this wonderful pastry in the mail before but the last time she attempted it, well, it never made it. She received it back in the mail many months later! I figured it would be moldy as it is very buttery but she said it was not moldy but was in the texture range of hockey pucks.
And, last weekend, my husband and I went to view my exhibition that opened at the Hickory Museum of Art. I will write more about this later as I was very, very overwhelmed seeing it for the first time. So for now, I can’t really say much other than the museum did a beautiful job displaying everything. Here is an overview of each case below.
Yep, they did a great job! Will go visit again and look better at the other new exhibitions as well. The difficulty this week had to do with allergies. My medicine that I normally take stopped working and triggered other allergy related issues. Ugh! Anyway, not that big of a deal, just annoying. So that is it for now.
My Mom Eating Cheese
For reasons I do not know I have had an irresistible urge to paint this picture of my Mother so I set myself to that task yesterday in one of my sketchbooks. I remember when I was a teenager my Mom would sit in a chair and watch TV and she also usually had a book or magazine on her lap. Once in a while she would say she wanted a piece of cheese, which at times I was put to the task of getting. So here she is, in her comfy robe, eating a piece of cheese. I do not believe we had a chair that looked like that although I do believe we had chairs that color. However, we did have bold flowered curtains. I also am well aware that when people cross their legs, it does not look like this. My Mom sat with her legs crossed and a slipper usually dangled off her one foot. I did not bother with the slippers.
Coincidentally, I read a fun poem yesterday morning by Billy Collins called The Lanyard about a gift a kid gives to his mom. You can read that poem here.
The Week Ending: February 25th, 2022
Every once in awhile I like to recap some pleasant or unusual highlights from my week. This is such a difficult time in the world, I figured I would share some more mundane, pleasant activities.
I drove back from Maryland on Monday after visiting with my family and the weather was very nice. Since this is a very long car ride, we get take out when I get home which is usually around dinner time. A new store opened near us that is a “concept supermarket”. Basically, it is mainly meant to take out prepared foods and pick up a few items. They don’t even have regular cashiers, all self checkout. The perimeter of the store is a bunch of Kiosks and we decided to get bar-b-q. So we each got a smoked pork platters (I got ribs, my husband got pulled pork) and sides. They also serve corn muffin tops, instead of hush puppies, which I am glad because I am not a fan of hush puppies. There was enough food for another meal for each of us and you could also say another two meals if you saved your muffin top for breakfast the next day (I did not, I had not eaten much on the road that day). But generally, I probably would. This came to a little over $20 so it is also a pretty good bargain as well as good food. I did attempt to food shop there this week out of pure curiosity and can honestly say it is not a great place for that for my purposes. They do have one feature I like that I photographed above which is cut your own herbs for 99 cents a sandwich size bag.
I went to work and the first plant I was greeted with to mount this week was Toxicodendron radicans, a.k.a. Poison Ivy! And the plant specimen was from NJ so it was not only Poison Ivy but it was decided that it was Poison Ivy with an attitude!
I like to conjure up odd salads because we tend to eat a lot of salads. Yesterday, I came up with this.
So what is this? It is Broccoli Rabe (known some places as Rapini) topped with kalamata olives, cannellini beans, a little bit of course shredded pecorino and a hard boiled egg half. It is dressed very lightly with olive oil, garlic, oregano, basil and a dash of red pepper flakes.
I will be teaching some botanical journaling classes so today I was working on some examples. The particular plant featured in this journal is a Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera). It is not complete yet but I figured I would share what I have so far.
Above is the inside with the pages unfolded. It is a mixture of dried plants, drawings, rubbings, and collage.
This (above) is a close of of two of the interior pages and one of the exterior pages folded over. The exterior page shown is a rubbing of the tree’s bark.
The image above is from a part of the journal not yet finished. The one side to the left if a depiction of the trees’ trunks that are generally very tall and straight. This imaged is collaged from one of the bark rubbings. The two painted pages with nothing on them yet will be a cover page and an informational page that will tell about the tree. If you follow this blog, you may recall a few weeks ago I presented a How-To on botanical journaling on a local TV station. The link to that is here.
