Explosion of Art!

I keep saying it is November already because everything I am involved with seems to have fallen in a span of 15 days in that month. I am skipping celebration of my 49th birthday, not due to the agony of marking such a milestone, but simply because there is no time. Here at home we are reeling with the news that Donna will be included in a  Hewlett-Packard "workforce reduction", and the impact this will have remains to be seen. The details are unfolding daily, and we await critical information. To me this waiting is like watching the unfolding of an accident. There is that surreal slowed-down moment when you know a crash is coming and the impact is pending. We are stilled in that moment.

Mostly we can not pause. Life around here is insanely busy as we both (what would I do without Donna's help?) meet the demands the deadlines for a busy season of shows.

Tomorrow is the Manchester Art Association Annual Craft Fair. It is being held from 10-4 at Great Path Academy at Manchester Community College here in CT. If you come along head for Parking Lot B. This event for me is a carry-over from when I was doing wearable stuff, but now the inventory is all wall art. 

Coast Guard Beach, North Truro

Tomorrow we also leave for North Truro for our scheduled week of autumn ocean. Birds of prey are still migrating and migration is, no pun intended, all over the map. Just now we heard there is a white-fronted goose~ a western species~ in the pond down the corner and despite today's chill bluebirds were checking out the houses, perhaps inspired by the warm days just past. Up on the ocean side of Cape Cod is where I draw lots of nature inspiration. I could prattle on about local birds of prey behavior but as my sister Barbette says "not everyone is on that train". Bottom line: I am packing the van for the show and Donna is packing the car for the cape. We keep telling ourselves it will be a good time to digest Donna's news.

Maybe I shouldn't have favorites, but my favorite show is also on the horizon: Open Studio Hartford! The 21st year of this event is chock full of all kinds of activities. If I don't stop typing RIGHT NOW I won't have my gallery piece finished for the "Coming of Age" themed show, which is a mixed media thang. Working on this piece has been fun, despite tight deadlines all around. Look for us on the 3rd floor of ArtSpace Hartford November 13&14.

Before I head back into the studio I will mention several other dates & places for seeing my work:

"Mad Gifts: An Art Show" put on by The Icarus Project will be November 5 - December 7 at Small World Coffee in Princeton, NJ. I will be unable to attend the November 5th opening but I can guarentee it will be a good time. 7pm-9pm.

Tolland County Art Association is also having a 21st birthday and mounting their 21st annual open art show. It will be held Wed. Nov 3 until Tue. Nov 30 at South Windsor Public Library in the town of the same name in CT. Most know I grew up in SW. We will be attend the reception Sunday, November 7. I took this opportunity to show two of my Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill series. I will be surrounded by watercolorists with mad skills and plein air painters who meet weekly in one beautiful location after another, as well as a wide array of other work.

New photos soon...

Respite from Business

Brown Trout

Today I will again head out to Belding Wildlife Management Area nearby in Vernon, CT. It is a gorgeous area and I get to work with 4th graders learning about ecosystems. My station is the stream and we were lucky yesterday~ most of the children saw at least one fish in the stream and we had a great time with our experiments. These same children came to Belding in the Fall and I was so pleased to hear what they remembered from that trip.

We walk quite a way through forest to get our prime learning real estate. To watch how kids absorb and interact with the outdoors is a huge pleasure of mine and becoming a Master Wildlife Conservationist with the Department of Environmental Protection has given me great experiences. In another life I would be a wildlife biologist. I wander around after the pros and soak up everything I can, and I can get a little "star struck" at these scientists.

Off to the stream!

The Race

It is that time of year, 2010 has flown by and is racing to a close at a speed like lightning, the sight of fall leaves is as startling to my eyes as the sound of a clap of thunder is to the ears. The year began in deep sadness and personal loss and quickly moved into world wide horror with the Haiti earthquake through to the BP Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and devastating oil spill. Nearby, the tragic shooting at Hartford Distributors left 9 abruptly dead including the killer and the toll of flooding in Pakistan is still unfolding as the monsoon season continues. A man I knew and loved since age 6 disappeared abruptly from our midst and I didn't have any idea until months too late....too late to say goodbye. I have been uncharacteristically silent.

