Judy – Page 100 – Dear Liza

Small Thanksgiving

Dear Liza,

Like everyone else in the country, we are having a small Thanksgiving this year. It is just safer, in these contagious times, to be around just us three in the household. I miss seeing you and your folks so much, and visiting the cousins and Auntie Katie. So this year will be….. smaller.

Since we are only feeding us, and Grandpa Nelson is a vegetarian, we bought two Turkey drumsticks and a thigh rather than a big old turkey. We prefer dark meat, anyway, and the smaller chunks are easier to cook and process. They are delicious and have lots of bones for soup, too!

We got just two sweet potatoes, and will be making them with goat cheese instead of tons of brown sugar. It’s something we both enjoy, but not the rest of the family.

Our cranberry sauce will have lots of orange peel and cloves, and is made (of course) from whole berries grown on the Columbia River just about 20 miles away.

We’ll have just a pumpkin pie from our last Halloween pumpkin, unlike last year, when Auntie Katie brought three pies and we made one! That was (just maybe possibly) too much pie. The other holiday baking we will do are cookies for the neighbors. Since most of them are staying home, too, it will be nice to share, via ring and run delivery.

I hope you have a fabulous, delicious, grateful Thanksgiving, and we will see you next year.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Art Crows

Dear Liza,

We have a lot of birds in Portland, but our most visible and noisy feathered friends are the crows. They are comfortable around people and don’t mind sharing our snacks or their opinions.

There is a healthy flock (called a ‘murder’, in crow jargon) in our Lone Fir Cemetery, and a lady who comes to feed them every afternoon. She says she doesn’t know if she is their queen or their slave.

Quickened Towards all Celestial Things, by Julianna Paradisi

All this avian beauty is inspiring! I have photographed dozens of crows, and other artists have honored them, as well. Julianna Paradisi, a Portland artist, created the wonderful “Quickened Towards all Celestial Things” in 2018. That same year, I photographed it at the Artbar downtown.

Browsing old photos for inspiration yesterday, I found it again and hoped to reimagine it as a collage. I must admit, in my “I’m not an artist” days, I had assumed that artists just picked up a brush or pair of scissors and ‘whoosh!’ Art happened. But during my ‘quarantine art education’, I have learned there is a lot of making mistakes, starting over, and just keeping at something until it looks right.

This crow took many sketches and lots of staring and trimming before I was happy with it. Cut out of black card stock, it joined magazine clippings, the remainder of a few envelopes, and just enough paint to make it interesting.

Thanks, Julianna Paradisi! Thanks, crows!

Love,

Grandma Judy

This Week’s Media Mix-up

Dear Liza,

My friend Ruth Inman gave us an odd list of things for our mixed media challenge this week. Threads pulled from fabric. Large envelopes. And a ‘page extender’, a flap or a fold-out section to make the page bigger.

As usual, I read the list before bed, so my brain could be working on it while I was asleep. I have a very self-motivated. brain, I guess, because when I woke up I knew just what to do.

Since I have been obsessed with trees lately, that’s where I headed. I drew a hillside with watercolor pencils and pulled some threads from some grey and brown fabric and slowly built a winter tree trunk and bare branches. This was tricky, because after a while the thread wanted to stick to my glue-y fingers instead of the paper, but I slowed down and got it all where I wanted it. I love how it looks and feels. Very nubbly and bark-Ish.

Next, I taped down a flap that would be the Fall part of the tree, and started putting on the orange and brown leaves. I used crumpled pages from magazines and an old Manila envelope.

Wintry tree with Fall flap

I realized that my tree was going to be pretty stumpy on top, so I taped yet another flap on and kept adding leaves until I was happy with the height. I needed to leave a slight gap so the page could fold.

Of course, a taller tree needed taller branches, so more threads got added to the Wintry tree. This sort of unexpected drift of a project can be frustrating, but is also exciting and fun, adjusting to what is needed.

This project ended up taking longer than I thought, because I had to wait for layers of glue and paint to dry, and having two flaps instead of one! Here is a picture to show how it is put together.

This website won’t post videos, but I have put one on my Judy Drueding Facebook page to show how the flaps open up. Go take a look! And if you don’t do Facebook, write me a comment and I’ll send it to you.

Have fun making art!

Love,

Grandma Judy

The Beauty of Letting Go

Dear Liza,

With the Corona virus having another spike here in Oregon, Governor Kate Brown has called for a ‘pause’. We are not going out to restaurants, even for take out. Our big weekly adventure is grocery shopping. But we do go out for a walk every day, and the leaves have been absolutely inspirational.
So I am playing with poetry again.

Red, like sunset, piled on the sidewalk

Red, like flowers, blowing down the street

Red, like candy, drifting in the gullies

Dancing along to the world’s heart beat

And some haiku:

Leaves on the sidewalk

Colors jumbled like confetti

After summer’s last fling

Arches of color

Bright gothic cathedrals

Welcome us home from the rain

Orange against blue

Making both brighter

Color theory come to life

I hope you like playing with words, too!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Moving Forward

Dear Liza,

For thirty years as a teacher, my focus was clear: to be the best teacher I could be. Since I have been retired, I have been figuring out what comes next, what my next focus should be. Two weeks ago today our country made its decision, and we are ready to move forward. And I have decided to help.

Many of our fellow Americans have fallen prey to the notion that it is a dog-eat-dog world, that only the loud and armed have rights, that bullies win. I do not believe this. I believe in the overwhelming power of kindness to heal. The Jewish term for this is “tikkun olam,” repairing the world.

So here are my intentions.

I will help my neighbors. I will donate to food banks, help the homeless, and offer kind words to strangers.

