Crocus, Finally

As everyone knows, April has been unusually cold this year. The crocuses (croci?) in our yard got snowed on twice after first rearing their brave little heads, but here they are at last, none the worse for it. It was such a beautiful day that I was comfortable in short sleeves as I toured the yard for the first time this season. The recent wind storms did a lot of minor damage, leaving a litter of small broken branches all over the ground, but no large ones. My vegetable garden is almost dry enough to start working the soil. I tied up a new clothesline and hung the wash out to dry in the sun. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy hanging out the clothes in summer, and working in the garden. After being housebound all winter, being able to get outdoors is like a whole new life opening up.

Cranberry Glass

Another piece of family history, at the opposite end of the scale from the homely horn cup. This pretty little glass, about the right size for juice, was brought over from Ireland and treasured through what must have been very rough-living decades. Perhaps it was once part of a set. My husband remembers being allowed to drink milk out of it when he was a small boy visiting his grandmother, but since its gilt and paint trim is starting to wear off, we never use it now, except for the times when I take it out of the china cabinet and try to capture it in paint.

Horn Cup

This little charred cup made out of a cow's horn has been passed down through my husband's family, who were early settlers in what is now Stittsville, Ontario.



One day their log cabin burnt to the ground, and the horn cup was the only thing recovered from the ashes.

It probably was never very pretty on its best day. After its trip through the flames it was charred, scarred, and ugly, but for a hundred years it has spoken about endurance and survival.

My infatuation with Ukrainian Easter eggs did interfere with daily drawing, unless you count drawing on eggs, but I'm back at it now. Just some carnations...







a few objects from the cupboard...












and, of course, a cat.

Jelly in the Bowl

My daughter, home for Easter, found a forgotten package of orange Jello in the back of the cabinet. "Ooh, Jello! Let's make it right now."

It seemed like a lot of excitement over plain old Jello after I had gone to some trouble to stock all her favourite foods for the holiday, but, oh, well, it's certainly not hard to make. On goes the kettle and out comes the mixing bowl.




Confronted with that familiar chemical fragrance and in-your-face colour, I was suddenly catapulted back through time. Food fads come and go, but there's always Jello. An old skipping rhyme popped into my head, one of the first I ever learned.

Jelly in the bowl, jelly in the bowl,
A-wig-a-wag, a-wig-a-wag, Jelly in the bowl.

Sausage in the pan, sausage in the pan,
A-wig-a-wag, a-wig-a-wag, sausage in the pan.

This was accompanied by vigorous waggling of one's hind end, hopefully without missing a step, which is quite a feat if you are very small and just learning to skip. We children thought it was hilarious and a little naughty.My daughter had never heard that one. She thought it was funny, too. We spent some time recalling other skipping rhymes, coming up with a dozen or so off the tops of our heads.

My old granny, ninety-nine,
She can drink a barrel of wine.
She can drink a bowl of soup,
To make her belly go boop-boop-boop.

Passed orally from child to child down through how who-knows-how-many ages, they tend to be irreverent, ungrammatical, impolite, sexist, ageist, probably racist, certainly politically incorrect. Raw kid culture.

Do not leave this rope be empty.
If you do, you shall be out!

I hardly ever see groups of girls skipping in the street anymore. In my day (that's the Jurassic era, not the Antedeluvian) it was one of the certain signs of spring.

Of course, I was a baby boomer in a Catholic town. Almost every house teemed with children, and it was usually easy to get a gang together just by stepping outside with a long rope in your hand. Parents were also eager (not to say desperate) to keep the kids outdoors as much as possible, as the houses were pretty small for the size of the families. Skipping drew in a wide age group, from about five to about thirteen. Once you were in high school, you didn't skip anymore, even if you wished you could.

In this village where I live now, there are fewer young families, fewer children, and I suppose less willingness to let children entertain themselves for hours outdoors, especially on the street (although road hockey still flourishes). However, I still see skipping ropes for sale in the stores, and sometimes I see a rope turning on a school playground. So I'm hoping the rhymes are still alive and being passed on.

Cinderella dressed in yella
Went downtown to see her fella.
Guess how many kisseshe got?
One, two, three...

Did I Say Distracted?

