View from my Kitchen Window

The other day, I shared with you the sketch of what I saw out my kitchen window....While very rough and unfinished, I thought you might like to see what I was quickly trying to capture.

You see three different types of grasses, all from the same family...although I must admit, I'm unsure of the difference. They are Panicums or "Switch grasses." Native to North America, many hybridizers have turned their attention to these attractive grasses.
The one which is reddish in color to the left is "Northwind", the one to the right, "Dallas Blues" and the one which is triangulated in the middle, but further to the back which you can't see too well because it is grayer is "Heavy Metal."

In the very back, beyond the fence but very tall and standing feathery and golden against the dark green of my neighbor's spruce trees is Giant Feather Reed grass, although I must admit, I'm a little confused at present. It has flower heads like a Calamagrostis, so I think it must be Ravenna grass (Saccharum ravennae, also known as hardy pampas grass), but it isn't invasive.. at least I've had it here for 5 years without it spreading by seed, only getting bigger at the base. It is not Arundo donax, which is definitely invasive. I will say, it has very sharp leaves and I imagine when I go to divide it, it will need to be done with an ax.

This is a slightly different angle, on a morning which the whole world was covered with a heavy, sparkly frost. I couldn't quite capture it, but the sort of golden dust and fogginess is that very essence I was trying to capture.


Now, from a different angle, you can see the same grasses in the summer. This photo was taken in August.

Sketchbook Challenge and Sketchbook Project

What a busy day. I started my taxes (I have to have them done early so I can file my daughter's FAFSA (Federal Application for Student Aid) for scholarships....which means a lot of number crunching before I take it to an accountant...providing we DO take it to an accountant (although it was my husband's idea he seems to be dragging his feet when it comes to calling the guy), I figured and paid the OH sales tax for the books sold in Ohio on Amazon, went to the Thursday group, finished sewing on the larger beads on the larger quilt I was working on...and did some other stuff.

I needed to upload the most recent sketchbook entries before I got too stacked up. Again, the theme is "Highly Prized." I chose my sketchbook out of the stash that I had sitting around. I'm trying to use up things that I have rather than going out and buying new. I used water soluble oil pastels (if this doesn't sound like an oxymoron!) and then washed over it with a brush. The pages of this sketchbook are so thin that they make the pages wavy. What is it? Well, when we go to Florida to visit my husband's family, I love sitting on his mother's deck drinking coffee, eating pastelitos de guayaba and watching the water. Her condo is RIGHT on the beach at Siesta Key.

This is a quick work of the view out my kitchen window. I love the grasses and sedum heads, along with other plants in my garden in the winter. This is done in Derwent inktense pencils and I'll probably come back and do some more with it.







This little dealie is my bookshelf in the breakfast nook. I love books....and this shelf holds a portion of my cookbooks....I mean to shade in the white areas with gray.

This last sketch...I sort of got carried away....and it has the marks of using up what I have. I wanted to do a sketch just of my eyes...but it turned out being my whole face...well, sort of my whole face..I don't think it really looks like me.

One of the things I have been struggling with is giving people who are older....as in middle aged and older the appearance of being so. For some reason, the cheeks I draw end up being rounded and smooth, wrinkles are hard to put in...
Of course the other problem was...my eraser. I couldn't find my art gum eraser and I used the one I had in the bag with my drawing pencils....only that eraser had been sitting in that bag ever since I was in high school....even pink pearls don't stay nice and happy for 30 years. I erased the mouth....and now it looks like I had a cup of hot chocolate.

This whole process has been giving me pause...all right, this whole process PLUS the Sketchbook Project. I foolishing joined the Sketchbook Project last year...I got the moleskin sketchbook, paid my fees....and promptly misplaced the sketchbook....so I've been trying to fill in in . I have to send it back on Saturday. It is JUST awful. Horrible. I feel like my head had been full of grandiose ideas which are not coming to fruition. Of course, I meant it to be the thoughts and images I had while going through this cancer journey I am presently on....most of the pieces are just pencil sketches...and I'm not happy. There are blank pages I will try to fill tomorrow. And...I looked at Cynthia St. Charles' blog and the last two blogs are filled with her gorgeous images. I feel like just chucking the whole thing in the wastebasket and not returning it. Do go and look at hers.

Of course, this always brings back the other question...can I improve, or am I just kidding myself. Should I just get rid of all my fabrics, tools and art supplies? It certainly is daunting.

