Morning glory advances and drawing, how long?

Friday's time on the deck was vintage. Perfect weather, low humidity, few biting insects. And I got my first clearwing hummingbird moth sighting of the year, working on the butterfly bush. Also a chickadee, a first this year. And a monarch butterfly. These are all less common than in earlier years, likewise fireflies, just the occasional one, but still welcome. 

Saturday's walk to the pond, cool and cloudy, great walking weather, is now no longer a stretch goal but routine. While I was there I pulled off a dead branch which was dragging a big bough down, and the bough sprang up gratefully, about fifteen feet up.

Already some leaves are falling, mostly wild cherry. You'll see beechnuts developing, and brambles growing in a planter, such temptation.  I expect birds and squirrels will see them off before they're ripe.

And back home I added in a couple of garden stakes to give the morning glories something to climb up. A couple of hours later, the tendrils are already establishing themselves. Warp speed.

I "pruned" the bird-planted butterfly bush by treating it rough. I'm not a careful snippity gardener, at least not with this guy. 

I just tore off lower branches full of dead foliage and tossed them into the trees on my walk.

When you consider the savage cutting and hacking and poisonous tools and materials used in suburban gardens, you wonder if many a murder has been averted by people rushing to take out their deadly aggression in the garden. All that slashing and dragging about. I do wonder.

Indoors the rescued orchid is getting near to flowering 

Anyway on to art.

Here's a little ink drawing from today 

And a bit tired, later I did a doodle while I listened to The Foundling, a favorite Georgette Heyer.

A couple of people have put a really good question about the drawings, not doodles,  I've been doing lately, viz., how long does it take. The answer is twofold, pour a cup of tea and sit a minute. 

One is that to an artist every piece of work, for better or worse, comes out of every mark they've ever made. That's because your eye sees based on all the years of practice it's had. Your drawing hand, too, has a lot of stored knowledge.  Your brain knows to permit the seeing without naming that's vital to drawing.  

Your experience tells you what tool or approach will work for this subject or idea -- you don't only draw stuff you can see, you may be drawing a concept, see Odilon Redon, early O'Keefe, and more. Here I drew my perception of what I was seeing, both object and idea.

The lightness and movement of the subject suggested fine-point ink, my pilot pen, the humbleness needed a small scale, here a page smaller than my hand. And the fineness of the line needed a bright white, slightly rough, paper for contrast.

So these little drawings took well over eighty years. And literally thousands of drawings and paintings and walking and looking and seeing and musing.

But what you probably really wanted to know was how long this particular one took as seen by an observer. In each case, a few minutes. 

The other thing that's not evident to an observer is that the focus needed is so total that, for me, one drawing is about it for the day. If I drew more, the focus would blur, the eye would flag, the drawing wouldn't be worth keeping, and certainly not worth showing you, and signing.

And I think you know I'm a true believer in drawing from life or memory, creating the composition there and then. I don't work from photos, even my own, where I created the composition. To me it feels dead on arrival.  The photo did it already.

I also work alla prima, meaning straight onto the blank page, no blocking or drafting or preliminary marks.  That takes place in the mind's eye. 

None of this is meant to pass judgment on different ways of drawing. It's just how I work.

More than you wanted to know, probably!  Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Happy day everyone, it's happy somewhere for someone, if not everywhere for everyone.

Prompt plumber, AMA and Leonardo

Promptly at eight am, the plumber got back to me, and by nine am the downstairs toilet was fixed so it doesn't run all the time. The upstairs one was looked at and they're ordering a new one, same type and color --bone, if you wondered -- so far so good. The guy who came was the one who installed the current ones, so he knows his stuff.

He thinks he can get and install the new one today or tomorrow. 

Edit: update, Wednesday. 

This is important because it's the one off my bedroom, and it's much safer to use during the night than going, while half asleep, down the hall into the other bathroom which is laid out differently. That's asking for a fall.

Then I started the car, wheee, it started right up after several cold days, this is great. One tiny drawback was the patch of black ice on the driver's side. 

