Laurelines

In a liminal state

Here it is, the end of one of my favorite months, the eve of another.

I am standing on a threshold, with loose ends to tie up before I leave for Wales and some miscellany to share.

Having finished my summer workload, I turned back to Alaska-inspired paintings. I felt as though I had, literally and figuratively, painted myself into a corner with the Copper Mountain series and their restrictive color palette. These are self-imposed restrictions, needless to say, and so are readily set aside for a while.

As a way to sneak up on and vanquish my stymied and procrastinating self, I turned away from orange and verdigris and thought about the cool blues and greens and earth tones that characterized 99.99% of the Alaska I experienced while I was there!

More studies. The trick is to keep the energy and verve of studies in my final paintings... that has been the hitch with the Copper Mountain series so far. Nevertheless, I persist.

Study of Lake Clark, Alaska and its turquoise waters and dramatic sky:

 

Standing here today, I believe I see some thoughts of Wales sneaking into this study! Liminal states are like that, with their rearview glances to the past and their earnest wonderings about the future.

I mentioned last time my brush pen technique as a solution for the garden illustrations I had to do and that worked well. I actually simplified shapes and tones and ended up with not a lot of nuance, but some fresh and light-spirited images which went well with the tone of the essay.

I can't share the final illustrations until they are published this fall, but here is a collage I made of leftovers from the process, all pasted into my journal/sketchbook. Color and light and simple shapes dominate here.

 

Having lately rediscovered my beloved brush pen for pleasure drawing I vow to make more drawings with it. Here is one of my daughter Kate from a few days ago. Pentel pocket brush pen and Caran d'Ache watersoluble crayons:

So now, again, back to the painting studio and to thoughts and plans for my upcoming trip to north Wales. See you soon!

Brush pen memories

Help! I'm working on illustrations to go along with the essay on my garden that I wrote for Charleston Style & Design's upcoming fall issue. Deadline: NOW or a time very much like it.

I have made dozens and zillions of drafts for these, mainly because I can't settle on the technique I want to use. My collage approach doesn't fit with this subject and the format of these images. My studio floor, the repository for rejected drafts, is a mess, 

What to do??!! Last night, I thought, "brush pen, why not?" I love working with my Pentel pocket brush pen. It feels almost like an extension of my drawing hand. I've used it for lots of sketch subjects and some illustrations over the years. I looked back at my Flickr account to remind myself of the ways I had done this and was waylaid by memories.

May I share some of these rediscovered images and memories with you?

Below: In Pasadena,a cactus garden, part of the larger Huntington Gardens, that I visited with my friend and brilliant artist Virginia Hein on a sketching jaunt fall before last. This brings back such wonderful memories of our time together.

I had hesitated to try brush pen with my current assignment because I wasn't sure I could get the nuances I want with it. But this sketch managed nuance!

Next a scene from Oakland Bay from 2015. I was visiting my daughter Cecelia. Looking at this, I am instantly back in that day, in that place. And I miss my daughter so much. Some nuance here, too!

In another vein, a portrait sketch of Sir Walter Raleigh for the cover of Walter Magazine in 2013. I submitted several images. They chose another one for the cover, but I have always loved this Sir Walter's sassy and flourishy attitude.

Jumping again to a quite different topic, here's a pretty atmospheric, nuancy sketch of a scene in Iceland. Drawing in the twilight, especially the Northern twilight.. aahhh. Heaven. 

The sketch below is another one-way express ticket to the past. David and I were traveling in the Dordogne with our friends Moreton and Drake. Moreton drew me as I drew this scene on the river near Bouziès. I spy nuance! Fabulous memories here, too!:

Finally, speaking of being overtaken by memories, I saw this pen and ink and crayon drawing of our Miles three or so years ago and, though it's not a brush pen drawing, it IS a drawing of a beloved baby, so that counts for a lot, doesn't it? Memories.

Back to work now, keeping my fingers crossed that my brush pen and I will get this done!

Wales: Journeys and connections

There are places in my life that I have experienced as numinous, locales in which the c'hi, or life force, is palpable to me, almost visible, almost overwhelming. Much of my art life has been an attempt to express that energy.