Clean and Sparkly Montana

When I was in Montana this summer and I was posting, Sunita, who lives in Mumbai, India commented that Montana seems so pure and clean.

Well, I have to admit, the air is pure and for the most part, the water is clean as well. The vast space with sparse population kind of allows for that....but up until the mid to late 1970s or so, and maybe in some respects now, man has left his mark in piles of trash.

There's a reason for this. Since there are so few people and since the attitude of getting rid of your trash has changed from "let's fill in the land that has no use" --gullies and other areas which couldn't be tilled, the method of getting rid of trash, old farm implements and worn out vehicles was to just drive them to the edge and heave them in.

Presently, that has been changing somewhat as people now take their trash into the landfills or transfer stations and when the cost of scrap metals rises, then people start raiding their dumps and bring in literally tons of scrap iron.


Indeed, my sister-in-law has made short work of some of the piles of discards on the land immediately around her house.


What is left, often leaves good fodder for photos. :0

The Sketchbook Challenge: Laura Cater-Woods Wonderful Composition

I've been working on my daily sketchbook entries. Some people have set up a different blog just to post their entries every day. I think I 'll just post mine here, but group them together.

Today, however, I just have to talk about this wonderful piece. The small image at left is Laura Cater-Wood's entry for January 4th. I think this little piece, only done in 15 minutes is a prime example of the design sense which makes Laura an internationally known artist.

One of the primary things which hits me about this piece is the use of negative space. Even when you see it as a tiny thumbnail or from across the room, it is pleasing. There is balance. The shapes fill the space well, but move the eye around. The lines have motion and while the go off the page, you are also brought around the page.

The limited use of color adds interest, but is deft in its restricted palette. There's a good range of shades here, but the colors are limited only to black, white (and the various shades), blue and a green-blue. It is subtle, yet rich.

The texture is absolutely wonderful, from the cross hatching and the dots to the swirls. I also love the text she put at the bottom. It reads: "In the morning I have birds,
clearly divine messengers that I don't understand yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions"

from "at age 69", a poem by Jim Harrison, published in
In Search of Small Gods

Laura's line explorations are fully evident here....and you really must check out her website as her fully developed pieces are truly wonderful. She derives much of her inspiration from the natural world, doing wonderfully abstracted pieces full of texture and interest.

I was grateful for Laura to post this, as she emphasized that she only spent 15 minutes on it. Yes I know, it is the second time I've mentioned this. I was happy that she did this because I was finding myself wanting to spend too much time on this. I was getting stymied by wanted to create a masterpiece....and when Melanie Testa wrote this: "And here is my secret: I strive for every page to be perfect. Every-single-page, page-after-page (there are some crappy pages here and there). I will not apologize for this." on her entry for January 5th, my heart stopped. Perfection? Each and every time?

But, like so often, your brain gets stopped at what you first read. Melanie went on to say this: "BUT. I will tell you that this has taken me years and years of practice. This is not inborn talent. This is trial and error and a lot of swearing and acceptance and page turning. And you too can put the time in to creating beautiful pages. Remind yourself that your shoes are unique, talented and directed on a path that is as unique and individualized as you are." She went on to describe how she arrived at her path.

I know my path isn't going to be like Melanie's. It can't. After all it is MY path. So, I was happy to go back to Laura's work, which I greatly admire, and remind myself, 15 minutes, but do it every day. Practice makes perfect and fear of not making perfection leads to no practice....which leads to no work...and how can you ever improve if you do this?

So for me, life isn't perfect, but I will muddle on an try to achieve great heights. If I don't reach it, that's OK, I'll certainly be no less advanced than I am at present.

Bicycling: A Year Round Sport!

Last week, my husband and I took a "local" sight-seeing trip up to New Bremen, Ohio to visit the Bicycling Museum there. Housed in a 19th century commercial building, the Bicycle Museum of America is largely composed of the Schwinn Bicycle company collection which was purchased by the owner of the Crown Equipment Corporation and opened to the public to create some tourism for this little town. New Bremen is charming, and the Bicycle Museum is located next to a reconstructed (and functioning) Lock on the Erie/Ohio Canal.

The museum is stuffed full of bicycles. Since today was such a slithery afternoon, I thought I'd share this one with you. It's a late 19th century/early 20th century effort to turn cycling into a year round sport in the northern climes. Although the manufacturer is unknown, it was probably made in New York. The bicycle (ice-cycle?) uses a standard frame, but the front fork is replaced with a ski, and the back wheel is fitted out with a spiked wheel to ride on the snow.

