Memento More

>>>> Appendix de Grenouille <<<<

Tres disturbing. When you see a human skeleton, how do you feel? What do you think? Does it make you think of the someone who gave up those bones?

That's what I thought when I saw this photo Etienne brought back from the musee de science in Greensboro. This was a larger cousin, and indeed in life he might have happily eaten me, but all the same, I can't help but feel my own bones when I see these...

Au revoir,

Grenouille.

Next Painting - Red Headed Woodpecker

On a walk last weekend I watched a woodpecker swoop repeatedly to cross a large open space between trees. At one point he turned and then spread his wings, so he was exposed to us as the woodpecker is in this drawing.

This will be my next painting, I hope. It will be an 18 x 24 inch watercolor on Arches hot press (my favorite). We'll see... My next internal debate is whether to give him his checkerboard pattern on the underside of the wings. I think that contrast and detail may provide additional focus on him. I'll go with my gut on that, though, and it's too late tonight to decide anything.

As usual, this began as a jumble of lines from a series of photos, about four in this case - most of them of either crowds of people or a plate full of cookies. I blind contour my way around the paper while my eye feels the lines in the photo. I really enjoy this approach and the unexpected results and candid, humorous lines and shapes that can result.

This is my entry for day 14 of AEDM.

Mountain Vacation - Small Painting Late

I just finished this one - I only had a pencil drawing when we left the mountains on October 19th.

And I'm also late joining the AEDM crew over at Creative Every Day. Thanks to Linda at Vulture Peak Muse for enticing me into this with her own contributions.

One evening, coming back from the Black Mountains, we were playing peak-a-boo with the rising full moon. It kept appearing around hills and over edges. That probably put this into my head.

Almost Accidental Still Life - Mountains Trip

This sort of happened by accident - I just moved the candles and turned the bowl to catch the light from a different angle. Apples in the bowl were bought from a "mix your own" stall at a local farmer's market in Boone, NC. The apples on the table were scrumped - some of the most delicious were scrumped after climbing a barbed wire fence. The old saying is true.

And there is no better way to eat them than to all be walking along an old carriage road, eating pieces in turn, cut and peeled with a pocket knife. This is now a family tradition, and while one blade of my two-bladed knife is primarily used for carving walking sticks - the other is reserved for apples.


P.S. - Sunday I redid my gallery website, simplifying so it's easier to maintain and easier to tour. I added the latest paintings that have been posted here, and also a "Small Works" page for the little paintings. I'll be doing more of those - they were fun and I might even be able to do them on lunch break at work.

Blister Beetle

>>>> Appendic de Grenouille <<<< I am insectivorous, of course, as are most grenouilles (we will overlook mon cousin de Afrique, which is the size of a small dog and consumes birds and mammals that come too close). Voila, here is a fat morsel, a creature that would seem a delicacy, a dream gastronomique, plump, succulent, but non, it is not so. This is a blister beetle, and it is unwise even to touch much less eat. The name; it is well to pay attention to the name.

Etienne and oldest son had a brief encounter with this animaux on a concrete trail at Cedar Rock Park in Burlington, NC. Knowing this creature well already, by reputation, they marveled at it's strange beauty and its fearless manner, but oldest son removed it from the path, and harm's way, with a leaf. No touching.

It was a beautiful autumn day, and the hiking was glorious, but Etienne will, perhaps, write about it.

Au revoir,

Grenouille

Housekeeping a la Chat Santolina

Voila, a place for everything, and every thing in it's place.

Au revoir,

Grenouille

Trees and Distance

As we get more clothes from closets and attics, trees shed their leaves and stand gloriously nude. Like people, some seem to dance even as they stand still, showing their lives in the body gesture of limbs and response to gravity. Dancers hold themselves as if gravity were an option, and they might defy it at any moment. Some trees do the same, while others seem to embrace it and the ground beneath them. I am drawn right up to the trunks of many, and touch them quietly, reverently.

I'm never done looking at the lovely lines of trees when they begin budding in the spring. I step back from them, mentally and emotionally, as they add their green blossoms and leaves. I pick out the different species at seventy MPH from the highway, using the shades and textures.

Summer is when I watch trees move in the wind, and see them as masses of light and dark. I love lollipop trees in the summer, and the points on the tops of Tulip Poplars. I look to see trees in silhouette on the ridges of hills, or across large fields. Summer is probably when I enjoy trees at the greatest distance.

But in autumn I am drawn sharply closer again, and I lose the trees entirely in the distraction of the individual leaves. Their flights to the ground, the rush I get seeing leaves in the tiny twisters of fall, the colors of them against the sky or against the grass... I want to pick up hundreds and save them. It used to trouble me deeply that their colors couldn't be preserved, but now I just enjoy the splurge and let it pass.

Most leaves combine colors like masters, getting maximum impact and never clashing. Others, like the ash trees, combine colors that cancel each other, so the result from a distance looks like smoke or shadow without a form to cast it.

>>>> Appendix de Grenouille <<<< You have heard, perhaps, of the Welsh Rabbit (which some misname the Welsh Rarebit)? This is the pastel Etienne thinks of as the Cornish Rabbit, large and cheeky at Lands End, with the blue of the entire North Atlantic behind him to the West. He ages with grace in the stairway hall, even though he is drawn on nothing more glamourous than brown paper shopping bag... As the hibiscus blossom says in The Marzipan Pig, "We can't all be posh." He lacks even glass or a proper mat - but all love him and he is happy. Perhaps he is a cousin of the Velveteen Rabbit?