A playdate

Recently the moms from First Child’s toddler playgroup got together for our more-or-less annual dinner. The toddlers themselves, I should add, are all in college now, and when we are able to get together, all six of us, we make a jolly group–we all have stories to tell and news to share, we have some good food at a restaurant overlooking the sea and the shore and a few cocktails and talk and laugh and marvel at the nearly two decades that have passed since we gathered in each others’ kitchens and yards to share coffee and tea and keep each other from going baby buggy. We’re also still learning new things about each other, and I was delighted to hear that another of my friends has also been working in watercolors.

Yesterday we got together at her house for show and tell and painting (oh, yeah, and for a wonderful cool lunch–did I mention it’s hot here?). I was stunned by the beauty of the paintings she’s doing–so much feeling and loveliness and such a wonderful grasp of how really to paint. Her things make me want to go out and find a teacher immediately and try to figure out what I’m doing. For now, no money, no space for that, so I’ll go on with what I’m doing and loving (and hope she’ll keep sharing her wonderful work with me).

After lunch and some good conversation about how we got to this place, we settled in to work, she on a rich and marvelous painting (water, trees, docks, and a beautiful coral red roof on a white clapboard building) she’s been working on for a while, me on more brush paintings. We talked a little while she painted and showed me some nifty techniques and I ground ink and worked on quick sketches, but mostly we just worked quietly, happily.

I’m afraid it’s bowls for a while, specifically, bowls used in the zen meal ceremony called oryoki (literally, “just enough”). They’ve been in my head since I painted this and several related things at zen the art retreat back in May, and now they just want me to pay lots of attention to them. I did lots of quick sketches:

and

and these

but my favorite bowls of the day were the simple turquoise stoneware ones in which she served up a beautiful amethyst cobbler, hot from the oven and full of blueberries and blackberries and peaches just as we decided we needed a break.

Now that’s art. Thanks, Maureen!

An early morning

What sparks you when you look at someone else’s work?

This morning I got up early (thank you, dogs) and everyone else slept late. I put the kettle on, had a quiet sit for a bit, did some laundry and then sat down to read my dailies: the NYT, Doonesbury, and a few blogs. I have a short list of blogs I try to check in with every day or every few days—you can see some of them over there to the right. The list changes and I try not to let it get out of hand (after all, one can’t just read blogs all day, right? Except for this one, of course!)—I bookmark new ones periodically.

Once in a while I feel like I’m going around in a circle with my favorite blogs, especially the art and craft ones. When I get the sense that everyone I’m reading is linked to everyone else I’m reading, I try to find some new, fresh voices and looks like this one.

Today I came to one art and craft blog that I liked so well I began to look through all the other ones she had on her blogroll. There are a lot of them, and I found myself observing the way I looked at them. All of them were beautiful, each in its own way. Some of them grabbed me immediately and I scrolled through them for a much longer time than I’d intended. Others let me know immediately that, though they were quite wonderful, they weren’t necessarily speaking to me. Others I passed by quickly, then found myself going back for a second look.

Another path, via this blog, led me to this one, and this. Each of these is quite different, and I’m not completely able to say why they drew me in the way they did. Most are by women—but not all. Some illustrate techniques I’d like to try. Some are so beautiful that I felt fed just by looking at them. Some just made me smile quietly.

So what art and craft blogs do you love best? And what makes them speak to you?

I hear footsteps upstairs. Time to get this day on the road.

So sue me

I know, I know, I said no more cranes for a while. But the origami crane theme continues over at Folding Trees, and guess what popped up there today.

Thanks, Eve!

Eve and June, who run the show over at Folding Trees, are trying to collect images of 1000 paper cranes in peaceful settings.  To read more about what they’re looking for–and to see the lovely cranes that have winged their virtual way to the site so far, take a look here.

I do support the arts, really I do. But . . .