Here's the rear wheel. I wouldn't want to accidentally get run over by this spiky thing.

There were other renditions of a bicycle built for snow, but none of them went into major production and they are very rare.

I always enjoyed riding my mountain bike in the winter on Mt. Higby Reservoir trails in Connecticut prior to children. One trip, I was following Ian Thompson on ice and we were going along just fine until ultra-cautious Carlos yelled to me that it probably wasn't too good of an idea to ride on the sheer ice....of course that was when I started sliding sideways down the trail. Never trust a cautious Cuban! They'll MAKE wierd things happen! It didn't dampen my enthusiasm for it though.


I think though, that perhaps a tricycle arrangement might have been more successful than this one.

After you drool over all the bicycles, you could go just down the street and eat at La Piazza, New Bremen...a sister restaurant to La Piazza in Troy....WONDERFUL Italian food.

So...you see? Ohio isn't really a fly-over state...

The Sketchbook Challenge First posts

Ok...so you're probably wondering what the heck I've been doing with the sketchbook challenge...So far, I'm sort of doing better with that than the Sketchbook Project, but that's another story.

The Sketchbook Challenge, which you can see others by clicking the badge on the side of my blog, is to do a sketch every day on a theme determined by the sketchbook "leaders" or whatever they call themselves. The theme for this month is "Highly Prized." Hmm. So, for day one, I chose my immediate family, my daughter and my husband. These are really crappy drawings of the pair.

Day two was my cats.....This one is Lemmie the Magnificent. Better than the family....however, I think part of my problem is this: My desire was to do a full scale drawing. Well, I used to draw, back in high school. I also find that in doing things like this, I always want to do my best and I'm terrified that my best is going to be well...absolute and utter garbage compared with all the talent in the group.

Breathe, Lis, just breathe. First of all, these are supposed to be SKETCHES. A sketch, by definition (according to Dictionary.com) is: –noun

1.

a simply or hastily executed drawing or painting, esp. a preliminary one, giving the essential features without the details.

Well, DUH! Do it fast, don't think it has to be a masterpiece and remember the point of this whole exercise: practice. By doing this, I will hone my skills and get back some of the ability which I have lost through disuse. It also occurs to me that I have never really learned how to cartoon...or make quick glimpses of things....sort of caricatures... Now's the time to work on that.

Then after deciding all that...today, I sketched this. It sort of fits the theme.....what I'd like to be able to do is grow old...and this old lady was sitting in the oral surgeons office directly opposite from me. She had such a wide and open face...and it was so cool....even if I don't think I was able to really convey her age...her skin was fairly smooth, with some wrinkles, but not terribly wrinkly....her eyes were not the same size....and she was just sort of cool. You couldn't see any of her hair, only her cap pulled down over her ears. Hmmm.

So bear with me, as I continue to explore this sketchbook thing. In the meantime, I do wish you 365 Happy Days in the coming year...just as this postcard which dates to about 1906 says.

Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit

There. You're the first people I have spoken too....and hopefully this will bring good luck. Maybe more so because it is the first of the year, as well as being the first of the month.

Huh? You might be thinking. A couple of years ago, when I used to rise early at 5:00 a.m. and go out walking with my neighbor at 5:15...which was ungodly in this part of the world in the winter (it is the coldest part of the night..but she was a school teacher and if we were to walk in the morning, then thats when it had to be), on the first of the month she would greet me with "Rabbit, Rabbit."

According to tradition in some English speaking parts of the world, to greet someone thusly on the first of the month upon rising, would bring you good luck. See more here. I find it a little odd in retrospect, because my neighbor is from the Youngstown, OH area and supposedly the origin in the U.S. is from Massachusetts....only I had never heard of it even though I had lived in Connecticut for more than 20 years.


Never the less, it seems appropriate for the first of the year....especially one which in the Chinese zodiac will bring us the year of the metal rabbit on February 3rd as well as the fact that my niece has a large house bunny named Derby and my husband's cousin has a very spoiled little Dutch house bunny named Nibbles...only I call her Princess Nibbles since she's so spoiled....

Well, now that I've wished you good luck in the New Year AND said "Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit," I'm off to stick the turkey breast in the crock pot and go up to finish my quilt. :)