Monthly Archives: August 2018

Ephemera

Over in a meadow

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Once upon a time I had an ordinary boring suburban lawn.  You know the sort, you water it to make it grow, then you mow it to keep it tidy, then repeat again and again.  It’s a mark of respectability to have a nice lawn.   Some years ago, we started out with a thirsty bluegrass lawn. Then there was a drought, and the bluegrass mostly died.   (We really never liked bluegrass, but it came with the house).   When the drought was over we replanted the yard in native buffalo grass.  (It does not grow very tall and it was what M’s Grandma had in her yard).  But over time various other plants have encroached into the lawn.

This yellow buttercup seeded itself into the lawn this year.

As did this sunflower, although I suspect that the squirrels may have had a hand in it’s being there.

Flowering sage was planted in the flowerbed near the house, but found this a little too confining, so it escaped out into the lawn.

Oregano flourishes near the front steps.   A favorite of the bees, the plants sprang up from seeds that leapt over the concrete.  Every year this patch gets a little bigger, perhaps it will completely take over my yard in due course.  That’s not a black snake hiding among the plants, it’s the hose.  (I do water things every now and again).

And who is the master of this tiny kingdom?   Why it’s the bunny of course.

Art, Town

Faces in Places

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I had ended up downtown at the terminus of the annual cattle drive through town.  It always starts near the private college and ends at the former county courthouse, which is now a museum.

I had always noticed the large faces on the facade, there is a Native American (also known as Red Indians in the UK) over each of the large windows in the place.  These faces don’t look to be too pleased with the goings on in the building, but perhaps that is only fitting.

The animal kingdom is represented by this lion’s head.   He would be part of a fountain, if only the water had been turned on.

The intermediary between man and beast can be seen in the base of this light pole.   With cherub faces and lion feet, one wonders, ‘what on earth was the artist thinking’?

This woman is just part of the woodwork in this former district courtroom, but she appears to be happy about it.

Unlike the previous sculpted faces, this figure is painted and shows the entire body.   And what exactly the figure means is rather enigmatic.  She has wings (is she an angel?), she is holding a banner labeled gold (representing Fortune perhaps?), and has a dangling, trussed up person in front of her (no idea what so ever).   The more usual figure of blindfolded Justice holding a sword and a scale is nowhere to be seen in this courtroom.   Perhaps this is an allegory of how our local justice system works.

Art, Ephemera

Windows

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If ‘eyes are the windows of the soul’, what are actual windows?   And more specifically, the windows of one’s car?  We generally live an anonymous life, one can’t tell much about a person’s interests from just a quick glance at the person.   But on one’s car it is easy to put out the information about what one is interested in.

Although it is sometimes a puzzle to figure out the enigmatic meaning behind the window.  Is this a romance reader, or a cynic?

To graphically show one’s stick figure family, was an early trend, mostly it was parents and the number of kids.   But this person has a complete family and doesn’t need anyone else, just her two dogs and a cat.

This one is based in a realistic depiction of the pooch and it was quite a large sticker.

This person wanted people to know that they were not a local.

This is my friend’s car.  While the end stickers are easy enough to decipher, the middle one is a little harder to figure out as it shows a rotary cutter, which is what one uses to cut up fabric for quilts (’cause scissors are just too slow).

Another enigmatic sticker (well it’s enigmatic to those who don’t follow anime).

So true.

 

 

 

Art

New Art

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I don’t know if there is any particular part of creating art that could be said to be the hardest part, it’s all hard, just in different ways.

I suppose the first hard part is having inspiration.   Some people fill endless sketchbooks with ideas, and then struggle to decide which one is worthy to finish.   But I typically have a single notion of what I might want to create, then the next step is to figure out how to do it.

Of course the model is the late Miss P.

And because I always work in fabric, I need to have a bunch of choices to try out.  Does the fabric play together nicely, or do they clash?   And the eternal question ‘Do I have enough fabric?’ (the answer is always ‘No”.)

And I also needed fusible web, sharp scissors and, wait a minute, how did Pteri sneak into the pile?

So here it is, the finished product.   I had an amazing (to me) amount of trouble with this piece, many things that could go wrong did go wrong.   I cut pieces out backwards, the fusible stuck to everything but the fabric, I actually sewed two important finished bits together and had to re-cut them at the last minute.  It was due at a show by 4:00 pm and I delivered it at 3:37 (so it was 23 minutes early, thank goodness that the traffic wasn’t bad).  And then the best bit, it was juried into the show.

I think the entire experience can be summed up in this quote from my e-friend Shreve “It’s when I’m under pressure that I realize what a great procrastinator I really am.”