And then a full moon rising

 

Last night when I went to bed, it was still light outside.  I read until I fell asleep.  Not long after that I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep and so I got out of bed.  When I looked out my living room window, I saw the full moon rising in the east, extraordinarily bright.  I went back to bed to read until I fell asleep again.  In the past week, it's been warm enough to have all my screened windows open, but by this morning the temperature in my bedroom was 55 degrees.  No wonder I had such a good night's sleep after all.  The windows are closed again for now.  It's almost noon and still chilly inside.  I'm looking forward to a walk this afternoon on a hillside trail that it new to me.  The trail begins close to the home of a friend who lives about 15 minutes away to the east.  The road that goes to her house follows, more or less, the northern shore of Lake Whatcom, which is the 14-mile glacier-fed lake that I can see from my porch, through the trees.

When I was walking in the woods yesterday, I heard Great Horned Owls calling back and forth.  I called out a "Who, Who, WhoWho," as I had on April 20 but didn't see either of them.

With Gratitude To A Person With Questions And A Sense Of Humor

The Wild Blue Sky Of Day

Thanks to R. L. Bourges for the inspiration.

Sending all my love to my nephew and his girlfriend who
will be having a baby in May.

A NATION OF SLEEPLESS WOMEN WITH MOON AND BIRDS

Awake and alert

As full and fragmented as the moon

Rising and reflecting

In a western sea

We hear night birds

Singing in the shadows

Mocking darkness

Mocking darkness

The moon asks an impossible question:

Do I control you

Or do you control me

In my circular journey

We ask the moon an impossible question:

Do we control you

Or do you control us

In our cyclical journey

We hear night words

We sing in the shadows

Mocking darkness

Mocking darkness

Imagine us at dawn

A nation of sleepless women with moon and birds

Just above the hills of childhood

Caught between impossible questions

And the wild blue sky of day.

NURSERY  RHYME (1982)

Babies are like us

Except when they smile

Their eyes are so clear

They can see everything we have forgotten

At first they have nothing to say

We draw their attention

Away from holy light

To clocks and alphabets

Words like parallelogram

Make them laugh

They can’t tell time from applesauce

Yet they store words

With smooth stones and skinned knees

No one really knows where they come from

Or where they go

They would put the sun

In their mouths

If they could reach that high

Not knowing who we are

Still they trust us

We impress them

With our brave words

Our clever clocks

(poems and drawing, "The Wild Blue Sky of Day," by am from the early 1980s)

Babar and Celeste

After dropping into a Yoga class at the studio where I first practiced Yoga, I have resumed a vigorous early morning asana practice. At the end of this morning's practice, as I was in the corpse pose, something in me said to draw the elephants from one of the two pillows I bought on the morning of March 21, 2008, a few hours after I had learned that Richard had a Stage IV brain tumor.

It's been a long time since I have felt like drawing, but I am newly inspired by Suze Rotolo's Art Books:





















The inspiration may also have come from,

















a copy of which sits close to where I practice the asanas (-:

or

"... the elephant in the room of my life ..."
(from A Freewheelin' Time, by Suze Rotolo)

Nothing to Say in Black and White (1982)

A story about this drawing which was done with black and white chalk pastel on Arches paper can be found in the December 13, 2006 entry. The image of the woman came from a photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe with Alfred Steiglitz. After doing this drawing, I didn't make any more images in black and white for twenty years. This is the third of a series of drawings done in the context of a university level drawing class, using a face from a photograph as a starting point. I graduated from Western Washington University in 1982 with a degree in English Literature (minoring in Art) and continued to be inspired to draw from faces in photographs I found in books. In 1984, I began working the evening shift as a medical transcriptionist and was no longer able to attend the informal life drawing sessions on Tuesday evenings in the Western Washington University Art Department.

Self Portrait of an Old Friend as a Young Man (1982)

This young man was drafted into the U.S. Army in the spring of 1969, went to Vietnam as a helicopter mechanic in January of 1970 and returned on December 8, 1970. Each day he was in Vietnam he wrote a letter to me, sometimes including drawings and photographs. Each day he was gone, I wrote a letter to him. In this drawing from a photograph he sent to me, I portrayed him as a man who could carry the weight of darkness and light in impossible situations. In Jungian terms, he is my animus.

Unlike the previous chalk pastel life drawings in this series, this one was done by projecting a slide onto a piece of drawing paper and tracing the image. Using that technique to produce a image was a drawing class assignment. I thought of the technique as "cheating." I can't take credit for either the drawing or the photograph from which the drawing was done, only for reproducing an image from 1970 from the war in Vietnam.

It's Christmas Eve in this season of holidays, holy days.

Life Drawing #5 (1982-1983?)

During the informal life drawing sessions at Western Washington University, the person who was being the model would take three half-hour poses. One night I was able to fit all three poses into one drawing that still amazes me. When I pause in my writing, I can look to the east and see the waning crescent moon over the Cascade foothills. The remaining areas of open water in the cattail marsh are so still that they are reflecting the grey clouds in the predawn sky.

Life Drawing #4 (1982-1983?)

Just realized that these life drawings were not done on a newsprint drawing pad as I had stated earlier. They were done on a slightly higher quality white drawing paper pad. Because it has been a long time since I have drawn or painted from life rather than memory and dreams, and I thought maybe it was time to start drawing from life again, even if only to draw my cat, I bought a book called HOW TO DRAW ANYTHING: A COMPLETE GUIDE, by Angela Gair. 

On page 20 of that book, she says: "If you are not sure of the height of, say, a tree in the distance compared with a tree in the foreground, you can check using the "measure-and-compare" method. Use the foreground tree as your "key measure," comparing all parts of the subject to that. Hold your pencil at arm's length, elbow locked, in front of the tree. Keeping one eye closed, line up the tip of the pencil with the top of the tree and mark the position of the base of the trunk with your thumbnail. This is your key measure. Now, keeping your thumbnail in position and your arm outstretched, move the pencil to that distant tree and compare its height with the length of your key measure. You can compare the length of your key measure with other parts of the landscape, too, for measuring widths as well as heights." 

This technique is what Tom Sherwood taught us in his life drawing classes and what I found most useful in being able to draw people from life. 

 On the wall near my computer is a large postcard titled "How to Draw Geometric Shapes." It shows, in four steps, how to look at a small dog who is sitting down, a parrot's head and a horse's head in order to draw two triangles, a circle and a rectangle. As a child trying to learn to draw from art instruction books, I never made much progress using that technique of reducing the shapes and structures of animals to geometric shapes in order to build them back up into a completed drawing, and that postcard has been on my wall for years because it still makes me smile. As I was looking at the above drawing again, I remembered that the way I did life drawings was to start somewhere in the person's face, usually the eyes. I would make a beginning mark and then from there begin the measuring process. I didn't sketch in the whole person, as is usually advised, and I certainly didn't reduce the person to geometric shapes, but slowly developed a drawing that I was pleased with. The process was deeply meditative.

Life Drawing #3 (1982-1983?)

The human body is sacred and is so vulnerable. This young man is sitting on a drawing bench that had been placed on the model's platform. Behind him on the wall was a blackboard on which was written "40%." If I had had time to draw everything I saw, he would have been surrounded by people sitting at drawing benches, deep in concentration. In a life drawing class, everyone sees from a unique perspective and has a unique way of drawing. It is fascinating to walk around the room and see how many ways a person can be seen and translated onto paper.

Life Drawing #2 (1982-1983?)

As my confidence in my ability to draw grew, I began to draw two poses on one piece of paper, and so it looked as if I had drawn a pair of twins posing or maybe a "time-lapse" image.