another art table with a different view! i have 2 facing east, 1 south, 1 west, and now this one facing north. the benefits of being a cat lady. no one to get annoyed with my art messes. 2 happy furry cats who have new surfaces to on which to loll about. win win.
last year sometime i started this page about trees in my yard, but never got around to actually putting the trees in their frames. until today.
these 100 degree plus days are ripe for drawing & reading (!) in the extremely excellent & cold air conditioning of moss cottage. i am happy to report after a full season of heating & cooling that the 2 mini-split a/c & heat units i had installed last fall do their jobs exceptionally well.
just in case you needed to know that.
meanwhile at the desk facing east, which has become my preferred surface for mess-making, a different visual journal is open for business. calmly accepting my pen & brush marks.
i was looking at this cutting from the top while drawing but then switched to a side view which means the botanical illustrators of america won’t be calling me anytime soon requesting a lion tale sketch for an upcoming brochure. about drought tolerant plants. in los angeles. will they?
HEY. thanks for the book recs. i have half a dozen samples on my kindle ready for sampling. by the time it’s reading hour on the night porch i should have settled on a title.
that’s all she wrote!
if something good is happening in your world do keep me informed. i have become too Lay Zee to check my blog rolls instead i rely on you to notify moi so i can click over and look in your virtual window.
The cover of this journal make me smile really big. Your entire blog makes me smile even bigger. It’s so wonderful I could get lost for hours at a time. Thanks for sharing your life.
Another journal beauty to behold. I love that you have ‘journal stations’ scattered about Moss Cottage. I think that is cool. I can imagine seeing you in the window, engrossed in the tasks at hand, and always having the delightful freedom of switching gears anytime you want, the delight of not having any schedule but your own, every hour and minute totally yours, or well guessing the cat posse might make a few demands now and again, our kitty boo boo my nickname for my daughter’s cat, loves nothing more than to decide if someone is at their keyboard, that is the time to wander over for some attention, settle in right on the key pad….this can be funny since she loves to track the cursor on the screen if she happens to notice it…but I am getting off track. Your sketches are perfect from my perspective and happy I’m not any kind of expert, I prefer just to enjoy what I see and all the ‘rules’ and loftiness can just ‘skedaddle’ and I almost forgot to mention this…so I’m looking at the photo of your Lion’s tail page and off to the corner of your table I spy a cactus…just a wee corner of the photo and I got so excited Mary Ann…I’ve become known to my family as the ‘crazy cactus lady’ I fell in love with the spikey plants while out west in June. I had no idea they could be found in local nurseries, I wandered into the plant section in Home Depot a few weeks ago and lo and behold I saw a tiny cactus in a wee pot and I just had to adopt it. Mind you I generally shy away from anything green and that involves dirt, just not my thing but I had to have the cactus and I was sure it would not survive the week, I transplanted it with another set of cacti that I had also adopted on site at yet another nursery and well, it’s not only growing but thriving, I’ve become crazy smitten with cacti and now have quite a collection on our kitchen table. I brought 2 more on Friday. All re-potted and all still hanging in there which also baffles me since our home does not get all that much direct sunlight. Anyway, knowing that somewhere in Moss Cottage a cactus sit on your table, is a happy thought indeed.
Welcome back from Sweden!!i have not been by for awhile but I intend to be visiting much more often soon! I go in for Hip replacement surgery on Monday and I have been prepping a new book for journaling during the last several days!! I am so excited to be able to ahve time set aside as I recover to work in my journal. I have allowed myself time off from” production for sales” work and I cant wait to get at it!! you are such an incredible inspiration to me in so many ways!! I think your Lions Tail illustration is pretty darn awesome !!
ROFL at my typo! The big tree didn’t crap, although I almost did. The big tree CRASHED!!!
Love the paintings MAM! That White House out of your window is lovely too.
In the Pacific NW we needed rain, and a lot of it. Instead we got a little rain and wind! I went to town to get my truck washed by the teenagers trying to earn money. On the way, a big limb almost fell on my truck. I skillfully dodged it like I was in a new truck commercial. Saw a streetlight out and a big treetop down on the lines. At the car wash the soap bubbles were literally flying through the air and everyone was getting drenched from the wind blowing the spray everywhere. My granddaughter was one of the teens blowing away. I tried to offer her my windbreaker, but she would much rather be soaking wet and shivering than UNCOOL. You know how it is. I went down to my pond to check on the orphaned duckling and heard a huge tree crap a smash to the ground. I didn’t know where it was falling from or to, so I ran like hornets were chasing me. All is good now. Safely on the couch on the ole Ipad. Fun times! Glad your air/heat work well, especially with your drought. My husband is in the HVAC business. I told him that is why I married him. I am a shade plant:)
I had to say goodbye to my sweet cat assistant Peer a little over two weeks ago and have been in a bit of a funk since. I didn’t blog for almost two weeks, but yesterday I finally picked it up again and to me that’s really good news. Just some pics from my walks on the island. It feels good to be back in the blogosphere. Anyway, I am slowly getting back into living the good artsy life. I’ve been doodling mostly and doing my daily morning paintings (I paint every morning, usually before breakfast) and I’ve been enjoying reading Mike Carey’s Felix Castor novels. It’s like ghost story meets mystery novel with a wonderful sarcastic sense of humor and it all takes place in London, only my favorite city in the world. Nothing too pretentious, just what I need right now.
Have a good weekend MAM, I love the paintings and how you have desks all over the place (sounds like someone I know, it might even be me). 😉
Mary Ann–If you’re too lazy to look at your blog rolls, you’ll never see all of the books your readers have suggested for you, including me! I know you’ll get around to it eventually.
huh? the reading suggestions are in the comments of my last post
I will take you up on your offer to come and visit my blog–read the second post from the top because it is full of blind contour drawings –the idea inspired by you and your sister!!
I second The Girl Who Chased the Moon
The list below are all very different, I have eclectic taste, but what they do have in common are excellent storylines and being very well written.
Night After Night by Phil Rickman (in fact everything he has written)
The Moth Diaries by Rachel Klein
Stranger Child by Rachel Abbot
The Misremembered Man by Christina McKenna
The Magpies by Mark Edwards
Radical Gratitude by Andrew Bienkowski
The good word here is… I actually took your prompt (on our recent trip to Alaska) and journaled each day, in my actual book! Well… okay, so I didn’t journal on the last day, but I will. That’s my weekend plan. To work on my book, adding photos, and scrappy bits, and then transferring a few of the small drawings that were kept in a smaller sketchbook I carried with me on our daily jaunts. Thanks for inspiring this new putting-it-all-together travel journal Mary Ann, I appreciate your generous sharing and the inspiration!
Love the cover. Especially love the lions tail painting. Great job!!