October 24, 2018
Sometimes
The To Do list should read
Just stop.
Look down at the ground
Or up at the sky
Slow down, take time to think
Take a picture of a flower
Or paint a mood
Or a memory.
“The Path,” October 15, 2018
The polar vortex; 25 degrees below zero… time to stay inside… spent three days experimenting with my newly acquired watercolors… discovered watercolor granulation… something entirely new to me… amazingly beautiful!
Violet Granulation, January 31, 2019
“How does it go together?” January 31, 2019
Sea Waves, January 31, 2019
Above: The Bridge , March 20, 2019
A certain utilitarian “brute modern” bridge is a familiar landmark in my daily walks, and it figures in many of my meditations on nature in suburbia:
The graffiti under the bridge comes and goes. Eventually the road crews cover it over and then the graffiti is painted anew. The layers of paint create their own designs. “Drew” has been under the bridge all this past winter (2018-2019). Probably not to the young person who painted the name, but to me, “drew” seemed a pun on the act.
Yesterday, looking at “drew” for the umpteenth time, in a moment of inspiration, I saw a painting of my own in my mind! Could I realize it? I decided to try. And then, well, I was like a naturalist on the hunt for an exotic butterfly–alert, on edge, camera poised, waiting for my prey to appear, the perfect car to complement the graffiti.
Needless to say, this is the first time I have painted graffiti. Believe it or not, it’s the first time I’ve ever painted a car either!
You might like:
Ye Knights of Ye Thirteenth Car
reflected interior lights; snow outside; December 5, 2016
the same sunset windows, almost forty years on . . .
Wall/ thru wall/ thru sky/ thru me
Transparent layers of color
Transparent layers of reality
The sunset, out there, at the edge of the sky
Colors I can’t describe
Sliding thru spectrums I can’t define.
The colors have no edges
Except where they touch the dark sky above
Or are cut by the black silhouettes of trees.
Me, trying to describe in words what can’t be described
Turned on the light
Creating my reflection in the glass
Hand on chin, pencil, paper, my bookcase behind
And I saw the sunset through the bookcase and through my head
Transparent layers of reality
Fading now into night.
January 5, 1980
Above, Early Morning, October 3, 2017, 6:28 a.m.
“If you make a practice or painting a sky every morning with the regularity you take your bath, you will find at the end of six months that you know something of its variations.” Alfred East, Landscape Painting
October 1, 2017, 6:43 a.m.
October 2, 2017, 6:41 a.m.
October 3, 2017, 6:36 a.m.
My cell-phone paintbrush… These three photos were all taken from near the same spot, on three consecutive days, at about the same time, in the forest preserve. The photo at the top of the page and the one just above were taken on the same morning, eight minutes apart. In those eight minutes, the sun had risen. How different each day is, and how fast the world changes…
For a view of this same landscape on a misty morning, see “Uphill in Fog,” a short piece I read for the 31st volume of the Short Nonfiction Collection
See more sky photos at “Painterly Skies.”
Above, Spider Web on Bridge Railing, October 8, 2017
I have been recording books as a hobby since 2008. Rather than familiar topics, I tend to let my curiosity lead me to books which open my mind to new knowledge. Such is the case with the book I read for LibriVox in the fall of 2017: Spiders by Cecil Warburton. As I age, I am of the opinion that remaining curious is a survival necessity!
October 9, 2017, 7:54 a.m.
How I became curious about spiders and their webs begins with walking. For years now (it’s 14 years since I retired), I have taken a long morning walk in our local forest preserve. Most days, my ramble takes me across a pedestrian bridge, which you can see in the photo. This bridge crosses a small creek, and the creek’s flood plain.. The bridge has a wooden floor and heavy iron slab railings, which have rusted into a deep rich red-brown color.
October 2, 2017
For quite a few years now, I’ve noticed that the bridge railings were covered with spider webs. They glistened with dew in the early morning sun. I would admire the webs in passing, but I never actually examined any of them until I acquired a cell phone with a camera. Then I thought the webs might be interesting subjects for the camera’s close-up abilities, and I stopped to really “look” at a few of them. And, wonder of wonders, they were inhabited! There were handsome yellow and black spiders sitting majestically in the center of net domains, and there were tiny white spiders, not more than a quarter of an inch in size creating webs a foot in diameter! Just amazing!