We went to the first day of a big 3-day art and craft exhibit this afternoon, and saw some wonderful, wonderful things. I was particularly taken with some simple but startlingly beautiful clay vessels in storm cloud blues and grays. This potter, Tim Scull, was the only one at the show whose card I picked up. Hey, you never know–maybe tomorrow we’ll win the lottery and we can bring home something like this:

In the past, we’ve bought from artists at this show a few times, but this year we are just skint. I felt like we should have had on big badges that said, “Sorry, kid in college.” I don’t begrudge the expense–this is what money is for, right?  There just won’t be any major investments in art until both kids are done, you know?

So in lieu of spending big bucks (or even small change), my support for the arts this afternoon consists of asking you to pop over here and take a look at Scull’s work.

Here there be dragons

This is honestly not what I sat down to do today. I got to work on what was supposed to be making some jewelry. Didn’t exactly turn out like that. On the way to the jewelry findings, I got distracted by a package of ephemera I bought a few weeks ago, and the watercolors were close at hand, and and and . . .

Can’t exactly wear them around your neck, but I had a great time with these.

First this. The last crane you’re going to get out of me for a long time. I promise. Okay, I think:

Next we veered into dragon territory for an hour or so:

And lastly, this little rabbit, gazing at the moon:

I don’t know what the text on any of the backgrounds is about. Since I don’t read any of these languages, to me the individual characters and words were just wonderful images that wanted to be part of the pictures. I hope none of them are descriptions from racy novels. Or recipes for rabbit stew.

Crane fever, part 2

Here is how the crane-y goodness all came together, and just in time for my dear friend Leslie’s birthday. I finished so close to the wire that I had to borrow it back from her for a little while so I could take some pictures of it after the fact.

I used to be so organized . . .

Anyway, here are a few shots of the finished product, my take on the story of the crane wife, in haiku, with (shall we say “primitive”?) brush paintings and an origami crane from a stamp I carved. Unlike the last book I made (which I’ll show here soon–I seem to be doing everything backwards), which was an edition of 10 copies, each hand-illustrated one by one, the crane book is a one-off. I’m still trying to figure out how to make a couple more copies without falling down dead, but for now Les owns the entirety of the first edition. Collectors, take note (hee hee).

The front (I forgot to include an item like a coin in the photo to help you visualize the scale of the piece–the covers are 4.5 x 4.5″):

A front view, with the book unfolded:

The title page:

The back cover:

And my favorite part, the last page/inside back cover:

The project was so much fun, though there were frustrating moments, such as the ones spent folding many successively smaller cranes until I did one that fit under the glass in this shadow box. Whew! Happy birthday again, Leslie.

Crane fever

I mentioned that cranes are, as my husband would say, getting in amongst me. How do things like this happen? Are there really more cranes on the horizon than there used to be, or am I just suddenly acutely aware of them?

Whatever the answer, I have been seeing cranes everywhere. Here:

Here:

Here (and I haven’t read this book yet, but it seems to be popping up in front of me all the time):

Even here, though this is a matter of hearing, rather than seeing (with apologies again that my version of WordPress doesn’t link well to YouTube). But this has been an especially insistent one, really sticking in my head and in heavy rotation in the car CD player, so do go and have a listen if you want to understand all the things that hooked me.

Other things began to come together to support these poor random birds.

A telling of the Japanese folk story about the crane wife.

The beautiful coat I posted about before, from SpiritCloth’s blog.

Some arts and techniques–brush painting, and the making of accordion books.

And some materials, including a wonderful package of midnight blue cardstock imbedded with white flakes that I got on sale here, a box of 2 x 2″ glass squares from here, and a boxful of unused sheets of paper decorated with suminagashi, or Japanese marbling, left over from an art assignment from a couple of years ago, like this one (but not this one):

What came of this I’ll describe in my next post. Time to go and make some supper and start getting the family settled in for the night.

