It is something- it can be everything- to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters. A fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle.
-Wallace Stegner from The Spectator Bird
Thunder is booming over my head as I write this post. Lightening just flashed in the window. Everything is rattling. A torrential downpour is beginning. Batten down the hatches! Everyone take cover! RAIN has come to LA after a long long long dry 7 or 8 months. Okay, the part about the lightening I made up, but it could happen. Somewhere it could. Like Ohio maybe. And perhaps I exaggerate the magnitude of the torrents. But the cat posse is cowering. The smaller members. The big one goes about his business. In my way of course.
No matter, I'm breathing in lungfuls of rainy air. The french windows next to my desk are open wide and it's downright dark inside Moss Cottage. How thrilling and delightful! I will need to be told a bedtime story tonight. Preferably a scary one. That takes place in a little rowboat set afloat on a wild sea. Where rescue is uncertain.
In other news, I have been making collages on boxy 8 by 8 canvases. Canvases that have been sitting in my garage since my last brief, yet energetic commitment to an art cause. I do enjoy the causes. There is something so satisfying about cutting, gluing, sewing, rifling through the pages of my 1965 Pictorial Encyclopedia of Birds. On a rainy day. In the dead center of a wicked storm.
Full frontals of those collages tomorrow.
Brown Sugar bloomed this morning. Amid cool high winds of perhaps, at least…I'd say, probably like 40 mph, I dashed out in gown and slippers. Clip. Good thing. She would not have enjoyed a lashing of rain.
I love , love , love your journal pages !!
Rini the Netherlands
Wow! What a color!!!
Mary Ann?
I must have all of these. full frontals won’t do.
I took photos of my hibiscus last week, but I called them hyacinth. I call them alternately hyacinth, hydrangea, hibiscus and sometimes herbane. What the F ?! I love them all, but can’t seem to label them.
Spectator Bird… is there NOTHING you aren’t onto?!
p.s. actually at our house during the storm, there WAS lightning. I was standing outside when I saw it! I bet you did see it peripherally, while composing and collaging…
yep..there is something about a boxy canvas that makes it so enticing… yay for rain in LA!!
gwen – sew first, mount on canvas frame afterwards…
as usual, a feast for the eyes and soul here. We also enjoyed a good lashing from rain, thunder and spectacular sky-splitting lightening last evening. We were at an outdoor Dia de Los Muertos party. The flashing and booming started just as the hostess was explaining to the crowd each of the many elaborate altars she had set up in her yard. People clapped and cheered and the buzz became a declaration that the spirits had arrived and approved of the party. It was wonderful.
my goodness wallace stegner’s words say it pefectly!! ahh, to have just a few wee fellow birds in one’s life…
love these collages (and had a very hearty and knowing laugh at these words — “since my last brief, yet energetic commitment to an art cause. I do enjoy the causes.”)… and brown sugar is mind bogglingly stunning.
MaryAnn, your collage is yummy, oh how I love the stitching…and as for Brown Sugar, you saved her from serious damage from the LA rains. Keep those collages coming, they are juicy!
Oh how I hoped looking out the window of the Obama headquarters that the huge clouds of Palm Desert meant rain just over the mountain in our Joshua Tree Village; but alas, still dry, hot, and no perfect storms like yours in LA.
Just BEAUTIFUL collages!
your work inspires me so!!
That flower is unbelievable!! It is making me insane! The little red dots on the stamen(?), intelligent life must have thought that up, intelligent life with a sense of humor, at that!
The canvases, also gorgeous. How did you sew on them, pray tell? Or did you sew things and then stick them on the canvasses? It is late and I am not thinking well…
You could always re-read The Life of Pi, you can’t get any further out in a lifeboat that that!
Good shot of catfeet. I like tickling catfeet – it is only occasionally tolerated by the cats here though.
I LOVE these collages! I love birds, I love the boxi-ness, I love the wallpaper… keep going! ( till you start on the next thing….) karen….
I am LOVIN’ the rain. We so have needed it. We did have lightning here and two amazing earth shaking BOOMS of thunder accompanied the earth shattering lightning.
A good day to stay inside and MAKE ART.
Love love love what you’ve been making.