Fragility

Having been glued to the news for the past 2 days, watching the storm pace across a vast section of North America; impersonal in it path, one can only be humbled by how tiny and fragile we really are.

Leafs waving in the breeze

I Was Suppose To Be Raking The Pond

After I finished with the whipper sniper I thought it would be a very fine idea to rake the leaves and pine needles out of the pond. The pond is deep enough to swim and so we are fairly careful each fall to rake out all the debris in order not to get sediment build up. Decided I would rather take photos than rake, so another job for next week. Love the patterns the needles form as they brush against each other.

End of Gardening Season Treats

I was working around the pond the other day cutting back and using J.'s heavy and loud whipper sniper, and needing a break [did I mention it weighs a ton ] I sat down and watched the pond. Embarrassing to have been working there for an hour and not noticed. On this dun colored day the pond was alive with patterns of pine needles and lily pads. The color of the water was deep dark. And that was the end of the whipper sniping for the day.

Lily pads and pine needles

A Blue World Continues

The fog the other morning has worked its way into the paths and lines. Today they have become blueprints.

blueprint |ˈbloōˌprint|nouna design plan or other technical drawing.• figurative something that acts as a plan, model, or template : a vagueblueprint for fundamental land redistribution.verb [ trans. ]draw up (a plan or model) : [as adj. ] ( blueprinted) a neatly blueprinted scheme.ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the original process in which prints werecomposed of white lines on a blue ground or of blue lines on a whiteground.

Crossed lines

Outer reaches

A Blue World

Extra special treat yesterday morning as I woke up to blue world. A foggy, blurry, blue world. Wandering about the trees, having them come in and out of focus and admiring the deep mysterious shapes of the old apple trees, the sense of wandering in an enchanted land. About 9.30 am. the sun had burned off the fog and life returned to normal.

Trees in the blue fog

Maybe Forward

Hmmn, this is big. Well at least there is something covering the whole surface. The thing is I never thought beyond the lines or paths as I call them now. Never "saw" anything more. Hmmn. And I can't paint. Hmmn. Forget painting. Just keep rubbing and smudging. And adding charcoal.

Where am I going now?

The great thing about documenting work in progress is that I can see it on the computer, and rotate it, flip it, reverse it, layer it. All great ways to help me see what is working, what isn't and where it wants to go. Started to play with this image below, a composite, that really help me see possibilities.

Going Back And Forth

Not having a big roll of paper in the studio and wanting to see how this idea would work, I attached 15 sheets of paper to the wall and using the templates for the coffee shirts I had made [link here and here] I began to trace and play. Using pencil was fine except I couldn't see it from any distance so I switched to charcoal. Handy having the upstairs studio that overlooks this wall as I could judge what needed to be added. Using the sheets of paper may turn out to be a plus, another grid coming up. Skirt Lines. We'll see how the drips work out.

Starting

1st layers of charcoal

Quiet Days

Drizzle; snow on the mountain, a quiet day reading The Ink Dark Moon, Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan and the latest Jack Reacher thriller by Lee Child. Lovely combination. One of the poems by Izumi Shikibu is perfect for the day.

All the flowers 
have fallen in this wind
blowing through the night.
What will there be
for consolation tomorrow?

[Translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani]

Frost on the grasses

We Ran Away

And drove down to visit the Clarke,  the Williams College Museum of Art and Mass M.O.C.A which had the O Canada show, complete with an intro and I quote "Confederated in 1867.....” Since when did confederation become a verb? Needless to say I was less than impressed with this exhibition. But at the Williams College Museum of Art there was a beautiful show of Sol LeWitt: The Well Tempered Grid. This is what the museum has to say about his grids, a structure close to my heart. "Inspired by his first encounter with the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) in the late 1950s, LeWitt began experimenting with a loosely structured grid in several large oil paintings of 1960, based on the Muybridge motif of a running man. By 1962 he had simplified his use of this format to exclude figurative elements, and by 1964 he was making his first wall-mounted grid structures. When LeWitt made his first wall drawings in 1968 he used the grid as the underlying structural principle. Thereafter grids became a pervasive matrix in all of the media in which LeWitt worked—in his three-dimensional “structures,” drawings and gouaches on paper, photographic cycles, artist’s books, furniture, and wall drawings."  LeWitt was also a huge Bach fan [with a collection of 400 Bach audio cassettes] listening to Bach in the studio as he worked. And as an added treat, as we were wandering about, a piano tuner was tuning a harpsichord in one of the galleries. Just the sound of the repetitive AAA, BBB ect. was perfect.

SOL LEWITT, DETAIL FROM ALL COMBINATIONS OF ARCS FROM FOUR CORNERS, ARCS FROM FOUR SIDES, STRAIGHT LINES, NOT-STRAIGHT LINES AND BROKEN LINES

And for some extra fun, check out Edward Lifson's blog, Hello Beautiful, for his article on how the Sol LeWitt exhibition at Mass M.O.C.A was created. [Link here]  As he says " Almost an acre of LeWitt. They'll stay up for at least 25 years."

 While I find the acres of LeWitt overwhelming at Mass M.O.C.A, the Williams College Museum of Art has lots of the notebooks and some very beautiful graphite on black paper drawings. Much more intimate and closer to my sensibilities.

THE POSTER FOR LEWITT’S EXHIBITION AT THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS, 1976

Procrastination

I do it every fall, procrastinate that is. About cutting down the gardens and especially the big studio garden. Love looking at it when it is all about plant / shrub / tree structure and leaf color.  I'm going to try something new for me this year and leave the clippings on the beds. That's the theory, don't know if I'll be able to hold out.

outside my studio

Studio garden from above J.s studio

Stairs in the studio garden

More stairs in the garden

Sumac

Pennants waving in the breeze or perhaps gaudy prayer flags, the sumac are in their glory now; breathtakingly wondrous on a dull overcast day.  Photos never seem to do them justice. From the hottest reds, tinged with magenta, through the orange spectrum, into yellow and exiting by way of chartreuse. They wave and shout, Happy Thanksgiving. And the deer say "Thank-you, you are delicious!" Which means there will be short stumps of trunks by next spring. However, sumac grows like a weed; even the years the deer have eaten them to the ground the trees recover to put on the show another year.

Sumac leaves waving in the breeze

64 and Counting

Actually at 65 coffee cups but only 64 fit in the grid. Think I'll go for a hundred. This is fun, makes me bug eyed, but fun. Don't forget you can click on the image to make it bigger.

The 64 

Caught My Eye

Hours on the computer working on coffee cups. The pile grows. 56 are finished, 14 or 15 more to do. All I see are circles, moons, cells, suns. Taking a break, walking about outside, the garden nags me, I ignore it. And then my eye catches this.

Tiny mushrooms in the grass

Rain, cold, feels like November although it's only October 1st. Still, these tiny flowers from the Climbing Hydrangea, which bloomed in June, gladden the heart. Fading, brittle, almost transparent; barely here and almost gone.

fading Climbing Hydrangea Flowers