cornflower

The shutter holds in my mom's village are so pretty, most are women and either they or the shutters are painted this vibrant blue.

neighbour

The door a few down from my mom's. The oldest records for this stretch of houses are from the 1590's because previous ones were destroyed when the town was sacked a couple decades before.

oops

An experiment gone awry.

I love a bit of decay incorporated into things, which is why I love old buildings, Michael Eastman’s photos, and the furniture I inherited (although a small fund to keep the chairs glued and un-wobbly would have been a good thing to inherit along with). I’ve been working on a way to include that in some of my pieces, but how best to partially destroy my work?

Here is a piece I’ve been wreaking minor destruction on, pre-destruction:

It definitely needs some decay, so I go to work on it, trying to balance giving it some integrity while still leaving it vulnerable:

Then I become Kali, speeding up the destructive force of time, and the result is:

Far too much decay!

Tomorrow, back to the easel, so to speak. I will repair it to wreak (less) havoc on it another day.

At least it won’t need this treatment:

Done to erase the result of another experiment. One not to be repeated.

urn

These are from this summer, all in my mom’s neighbourhood.

I’m working with photos for a few days to distract myself from some technical difficulties with the other series I’ve been working on. I’ve looked around to see if anyone else is doing a similar process with inks, pencil and encaustic, but haven’t seen any, so I’ll go back to experimenting with the propane torches tomorrow. So far nothing big has caught fire or blown up, that’s good anyway.

Earlier this evening I was showing a friend the website of one of my favourite photographers, Michael Eastman – his Cuban and Italian photos are incredible. Then I learned of the death of Roy DeCarava, another amazing photographer. I was trying to pick a few of his photos that I liked best, but it is so hard to choose. This is one of many, and this, and this. They are so evocative.

Now that I have loaded my photos onto this post I’ve decided I don’t like the way they look small. I love how art has such a different effect at different sizes (except when it doesn’t work small on my blog). I spent the day at an art museum with some friends recently, and was loving the difference between various pieces close up and at a distance. And the texture, that fantastic delicate texture of drawings and miniatures, it’s all completely lost in reproduction.

locations

This is what I’ve been finishing up this week, another architecture + script. I love gothic anything, I haven’t put the buildings in my work much, but I do use this old Italian handwriting frequently.

All the travelling has stopped (for now) after a weekend at a beautiful town up the coast for a wedding (also beautiful). My computer celebrated by coming down with some dreadful, barely fixable condition, and now, after everything it went through as a cure, I’m having a hard time finding my stuff. I may have to learn quite a bit more about computers to get everything re-organized, adding to the chaos of moving back in to my regular life.

It has not been enough to keep me from thinking about a trip to New Orleans in March though, I’ve been dreaming about the food, music, and the architecture.

sonnet

Detail of a recent piece.

cashio

I’m excited because I’m getting ready for three months of travel, but I’m also mourning because I haven’t been able to work on assemblages lately, and I won’t be able to bring those materials on the road. I will be restricted to working on pieces like this one (which I do love creating), plus a few fiber projects which pack easily. It’s frustrating to want to be making things and not be able to get my hands on the bits and pieces, but at least I will be finding more in the four countries I’ll be travelling through to visit my family.

There are a few things I’m sharing from the garden before I leave – raspberries, boysenberries, figs, pads for nopales (with lentils, yum!), and this lone avocado, very buttery. When I get back there may be a few strawberry and pineapple guavas left, then there will be pomegranates. I’ll miss the peaches – heavenly when they’re ripe and the skin slides off in your fingers, also the ripening of the manzana bananas and thimbleberries. My stubborn pineapples think they are just for show, all the other bromeliads bloom while they just sit there, but I am very happy because an ancient cycad that was damaged and seemed to die three years ago just produced a beautiful crown of leaves.

I love traveling, although I will miss a lot of close friends – three months is a long time between visits, but I will be staying with family and friends, some of whom I only see every few years, and there will be a new bébé when I get back.

weggehen

I was thinking about the process of art – I love how poet Hilde Domin talks about being deeply immersed in her writing, then stepping back. From a poem of hers:

Man muß weggehen können
und doch sein wie ein Baum:
als bliebe die Wurzel im Boden,
als zöge die Landschaft und wir ständen fest

(my not-very-poetic translation:
One must be able to go away
and yet be like a tree:
as if the roots remained in the ground,
as if the landscape moved and we stood fast)

mermaid

vitreous

I was thinking that I should be putting more photos of my work on here, and thinking about how dull yesterday’s post and photo were (repeated apologies to the readers who clicked in to just that post from Korea, the U.S.A., and Cork, Ireland!), but today I’ve been asked to write an article for a magazine and the part of the project I’m working on is not yet visually interesting. What to do. So then, here is one more wave from last week’s day at the beach, and I’ll be over my ocean photo quota for the season. Also over my post-about-writing-a-post quota.

And I’m thinking I shouldn’t make a habit of posting before my morning tea. Or in the hours after midnight.

beach glass

At the beach the other day it occurred to me that I have never lived more than ten miles from an ocean (not always the same one). I had a pet starfish when I was a kid, I’d get mussels and clams from the beach across the street to feed him.

Years later, and further inland, I had a enormous one-eyed frog as a pet (named Argus, of course), who would act peevish when I tricked him into eating a mouse instead of his preferred goldfish. He was actually a mouse-eating species of frog but apparently felt more comfortable as a pescatarian.

ambition

I cook competently only because I love to eat good food. Every once in a while I’m sure if something were fixed, made available, or changed in some way, I would be motivated to spend more time in creative partnership with my 1950’s two oven, two broiler, six flame Gaffers & Sattler. That’s when I do things like pick up prickly pear trimmings some guy threw over his fence, cure them, and plant them because I love lentil stew with nopales and these prickly pear pads have fewer spines than your average prickly pear, so would be easier to prepare. The prickly pear hedge is now huge, because of course I still don’t cook nopales, but it did prevent the guy who was trying to cut the lock off the side gate from hiding when the nurse across the street got home at 2am one night last year, so I had good feelings about it until today when it tried to St. Sebastian me while I was trying not to startle this little guy. Hedge trimming is on tomorrow’s schedule.

virtual geography

I saw a list of blogs that a search engine thought were similar to mine and clicked on one at random and the top post was about the blogger’s paintings being photographed by Eduardo Calderón, whom I’ve known since I was a kid! I love his photographs, but it’s much nicer when I run into him in person because then we can go to lunch and chat.

The picture is of a shallow etching I am trying to work into a piece. It is not cooperating.