I was not eager to fall, so I navigated with great care. Then while the engine ran, I took out the garbage, then found the snow shovel and managed to break up and toss the ice. Much safer now.  It's so good to be able to fix my own ice! I feel quite capable again. 

See chunk of ice propped up against the curb to melt.

And I checked into the AMA YouTube channel for the latest virus and heart news.

Because art will save us all, I thought I'd share this 

This is unfortunately in the royal collection, available only for viewing and study by well connected academics.  The peasants don't get to see this and hundreds of other drawings. I strongly doubt that any of the royals ever browse there, in between dress and hat fittings and intra-family feuds.

Leonardo is a gift to the world, and my egalitarian little artist heart thinks everyone should be able to see and experience his work.  Meanwhile, I remember all the times I copied this and other master drawings as well as Leonardos,  as a student while learning to see a particular view of the turned head.  

It's all about the mechanics of anatomy and perception,  and you can get a whole education from studying and copying this one drawing. Then, after copying,  when you look again, you see it with a more educated eye.

Like this, I learned so much about the shape of the eye and the relationship of the eyelid, and used the knowledge in  doing this ink and wash, much later.

And here you can see the influences in this charcoal, ink and monotype mixed media piece.

Hard to see because of reflections, but you can get the gist.

Happy day everyone, and I hope your gist today is good.

India at the gallery, food and drawings

 Today the house cleaners are scheduled, so I'm out and about, first to the UPS store to return an item which just arrived. 

Nothing like the description, also comically wrong size, but black, I'll grant them that. The label was correct, but the contents were random. QR code set up, back to UPS, nice lady scans, takes package, issues a receipt. 

This makes three out of three recent  fails in online shopping for clothes. Usually the labels are as ordered and the item bears no resemblance. I wonder if they count on people not returning them.

Then the day improved with a wonderful photography show at the library gallery. I'm not usually much interested in photography; few people really make art  with a  camera.

But this man does.

He has an eye for daily life, the tea wallah tending his shop, the goat at the door of the bead shop, the tiny shoes being made for little refugees, the man carrying an enormous vessel on his head, echoing the dome in the background, Diwali lights, nature encroaching on buildings.

The three headed figure is in the context of the two headed memes we talked about recently, and in Europe the three headed glass vase used to be a popular motif.

Lovely show, and I've only shown you my favorites. Outside the gallery, I put in a few puzzle pieces

Yesterday Gary brought me in to help him with Indian sweets he'd been given for Diwali. The Indian neighbors have showered western friends, and now we're redistributing. 

I'm one of the few Westerners around here who love Indian foods, most Americans finding them a bit spicy.  And I'm so grateful for a digestive system which seems to be castiron, despite my great age and decrepitude. I can eat and enjoy practically anything, and I never forget how lucky I am.

While I listened to the Martin Walker Bruno mystery, I knitted a bit, and suddenly felt like a couple of minutes'  drawing. 

Just pilot pen in a little all-purpose notebook. These shapes might show up in some future work, we'll see. Meanwhile it was a nice couple of minutes.

Happy day everyone, seize the nice couple of minutes where you find them!

The Day After and other pleasures

Thanksgiving was a joy start to finish, a lovely cheerful day, all the food worked out well,  I even remembered to serve it all, not leaving anything in the oven.

Handsome Son dealt with a lot of it! His contributions included a pumpkin pie, a slice of which I had for breakfast this morning in true leftover tradition.  

He departed last evening with the makings of another meal, and left me with same, plus some pie, crackers and cheeses. Not as many leftovers as you might think. It was very successful.

And here am I rockin the pearls and looking a bit  how did I get here, in the evening

I had done bit of drawing with a sepia cretacolor pencil early yesterday morning though

And since what with changes in my online life, and an impending birthday at which point I will have been 42 twice, take that Douglas Adams, no relation! I think this artwork is a good one for now

Happy day everyone, enjoy your own journey, down with FIFA

Post-Twitter and other ideas

Since Twitter has been an interesting, sometimes vital,  part of my online life for several years, and you, dear blogistas, have benefited here and there, too, now that it may be ready to go I've been looking at the whole thing.

