Autoportrait en morceaux

Confab at the end of a letter ladder

A flying boat, the dormant moon

Risky business

The composer falls asleep to his own composition

"Autoportrait en morceaux"
06-16-13a
collage, water color, ink, crayon

Catastrophe!

The impending global collapse of honeybee populations has forced farmers and governments to come up with novel but drastic solutions including the hand-pollinating of almond orchards in China and the rest of the world.

Whither go the bees so go we!

doodle birds

Last weekend was busy busy busy …but I was early to church so I worshipped the doodle god before all the fuss started.

Later in the day, my daughter graduated from high school. It was marvelous and wonderful and gratifying.

There's so much to be thankful for.

:-)

Bird in A Boat

On the prow of a small boat in the middle of a wild sea… a tern pauses for rest. The empty boat is an island for his thoughts to occupy while the elements swirl around him.  

The wind gusts and rushes with no apparent reason or pattern. The clouds and mist fly across the white sky.

Above it all, the imaginative moon stalls transfixed yet untethered.

The empty boat, once so full of ambiguous promises still seems to wait. Wait for what? Terns fly from pole to pole and from sunrise to sunrise. The bird is always fatigued and always ready to go.

The Tern gathers strength and solace imagining that this moon, even, this benevolent and sly orb, sends a few beams (of uncertain vintage) his way and dimly lights his gay and urgent flight.

This painting is from my sketchbook. It was finished on June 4th. I lump it into my series of paintings and drawings about Owl and Tern.

Struggle!

"Attack!"
05-29-13
watercolor, crayon, colored pencil

When I drew as a young boy, I would make pictures of battle scenes. There were tanks, planes, warships, cannons, guns and helmeted soldiers. Later, flying saucers and aliens would be the bad guys. On paper, the outcome was always certain. But given a new sheet of paper, the struggle began anew… complete with sound effects!
I suppose it's a "boy" thing. We were so innocent of the real Cold War dangers and the nuclear chess games going on in the 1960s. I remember JFK's funeral on TV; it was all a dream because it happened in childhood.

Sometimes I feel as if I'm still dreaming, still deluded by my own sense of uniqueness and an elemental innocence.
I think that if reincarnation were "real" (it is in a way, as I see it) Innocence would have slowly leached out of human experience because there would be an accumulated knowledge of the costs of all forms of violence.
But boys continue to play with guns or dream of being heroes and of dying on the battlefield. And, I presume, girls worked out their own struggles by more subtle, but no less destructive and innocent means.
Why is life a struggle? I guess that's the question I leave you with.
…
Have a peaceful and fun day. Love the ones you're with in body and spirit. Smell the roses, they're everywhere!