Amazing amazing

In my trip through the arts and crafts blogosphere (and a discussion of those two volatile words will come up here one of these days; not today, though) this past week I came across one of the most amazing and beautiful pieces I’ve ever seen, at SpiritCloth’s gorgeous blog. Okay, actually on her flickr site:

Everything she has posted on both the flickr site and her blog is beautiful, but this one had me just over the moon. Partly because it’s so, so wonderful that I want to reach into the photo and steal borrow it for many, many days, and partly because it fits right into a synchronistic thing that’s been going on in my head and my work for a while–cranes, crane stories, crane imagery–they all want me to pay attention to them these days. Also, I’ve wanted to make myself a quilted coat ever since I wore out the one that my college boyfriend bought me on impulse one day–man, I miss that coat.

I have actually done something with the crane theme, which I’ll show you later on today if I get a chance.

In the meantime, though, do themes and images grab you before you have any idea what form they want to take in your work? What kinds? And how does the process work for you?

Art is where you find it

Sometimes beauty and art are right there in front of you.

I spent so long trying to capture the beautiful sour cherries, the black currants and the red currants we gathered from the yard (with big thanks to First Child for climbing higher on the ladder than I am comfortable doing and for clearing out the brush and showing us that the currants we planted a–ahem–very many years ago are still there) that I didn’t actually have time to wash and pit the cherries until the next day.

Alas, the picture of the cherry pie was too elusive to capture.

But it was extremely tasty.

By the way, take a quick look at my other blog if you want to see another family member who likes to snag a cherry right off the tree.

Drawing Daruma

The first person ever to say “one thing leads to another” was born long before the internet, but, boy, when I sat down this morning to read my mail and a few friends’ blogs, somehow I ended up far, far, off track. Sometimes this turns up pure internet dreck, but today I was richly rewarded for my e-meandering.

Yesterday I read an article in the current issue of Shambhala Sun called “There is Much We Do Not Know About the Feelings of Butterflies,” by Liza Dalby. As a graduate student in anthropology back in the 1990s, Dalby immersed herself in geisha culture and trained alongside other young women who wanted to be geishas, making her 1998 book on the subject, in my opinion, much more fascinating than Memoirs of a Geisha.

In the Shambala Sun article (which is not, alas, available on the magazine’s web site, so you’ll need to find an actual copy to hold in your hands in order to read it), Dalby writes movingly of an intimate encounter with a butterfly in the cemetery to which she has gone to visit her geisha mother’s grave. She refers the reader to a YouTube video in which she captures this moment with the butterfly.

Well, one video leads to another, doesn’t it? You sign on to look up spectral butterflies, and before you know it you’re watching banned Ikea commercials or talking cats or Decemberists videos and half an hour has gone by and your tea is cold. Eventually, though, I stumbled on something completely marvelous–another Liza Dalby video posting of a brush painting class in which the instructor leads the class in painting images of the famously dour Daruma, aka Bodhidharma, credited with founding zen, Shaolin martial arts, and, not incidentally, with creating tea. To keep himself awake during meditation, goes one version of the tea legend, he cut off his own eyelids, and from the place on the ground where he tossed them sprung the first tea plants. The painting class is just irresistible–I’m off to clear a space at the table, grind some ink, and paint my own Daruma/Bodhidharma. After all, zen, karate, and tea are all pretty important to me, so it seems appropriate.

[several hours later]  Okay, here’s my shot at old Bodhidharma. He’s a great subject, because he scowls so fiercely there’s no point in trying to make him look pretty:

I may like this one even better–a sketch I scribbled with a Sharpie marker on some kraft paper cardstock (that’s a crease in the middle of the paper that runs through the bottom). I’ve never done any cartooning, but if I did I think Bodhidharma would make a great character.

By the way, here’s one more side note about how much we don’t know about the feelings of butterflies. When my son and his best friend were 8 years old, I nearly convinced the two boys that when a butterfly lands on you and gently taps your arm with his delicate feet . . . he’s really trying to kill you and it’s just the best the poor guy can do.