In recent years, I discovered that some of these charged places, far flung now, were once connected, the result of a prehistoric mountain- building event called the Caledonian Orogeny. I learned that Norway, one of my best-loved lands, is tied to Scotland, where I lived and where my daughter Kate was born, to parts of Wales, to the Appalachian mountains, close to where I live now... and that they formed a mountain chain high as the Himalayas. This was hundreds of millions of years ago, of course, when there was no Atlantic Ocean to separate them. I fell hard for the idea of a force that connected, and still connects, these places of my life.

Early spring of 2016, pursuing my renewed interest in geology and having learned of the Caledonian Orogeny, I read  Richard Fortey's The Hidden Landscape and it was then I heard a call to Wales, where I had never been.

 Here is Fortey's siren song to me:

Many years ago I travelled to Haverfordwest to get to the past. From Paddington Station a Great Western Locomotive took me on a journey westwards from London further and further back into geological time, from the age of the mammals to the age of the trilobites.The train soon quit the flat Thames Valley beyond Reading, and with it the soft sands and hard cobbles of the Reading Beds, laid down when there were mammals and birds on land and crabs in the sea, and when the world would have felt familiar. Then I was speeding over the Chalk, and back in time to the company of dinosaurs. The train travelled on towards Bath, where Jurassic limestones and shales take turns across the countryside, the former proud with ancient corals, the latter dark and low, with ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, 'sea lizards' that grasped Jurassic fish and ammonites. ... Under the River Severn and into Wales and I was back before the time of the dinosaurs, to a time when Wales steamed and sweated, not with the fires of smelting, but with the humid heat of moss-laden and boggy forests in coal-swamps, where dragonflies the size of hawks flitted in the mist; and then on back further still in time, so far back that life had not yet slithered or crawled upon the land from its aqueous nursery.

At last I arrived in Haverfordwest --- I had come back far enough for the rocks to yield trilobites. Trilobite land lay all around; to the west as far as St Davids, imbued with the mystery of the origin of all things.

p 1, The Hidden Landscape.

Fortey continues:

It was further to the west, near St Davids, that I began to appreciate more the links between the rocks beneath and the land above, and between our own lives and distant prehistory. St Davids is a little town set at the western tip of South Wales, and it is not much bigger now than it was two hundred years ago... . But to see the rocks themselves you must go to the sea. The cliffs near St Davids are now famous. The entire cliff path is owned by the National Trust, and it winds up and down all around the old county of Pembrokeshire... .  And everywhere there is rock. Rock plunges vertically into the sea where the breakers chew at spiky slabs two hundred feet below. In other places there are folds; the bedding is twisted, and convoluted, and thrown into crazy spasms as if the strata had been in the hands of a demented pasta spinner. Then, suddenly, along a vertical crack the rocks will change: black shale will give way to purple sandstone, or silver slate to red shale. These cracks are just what they seem... breaks in the fabric of the earth... . Hardly any of the rocks here seem to be horizontal, as they were when they were laid down beneath the sea. On these cliffs, the viewer can feel the strength of the Caledonian convulsions twisting and breaking the rocks, conjoining what was once separate in time and space, separating what was once joined.

p 7, 8, The Hidden Landscape.

  

Richard Fortey's magnificent voice and story took me to Wales, to Pembrokeshire, to the countryside around St Davids, to Whitesands Bay, last October and for two weeks this month.  I knew where I needed to be and what I neeed to do,  to draw those folds and convulsions, and so I did, on three days, standing on the sand, surrounded by tide sounds and bird songs and wind.

First day, on the beach, midway through one of the drawings:

The nearly completed sketchbook on the table of the apartment I rented in St Davids:

 A sample section of the book:

 A slightly wobbly video of the book along its length:

Whitesands Bay, Pembrokeshire accordion sketchbook from Laura Frankstone on Vimeo.

I want so many more years of this! I want to go back for long stretches and make more of these responses that mean the world (you should pardon the pun) to me.

Well, we do what we can. I'm returning to Wales this fall, but to Anglesey and the Lleyn Peninsula this time. Anglesey plays a part in our Caledonian story, too. I will get another pass at this unfolding epic tale that I love.

 

More conventional travel sketches from my second week in St Davids will follow in a few days.

Trip prep and paint pots

I leave for Pembrokeshire, Wales in a few days and I'm madly scrambling to ... do everything. I travel only with a carryon, which makes it rough if you want to make art! This time I was able to order some things from Amazon.uk that I couldn't pack and have them sent to the place I'm renting...things like a jar of matte medium, and some giant Derwent graphite blocks (man, are they heavy and messy! Not sure they'll be my faves, but wanted to try.) And a pair of foldable hiking poles, which for me can be classified as art supplies! ( TSA won't let you pack those in a carry-on.) And a couple of other things. I'll order some gesso when I get there.