I've always looked at Ukrainian Easter eggs with enchantment and awe. Such moving symbolism. Such beautiful colours and patterns. How do they draw those straight lines on eggs? How do they do that tiny cross-hatch thing? >

Last week I finally got to attend the annual workshop which has been offered by our local library for the past seven years. Turns out, it really is simple. It does take time, for sure. Nothing about this process is fast, but it's so absorbing that you hardly notice the time passing.

Obviously, experience and practice count for a lot in turning out a really high-quality piece. My lines are still wobbly and I often have to compensate for blobs of wax in the wrong place. Honestly, though, anybody can make these. You only need the kistka, the little tool for applying the wax, and of course the special dyes.

>

As soon as I got home from the library, I went online and ordered supplies from www.babasbeeswax.com. They were great to deal with. Everything is reasonably priced. My package arrived within six days and everything was in perfect order.

I got the basic beginner's kit, which consists of five dyes, a medium-size kistka, a piece of beeswax, and instructions. I chose the plastic kistka, which costs more, because that's what we were using at the workshop, and some people who had attended in previous years said they're much easier to use than the old wooden ones. I also ordered a packet of black dye, which wasn't included in the basic kit. I knew I wanted black after seeing the eggs the instructor had made. All the other colours just glow against it.

I once read in a magazine article that many Ukrainians regard making pysanky as a prayerful activity. They meditate and pray as they work with the ancient symbols of life and faith handed down to them by their ancestors. It certainly isn't necessary to take that approach in order to make beautiful eggs and enjoy them. For myself, I thought that trying to be too pious might rob me of some of the fun, so I didn't consciously set out to do that. However, I found that sitting by a lit candle, calming the mind enough to draw the simple shapes on the surface of an egg, and thinking in the most general way about the ideas expressed by the cross, the fish, the rose, the little dots that represent Mary's Tears, has been spiritually uplifting in a totally unexpected way. I'm definitely planning to make this an annual event.

Habit Almost Formed

It's a popular theory that it takes 28 days to form a new habit. Alas, in my case, it seems to take a lot longer than that. 88 days have passed since I started this drawing practice, and it has reached the point where I do draw something every day. It's become routine to pick up the pencil each morning, after coffee and blog-reading but before anything else.

>

Still, I don't think it's an actual habit yet. I feel that any little change in my routine, any distraction, could disrupt the practice, and I might not get back to it. Perhaps it needs another month.

I don't think my drawing has improved at all. Sometimes it's awkward, sometimes it flows, but there doesn't seem to be any way of predicting which it will be. My learning pattern tends toward sudden leaps after a long season on a plateau, so I hope to see a change soon.

I am discovering a little about the use of pencil, which is something my spotty art-education missed. I suppose my art college teachers assumed we had all done that in high school, but my school had no art program, and I lived in a town where you couldn't buy drawing pencils. Willow charcoal sticks were available, which I used and loved, but this made me very resistant to the harder pencils when I was asked to use them. I thought life was way too short for shading in teeny-tiny lines with an 8-H. Nobody told me you could expose a long length of lead and use it on its side. I always thought those pale leads were terribly fragile, but they are actually stronger than the big soft leads.

Study of Irises

This week's winter storm didn't live up to its billing for us. A few hours of freezing rain were followed by some gloopy wet snow, but nowhere near the amount predicted. It was warm enough yesterday to bring flowers home from the grocery store without their turning into purple popsicles.

UPDATE ON NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION

My plan to do more sketching is coming along pretty well.



I sketched in the local diner, learning that coats on hooks sit pretty still, people not so much.

I drew a guy in a wheelchair having coffee at Mac's Milk. (I knew he wouldn't mind being drawn because he's my husband.)

A guy in a baseball cap. No relation.

The cats were happy to pose. This is Vinnie, a very large, gentle, sweet, ten-year-old tabby. He likes to lie on his back to take the weight off his feet.

I even dabbled in a little colour. Of course, Jake took up a lot of room on the table, distracting attention from the fuji apple which was supposed to be the subject.

So I'm an almost-regular sketcher now, but obviously the blogging still needs work. I'll try to show up more often from now on.

FIRST SKETCH OF 2007

This is a pencil sketch of Jake, our Himalayan, taking a snooze. The lower one is the undoctored photo. The upper one was "fixed" in photoshop to make it more visible. Maybe I need a more high-contrast medium.