Spider about 1/4 inch long, on railing; it was spinning lines while I watched, Oct. 9, 2017
I began to photograph the webs, trying to capture their artistry and the quality of “abstract, or “graphic” art which they conveyed to me. I included the spiders too, when I could (not, admittedly the easiest creatures to photograph). Then I began to read a little about spiders, starting with a selection called “The Circular Snare” for the 51st volume of the Librivox Nonfiction Collection. On my website page for this reading, you can see a spectacular circular snare.
Funnel Web on Bridge Railing, September 26, 2017
The pedestrian bridge railings make a home for funnel web spiders. They stretch their webs out along an iron railing and hide their funnel between the railing and an upright post.
Looking into the funnel,
Sept. 26, 2017
Gossamer Tatters, October 9, 2017
You can see a second, circular web in the background, with a small spider in its center!
Here are a few more of my readings prompted by “curiosity.”
Above, a Red Eft, my photo, July 31, 2018
August 12, 2018:
The other day, I called (on my land line) a carpenter who had been recommended to me to repair some woodpecker damage to the cedar siding on my house. I told him I’d lived here for 43 years, which was a sure give-a-way about my age. The carpenter said he could handle the job, and just to text him my name and address and he’d come out and give me an estimate. Then he stopped short and asked me over the phone: “Do you know how to text?”
My computer keyboard
Oh sure. I do text, sort of. I’ve concluded that my cell phone takes the letters more accurately if I use the side of my thumb than if I use my forefinger to punch the letters, but physically, and intellectually it’s a struggle to believe in the process. As to using speech input, I simply won’t go down that road. I try to keep up with technology, but much of the changes will never feel natural to me.
One of the most self-defeating aspects of aging is if you come to believe there will never be any more “firsts” in your life, that you’ve seen and experienced all that you can reasonably expect to see and do before you exit this earth. I’m not quite that self-defeating but it is seldom I have a really awesome “first” moment any more, which is where the Red Eft comes into the story. Actually, the Red Eft’s sighting turned out to be both a great “first” and “second!”
On July 31, 2018 at 7:57 a.m, I was taking my usual morning walk in our local forest preserve. I was crossing the parking lot in front of the old red barn, when I happened to look down at the pavement and saw a creature entirely new to me! It looked to be a red salamander, about 3″ long. Wow! This was exciting. I texted a photo of my find to one of the county naturalists and got back the following messages: “Cool! Pretty sure this is an eastern newt. I’m sending it on to our wildlife biologist. Great find!” And a few minutes later: “Just want you to know that this salamander, an eastern newt, is a very special find. Yours is only the second sighting of it here. Our wildlife biologist is thrilled (as am I)!”
A few more firsts: Yesterday (8/11/2018), on a whim, I decided to see how many different insects I could find on a stand of sunflowers along the path. In a minute or two, I’d photographed these
You might enjoy these:
Another “How many insects can you spot?” photo play. These pics were all taken on a clump of milkweed, August 19, 2018. What caught my attention was the monarch butterfly caterpillar curled on a leaf;
Milkweed with monarch caterpillar on leaf
Then I spotted these milkweed bugs “frolicking” on another milkweed leaf.
Milkweed Bugs
You might enjoy:
Remaining Curious: Or Spider Web Graphics
When I was a small girl, 7 or 8 years old, I made a list of what I didn’t like about grownups, with the intention of reviewing it in later life, so as not to be like that. Sadly, I lost the list somewhere along the way of growing up. However, I still have another similarly intentioned list, begun in 1997, outlining what I should guard against when I got “really old.” (I was 56 at the time.) “Don’t wear pink!” I admonished myself. To which I added in 1998 “Don’t still be working!” and in 1999 “I don’t want to be dissatisfied with my life because I don’t think I’ve done it all.”
Lists of negatives . . . not the best approach to planning one’s “later years,” but, then, envisioning how life is going to play out in retirement is difficult, probably impossible. Too many hours, days, years, too many unknowns. But without doubt, having some idea of what you’d like to “do” when you don’t have to work and thus “have time” would be helpful.
