Laurelines

My Life--- a poem with annotations

Sunflow'rs are red,

Salamanders are blue,

I had baked eggs for breakfast.

  Did you?

Those burgundy sunflowers are called 'Moulin Rouge' and they are brooding and intense, the Heathcliffes of the sunflower family. Got them at the farmers' market yesterday.

I engaged in a very balletic struggle with a salamander the other day as it scurried through the back door into our laundry room. I grabbed an industrial broom and tried to scooch him out of the house, but he headed for our tool closet where, presumably, he still is. I know salamanders aren't vicious but, if it's all the same to you, I 'd rather not wake up at 3am with a salamander traipsing across my forehead. By the way, our salamanders ARE blue, I don't care what the naturalists say.

Baked eggs are new to the Domestic Chef's repertoire. They may have made their first and last appearance on stage today, however. They seem to need to bake FOREVER ( 18 minutes in our oven as opposed to Julia's alleged 14)  But they are tasty. My, yes.

One* of these things is not...

like the others. Online drawing group challenge for the week: draw a glass. Now I've just recently drawn glasses (see 'I'll be home for breakfast' below) but not wanting to appear churlish, here I went again: 

The ellipses aren't perfect, but life isn't. And, of course, this being Blue Time, I had to drag out my cobalt blue glassware. Wouldn' t you?

*salt cellar, one of a set. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Pencilled portraits

Made a quick trip with younger daughter C to see my parents before she leaves for junior year abroad in Sweden and Russia. On the road all day, but returned with gratitude that my mother is healing and that my father is doing as well as can be expected in the nursing home. He misses my mother terribly.

I will post drawings of my two daughters very soon. I have to draw them first.

A return to painting

I've neglected my painting side for a while (as opposed to my sketching side.) To nudge myself into action I'm posting a couple of very early phases of paintings I'm working on. I won't post daily reports on their progress as I did for my mural (see Archives, March and April) but I will show their development at sporadic intervals. These images are just baby paintings and they have all the amorphousness and awkwardness of babies everywhere, without, unfortunately, that universal appeal. Remember, just as with babies, there's no guarantee how these creatures are going to turn out.  Here we go. 

I'll be home for breakfast,

you can count on me. Especially Sunday breakfast, when Chef Husband's on duty.

It's not exactly bungee jumping

Trying to fill up pages in my color sketchbooks, I've come up with* a couple of processes that amuse me no end. One is painting on patterned paper and the other is making white line drawings on a colored ground. I start at one point on the page and then I let my hand follow my eye as it forages for edges, hovers over ellipses, careens around hairpin turns. I have some sense of what the total page composition will be, based on the shapes before me, but other than that I just wander, with very little idea of what a particular concatenation of lines will look like at the end.  Kind of thrilling in its way.

*not that these things had never been done , but I'd never done them.

Home again, home again

No, I didn't buy a fat pig at the market. Here's what I bought instead:

And afterwards, it was back to Foster's Cafe for breakfast and drawing:

It is nice to be home again, after another trip to help my mother recover from her hip surgery. She is doing very well now. My father is in a nursing home while my mother gathers her wits and her health. We aren't sure what will happen next. Thanks for all the inquiries and good wishes.

Mind your Mannerists

In April, I went to see a show of Bronzino and Pontormo paintings and drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I've always loved the so-called Mannerist painters---their portraits have a psychological punch and directness that really appeals to me. Here are my renderings of Bronzino's Eleonora di Toledo. At right is a quick sketch I did of her from the catalog, right after the show. At left is another of my playing-with-patterned-paper pieces.  Unfortunately, neither conveys well the killer blue of the background in the original.  

Apparition in blue and white

Every summer I look forward to the chleome influx. You never know where these otherworldly flowers, their seeds broadcast by bird and wind, will appear. I loved drawing the one outside my studio door this morning---white lines on blue convey their startling spideriness well, I think.

What life is...

not.  But that's OK. As long as there are brief cherry interludes from time to time, I'll take it. (My online drawing group's current weekly challenge is fruit, so voilà. And that is a plate, not a badly drawn and very flat bowl !)