After trying for weeks to come up with a plan for developing my drawing skills during the coming year, no particular subject appealed to me as a focus, so the plan, if you can call it that, is to pick up some kind of drawing tool and wiggle my fingers until black marks appear on the page, then publish the results on this blog.

The only rule is that I must draw from life, not photos. I see wonderful work by other artists done from photos, but I know that working from life is what I need at this time. If it limits me to cats, pears, and coffee cups, so be it. Sigh.

Yesterday was the the first day. Not only am I rusty, but I've also lost the ability to concentrate for more than a few minutes. My brain does not want to observe. It whines that it wants to go watch the food network. I expect to be pretty creaky for a while, but hopefully the brain and I will limber up.

ESPRESSO

When my husband asked for an espresso maker for Christmas, I had some misgivings. Moderation is not exactly his middle name.

Whenever we visited the Indigo bookstore in Kingston, he would go directly to the coffee outlet and order two double espressos to start with, then keep ordering one after another. By the time I finished shopping, there would be a litter of little cups on the table, and the waitress would be looking as if she wished he would go home.

I'm forced to admit that the caffeine never did keep him awake, nor did the acid bother his stomach, but I stubbornly maintain that it had to be bad for him in some way. There's no way that all that pleasure comes for free, mister. (I myself can't sleep a wink if I consume caffeine after twelve noon. Life is so not fair.)

He says he only ordered so many at once because he didn't have access to any at home. He promised to keep it to one or two a day if we got the machine.

So we've got one, and he is as good as his word.

The one who is flirting with addiction is me. Holy Cow. I love this stuff. I love the espresso, and I love the little ritual of making it. I love the cappuccino even more. The froth is made from skim milk, so I don't even have to feel guilty.

Well, yes, well, there's the question of sugar. I've always taken my coffee black, even espresso, which is probably why I was able to take it or leave it until now. Having recently read, in one of Frances Mayes' books, that espresso is really meant to be sweetened, I decided to try just use a tiny spoonful or two of sugar. The rest, as they say, is history.




We're finally using the demi-tasse spoons we got with our flatware set when we got married. That's a good thing, right? And the little cups? Aren't they adorable? We got them really cheap because there were only five in the box instead of six.

The key, I think, is to handle these drinks like very rich chocolates. You can eat one or two chocolates a day, but more than that and you'll be in trouble.

My New Year's Resolution will be Moderation in All Things Caffeinated.

Oh, yes, and I'll be getting up earlier from now on. Gotta make sure to get my two drinks in well before noon.

Happy New Year to all.

BOXING DAY

It was a green Christmas here, and I'm not kidding. I harvested fresh thyme, rosemary, and sage from my garden for cooking. Some friends dug up carrots. This is unheard of in this climate even in snowless years.




Then, this morning we woke to a perfect holiday card scene.



Some might be annoyed at this timing, but I'm reminded of Boxing Days when I was young. Children would inquire anxiously, "It's still Christmas, isn't it?" And the elders would reply, "Yes, it's Christmas for twelve days. It's only just begun."

We knew there would be no more gifts, except for the odd stray that hadn't been delivered in time for the 25th. But the beautiful tree would remain, the candy dishes would be refilled as they emptied, and we would be allowed to sit in the front room which was not used at any other time of the year. We had our new toys to amuse us, and we would exchange visits with friends and relatives we hadn't seen for a while.

The fever of anticipation had peaked and started to drop, but there were still things to look forward to, so the descent was gentle and gradual.

By the twelfth day, known to us as "Old Christmas Day", we would be back in school. The bone-dry tree would be broken up and the branches laid on the flower beds to protect them from the January frost. The boxes of chocolates were gone, the bucket of hard candy was empty. By that time we had sucked all the juice out of Christmas and were ready to turn our attention elsewhere. Even so, there was a tiny crumb of cheer on that day, knowing it was still officially Christmas for 24 hours.

JOY TO THE WORLD

For almost as long as I can remember, I've wanted a miniature village at Christmas. The idea must have been planted by some long-forgotten children's book. In recent years the wish is being gradually realized with these little houses and figures purchased a few at a time from the dollar store.



Lined up on the kitchen windowsill, they are cheap and crude, yet they satisfy my old longing to a remarkable degree.