Life rolled on rapidly in celebration as well. I know what my high school and college classmates were doing in the seasons of 1991 and early 1992...making babies. An unprecedented number of my friends' children matriculated from high school and into life and college life this summer. I am old enough that some of my classmates are grandparents and I am amazed at the marches to the alter all around me: youthful first marriages and the elder blissful surprise of second marriages.

My beloved neighbor Fred Voto had his Vietnam memoir published and an old friend launched another best seller. My kindle has been a constant companion.

I am a news watcher, but I have ceased to be a trend watcher. For the art business, like many types of business, the economy has ached deeply, and I needed to stop tracking trends to find my own way. Starting last October at the East Coast Art Retreat http://www.art-is-you.com , my network of creative people exploded and I have been happily networking since. Our local Creative Co-Op turned me on to some unprecedented and excellent art marketing workshops and it has become easier to keep my eyes on the prize of creating more work. A college chum shared my work with a dealer in South Carolina and getting work in place there jump started a better organized system for tracking shows and consignments in more states than I have ever had representation.

Whoo. But I sat down to do a show submission today and I have doubts. All these years of painting and drawing birds, being a nature lover and observer, set me up for an unmatched ache for the BP oil spill and its impact on the fragile Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. I could, without the aide of news crews, easily picture the devastated breeding areas and the horror of live and dead animals helplessly mired in oil. Sea birds have, especially over my years vacationing in North Truro, MA, become a special passion. My new work is inspired by the disaster and I am not sure how people will respond. My first chance to submit work from this series is today, and I am torn. It is still too soon too offer for sale. How silly is that? Yeah, I know, starving artists should have no qualms. These two are the 8th or 9th images in the series. Any thoughts?

A welcome downpour of rain has arrived. The yard became dust with little rain in July and August~ except the three garden zones I watered sparingly. The moist air has reminded me of ocean: "The Race" is what the New York current in Long Island Sound is named, and it was a terrifying band of water when I was a child. You could be on calm water one moment and see a boats of every size lurching wildly ahead, parked in The Race in pursuit of "blues", one of my favorite fish to eat next to shad. My uncle acquired a boat this year and he and Donna and I have been venturing out on a local lake and, unexpectedly, spending time on the CT river. I missed signing up for the boating license class in a flurry of art stuff, but I am motivated to "get 'er done" this year, before the fees go up. I am sure the only way I will get my bluefish this season is sailing out on a charter...or cruising into a fish market!

Feeling like life is racing by, picturing the bounty of the sea in Autumn, and off to make more art of  sea birds. Perhaps I will yield to the sale, perhaps I will just keep drawing and picturing the Sound on a stormy day, bemoaning the plight of fishermen and sea birds everywhere.

Marchness

Do you ever have a hard time making a commitment...to yourself, to anyone? Knowing what is good is one thing, doing what is good is another. I don't mean acts of charity or other goodiness. I periodically stumble on doing a good thing...say comforting words to a friend who has lost someone, make a particularly good meal for my love, pick up trash on the trail...easy things that take little sacrifice.

But in the lengthening days of late winter, right about now, a winter kind of madness sets in to me and nothing eases it. Everything around me has lost the grace of snowy whiteness, and the grey and brown earthly things revealed I know are poised to burst, yet to me they still feel hard and coiled in their seedy hulls. A moment of sun warms my face, then the relentless grey sky takes over again and I am chilled to the bone, stiff and older than my years. I become stingy with myself, withholding simple pleasures.

Life is out there...I SEE it...glorious and beautiful, clever and cruel. But I am separate from it somehow, as if thick frost covers the glass I am trying to look though. Hans Christian Andersen's story of the Snow Queen was one of my favorites as a child. I read it over and over and at the moment I feel like one of the central characters, Kaj (pronounced "Kay"), after he has fallen victim to the splinters of the troll-mirror.

