Out my window on a dew-filled sunny morning this week. Something beautiful can come from the burden of holding up under the weight of the moment.
This morning I saw this image of English textile artist, Janet Bolton. I have followed her work for many years…the simplicity, the deft ability to maneuver thread and needle into such tiny appliques! Here is her work posted this morning along with my comment back to her.
Janet, I would like to thank you for letting me see your work made up of disparate small pieces coming together to shape something beautiful in its simplicity. The way it harkens back in time when there was harmony in our differences is like a tiny thread of hope for those of us in America who are seeing it slowly slip into history. Please don’t stop.
Isn’t her work extraordinary? Every collage tells a story that each viewer can interpret. Anyway I love seeing her work and when she gets past the ability to make more, I hope she will continue to show what came before.
Speaking of “pictures”. There is a recent book by English author, Chloe Dalton, titled Raising Hare. She documents living with a tiny hare (leveret) until it is grown. My friend brought her copy to our lunch date the other day. I was of course taken by the drawing of the full grown hare on the cover and flipped through the pages to see if there were more illustrations. Yes. Plenty of pencil sketches throughout. BUT nowhere on the jacket cover, on or in the book did it tell who the illustrator was. Nowhere. So I looked it up and found the illustrator to be, Denise Nestor. Why that bit of information was not important enough to be noted on or in the book itself is puzzling. Do illustrators not matter anymore? Was there an agreement that Ms. Nestor remain anonymous? Seems a bit silly since one can so easily look it up. Personally, I hope that we never outgrow the desire to know who draws such engaging images of animals.
Here is an excerpt from my essay (that I am still working on) about museum shops and the magic of what some of them can offer.
“Forget buying children’s books unless they have exceptional illustrations. You want to buy books that have pictures that look like they took time to create, and reflect the artist’s years of interpreting words into pictures. Think Tasha Tudor, Maurice Sendak, Jill Barklem, and almost any illustrator from England. In the Australia National Museum I found a reproduction of Night Fall in the Ti-Tree with extraordinary woodcuts that were famously inspiring in their simplicity, gesture, and narrative quality. The heavy card stock paper has a folded foredge that makes the book feel like it was just handcrafted in a studio nearby. With only two on the shelf and me being a carver of woodcuts, well…..this book has been an inspiration to hold and look at for years.”
Yesterday I wrote more on the temptations of museum shops. Then, because it had been a week or so since writing poetry, I wrote the following.
The Ones We Miss
I don’t miss who I used to be
just some of those who knew me then.
The ones who were there to be missed later
when their memory is needed to return.
To sit by my side, reach for my hand.
I pull theirs close to hold against my cheek,
and let them wipe away the tears of loss.
They stay with me and wait until I smile
at the stories they tell of how we were.
After we both grow silent,
they pull away, touch my face,
and say, “See you next time.”
S. Webster
Today is a good day for writing. It is cloudy. Words can’t escape quickly into the heavier air outside. They will linger long enough to be rearranged and shuffled into meaning. I suppose I should get to it.
There are thirty-seven new poems, five new short stories, and a few more essays to put into a new book. Maybe I will just do a second poetry book and keep the stories and essays for another.
When we are older…past eighty…we think of perhaps not being able to finish the plans we had for ourselves. The worry of that is like a small prod in the back and a whisper in the ear to get on with it.
So, maybe I will….
Til later…