The first idea is to run to alternatives and I've signed up for a couple of potential new platforms, and the newsletters of people I particularly like to hear from.  But I've also been thinking about habit and needs.

I quit a heavy smoking habit many years ago and got a lot of questions about what I would replace it with. Answer: nothing. 

Briefly I clenched a paperclip in my teeth at work, but quit that too. I found that I didn't actually need to replace smoking, which had been satisfying and time consuming and urgent, very much like social media. Hmm.

I just let my days reshape as they would, though the need didn't abate for a long time. So I'm considering that, and wondering if it applies. 

Only a long time smoker really gets the difficulty of quitting and staying quit of a habit that wasn't healthy and it strikes me that there may be parallels. Not sure, but I'm doing a bit of what religious professed people call discernment.

Meanwhile, I thought it would be good to resume my daily art making for your interest, before I get too rusty to draw. I last did a drawing in late July, so maybe that will happen again.

Here's today,  the little art making book and trusty box of tools out. 

A five minute drawing with a carpenter's pencil

I did what I rarely do, draw from an online image, of Elizabeth Fraser, Scottish musician, couldn't find a photo credit,  just to get started and because I was attracted by the face and hair shape.  

I didn't time it, just drew till I was done then noticed the time elapsed. This book is all about brief art making, that being the nature of how I do it. I can see how faulty this drawing is, showing rust, but best I can do today 

I usually draw from life, more energy that way.  Anyway I think I'll resume doing this exercise again, from life, daily if it works out that way. 

Happy day everyone, enjoy your day with the materials at hand. A clue for the word puzzle: it's a visible body part!

Photo AC 

Woodland friends and neighbors

Yesterday I was happy to see my next door neighbor and good friend home after yet another Florida trip, no doubt rehabbing a friend's house. Knowing he's back goes a long way to allaying my concerns about being alone and various health adventures. Having all three of my helpful neighbors either away or about to leave has been part of the anxiety I've been feeling.

I walked early yesterday, before it got too hot, meeting these shy woodland creatures, rabbit studying me at a distance - why do rabbits run away keeping right in front of you instead of dodging off the path?

And this new sighting, probably left by squirrels. I'm guessing some puppy is wondering where his toy went.

Speaking of squirrels moving things around, a while back one of my neighbors was complaining that his collection of miniature gourds decorating his picnic table were being swiped one by one. 

Which explained the gradual appearance of more and more miniature gourds chucked onto my patio. I saw a squirrel carrying one, illustrating it all. l restored the gourds to their rightful owner now I knew who it was, complete with bite marks. The gourds, not the owner.

Yesterday's movie, another big family fantasy, was

Which is the next chapter of the Cheaper by the Dozen family story. This one starts with the college graduation of the youngest. And pays respect to Lilian Gilbreth, who became a widowed mother of twelve at a young age and still pursued an engineering career.

Frank Gilbreth, the father, was a pioneer, for better or worse, of time and motion study, and ran his family more or less along the lines of efficiency theory. 

He didn't really raise them, though, since he died suddenly, when the eldest was still in college, and the family ranged down to very young. His widow raised them and lived to a great age. Tough stuff, that Lilian.

The movie is kind of a musical, breaks into song and dance now and then, but I wonder if they couldn't decide if it was a musical or straight comedy. I'm not a fan of musicals where the plot keeps going on hold while they sing about it. I tend to go put the kettle on when a song starts up. 

In opera it's the other way, the arias being to my mind the whole thing, the plot not so much, and the recitative, the bits where people half talk half sing, too actory for words. 

I'm missing so much being able to knit, but I really need to hold off till my shoulder feels better.  Movies and mysteries on the Kindle are just the ticket, nothing very serious or demanding right now. Hamish Macbeth mysteries, fantasy big families are about where I am this week.

That and drawing with marker.

Happy day everyone. Looking forward to seeing better soon. Like birds flying singly instead of in double formation, and words being legible again, without having to angle them just so. 

Hang in there, Brit blogistas, I hear about the stresses of all kinds you're dealing with, and hope for some relief for you, one way or another. You've got Janie Godley's voiceovers and Josie George's found poetry to help keep you afloat though, fortunately.