Quickly I will sum it up, though I imagine you might remember it a bit. An evil troll makes a magic mirror that has the power to distort the appearance of things reflected in it. It fails to reflect all the good and beautiful aspects of people and things while it magnifies all the bad and ugly aspects so that they look even worse than they really are. The troll teaches a "devil school," and he and his pupils delight in taking the mirror throughout the world to distort everyone and everything. They enjoy how the mirror makes the loveliest landscapes look like "boiled spinach." They  want to carry the mirror into heaven with the idea of making fools of the angels, but the higher they lift it, the more the mirror shakes with delight. It shakes so much that it slips from their grasp and falls back to earth where it shatters into billions of pieces — some no larger than a grain of sand. These splinters are blown around and get into people's hearts and eyes, making their hearts frozen like blocks of ice and their eyes like the troll-mirror itself, only seeing the bad and ugly in people and things.

It is on a pleasant summer's day that splinters of the troll-mirror get into Kaj's heart and eyes while he and his best friend Gerda are looking at a picture book in their window-box garden. Kaj's personality changes: he becomes cruel and aggressive. He destroys their window-box garden, he makes fun of his grandmother, and he no longer cares about Gerda, since all of them now appear bad and ugly to him. The only beautiful and perfect things to him now are the tiny snowflakes that he sees through a magnifying glass, and his pursuit of them leads him away to the permafrost home of the Snow Queen, who imprisons him. Kaj is presumed dead by his family and neighbors, but Gerda is not convinced and commences searching, and after many trials she releases him from the Snow Queen for eternity.

I suppose the commitment I must make is to release myself from the grasp of my Marchness by spending time making stuff with the East Coast Artist Retreat folks and taking advantage of the snowless land for longer and longer treks with the pup. I can commit to the birdwatching course and finish one thing of the hundred I have in progress. Just one.

Perhaps my Gerda, the heart and soul of Spring, will find me soon. May she have found you already, or, may you be certain she is looking, just in case you too are lost in the Marchness.

Yellow Brick Road Paved with Good Intentions!

Okay.

I should have taken the hint that things were all going astray when I was working on a new/old piece (started it in October!) I have been calling "A Shrine to the Whaler's Wife" which seemed perfect for the Hygienic Art Show in New London. After all, New London was at the heart of the American whaling trade for so long...

So I spent a little time planning how to do what was left...it required some special rivets...and I come back to claim the pieces and sure enough, there is Rosie, happily gnawing on the oh-so-fragile whale bone that was central to the piece. I found it on the beach at the Cape years ago and had finally found a home for it. In a few short minutes she chewed off the part where the fastening was to take place. I haven't adjusted to the new shape of it, so I set it all aside for now...the whale bone and driftwood, and the tin types of my imagined whaler and his imagined wife...the key to her and their story's home~ a triangular box that was a small drawer in its' former life.

NEW PLAN! Take something from my own collection I haven't shown. Sure. That's it! I have been dawdling around this for days. Donna and I shamelessly "Wiied" away our morning golfing in the living room and I had leaped in the shower, ready to roar out to the show. And apparently the blackberry went off. Next thing I know Donna is sailing out the door to work (an emergency with computer speakers?) and I am marooned. I suppose "marooned" is a strong word for it. I could go on by myself. Thursday my sister had provided Mom and I with the chance to see the musical "Lion King"~ the sets and costumes and lighting made me WEEP they were so fabulous ~ and my engine light came on on the way home. Now, I know most people would go ahead and use the vehicle...but I am not interested in risking being alone in the dark with in a not-running car an hour and a half from home when it is 25 degrees out. I know, chicken s--t.

So here we are. I have no dinner planned...the oven isn't working (don't get me started on my annoying appliances)and the whale-eating dog and I will just have to settle for a track-stuff-in-the-snow walk while we wait for the better half to be through with work. And this painting will just have to stay on the wall in the studio...no walk-about for it.

So why the Yellow Brick Road? After last October's Art Is... conference a bunch of us decided to make a deck of artwork. We are doing a round robin...make a piece on a card from some sort of deck of cards (I used flash cards left over from tutoring) and mail it on around so all 22 artists end up with a deck we all contributed to. The theme for this year's conference is Wizard of Oz and we all were taken with the idea of wickedness...so this is our "wicked deck". Sounds great, right? I went nuts perseverating on my start-up...the first card is always the hardest, right? I pulled together FORTY TWO rough drafts of ideas before I started playing with ruby slippers...and there are ruby slippers still all over the darned studio...once I narrowed it down I still made another 23 before I liked what I had, then I express mailed it out to the next person on the list so she could get it turned around before the next mail date. I must not be the only one who gets sidewinding all around...the robin had not rounded its way here yet!