It occurs to me that the child I used to be knew nothing of scale and workmanship, and only wanted enough to set the imagination working. These pieces are perfectly able to do that. If they were more expensive, I might not have bought them, or might feel a twinge of guilt whenever I look at them.




As it is, whenever I behold them I feel a thrill of pure joy. Who would have thought that the elusive Christmas Spirit would inhabit these tiny dwellings?

It's not likely that anyone is reading this post, as I've been a terrible slacker with this blog, but in the new year I hope to get it going again, so if anyone does happen by, I wish you a very merry and joyful season for whichever festival you might celebrate at this time of year, and please do visit again.

The Makioka Sisters

This photo was actually taken at an ethnic festival in Brooklyn NY, by Wendy Zarganis, who has a column about local events on About.com. (I tried to put in a link but didn't succeed, sorry) but it beautifully illustrates this book that I found in a hospital waiting room and slyly slid into my bag to take home with me. It does bother my conscience a tiny bit, thinking about the next person who comes along and has to be content with tattered Harlequin Romances, but there wasn't time to read the whole thing there and, well, I just had to know if Yukiko ever finds a husband! Besides, it's quite an old paperback, printed in 1966, and it was falling apart in my hands as I read, so it's unlikely that anyone could have read it after me.

Maybe I'm just the last one in the world to know, but I've never heard of this book or this author, Junichiro Tanizaki ("author of THE KEY and SOME PREFER NETTLES") before. According to the blurb on the book, he was already very famous in Japan when this book was first published in 1957. It was written in Japanese and translated into English by Edward G. Seidensticker. It's the story of four sisters from a merchant class family in the years leading up to and including World War II (but it doesn't go as far as Pearl Harbour).

While quite distinct in style and content, it strongly resembles a Jane Austen novel, with perhaps a dash of Georgette Heyer. Although there are some delightfully humorous scenes, the author can't match Jane Austen's subtle wit, but makes up for it with intriguing, complex characters and fascinating scenes of daily life, combined with a story line that manages to keep you (me) turning the pages. My Harlequin-programmed mind naturally focussed on the two unmarried sisters as the heroines. A husband must be found for Yukiko, the third sister, before Taeko, the youngest, can be married to the man she already loves. This is why it's important for Yukiko to find someone soon, but she's not one to settle for just anybody. In the end, I find to my surprise that it's Sachiko, the second sister, and her wonderful husband Teinosuke who are the true heroine and hero. What a darling couple!

I'm totally charmed by the seasonal celebrations that mark the passing years. Each spring the sisters go together to view the cherry blossoms, wearing their beautiful silk kimonos, and have their photograph taken together on a bridge. Didn't I tell you the picture above is perfect? I don't know when I've wished harder that a book was illustrated. There's a festival just for admiring the harvest moon. Imagine that. The whole family spends an entire evening admiring the moon, writing poems to it, painting pictures of it, and remembering family members who are not there to share it with them.

At the same time, I have been very surprised by the degree to which this family's life is "westernized". They drink coffee for breakfast, have "western" rooms as well as "Japanese" rooms in their houses, wear foreign clothes, go to movies, listen to foreign music as well as traditional, speak foreign languages, and occasionally go out for barbecued chicken. In spite of this, the Makioka sisters - except, perhaps, for the youngest, Taeko - live quite comfortably with their deeply traditional heritage, perhaps because it's been one of wealth and privilege.

These people, even the youngest and flightiest of them, think long and hard before they speak. They ponder. They discuss. They debate. They consider all the points of view, and all the possible outcomes, and do their very best to make prudent choices. There's plenty of pressure to conform, but individuals are left to make their own decisions to a remarkable degree.

I would love to see this story made into a miniseries. A good one, a BBC type, with close attention to background and mood, and less to sex and sensationalism. What are the chances, I wonder?

Just Playing Around

I've been trying to learn how to place photos where I want them in the text, and not just all at the top. Here's my first attempt, a few peaches.


Hey, that actually worked. Let's see if I can do it with this old pastel of a clothesline from last summer.

And now, on my left, a statue in a misty park with a face that didn't turn out.

This is fun.

