April 2016 Poem A Day #25 - Planting

Planting
the spring exercise

  Position the shovel.
  Place your full weight
  on the shovel by standing
  on its top rim so the shovel
  sinks into the earth.
  Rock the shovel back and
  forth to loosen the earth.
  Leverage it down
  and swing up
  this small load of earth
  out of a brand new hole.
  Empty the shovel to the side
  Do over. Do over. Do over. Do over.
  Remove the container and wrappings
  from the plant and set it in the hole.
  With a trowel ease the dirt around the plant.
  Gently tamp with a thumb or a toe.
  Keep filling in with rich loose earth.
  Water liberally.

Ubiquitous entropy

Summer seems an odd backdrop for thinking about fall, but entropy is on my mind today. Ordered systems tend toward disarray. Everything that grows also harbors a limit of time, energy, health, of life itself. Nature ferments a slow cycle of wax and wane. These days, this is is not a popular thought. Yet, everything is cyclic, planets, plants, even people and ways of thinking about the world. All things bloom and wither. Things change in the world and in us. The interior world does not follow a smooth logical trajectory upward anymore than the exterior world does. Oceans rise. Rivers dry up. Things that are whole fall into parts. Things that have grown crumble into compost. That which crumbles doesn't permanently return. Something new might grow. And even in barren dry soil, a desert might offer it's subtle beauties. Selah.

The above picture I made in an online browser program. I was thinking about fall.

A view of land, water, sky

This new work was created entirely in browser-based programs, including DeviantArt Muro and Google+ Creative Kit. This work was inspired by a landscape workshop I went to last night. It was given at SCAN by James Grabowski - whose playful nonchalant approach prompted me to experiment more freely with color in the context of this landscape. All rights reserved.

Paintings: Spacious No 1 & 2

Though I have put up Spacious No 3 - I had not written about Spacious 1 & 2 yet. With the caveat that the color is a little off in these photos, here they are:

--- Spacious No. 1 ---

....

--- Spacious No. 2 ---

Both of the these paintings had more garish beginnings than is apparent here.  They both hung for years in the house before I finally knew what to do with them...  Spacious No 1 on the left, had green and purple clouds that looked for all the world like intestines. And that is what bothered me about it.  Spacious No 2 had a garish sunset, and I do mean garish.  Ultimately I went for a sense of spaciousness over jumpy colors that I didn't think worked well.....

The link to a post on Spacious No 3: http://puzzleddragon.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/painting-spacious-no-3/

Painting: North Country Scene

This scene was inspired by my years in Maine and New Hampshire. I started painting this when I lived over a junk store in Cornish. I think now, finally, it's done. It's oil on an 8 x 10 canvas board. Wrong it's actually on 9 x 12 canvas board. I was close.

Painting: Spacious No. 3: The Dry Lands

These mountains, rising in the distance under an expanse of sky, began their existence looking like scenery on the planet MARS. The underpainting I used for this oil-on-canvas-board scene was cadmium red.  You can see it clearly in the stage on the right. The main shapes of the mountains and the road line were immediately laid in with a soft cloth. I learned this technique when I went to a SCANart.org demonstration where a painter used it to build  a flower painting.  The red was hard to give up though, so this painting ended up as a Southwestern sort of scene.  I thought the colors were off, but a friend who'd lived out west told me this is how the mountains look at a certain time of year.  I'm not positive that I'm through with it.  I have terrible urges to add items to the foreground such as a rusty pickup, a gates, an oil derek, a wagon wheel, an OKeefe-eske skull, or an antique gas pump, or aburro, etc. etc - all the usual Western sterio-typical items. I am trying to resist this urge.

One thing I like about this painting is a funny effect the sky has in different light. Sometimes the clouds almost seem to have a depth, I think from the layering of blue and white that I used. Sometimes it looks like it must be raining over the mountains. Sometimes it looks like dusk, and there is a city on the other side of the mountains - giving off a glow.  It's quite odd. And I am not sure if I could reproduce it.

It occurs to me that I have not posted Spacious No 2, nor Spacious No 1 - so I guess I am ahead of myself somehow.

PAINTING: The Glaring Irregularity again

Update Mar. 9, 2011  This painting drives me to drink well, coffee.

VOLCANO PIC CHANGES AGAIN!! And Again! And Again. And Again.

Updated Jan 20, 2011 -->  "The Glaring Irregularity!" This painting has gone from just odd, with a Greek classically clad family standing at an angle, to bizarrely dragonesque, to google earth meets black velvet, to Google earth meets VanGoh to lava spill in candyland. At this point it is all about undulation, oscillation, periodicity somehow. Everything comes in waves in this pic now.  Although I like this version in someways, I miss the very first version with all the crazy eccentric lava.  Sigh. Let's give it a few days and see....

I am beginning to understand something. I need to preserve the eccentricities somehow, but in a way that serves the overall composition. I am most likely to use this cronic revisionism when I don't have an overall composition in mind at the start of the painting. Scroll down for pervious versions.