I'll have to send home the poles and whatever else I want to keep and use after my time there.  Luckily, there's a very nice postmistress in St Davids who will help me accomplish this in a reasonable way. This reminds me that I FINALLY got out of my state of denial with regard to the size of drawings and paintings I can work on while traveling... especially, since, as I said, I pack only a carryon. I'm restricted to about 9" x 11" paper and just a few watercolors as paint. But that's okay. I happily use these sketches as source materials in the studio when I get back. 

Here are some shots of what I'll take with me. My travel palette has two new colors: Daniel Smith cerulean blue (Wales seems to call for that opaque and granulating oceanic blue) and Daniel Smith German Greenish Raw Umber. That last works well, combined with other colors,  for rendering the rock outcroppings I love to look at and draw.

:

I'm taking three (!) sketchbooks, if my carryon will let me. First is one made of Khadi paper, a rough, tough surface useful if you want to paint with mud, sand, and the like.

Second is a new Seawhite accordion sketchbook, pictured below in its case next to the one I used last fall, an old one I'd ordered from Seawhite of Brighton a few years back. Note the diminishment in size, which made me a little sad. Here's the one from last fall, all spread out:

And here it is side by side with the new one:

Third one is a new Stillman & Birn Beta, the ultimate in sketchbooks, for my tastes.

Just to round out the picture of my gear, here are my hiking boots, which I have to wear on the plane and trains since my feet are big, which make the boots bigger than they might be on others. I got them for my Alaska residency and I took them also to Wales last fall and I wear them gardening around here in areas where copperheads thrive. They'd just about fit in that much-talked about carryon, if I packed nothing else with them. My feet and I will be the absolute picture of travel chic! 

I had hoped to be finished with some of the Copper Mountain paintings I've been working on before I left for Wales, but this is not to be. There are four out of the eight or so that are ALMOST finished, but clearly I can't rush them. I work on them every day, but there you are. They have a mind of their own. To tide them and me over until I get back, I have made pots of the colors I've mixed for each painting, so I'll be able to take off running with them when I return.

See you in Wales very soon!

Copper runs through it, part two

Here I've been, in the studio, seeing what emerges from my Copper Mountain ideas and inner imagery, my drawings and photos, and the emotions I experienced in my Alaska residency.  I find it surprising how  all over the place they are, and, well, interesting, too... but then I would, wouldn't I? 

I've been trying to figure out how to deal with deeply staining and glossy paints... colors like phthalo turquoise, quinacridone burnt orange, and others that I haven't used much before in acrylic form. I want to layer them, but they don't layer well. They kill whatever colors I have painted under them and then there's that glossy sheen, which I hate. So, much mixing with white and other colors and experimenting has been going on here. I'm learning the best way to use them for my purposes.

I'm making lots of studies, but I also have a dozen or more big paintings started, waiting for me to figure out what the heck I'm doing. Here are some of the studies painted in my latest Stillman & Birn Alpha sketchbook, my treasured portable studio and lifeline: 

 I love the verdigris aspect of copper and go back and forth with it in my rendering of mountain shapes.

As I posted last time, I note that the coppery palette now crops up everywhere I put pen, pencil, or brush to paper. I don't mean it to, but I don't mind it,either. Here's a quick warm-up pen and ink sketch made last week with cad red, phthalo turquoise,  and ochre watercolors. 

I purposely didn't mention the fact in my last post that there is a connection between my copper theme and Wales. Both Alaska and Wales have a long history of copper mining, but since I don't do caves and deep underground, I thought I'd never be able to personally experience that fact of Welsh history in my visits there. But NOT SO! Peter Wakelin, Welsh scholar, author, and former head of Collections at the National Museum of Wales, was also head of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments  of Wales. He sent me a link to this video of Parys Mountain in Anglesey. Reader, I'm going!

 

Copper runs through it

Well, here I am with a post from February, which cheekily ended way too soon! 

For months I have been elatedly immersed in thoughts of copper and copper-related minerals and copper-related colors, ever since my residency in Alaska last August. One Alaskan sunset in particular was seared forever on my mind's eye and heart... the sky all tints and hues of orange, pink, red, and the glacial waters of Lake Clark looking like pale oxidized copper,  and then the mountains, Copper Mountain, in particular (yes! That is its name!) was set on coppery fire by that sun. It was one of those holy moments; I felt lifted to a world of thrilling and pure beauty.

