First day of Spring…

It’s not all about painting this week…

The kitchen table has been piled high with vegetable catalogues and gardening bibles and seed packets and yesterday it was time to get some dirt on my hands. This year we’ve added two new raised beds. One for raspberries and the other for a cold frame greenhousey kind of thing under which I’ve started all the lovely salad greens and those devine french breakfast radishes.

Next project is to repair and secure the old Finnegan fence sections and then finish planting the peas…but mother nature is helping the muses out by dampening those plans with a forecasted week of rain.

Sooooo…it’s back to the easel for me. But at least I’ve got some dirt under my nails and those wonderful gardening endorphines keeping a smile in my heart.

Happy Spring !

This one’s for Follansbee…

Pat just called and frantically yelled to get my camera and come outside…

Here’s who came to visit the studio this afternoon…

She , or he, sat perched in this hickory for enough time for me to circle around and get the sun in the right angle and then sat long enough for us to call Sue and Zola to look out their windows and then an electric truck drove by and that was time to bolt…

It wasn’t until it had taken off that we saw there were two of them flying around together. When I came inside to look at the photos the other one was there all along…

The whole neighborhood came out to see and it was a wonderful break from a long day of painting shingles…You can just make her out in the upper left corner…my easel window in at the bottom right corner…

Someone told us they are living in a nest down the lane…now that they know their way to the studio I’ll be sure to leave some goldfish out for a snack…

Chained to the easel…

that’s where I’ve been for weeks now. It’s super crunch time as I see the deadline for the July show coming closer….and closer. Every waking minute needs to be spent with brush in hand in order to meet the ambitious goals I have for producing more and better work this year.

You will have noticed that writing blog entries, which can sometimes take hours, have been shelved along with dinner invitations and all other social interactions, except for PT which is keeping my knees and back from seizing up all together.

I do monitor the incoming channels via email, internet and facebook so the outside world does get in… in short controlled bursts.

This morning one of those playful but interesting FB threads came through from a friend…World Book Day. Grab the book closet to you right now. Open to page 56, and choose the 5th sentence. Publish it as your status and write these rules as a comment. Don’t choose. PICK UP the CLOSET book.

I am a book lover so… I reached behind my easel chair and grabbed the closest book…it turned out to be Mechanical Drawing for High Schools by French and Svensen, used by students at the George Washington High School in Manhattan, N.Y.City between 1936-39…interestingly enough one of the students who signed it out in ’37 was George O’Neill…almost a relative ?

I use this book as a prop and it has appeared in several paintings…here’s one called Book Mark…

and a recent one, By Design…currently available at the Granary Gallery

So I opened to page 56…

and the 5th sentence reads…”When a pictorial sketch is dimensioned, the only additional consideration is to use care to see that all extension lines are either in or perpendicular to the plane on which the distance is being given.”

Which was a much needed reminder that the muses are here…just over my shoulder as it were…helping me struggle through the long hours of trying to get those extension lines just right…

Here is a shot of what I was painting when that facebook comment came through on the iphone beside me…complete with T-square in place to make sure those carefully considered doors are perpendicular !

So what book is beside YOU ?