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…
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…
This cardinal and his mate have been tap tap tapping on my studio window incessantly for …ever.
I have tried closing the blinds, leaving them half open, open all the way, hanging strings in the window… putting up tiny signs that say hush… and still…every day…he and his mate come back a’ knockin’.
I even suspect that this is the second generation because last year the female had a strange growth on her head…probably from knocking it all day…and this year it’s gone.
One morning this winter, while I was eating breakfast, a cardinal slammed into the kitchen door. I mean kamakazi. He didn’t make it and what with the three feet of snow on the ground the best I could do for him was to throw him in the garden. He sank like a stone. Yesterday I found the bright red feathers amongst the brilliant green chives.
Perhaps he was the patriarch and the current pair are keeping up the family tradition of trying to get into the studio…or just to get my attention…
The call came in at 3:30am from the hard working vet that Finn was out of surgery and doing well. I had caved in at midnight so it was early this morning that I got the message. Now my flu ravaged body may still be weary but my spirits are high. By this time next week all members of my little family should be off of antibiotics and we can say good riddance to displaysed elbows and rattling pneumonic lungs and maybe even to … snow ???
I’ve got to pass along our thanks to all of you who have been checking in and offering help and that all important compassionate ear of support… you will never know how those words and gestures of kindness reach in and lift us up.
One person who has done some heavy lifting in that department is our friend Saren. She has talked me down off of many a ledge especially with dear Finnegan’s trials. I was checking in with her early this morning and felt like a corner has been turned. The sun is shining, there is a definite warming in the air, and when I took the time to look I found the first signs of spring in the studio yard…
Can I get a witness ???
Through the darkest days of this long hard winter I’ve been taking myself to one of the happiest and most anticipated events of my year…the Sheep and Wool Festival !
The warm sunny first weekend in May when the Howard County Fairgrounds fill up with color and fiber and everything sheep. The crowd is full of my kind of people…old back to nature hippies who dress in sensible clothes and parade their knitted and woven creations and scour through the straw strewn farm shed stall to replenish their supplies of yarn and fleece and needles and sheep dip, etc.
There are many happy memories there for us and I’m so excitedly looking forward to making that trip this year…we may go both days !
My spinning wheel waits behind the snow shovel…
And I’ve got one great big panel up on the easel that needs to be finished before then…
But by golly I can feel it getting closer…I am dreaming now of coming home with a nice bag of fleece in the truck and oiling up the old wheel and sitting on the warm sunny porch with Finnegan stealing bits of wool and running down the walkway with it flying up over her shoulders in triumph…
The winds outside the studio are howling with our third blizzard of the winter. This one is a much more serious storm for our friends to the north and I have yet to hear from the stalwart islanders who are in the path of the gale force winds…but one of them has managed to send along some fortification for our own storm weary selves…
Leave it to Wendy and James to know exactly what would perk up our spirits… Chilmark Chocolates !!!!
For those of you who have never had this treat…there is a little farmhouse in the town of Chilmark on the island of Martha’s Vineyard…and in back of that farmhouse is a little shack…and inside of that shack are a team of chocolatiers who have overcome some of lifes more difficult challenges and have found meaningful work blending and dipping and creating the most delicious candy on the planet.
If you have been there then you are familiar with the crowded dance in the tiny parking lot and the streams of visitors who wait their turn in front of the long case to choose and point and watch as the staff fill tiny dark brown fluted paper cups with the sweet delicacies. I expect that on a snowy february day there is not much of a wait…but the thoughtful effort to procure these boxes and send them south to us in the depths of winter….is nothing short of spectacular.
Pat would not let me show her face in the photo but I can attest to the smile from ear to ear…with a tiny little dab of chocolate at the curl on one side.
A great shout out of thanks to you both. Brilliant !
Here’s a look at what Wendy is doing when she’s not playing an elf and is in her Vineyard studio…and when James gets a web site up and running I’ll pass along the link to his own amazing artwork… wendyweldon.com
And though they don’t have a web site…here’s a link to a very old NYTimes article on the startup of Chilmark Chocolates… Click Here
We bundled up and went over the river and through the woods to EY and Alice’s house for an evening of fine food, good company and great music. The Murphey’s are innkeepers at the E J Bowman House B + B in Lancaster, PA.