And then, everywhere I looked afterwards, I saw copper... in the salmon leaping from the water, in the colors of the native blue geranium leaves as they turned autumnal, in the bonfire flames, and on and on. My work started to be filled with burnt orange, cadmium oranges and reds, phthalo turquoise, cobalt green, teal, burnt sienna, ochre... the orange/blue- to- red/green world I saw when I thought of Alaska.

This is a bonfire built the night of that coppery sunset.The magnificent fire was a brilliant celebration of that place, that day, that glory. Here we see my orange/turquoise palette in an early manifestation.

Below are two of many, many studies I'm working through to try to figure out my own idiom for expressing what I saw and felt in the coppery Alaska. In addition to those zillion studies of all sizes and impulses, I have 12 paintings in progress, filling up my studio walls and floor. Who knows which of these will end up resolved? I don't mind, though. This is the slow way I work. I am an eternal pioneer in the studio, scrabbling for ways to get where i want to go.

Here is copper in the vegetal world, spangles of it appearing overnight on the leaves of wild native geranium:

Later, on my trip to Austria, I was thrilled to learn that the Natural History Museum in Vienna has a vast mineralogical collection. I headed straight for the specimens that were copper-related. Oh, those colors, my new colors! I stood my ground there on the cold tile floor, sketching carefully for hours, as rivers of school children flowed everywhere around me. This was the micro view of my copper world and with my love of geology, I reveled in it.  Here are two spreads from my Vienna sketchbook:

Since my return, I've made several sketches, unrelated to my Alaska project, without realizing as I drew that I was still using my coppery palette!

A bystander at the Women's March in January asked me why I'd chosen the colors I used for my sketches. It was then that I realized what I'd done!

I want to finish at least SOME of the Copper Mountain series before I leave for Wales again in May. I'm slow, but I'm optimistic!

2017, the plan(s) and hopes for a newish year

I'm late posting my new year plans because I've been waylaid by flu for a good first ten days of the year.

 Waylaid times can be useful for thinking and such was the case for me. I started keeping a daily journal again. My writing had become sporadic and sparse in the busy, extroverted year that 2016 was. There were also world events that eclipsed my inner life, at least the act of thinking and writing about it. 

World events loom huge today, but I separate from them by taking to the studio, to the outdoors, and to the balm of friendship. And on this page, here, with you.

Painting!

On the studio score, I'm very excited! All that pent-up painting energy, accumulated over the months of travel in the fall and winter, is coming out in leaps and pirouettes! My Places Project gave me so many opportunities to experiment and store up ideas and inspiration. In 2017, I'll be able to see what emerges from that in the form of more sustained pieces, paintings and such.

I was afraid that my trip to Wales might eclipse the ideas that occurred to me during my Alaskan residency, but no!! The Wales imagery and ideas seem to be patiently waiting in the queue for Alaska to happen first. I have several paintings started and a sketchbook bursting with color, texture, and compositional studies, but I resist the urge to share those here. Let us not queer the deal by showing too much, too soon. But the textures and the colors are giving me ecstasies of delight!

 

Drawing!

Oh, and I've been drawing, too. Drawing is central to my life. As I've said before, drawing is one of my earliest memories, and one of the happiest, of my often-challenging childhood. Here are two simple pencil drawings I made last week of our Jonas lost in Legoland!

Pop ups in my sketchbook!

I don't know exactly where the impulse came from, but I started making pop-up sketches in my sketchbook a few days ago and now I'm in love with that idea! Here are a couple of recent examples. The pop up approach seemed especially right for expressing that mental image I've had since October of jackdaws wheeling in the dawn sky at St.David's Head. Not that this one perfectly captures that image, but it's a start!

I wanted to learn more about this technique, so I bought two books on the subject and quickly learned I had been doing it all wrong! ;D. That didn't bother me a bit. I can carry on my way, but still add traditional techniques to my repertoire. Here are some early attempts at learning popups the normal way. Who knows where this will take me? I have no weighty plans or expectations. Pure play is what this is. But there WILL be more to come!

Illustration!

