All Over The Place

It is a rather dull fall season here. Not much color. And today it is raining. I feel scattered. Unable to settle. I took all the dead and dried up Eucalyptus leaves placed them along some lovely wool scarves to see if any color would come from it. I might have just turned the whole bunch into a dark and dismal brownish grey with no leaf definition.

Nobody ever shows putting dead dried up leaves on their contact prints.  Maybe I should go out there and see what it looks like. Yep I will do that now.

Well that was better than I expected! I rolled it up quickly so as not to disturb the leaves doing their best and stuck it back in the pot. I will wait until I return from Asheville on Wednesday and then undo the two scarves. I might even bring home some more Eucalyptus from Trader Joes. I think the orange-ish ones are from a dried up bunch left from a box shipped from California a couple of months ago. So that is good news…not ruining two of the perfectly good wool scarves I ordered from a textile artist in Ohio.

But doesn’t it seem that everybody is doing contact prints with plants? And the funny thing is that no two look the same. It is impossible to duplicate. So when you have some leaves, some paper and/or cloth, you just have to try it again. So simple. So thank you again, India Flint!

I also went back to my Specimen Journal to do some more of the discoverer’s drawings.

He must be documenting a hatch on this page.

And then looking closer to the surface on the water there appears to be gelatinous masses with small eggs. This will be the beginnings of the large brown water bug, I think.

Sadie likes this page.

The other day I went outside the studio to look for something inspiring to catch my eye and noticed that this is coming up the second year of the fish outside the studio. Just a bit more rust on the wires, the rocks holding them from swimming too far are all in place and I still like them. Hard to believe that I drank the dreadful wine that was in them.

I really need to find something else to do in the studio. Sometimes I wish I could be like so many others and just crank out the same thing over and over for forty years. Settle on one thing like baskets, pretty watercolors of flowers, blank journals, even Nature contact prints….and then do it over and over and teach everyone else to do it over and over. But I can’t do it. I make no new discoveries about myself and what I am and am not capable of if I go down that road.  I am bored by it, that constant repeating.

I think that after last week with the completion of the Australian piece, I need to go back to the press. There are more images in my head that might just work out as etchings.

And there is writing to do. On rainy days like today it is hard to not just pick up a very wet ball point pen and a pad of yellow dog paper. They feel so much more natural than a keyboard.

Anyway, enough. I am headed upstairs to fix lunch and think about meals made in crock pots like we did almost fifty years ago. I am seeing more and more recipes for crock pot cooking lately. And it is getting to be soup weather.

Tomorrow it is off to Asheville for an overnight. When home I will unwrap the scarves and show you how they came out.

Til then.