Yesterday I was going through the photos on my IPhone and got caught up in some “used to bes”. It is not a good place to spend too much time. Things are so different now. Anyway I found this image from my old dining room table of things I was drawing into a sketchbook. “Dead things” as friends used to tell me when they’d see me hunched over something brown. So many of my sketchbooks have these types of drawings in them. Once while teaching in Alice Springs, a student brought me a pressed desert flower. She said, “I thought you might like something different from the dried out dead things.” It was a flattened pink bloom that I drew just as I saw it. And the poor blossom looked somehow deader than anything in my brown pile. Anyway, I thought of that as I moved this image to where it would be more accessible.
I love this picture of things that made me stop and look hard at their shapes, their colors, how I came to have them and who I was with when I brought them home to stay. They are good company.
So far there are twenty small illustrations for the Scrabble story. And it took that many for me to realize that they need to be redone…all of them. The good thing is that I am now more well-practiced with the colors I need to use. I think the pen is too harsh. I think they need to be drawn a bit larger in order to get the shading I am expecting. And in the more recent ones I have completely left out the native hen! But the good thing is that I am getting more familiar with the little fellows. So here are some more of the story in “preliminary drawings”.
The first attempt to make a boat.
How it is carried to the shore.
And its failure to stay afloat.
Starting over.
Heading toward the shore.
And failing again.
Earlier this week I took myself off to the bar with my short story. It was pouring down rain so no one was there but me when they opened at five. Good. Elizabeth fixed my Manhattan and I ordered a pizza after a spell of writing.
I need to make Joey’s story longer so will spend more time with him. I always get in the writing mood when it is close to poetry meetings. The next two Thursdays will be sharing words with others constantly putting feelings on pages.
Yesterday in the mail was a package from Australia. A friend thought I would like this apron with Australian animals on it. She was right. I love it and it now hangs right next to the flour canister in the pantry. I can’t seem to bake without covering myself with whatever is being beaten up in a bowl. It has to do with the false promise of a slow speed on a hand mixer. The first speed that one would think is slow, covers me, the floor and the walls with its enthusiasm to get going.
BUT my son Patrick took home the hand mixer by General Electric that Lee had before we were married fifty-seven years ago. It had stopped working. So I had to buy the racing machine I now have. And the other day Patrick called to say it now is working just fine. The interior had a complete cast aluminum housing that he took apart to fix worn connections, and it is like new. those beaters know that the slow setting is slow, very slow. So I will have them back whenever he heads this way again.
Sorry, got side tracked. Here is that apron. Thank you so much Judith!
It is a dreary day. So I might get out of the studio and find a good movie to watch. And it is close enough to wine time, so movie and some wine.
I just had a thought, What if I stopped thinking of Beatrix Potter and did all my characters larger and in graphite, like the sketches in my large sketchbook. I can get so much more expression in their faces. What if the story was told in a much larger book? Maybe 10″ square…maybe bigger. I think it would be much more fun for me…and it is my story, my book. Why not? I might just tidy up the whole studio and start over. More on that later.
Did you know that the purpose of art is not to produce product but to produce thinking?
Anyway, I am off to pour a wine and pour over the movie options.
Til later….