I'm going to carry on working for Charleston Style and Design. I love working with the AD and the editors there. It's a quarterly, so the timing perfectly suits my resolve to keep work for others at a minimum. There is ONE other job that I've been approached about and I'm very happy about it, but the when is uncertain. This year, for sure. Or, for maybe. I'll let you know more when I can.

My latest illustration accompanies an essay by Katherine Wilson on her mother's lifelong obsession with Italian style and notions of beauty. I am sharing a just a few of the many  draft sketches I made to show how, at my searching hand, Sophia Loren looked like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gina Lollobrigida, and other anonymous retro beauties, until I got the style I wanted and a good enough likeness. 

Travel!

Because I found Wales deeply inspiring, I knew I had to get back and see where  those geology-based images would take me. So I have made arrangements to go back to Pembrokeshire for two weeks in May! And maybe in fall, too. We shall see. I long to go back to Norway and that will be my next big travel goal.

As long as I draw breath and can stride, I'll be on the move. Who knows what the future holds? And that last question, dear friends, will be last allusion I make here to the events of the world for a while.

Happy and safe 2017 to one and all! Thank you for your support and interest.

2016 turns to 2017

 And so do we all. This year has been a fraught one, to say the least. We have had way more than one year's share of loss, despair, and dread. I know that many of us around the world are looking to the new year for some, for any, relief. May we find it.

On a personal, artistic level, however, this year has been one of the fullest ever, with trips and work deriving from my Places Project. I began to experiment with painting and drawing with found, organic materials. I have a long way to go and, I assume, lots of time to continue with this. Mud, paint made from rocks and soil, sand, charred twigs, berry juice were some of my means along this path.

The red earth of North Carolina, gathered here from Peregrine Farm, is highly pigmented and is a total joy to smear and brush on surfaces. Soil from my area makes paint in this deep red and in various other ochre, umber, and sienna hues.

 Rows of celosia flowers at Peregrine Farm, supported by white plastic mesh made for a striking subject. Mixed media : mud, acrylic, watercolor, found charcoal on toned paper:

Other studies and sketches from Peregrine Farm can be seen here and here:

 In Alaska, at my residency at Chulitna Lodge on magnificent Lake Clark, there was peaty soil and sand to dip into. I brought back some soil I ground and dried for use in my studio this year. I overestimated what I could do pursuing these means in a limited period of time, restricted to materials I could pack in my carryon! I need to be somewhere for an extended period, with lots of space to work and to store materials. I am working on just such a scenario for myself for 2017.

View of Copper Mountain from across Lake Clark. Mixed media: watercolor, sand, soil.

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 There were wild currants to squash and smear to add color to drawings:

This and other spreads and studies from Alaska can be seen here and   :

 

 

In coastal Pembrokeshire, the world was rich with beautiful mud and rocks that told stories 450 million years old. I was in ecstasy there and have just made plans to return for two weeks in May to continue those explorations.

Above, I paint and draw with sand and rocks and below I smear in my sketchbook mud from the source of sacred St. Non's well near St. Davids, with blackberry stain added for color.

Other paintings and studies from the 12' long accordion sketchbook

I used in Wales appear here.

I enjoyed another year of working with Charleston Style and Design Magazine, producing illustrations that allowed me to stretch and play and that were such fun to do

 

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I led my second three-part drawing series at the Nasher Museum of Art in September and it was a lovely, successful experience, just as last year's was. It is a thrill to work with enthusiastic students from all ages and backgrounds. 

 

 

Wales, my traces. Thin Places. At last.

[Please click on images to see them whole! ]

 

It has taken me a long time to get my Wales sketches ready to post. Life, with its illustration deadlines, its family obligations and pleasures, its holidays and feasts, its ordinary hiccups and flare-ups, intervened. And then there was my being daunted at the beauty of the Pembrokeshire coast, that thin place, as Celtic Christianity would have it, where heaven and earth share an unusually permeable and fragile boundary.

Anyway. Here we go. I used an accordion sketchbook from Sea White of Brighton, one I'd had for several years and rediscovered before I left. It seemed a perfect sketchbook for my adventure on the Welsh coast! When spread out, the book is over 12 feet long. I filled one side. I drew, I painted, I cut and pasted, I slathered mud and sand and berry stains... the place called for many responses and evoked many of my passions.

My husband and I walked sections of the Wales Coast Path, a dream I've had ever since I read Richard Fortey's 'The Hidden Landscape.' On the coast path there are many places to sit and sketch and bask in the glory.