Ah, the best-laid plans. And now Donna is already on her way home. She had to work just long enough for us to miss the deadline for submission for the New London show. I suppose if we had been just a little quicker out the door she wouldn't have been able to get back to help the person in need...by far the greater portion of our bread and butter.

Speaking of bread and butter, if we had gone along...we also would have missed bread fresh from the oven our good neighbor Fred brought to us. Win some, win some.

Close encounter

John Nieto's "Blue Coyote" is perfect art for this clear, bright winter day. I haven't been sleeping well, a combination of an earache and the antibiotics to treat it have kept me up and down, so Rosie had to wait until 10 a.m. for me to get my butt in gear for a "big" walk. The snow is beautiful and the sun is making for higher temps than we will have again for a while. I didn't really intend to go very far, but the day called us further and further out. Against my own policy I left without leash in pocket, letting Rosie bound freely in the snow.

First we tracked the red fox that walks up along the treeline on the North side. My theory is that there is both a male and a female, but they do not travel together this time of year, so I need to get photos at each sighting~ not always easy. The fox tracks crossed back over into the brook and we had people and dog tracks from neighbor's who run their dogs out here too. Off the beaten path was unmistakable coyote track, and if I thought about it hard I might have guessed they were the freshest there. We followed those across the open snow drifts in the meadow then joined the trail again at the brook and pond, where Rosie plunged her face in the snow, searching for the mice and voles.

Snowmobilers came through a day or so back and I briefly considered following their tracks off the property, but I was mindful of not having a leash and turned back to look for deer tracks on the South trail, on the "Abbe" side. Deer cut through the trees there and often find a bit of open water that trickles across the path there, and I hadn't seen deer since the weekend snow.  The "herd" is only 7 or 8, but this year an impressive 8 point buck trails the does and last year's twin fawns. Rosie was lagging behind me, just as I entered the trees past the pond. First I heard a yip, then a howl. Unmistakable. Coyote. VERY close.

Now I adore a close wildlife encounter, but I had just been thinking food might be scarce for the fox and coyote with the freeze and the snow cover. I threw off my hood to hear better. I don't hear well on a good day, and I am temporarily pretty deaf in the bad ear. Another howl. The critter had to be within 25 yards, hidden by the old Christmas tree growth. Rosie was oblivious, face in the snow still, intent on her hunt. I needed us to be in the open fast. I kept thinking about a hiker and dog I met on the trail in Massachusetts in November. She had a stand-off encounter with a full family group...a pack...the day before we met up.

I called Rosie in a way that caught her swift attention. She sensed my urgency and did not look behind me. Good. I did not want her to catch sight of the coyote, and I know it could see and smell us just fine. I picked a more playful tone and started running, calling her and looking back. Good girl, good, good dog. Rosie veered once away from me and the coyote, but she was glad for a game if I was playing and quickly rejoined me. It was going to be hard, telling the story to Donna later, to confess I left without the leash. I would have dropped it so the two of us could run without tripping each other up, but it would have held her to me should she become curious about the critter.

Nothing followed us. I stuck to the wide open and made my way home, distracting Rosie with a frisbee I had dumped off to pick up on the way out, and I spent plenty of time looking back as I caught my breath.

She is napping now. Our late day walk will be up closer to the houses. Not that coyotes don't come close to the houses, they do. If I step outside they freeze, and we watch each other until one or the other of us has to move on. But Rosie is not yet a year, and I am not ready to know how that goes if she is with me. For today I am grateful her puppiness kept her distracted.

I remember the first time I saw John Nieto's paintings, in a gallery in Sante Fe. I hadn't been painting or drawing wildlife for a while, but the bright brushwork slaked a thirst I forgot I had. His colors are luscious and I recognize his work from any distance, for all of the two and a half decades since my first look. So I will take my coyote encounter, and this dry, bright day that reminds me of walking in snow in the high desert country, and finish the fox moon series I started months ago. Hopefully this will be a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of experience, an awe-inspiring close call that keeps me mindful of the wildness of life even in this tiny pocket of space.