I did have one fixed idea of what I wanted to accomplish in retirement. I wanted to learn to draw. By this I suppose I meant learn to draw realistically and with linear perspective. What I couched in terms of learning a specific skill set was probably just a wistful yearning for some creative outlet, but in my mind, it was the one definitive project I was going to tackle when I retired. I began retirement in 2003 by buying a drawing kit that came with a pad of paper and a fancy box of pencils. And now here I am, 15 years later with a website celebrating the public domain audio books that I’ve recorded!
The impulse to express oneself through drawing or painting, must run deep in the human psyche, because the most popular book I have recorded for LibriVox is Sir Alfred East’s The Art of Landscape Painting in Oil Colour. As of June 2019, it has been viewed on the internet over 255,349 times. I picked East’s book to read because of his perceptive chapters on how to draw and paint.
One of the delights of East’s book are his pencil sketches–which, of course, cannot be seen in an audio recording.
“Rockingham;” Sketch by East
East devotes a chapter to “Pencil Drawing from Nature.” He recommends a pencil with a thick lead and then goes on to say “do not attempt to sharpen it to a point. If you wish to get a thin line, use the edge of the lead. Touch lightly, and in the faintest possible manner, the salient features of the subject, the main contours and position of the masses. This should be the merest suggestion of an outline, and when you are satisfied, draw it in with courage, in big lines, with a firm, bold touch. Do not hesitate. Include only those things which are important, characteristic, and essential.”
“Ash Trees on the Stow Road;” Sketch by East
East’s almost scriptural description of the drawing pencil and it use brought back to me, in sharp relief, childhood memories of my father. By training an engineer, my father was scrupulous about the care of his pencils, which he sharpened with a pocket knife. He too, favored a flat sided tip, good for drawing lines. I was rebuked if I so much as touched his drafting tools, and to keep me out of his pencil supply, he finally resorted to giving me, once a year, a box of a dozen Turquoise brand HB pencils in my Christmas stocking. There was no asking for more!
Alfred East is a proselytizer for the theory of practice makes perfect. “Never let anything prevent your drawing a little every day. It is necessary discipline . . . One’s hand grows sensitively obedient to the brain, and answers directly to one’s power of observation, like the touch of a musician’s hand upon the keyboard. . . Draw anything, everything. You may do it badly at first. Never mind. In a week or two you will be surprised at the progress you have made.” I like East’s enthusiasm.
Have I learned to draw? Well, no. But I’m not so much bothered anymore by my “failure” in that regard, because I’ve taken up oil painting . . . How this came about is one of those serendipitous changes of direction that can happen when you let them, I guess. In my case, it happened in 2014. I was 10 years into retirement and still hadn’t accomplished my “one” retirement goal. “Better get moving on it, Sue,” I said to myself, ” before it’s too late.” So I thumbed through our local park district’s newsletter with its cheery listing of self-improvement courses: “Lunch Break Yoga,” “Windows PC Troubleshooting,” and, yes, there was what I needed: “Fundamentals of Drawing.” I signed up.
Watermelon Rind, by Sue
Anyone can imagine what happened next–a call from the instructor. “They got the description all wrong; it’s not a drawing class; it’s an oil painting class.” I still took the class. This early oil, dated March 7, 2015, is one of my very few attempts at realism. At best, it illustrates my fondness for watermelon!
Sir Winston Churchill was another person who slipped, serendipitously, into oil painting as a pastime. I’ve recorded his enthusiastic story, Painting as a Pastime, for LibriVox. Churchill writes “If you need something to occupy your leisure, to divert your mind from the daily round, to illuminate your holidays, do not be too ready to believe that you cannot find what you want here. . . Buy a paint box and have a try.”
Above: Cattails along the edge of the pond, October 21, 2016
Reflections, November 27, 2016
Familiar places can be magical sometimes. For me, yesterday (2/21/2017) the familiar place turned magical was a clump of cattails on the edge of the pond in the forest preserve. The pond itself is a quiet, beautiful spot, where there is always something to see at any season of the year.
In summer, the pond’s edge is alive with frogs that kerplunk into the water as I go past. Although I’ve tried, I’ve never been fast enough with my camera to catch a frog in a photo. I’ve had better luck with herons. (Addendum–see frog photo below!)
Heron, October 12, 2015
In winter, the pond is ice-covered.