 The coast is dramatic, stunning, magnetic.  A large part of my heart is still stuck there. (And I'm working like anything to be able to go back soonish...more about this another time.)

I took my little scissors and a glue stick with me to be able to add some collage elements to my sketches, the way I do with my illustrations. I got a start with this practice in Wales and am eager to do more on subsequent travels.

 

The rose hips I saw, pictured below, in the front garden at Ty Gwyn, the historic house where we stayed in Pembrokeshire, were luscious and huge... that must be the climate that rugosa roses pine for. My garden certainly isn't.

A chief goal of my Places Project is to use found organic materials in making my drawings. I discovered in Alaska there's a limit to how much you can do as a visitor from far away,in a short period of time, with necessarily portable and spartan materials... but, again, I did what I could. The day pictured here I was ecstatic...painting with soil and sand, dripping with chilly water, standing, striding, drawing in the midst of one of the richest geological spots on the planet! Heaven and earth side-by-side, indeed!

 

My second mud and sand drawing, below. Those rocks! That movement! Those textures!

 

 

Farther down the coast, David and I walked to St. Non's Well. There I gathered mud from the well's source and smeared it on my page, adding berry stains from nearby wild blackberry hedges for color and good measure.

Since I  couldn't always attach organic elements themselves, I made paper and paint versions of them and pasted them to the page, as below.

I chose coastal Pembrokeshire to visit, as mentioned above, because of the incredible geologic history of this part of Wales. The energy of the earth, 450 millions of years of it in this case, is visible everywhere you look. And this part of Wales was once connected to Scandinavia, which is another reason I, the ardent Scandinophile, wanted to go. The rocks here are vestiges of that Caledonian Orogeny, which produced the mountain range stretching then from Norway to northwestern Scotland to Wales and to the present-day Appalachians. Back then, of course,  there was no Atlantic Ocean separating these lands.

I made simple and stark drawings of some of the rock formations at Whitesands Bay, some of which you see here. I don't know exactly what I will make of this inspiration, but with this and my experience in Alaska, I have a huge crowd of ideas and images waiting in the studio wings for 2017.

I made the sketch below from one of my own reference photos, something I rarely do, but here I was trying to capture the look of very rocky rockiness with bottled ink and palette knife, a method I couldn't use as a transatlantic, carryon-only traveler, on site.

And, speaking of 'thin places," this sketch I so enjoyed making one morning in Fishguard is way off in terms of rendering of depth. Everything is very smashed together in thin space, which gives it , for me at least, a kind of quirky charm!

Do you see why I loved Wales so? I am hoping to go back in spring and fall next year, but its going to take a whole lot of fixing and arranging. Wish me luck!

February in the studio: collecting, dreaming

I've been collecting images this month, fossil images relating to the places I've been to and hope to go to. This is an offshoot of my desire to make artwork with and of the numinous places of my life. I plan to paint and draw with found organic materials, as I've mentioned before. I won't be using fossils themselves, I hasten to say, but will incorporate that imagery somehow into my work, if and however it works out.

I've also been generating lots of images for illustration projects, one of which I finished, but can't share until it is published in April. But I CAN and do keep the leftover bits and pieces and recycle them in the pages of my  journal.

First, though, the drawing below. It's throwback to an old, old theme of mine from my early years of blogging, in which I collected interesting objects found on my walks, brought them home and drew and painted them. As usual, it was the textures and gestures of the objects that captured me.

I have birds! My most recent illustration assignment for Charleston Style & Design centered around singing birds in a cherry tree. I put my cd, A Field Guide to Eastern Bird Songs, on the laptop and played it as I drew. Perfect inspiration!

Here are some of the aforementioned illustration leftovers, pasted on a page in my journal:

Below, more leftovers, from two different projects, appearing together in the pages of my journal.  A happy pairing, I thought:

Below, a spread of the fossil studies I mentioned earlier:

There is something very compelling to me about connecting in my artwork, in any way I can, to the deep energy of the world we stand on. It's that old sweet song... channeling the ch'i.

In a few days, I'll be back in the San Francisco to see my daughter and my dearest friend Kathleen. I'll be sketching there, you can count on it. 

I'll tell you then about the place I've recently added to my plans this year, a country connected to Norway by virtue of the events of the Caledonian Orogeny. What's four million years' separation between friends? I'm beside myself with glee, thinking of the new place!

See you soon!