Farewell Old Friend

We've sold our tent trailer, along with a lot of other things, to help pay for installing a bathroom on the main floor. There's no doubt that we need the bathroom, and it can't be said that we need the trailer, which hasn't left the yard in two years. Still, it wasn't easy to let it go. A very nice family bought it. Their little boy fell in love with our gray cat and carried her around the yard in his arms (she almost as big as he) while his elders made their inspection. I like to think of him tucked into his bunk at night, listening to the loons as he falls asleep. My daughter composed her first two poems, at the age of six, while doing just that.

My Daughter Has Blue Hair

Figures and portraits are my first love, but I hardly ever get models, so my life drawing is rusty. My daughter spent too many childhood hours posing for Mom and can rarely be persuaded to sit for me anymore. Nowadays I can only catch her occasionally when she's dozing on the sofa. She's much prettier than these sketches show. The blue hair is surprisingly flattering to her fair skin, although I don't think it's as nice as her natural ash blond.

A Few Wildflowers

The purple vetch is very luxuriant this year. Although it's a small flower, it shows almost the same range of blues as delphiniums. The sketch doesn't do them justice. This little bouquet also includes a red clover blossom and some Dutchmen's Breeches.

My Watercolour Box

Behold the perfect watercolour box.

Perfect for me, anyway. A painting kit is such a personal thing for each artist. I'm a casual, undedicated, impulsive watercolour painter, so this sturdy black plastic box made by Pelikan suits me very well.

I've had it for sixteen years. It's 8.5 inches long, 4 inches wide, and 1.25 inches deep. It came with 24 pans of colours, arranged in two trays that snap together, one on top of the other, allowing seldom-used colours to live in the bottom tray, while all the current favourites stay in the top.

The inside of the lid is white, or used to be, and serves as a palette. It also used to be attached to the top tray with hinges, but they wore off around the tenth year. If anything, this is an improvement. I can now remove the lid altogether and place it wherever it's most useful. It still snaps back into place with no problem.

This box is so durable that it once spent an entire winter outdoors, when I forgot it on a rock in a campground at the end of the summer. When we returned in the spring, it was right where I had left it, no harm done. Being made entirely of plastic, there's never any worry about rust.

It's very light and easy to carry around. I just put it on the scale and found to my surprise that it weights 8.9 ounces, or a smidgen over half a pound (roughly 225 g) - the weight of a large Delicious apple. I didn't think it was that heavy. I usually carry it in a canvas tote bag that easily accommodates it along with a couple of sketchbooks, a set of brushes rolled in a bamboo place mat, a plastic water bottle and a cheap plastic juice glass. In a pinch, I could carry it in any reasonable-sized (i.e. large) purse. Water would be a problem, perhaps solved with one of those plastic waterbrushes, but I've never tested that idea.

Not liking the Pelikan paints much, I gradually replaced them with Windsor and Newton pans, which were a slightly different size and had to be glued down with globs of that blue sticky stuff, but that worked fine.

Then, for reasons I have never understood, all the manufacturers stopped making full pans. You could only get half pans or tubes.

Half-pans are too small for my slap-dash approach, and although the tube paints have a lovely fluidity, and are worth the trouble for indoor painting, they are just such a royal pain to use outdoors. First, they have to be carried in some kind of separate container, a box or a bag. The colours don't gaze soulfully up at you when you open the lid of the box, but lurk inside the tubes thinking of ways to waste your time and ruin your day. Sticking caps is one way, lost caps another, squirting tubes a third, drying inside the tube a fourth. Their ways are endless.

So I squeeze tube paints into the old empty pans and allow them to dry. The labels kindly fixed in place by Pelikan don't match the new colours; I have to guess and test a bit with the blues. Most of the others are easy to identify by sight.

The old pans, made of flimsy plastic, are remarkably long-lasting. I often wonder what I'll do when they wear out, because the closest thing to a full pan that I've seen advertized lately are the round pans in a new Pelikan box. Who needs a round pan? You can't fit as many in a box, and they look like the first watercolour set I ever had, at the age of five - eight puddles of cheap paint on a kidney-shaped wooden palette with a thumb hole. (Hello, toymakers, you don't use wood for water-based paints. Stop leading small children astray!)

It seems that some manufacturers make good paint, others make good boxes, and some make beautiful boxes that are works of art in themselves but are as useless as casters on crutches. So it's a good thing my box is so durable.