Attempt at a Conversation with Birds

This blog was titled Conversations With the Muse many years ago, and mainly that’s been happening. I make art, and then I think and write about it. Otherwise it feels so unfinished. With the mixed media expressive art there is often a verbal interaction attempted with the content of the piece, which usually contains a great many unanswered questions. . .like this one.

For my underpainting I used an unfinished experiment with dripping inks and blowing them across the page with a straw. Then I found pieces of deconstructed paintings I’ve been keeping for the collage. The result was something that totally short circuited all the rules of color, design, technique etc that i have been learning and relying on in my art for many years. Thank goodness. My favorite thing is to create something bizarre, unexpected, and fascinating to contemplate. Hopefully it will get me wondering outside the box of my usual thinking.

acrylic inks and fluid paints on w/c paper

You crows, all black and squawky on one side and cooing doves on the other.

You’ve laddered up from the lower realms and found a roost for your pulpit.

Now speak!         

(silence)

How can you be so silent now, as I sit expectant with pen in hand to take dictation?

What do you see and hear and feel in your vast communications network?

Am I too dense to plug into it and understand?

How long would I have to sit and watch and listen to receive even a micron of the information which sails unseen, unheard by us humans, between you  and your avian family each moment of the day.

Surely this painting entitles me to just a bit of all that? . . .a feather dropped that I might keep for a dream catcher? A song that I could learn and sing to myself?

Perhaps when the cawing meets the cooing I may at last get a feel, by audio transmission, for the freedom of flight?

a look at the process of construction from beginnings to placing collage pieces and drawing in the focal bird

Have you had any conversations with your art lately?

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Caw Caw!

A crow arrived in my meditation, a big black bird body, up close and personal with his back to me – demanding attention like all his cohorts in the skies, on branches and wires, beak open and loudly proclaiming, or was it complaining? I wondered if I could ask for a smattering of blessings from the crow proclaimer, blessings for us earthbound mortals. 

So I did some art and asked.

collaged, hand painted papers

(And Crow spoke)

“Look to each other

be the sentinel at your friend’s gate

stand watch over that which is most precious

to yourself and also to others

listen to others’ voices

and speak your own clearly

base your claim to nobility

on your readiness to share

your own inner wealth.”

Thanks to Birthday Well Wishers!

It is a bit of a rush to see all those names of familiar people popping up on Facebook to wish one a happy birthday. So if you are one of them, THANK YOU! March 13 often lands on some spring day heady with perfume and buzzing bees and. . low and behold, this year the sighting of the first Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly which was flying in ecstatic curves and dips. I had to wonder if it had just dried out after emerging from its papery frock.

All the spring art coming out of Muse Group has a strong nature tilt. This one is from last week.

painted with water and charged with inks, with collaged papers on w/c paper, 10 X 11″

The sun rises and sets on this kingdom of nature. There can be a fair amount of strutting about here, of gorgeous posturing and preening (It’s not the kind of false showing off and pontificating we find in humans)

It takes a wise one to know what are empty declarations and what is truth worth hearing. There are no fakes among these birds in the shallows. I’ll put my bets here on the waders.

The lesson was drawing with a brush loaded with water, then charging in inks and watching them blend. I was using Higgins waterproof inks which blend so beautifully. I had a book open to some bird pictures while painting the large bird and the ones in the background and enjoyed making up the little ones. Pick your breed of bird! You may not find these anywhere else.

This was some playing around I did to get ready for the lesson. The top ones are a kind of rohrshach, pressing another paper onto the wet painted image to transfer it. I liked the lacy edges I got that way.

Bird Sunday

Falconer Sara with her redtailed hawk, Enola, at Armstrong Woods in Guerneville, CA

Isn’t she beautiful?!  We got to sketch Enola in the redwoods before heading out to Goat Rock beach, in the second session of Bird Arting with Jonqui Albin, sponsored by the Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods.

Myself, Suzanne Edminster and Karen Mason bundled up and at the beach sketching those impossibly fast flying gulls, cormorants and terns.  Those lumps on the beach in the background are the harbor seals and their pups. Just draw a tube and put some eyes in it!

9 X 12″ pen and w/c sketch

Our reward. . .a delicious lunch at Cape Fear Restaurant in Duncans Mills and time to sketch people and share pens and paints with each other.  I love the way this woman looks like she’s biting her nails, which seems to go with the title “Cape Fear” even though that was unintentional. She was eating, after all.