When I looked out a little while ago this morning, I thought I saw a person with a brown corduroy jacket and yellow hat standing at the edge of Scudder Pond. I thought I could see the figure moving. When I got my binoculars out, I saw that what I had thought was a person's head was the few remaining bright yellow leaves on a small tree, and that the brown corduroy jacket was the tree's dark wet branches and trunk. The blurred photo only gives a general idea of what I saw. As I look out right now without binoculars, it stills looks to me as if a tall thin contemplative man is standing there on the trail.
The gouache and watercolor painting up at the top of this post is something I'm working on. It's something about a dialogue at the ocean at night. I think I like it better transformed by my computer into a black and white image. I began working on it more than a week ago, while listening to music from my past, organized in chronological order beginning with music I heard when I was 10 years old or younger:
This week I visited the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham where I saw a traveling exhibit of California Impressionist paintings. I was drawn to the landscapes of places familiar to me but much changed since they were painted so many years ago before California was so densely populated. The images below are of the California my Minnesota-born parents moved to in the late 1930s and early 1940s and that my father's father traveled through as a young man from Minnesota in the early 1900s. As far as I know, my grandfather only made that one visit to California and the West Coast, living the rest of his life in Minnesota, although he did visit relatives in Norway in his later years.
Arroyo Seco Bridge in 1912:
Arroyo Seco Bridge in recent time:
Today here in Whatcom County there is snow in the foothills to the east. Here's the view from the porch this morning. You can hear the Chickadees and Red-winged blackbirds singing:
"I definitely look for things to inspire me or to get me wanting to do work. It doesn't come all that naturally. The thing that's helped me the most has been figuring out when I could work best. This thing about working best in the morning with nobody around, I figured out a long time ago. If it weren't for that I probably wouldn't get half as much done."
(Dale Chihuly)
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