The Garden is a good place…

to grieve.

It has been a little over a week since my father died and there seems to be an endless stream of logistics to attend to, paperwork to be filled out, emails to answer and to write, and thoughtful considerations to be made by a caring committee of siblings.

Woven through the long hours in the day has been a gossamer thin thread of sadness. It’s soft and shiny enough that I only catch glimpses of it through the haze and weariness of dealing with all the details of death. Living with a hospice nurse for twenty years means I recognize it as grief. But knowing that it is my father who holds its fragile and faraway end has a sharper edge about it than all the other times I’ve seen it.  This one is amber in color…with an Old Holland Red Gold Lake glaze…and has both a startling beauty and a staggering pain.

So, while I know it’s there and see that it’s trying to catch my attention, I am busy right now.

It’s been hard to concentrate at the easel. I’m finding just how much the creative act of painting draws from my deepest emotional pools. It doesn’t surprise me that now, when those emotions are so much closer to the surface, they have such a direct line from the heart to the brush.

So I’ve chosen to do some large muscle therapy.

Finn has been getting me up with the first birdsongs well before the sun rises and we’ve been spending those first cooler hours of the day doing the heavy lifting of turning the compost into the garden soil and getting the beds ready for planting. To Finnegan’s great pleasure we have a plethera of plastic pots. The best dog toy in the world…for our Finn…is a black plastic plant bucket. She will amuse us all for hours with those treasures. I will not embarrass her by sharing my favorite pic of her with one of them on her head like the proverbial lightshade but you get the idea that my gardening obsession is feeding her playful spirit as well as brightening up our yard…

Here in this corner of the planet we are three weeks past the last frost date. Our most tender vegetables should be into their teens by now. I am catching up. I recycled the wood that the roofers left behind in December and have made 5 new raised beds. The greenhouse bed is now in it’s second planting since the ridiculous heatwave has bolted most of the greens…

The best neighbors in the world, Sue and daughter Zola, drove their tractor over this weekend and…while Zola minded the best friend pups, Jed and Finnegan…Sue and Pat and I hauled a huge pile of soil up to the top of the yard. The next day I framed it in with the roofing scraps and made a bed which will nourish some watermelons this summer and, in the fall, will be planted as our long awaited asparagus bed.

 

We’ve expanded the vegetable garden in some unusual ways…

These back beds are producing peas faster than we can eat them this week… and yesterday I planted bush beans, watermelon, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, onions, and runner beans…

And then there’s the great potato bag experiment…went a bit overboard here… so I’m told…

And the roses, oh the roses, they are doing such a good job of lifting my spirits…

And the greatest gift of all… from Gulliver. I inherited this rose bush from the previous owner. For the last three years it has been eight inches tall and only bloomed once. One single flower. Until I put Gulliver’s wind chime there, just outside of my easel window. Now look at it. Gully likes it when I sit in this chair all by myself in the morning. She rings loud and long to let me know that she’s still got my back.

Finnegan is listening to her too…and learning from both her predecessors how to take good care of me.

So, you see…life is good.

Night Games…

So this morning…

I was taking the first look at the newest addition to the studio library,  STAR WARS Art: Visions published by Abrams, (the cheap version). It’s a stellar collection of Star Wars inspired art by contemporary artists.

And it occurred to me that I had done a Star Wars painting too…

Night Games…It’s currently up at the Granary Gallery


Here’s a closer look.

While it wasn’t commissioned by George Lucas, that little McDonald’s Toy version of Yoda has been a constant muse since the very early days of the saga and sits ever vigilant by my easel watching… and whispering…

Kudos to the artists whose work fills the new book…I’ll enjoy dipping into that this winter…

and may the force be with you.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp8Ms7FBC7M&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]

A Halloween Rose…

by any other name… made sweeter by the hand

They called for the first frost of the season on wednesday…so Finnegan and I spend the day before putting the garden to bed. We soon had the big bucket filled with peppers and parsley, green tomatoes and beans.

It was sweetly satisfying to pull out all the withering vines and stems which had worked so hard this summer to feed us…and to haul it all over to the new compost bins. We picked a corner to plant the garlic and casted the winter rye seeds over the rest of the beds. Then we fired up the lawn mower for the last time and limped around the yard collecting clippings and chopped leaves to gently cover the soil. But the sweet peas and the nasturtiums refused to give up…so they get to stay a little longer.

The Baron… and The Baroness

Every so often I rotate the stack of reference books in the stacks on my studio kitchen table and dip into old volumes to find new treasures. In that way I always find something that I’ve overlooked or was not ready to see before and a window is opened for the muses to shove me through.

Such was the case last month when I was paging through…

I came across a watercolor that my leaky memory has no memory of ever seeing before… Baron Philippe (1981)…

Something clicked and I began to sketch out an idea for a response….

I’ve been working on a series of studio still lifes and this gave me a chance to pull together some of the old props that have been living in the old studio (now renamed the POD ).

The oil lamp was Cousin Ed’s and one of the few treasures of his we were able to purchase back from the auction of his posessions. The empty wine bottle is courtesy of our holiday feast with D and S. The ladies handkerchief was one of Polly’s. The teacup is from Sue’s grandmother. The chair was from the old farmhouse across the road and is a very old shaker style ladderback that somewhere along the way had the rockers sawed off of so it is now a slipper chair. The little porcelain doll in her silky purple gown is a gift from Chris. The cane was a flea market find and has the whisper of a serpent carved in the handle.  The bottle was from an antique store purchased on the day we went to the Amish country to pick out Finnegan. The uniform has appeared in several other paintings and was an old hollywood costume found on Ebay years ago. The shell is from Sengy pond on the Vineyard. I don’t remember from whence the table came but the old wooden floor is the very foundation of my new studio. And the rest… is pure folly.