PREVIOUS UPDATE  -- I have altered this so many freaking times and still I am not statisfied with this painting. I would like to be able to throw it out. But I just can't. I need to nail it down in some way that pleases me for more than five minutes. But in the night version here, the smoke bothers me. I want something to unify the composition. ( I think because of the previous tentacles picture it became parallel lines.. hmmm.)

After  seeing pictures and videos of Mr Etna erupting in Italy -  I just had to revise  this picture!!!  MORE RED!!!  that's what  Eli Cleary told me.  Okay I am not yet done with it..... and of course I am nuts.  I just can't seem to stop. I actually showed the second to last version of this. But it still bothered me. Someone said the lava looked like a dragon. And I could see it didn't follow the land contures but seemed vertical somehow.  SO here is yet another incarnation of the same canvas. I might change the title too.

PREVIOUS UPDATE:  Below is the version that I showed at Artwell in 2010: Between The Darkness and The Deep. What promoted me to change that one is I couldn't get the lava to lie down on the landscape.. hmmm. I don't know what's come over me, painting a semi-readable landscape. My usual fair is oddities like the very first version at the bottom .

I like  the early eccentric version a lot. It is a  completely different painting that I wish I still had!   Apparantly I am painting the eccentricity right out them I think and I don't know why! I seem to be going though a pseudo reality phase....  It might have to do with my new reading glasses.  I had  quite a stigmatism in the left eye which some new glasses correct. When I first used them, every thing on the right seemed bigger than it should. In the original version, what prompted me to begin changing things was I could figure out what the people were standing on. Then I couldn't figure out where the horizon was since the Island was tilted. Probably due my stigmatism.  I guess my brain had learned to compensate..... To the left is the lava that looked like a dragon. To the right is my favorite version:

Painting: Cold Quiet Tranquil

There is a feeling I get when I look out the window at night and snow is falling, relentless and silent.   When my dog Oggi was alive. we often took late walks in falling snow. Sometimes I still do. In the dark snow, I feel expansively alert and connected to everything, yet also filled with a strange sense of deep peace. For a few years I lived in Maine, so I have a passing acquaintance with the desolate beauty of winter in the north country. This is an older style landscape, a bit hallmark for my taste.  It belongs to my mom who asked me recently  "Is there ever a painting of  yours that you are actually finished with?"

When I look at it now, I feel that same peaceful sense as when I look out the window in a quiet spell of falling snow ....  So yes, I think it is done.  It's oil on 8x10 canvas board.

Painting: Rural Free Delivery

This is an oil painting on a small canvas board.   This painting hung around for a year because I couldn't figure out how to finish it.

Below are earlier versions of it.  I have this debate with every picture:  when do I stop? Things are lost and others gained. Perhaps I am over painting them.

DRAWING: Fingers of the Sun

This is a pen and ink from quite a few decades ago. It's first life was black and white only. Then I got the itch to alter and out came the crayons. I like the sense that everything is in motion, very busy, frantic motion. I think life felt like that to me back then.

PAINTING: River of Sky

This is finally finished, I think anyway. It is one of those pictures where I didn't have a good composition to start with, and I fiddled and fiddled to bring the perspective into line. Originally there was a water fall in the rear as well and judging by the height of the trees in the foreground, and on how far back it was -  it must have been hundreds of feet high higher than Victoria Falls even.  It didn't make visual sense though it was very dramatic. It makes more sense to me now.

It's quite small 8 by 10 canvas board with oils. There is a cat in this picture too. Whenever i can fit one, there is a cat.

Below you can see the original design - which I liked in someways, and the stages through which it evolved. The original, I liked it but I could not accept it visually. Water doesn't fall at an angle. By perspective, and by comparison with the trees on the banks of the falls, - that water fall was ENORMOUS - taller than Victoria Falls.  Slowly I tweaked it into a form I could accept. I do like the some of the early versions for their  energy and angles etc. I like the finished painting better.

Oil Painting: Odd dome of slopes

This is oil on canvas. I was thinking about skiing when I painted it.

I don't ski - anymore.  I tried it once and learned two things:  First: Don't do anything strenuous on the last run of the day when you are tired. Second, my date was an inconsiderate narcissist.

After a day practicing on the kiddy slopes while he skiied, the last run of the day he took me up to a real trail. He should have known better. I lost control, fell head over teakettle, tore a ligament and couldn't stand up. He screamed at me to get up, because  I was embarrassing him by lying there in the way.

You don't have to tell me twice. Prince Charming was a a hideous troll under the skin. The Ski patrol was much more accommodating and polite.  You really don't know someone until something goes wrong.

Painting: Alternate reality sunrise

This was moved from the Metaphoratorium Gallery where it was a January 07 entry
This small oil painting of mine is from 15 years ago or so. I was trying to avoid the cliqued, though lovely view of the sun over the ocean, that can be found in literally thousands of paintings. This one is 18 by 24 on canvas board. I like the way the sun seems to be melting, but the wild clouds always look like a distant war or a misplaced 4th of July rather than then a daily appearance by the sun. Of course if a sun rise or sunset looks this wild, it means there are a lot of unusual pollutants floating in the atmosphere. I wasn't at the ocean when I painted this. I wasn't even outside. Perhaps that's the problem.