Cattails, January 21, 2015
Cattails, January 3, 2017
December 26, 2017
Ice on the pond, Dec. 26, 2017. It was minus 6 degrees during the night
Cattail Seeds, Dec. 21, 2017
A couple of years ago, the cattail clump held a surprise for me. The snake photo dates from May 4, 2015. I’m no wildlife photographer, so you have to use your imagination to see the hidden snake. But I stood entranced watching it from just a few feet away. We didn’t have big snakes like that in Seattle, where I grew up. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources has an informative identification website, and looking through the photos there, I’ll guess “my” snake was a northern water snake, but whatever its name, it was a treat to see.
Water Snake, May 4, 2015
Grass disturbed by muskrats, February 21, 2017
Yesterday (2/21/2017), the same cattail clump was again showing me its magic. As I approached, my impression was that the cattails looked rather “end-of-winter” ratty. The grass several feet out from the bank was trampled revealing dark muddy soil underneath. I thought the damage was caused by people or maybe by the Canadian geese. Then I spotted a muskrat! I’d never seen one up close before. There were actually two muskrats, and they put on quite a show, diving in and out of the cattails, and periodically running out on the bank for a nibble of grass.
The muskrats made magic in my day.
Muskrat, February 21, 2017
A frog in the cattails, May 31, 2017
The muskrat, taking a swim in the creek, February 23, 2017
Tadpoles in the pond, April 28, 2017. I recorded a short piece about tadpoles for the 49th volume of the short nonfiction collection.
Above: Sketch, Old Factory
Bronze kelp sculpture, Edmonds, WA waterfront
June 4, 2019
As I’ve detailed elsewhere in my blog, when I officially “retired” back in 2003–my retirement wish was to learn to draw. At best it might be said that I’ve “circled” this goal by dabbling in oil paints, and recently, watercolors. But being able to put marks on paper that resembled a scene or an identifiable object eluded me.
However, lately I’ve made some progress. And I thought it might be interesting to record how this came about. It started in 2017 with me standing in front of a bookcase in a Seattle nursing home. My mom, then 107 years old, was a resident in this home and a few days away from dying, and the nursing home administrator and myself were confronting my mom’s bookcase. “Don’t you want some of Mary’s books,” the administrator asked me, as I stared at titles like “The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew,” “Pollyanna” and “Engineering Drawing (1911, revised 1918).” I silently asked myself why had my mother dragged these kid’s books and my dad’s college text books from the 1920’s around with her all these years? I finally settled for one book: Engineering Drawing. Not that I was interested in engineering, but the word “drawing” in the title intrigued me.
Back home in Illinois, I opened my book. My dad had bought it used, and the original owner’s name was still inside the cover (Merlin Hanan). Merlin had written down directions to the U. of Washington Engineering building (take the 1st rt. Good Roads Bldg.) My dad had dutifully added his name, address, phone number and the price he paid for the book ($2.20), as well as his grade for Civil Engineering I (a “B”). He’d left his grade for C.E. 2 blank.
The book opened flat of it’s own accord to page 30, the section on pen and ink technique, and the author, Thomas E. French, M.E. intoned “If inked lines appear imperfect in any way the reason should be ascertained immediately. It may be the fault of the pen, the ink, the paper, or the draftsman, but with the probabilities greatly in favor of the last.” Figure 47 illustrated faulty lines.
Well, drawing lines is certainly easier today, with today’s fine-line markers, than it was back in the 1920’s, I said to myself. Encouraged, I read further. Ch. IX dealt with drawing “Bolts, Screws, Rivets and Pipe.”Here was all the information I needed for drawing bolts and screw threads; hmm…
I delved deeper, and discovered a chapter on “Shade Lines and Line Shading.” Now this was useful information, how to make pipes look curved and spheres shaded with just inked lines strategically placed. I began to feel friendly toward my dad’s old book.
Fast forward to another book, one that I discovered in our public library: Freehand Sketching, An Introduction by Paul Laseau (W. W. Norton, 2004). Laseau is an architect, and his small book is a clear, structured, step-by-step guide to pen-and-ink sketching.” It’s a book I highly recommend. My pen and ink sketches are inspired by my dad’s engineering text and were created following the exercises and tips in Laseau’s book.
It’s warm up here.