There are homages here to all three generations of Wyeths and I humbly submit my tribute to them… The Baroness.

Night Studio

It is deep cold winter now and when I leave the studio at night the furnace is turned low and I shut off every light except the string of tiny white lights that wind from the porch … along the picket fence…up over the garage … and down the path to light my way home.

When my eager apprentice wakes me in the early morning it is night black dark as we make our way to work and those lights are there to welcome us like hundreds of tiny muses.

This morning, like all the others, while waiting for me to get our breakfast ready, Finnegan went to get the paints out for the day’s palette … but she came running into the kitchen with a surprised look on her face.

…this is what she found…

Now I have always known that the muses have a keen sense of humor. And I have often come across evidence of “night play” in the studio. But this little tableaux shows some promise… and I may just see where this road takes us.

Stay tuned…. and stay warm.

Thanksgiving Special

With thanks to my patrons for their support…

We are offering  25 % off  of all

Strider’s Surrender Prints !

These limited edition prints are available through my website as well as at the

Granary Gallery on Martha’s Vineyard.

All prints, both framed and unframed, will be on sale now through November 29th.

A portion of the proceeds on the sale of each print is donated by the artist to

The Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society

and to

The Dukes County Fisherman’s Association DC/MV

When the Muses don’t show up…

It is dark now. And it’s been a very long day of frustrating fits and starts. Much ado and almost nothing to show for it.

Last week I had a dream in which a painting began to take shape. A line of pumpkins supporting a pile of corn was the start .  At first a shining ear with one glorious pat of butter atop was hovering over the pumpkins. Then the next day the title came into focus…The Philosopher Corn. I liked that but the original butter thing was too cute.

While sitting on the studio porch carving some spoons that afternoon I kept hearing a great swoosh in the trees just before seeing hundreds of migrating birds take flight. And I thought of a Raven…with an ear of corn in its beak… and that was my philosopher. Probably an echo of Jamie Wyeth’s sinful seagulls that I saw last week. But I liked the idea of the oily black feathers against the orange and green fall carpet.

I did a tiny sketch and gave Pat a shopping list. First off, the pumpkins. Well it turns out we are on the cusp of that season. Farmers said look back here on the weekend. And corn is at the other end of its season. Farmers said we probably won’t have any more by the weekend. And…we leave on Tuesday for a month on MV.

Soooo… I drove all over kingdom come and found Pumpkin Hill where I was no doubt the first customer … but I loaded four pumpkins into my wagon and called Pat. Got ’em, now can you go straight over to the orchard and grab all the corn that’s left.

That was two days ago.

Now here I sit tonight, waiting for my ipod gadgets to sync after hours of repairing loopy software, and decided it was time to set up the still life with the harvest. An hour later I am beaten.

Granted, I may be too tired to hear them…but the muses just ain’t helping out here.

IMG_0014

This is absolutely hideous.

I hardly ever paint what is exactly in front of me in this kind of a still life…but really…my first little sketch had way more information than this heap.

And I have now ignored my partner and my puppy for most of the day… have two dozen perfectly good ears of corn going to waste…four decent pumpkins (pick of the crop) and a whopping headache in the balance.

Lesson learned…again…

these paintings have a mind of their own and when I try and force them into a tight little box in a crazy busy schedule… I just end up in tears.

I’m not letting go of the title, or the characters in play, but I am turning off this machine, going to shake myself together, find my dog, and head home to my loving partner for the night.

Tomorrow is another day Scarlett.

Phenomenon

Calling all scholars and mystics…

I need some help interpreting two phenomenons that have puzzled me of late.

The first is straight forward… this cloud formation followed me all the way to the park a few days ago. It looked so much like calligraphy that I pulled over and sketched it in a notebook. Reproduced here via photoshop it is a fair representation …

sky writing

The second phenom is something that I started recognizing  months ago. Every time I would look at the clock it read 3:33 . Now, to clarify, I hardly ever look at a clock. And obviously there are only two times in any given day that that number can come up. But sure enough, my nightly bladder call was precisely at that hour…and I could have gotten up and looked at the clock at any stage in that journey to and from the throne but I  always seemed to catch 3:33.

Same thing in the afternoon. I’d stop painting and just randomly glance at the clock by the easel and there it was again. Not 3:34…or 5 but 3. When I think back now I remember that the first time that number came up it was on election day. I was number 333 in line to vote. Hmmmmm.

So …leap forward to almost a year later. The anomaly has blossomed. Now almost every time I look at any clock the time has all the same digits repeated. 5:55 comes up a lot, 11:11 is a fun one, I seem to catch 4:44 almost every day and so on.

No, I do not hang around waiting for the numbers to roll around. And no, I don’t pay any more attention to the time than usual. And Pat is completely done with me exclaiming, ” I don’t believe it…look…again !”  But I do feel, not unlike the sky writing, that there is some larger message from the beyond that I am supposed to be getting and am obviously not catching it on the whisper.

I have no clue if anyone  out there actually reads these blog entries but  I am curious to hear if anyone else finds these things… well…curious ?