Where Alice is famous for her gourmet breakfasts and charming hospitality and EY is famous for gathering musicians and friends together so he can wander through the crowds joining in on the jam sessions with his tin whistles and his clever reparte.
Last weekend Pat and I joined in the merriment and I got to fulfill a life long dream of playing the Bodhran in an Irish band.
The evening started with a potluck spread out over three rooms and it wasn’t long before the musicians started one by one to play in a little nook in the front hall. By the end of the evening, with the crowd in full voice and brew inspired gusto, anyone with an instrument from harp to fiddle to guitars gallore and full throated keyboards, pipes and spoons and yes, bodhrans….was playing to bring the house down.
In this most welcoming and generous of venues, and in true Irish Session tradition, I pulled out me drum and me tipper and beat along to the lively tunes. The best part was the kind reception from the pros who admired my ebony tipper and showed me a few pointers on their sweet and beautiful Waltons Bodhrans.
When the skin on my old bodhran split a few years back I replaced it with a drum with a synthentic head. It’s tunable and the guys did get some terrific sounds out of it but it’s nothing like the velvety notes they were getting on the real deals. Of course they went to the emerald isle herself to pick theirs up. But then that’s another dream…
Meanwhile it was grand to step out of the studio and tap into the life source again…
I remember sitting at this computer a year ago today…plowing through piles of tax papers and getting an email saying that a litter of 14 pups had arrived…and one of them was our sweet little girl…
So far she has celebrated her birthday with a little run through her snow maze…some zippers around the studio kitchen…whining at the window as she watched Zola get on the school bus…then…on the sly…while I was writing this blog entry…she somehow found the stash of bully stick chews and gave her own self a birthday present.
We have a couple more surprises in store for her today…and I can’t wait to see what others she has for us.
We look forward to many years worth of fun and adventures to come….Happy Birthday Finn.
Sitting here in the studio looking at mountains of snow.
Three days of hard labor with the snow shovels and monster blower machine thingy and I am so grateful that all I have to lift today is a triple ought sable haired brush.
At the height of the blizzard I took this shot from the studio window…
And here’s a look at a painting that I worked on after our first snow storm back in December…almost the same view…just pan over to the right a bit more…
And a look at the labyrinth that I have to shovel out for Finn each time it snows so her mending legs have a better than fair chance out there in the tundra…
And the Apprentice Herself tucked into the snow fort that has melted some but was well over her head a day or so ago…
The good news is that we finally got Miss Pat out of the lane and up to town. Her cabin fever was approaching the red zone so even the laundromat was looking good !
Blueberry pancakes for both of my valentines this morning to fortify another day of winter survival adventures…and I shall be more than content to paint the day away and know that I am so well loved by my two sweeties.
Last week we weathered a trifecta of sad, painful and challenging events. Pat’s father, Frances (Pez) Ritchey 86, was admitted to intensive care and we waited each day to hear news of his deteriorating condition while in the hospital in Hawaii. On the home front our dear puppy Finnegan was scheduled to have the first of two surgeries on her front legs to minimize the elbow displaysia with which she was diagnosed in December. And, along with several other million people, we were following the weather channels who predicted us to be in the core of the blizzard of 2010.
I’m sad to write that Pez died on Saturday. Pat was relieved for him that he was not allowed to linger on machines and that she was able to have many hours of conversations over the last few years about the old neighborhood and adventures that she remembers fondly with him when growing up in Lancaster, PA.
We brought Finnegan home just in time to batten down the hatches for the big snow storm. It has been four days now and she is doing remarkably well. On strict house arrest until her next surgery in a month, she is getting regular therapy sessions and a big dose of love from her buddy and me and ….except for insisting that we refer to her as “You Highness” when she has the Elizabethan Collar on…she’s a model patient.
Today the apprentice returned to the studio for the first time and was beyond excited to see that her toys and bones and her brushes and paints were right where she left them.
Meanwhile I had the pleasure, while taking Finn out several times during the blizzard, to watch it bury our little corner of the planet. We got two feet and more in some spots and the snow blower finally has paid for itself.
Here are some highlights mid-storm and the morning after.
I can report that we made it up to town today to stock up for the next storm which is predicted to be a piddling foot or more moving through here tomorrow night. Restocked the pantry and the wine cellar…so we’re ready.
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.
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.
So this morning…
Night Games…It’s currently up at the Granary Gallery