I will help my neighborhood by shopping in local stores and businesses as much as possible, instead of sending money to the bottomless pit that is Jeff Bezos’ pocket.

Grandpa Nelson at the wonderful Helen Bernhardt Bakery

I will help my neighborhood by picking up litter and encouraging others to do so. This weekend while we were our doing our ‘Sunday Service’ we ran into a little girl and her dad. In the course of our conversation, I said, “When you see trash on the ground, you think ‘Someone should clean that up.’” And her dad, without missing a beat, said, “And then you think ‘I could be someone.’” The little girl nodded seriously.

I will offer beauty instead of ugliness, forgiveness instead of anger, gratitude instead of greed. As Gandhi advised, I will be the change I want to see.

My Momma once scolded my dad for spending a whole day of a camping trip picking up trash along a mountain road. “You can’t clean up the whole world, Lowell!”

“I’m not trying to,” he said. “Just this bit.”

So I will just do this bit. Maybe you can do your bit, too?

Love,

Grandma Judy

Funk’s Franks

Dear Liza,

Last week when I was walking Auntie Bridgett to the SideStreet Arts for her shift of gallery watching, we ran into a new, delicious place to get lunch!

Young entrepreneur Charlie Funk, originally from Chicago, has opened his brand-new hot dog cart at the corner of SE Stark and 28th. He and Funk’s Franks are pleasant and Covid-friendly, and his hot dogs are very tasty!

I bought a Chicago dog, sliding its tinfoil-wrapped goodness into my shopping bag of so I could enjoy it at home. The pickle was spicy, the neon relish crispy, and the tomato fresh and sweet.

Charlie told me that he and his partner have come out from Chicago and will spend the next few weeks in Portland. At the end of the month they will re-locate near our old stomping grounds, in Santa Cruz, California. They should do well there, in the land of warm dry winters and lots of foot traffic.

I wish them well!

Love,

Grandma Judy

More Mixing of Media

Dear Liza,

Learning and doing new things is a wonderful way to stay young. Doing the Art Journal challenge with Ruth Inman every week is making me be a better artist, too.

This week I decided to use the mixed media items (address labels, box tops, and can labels) to make a picture that wasn’t about the collage. Let me explain.

I have usually made collages where the paper itself is the feature. The Tootsie Roll wrappers in my bouquet, though bright and fun, never looked like anything other than what they were.

My new challenge was to make a real picture using collage bits. Since I am getting better at faces (by practicing a lot), I decided to draw a face with watercolor pencils, then build the environment with collage.

Naked face and some tentative background…

Once I got the basic proportions in, I built my cityscape background from junk mail. I made them very vertical so they looked like tall buildings. Auntie Bridgett showed me how to make the perspective.

Then came the hard part, making the face. Auntie Bridgett suggested making my character monochromatic, or all one color. I chose blue.

The more I drew, the more I liked it. Shading cheekbones and eye sockets is something that definitely takes practice! Putting in sky and what I thought was a street made it more ‘real’.

He needed a face, so I made eyes out of box tops and junk mail, with eyebrows from address labels, and lips, mustache and goatee from security envelopes.

His hair is made from address labels, with a little black acrylic sponged on to make it more uniform in color. I kept liking it, so I put some details in the background with an Elegant Writer and a few clouds to give perspective.

Looking again, I realized the ‘street’ really looked like an overcoat, so I put in some lapels. And voila! I call him Georges, because he looks French, stylish, and a bit paranoid. I hope when you see this, you will try making a collage picture, too!

Love,

Grandma Judy

My Life in Gardens (Part 2)

Dear Liza,

Since I was raised with gardens, I have seen the benefit of them on the mind and spirit, I have enjoyed sharing gardens with the children in my life.

Many years ago, I enjoyed watching young Isaac Godin explore my poppies.

Young Isaac

While being a docent at at First Mayor’s House in Salinas, I enjoyed encouraging g students to taste and touch sheep’s ears (useful for toilet paper), mint (for indigestion) and aloe (for scrapes and burns).

While I was staying in Salinas with you and your family, we had some fun with gardens, too. You helped pull weeds at my dear University Park to celebrate Earth Day.

You even got the hang of hoeing weeds to help your own garden grow!

My mother was a fan of the Frances Burnett story, “The Secret Garden”. She understood that when you nurture the earth, you nurture your own soul. I believe it too, and hope you continue to grow by helping gardens flourish.

Love,

Grandma Judy

My Life in Gardens (Part 1)

Dear Liza,

Last night it was below freezing here in Portland, and the high temperature today will be 45. Our winter is here, whether the calendar calls it that or not.

Momma’s house, seen through her back garden

On dark cold days, I miss gardens. My mother was a gardener her whole life. After Dad died, she said caring for the garden everyday was her reason for getting out of bed. I gardened for years, and was afraid I would miss it when we moved into our townhouse. I haven’t, though. Well, maybe, sometimes.

When we travel, we always visit the public gardens. Not just beds of flowers, the lay-out says a lot about the esthetic of the people who created them.

Victoria, B.C.’s Butchart Gardens were built in 1909, by Jennie Butchart, the wife of a Portland Cement millionaire. She hated the ugliness his quarries left behind, and spent years developing different styles of gardens to fill them up with beauty.

Gardens in front of Buckingham Palace show glory and power. This happens a lot in Europe, where kings needed to impress other kings.

Buckinghom Palace showing off with geraniums

Versailles’s gardens were built by France’s Louis 16th to impress his courtiers with the infinite power of the monarchy, to keep them in line. As it turned out, his courtiers weren’t who he needed to be worried about.

Built to impress, Versailles goes on and on and on….

The Luxembourg Gardens in Paris were built by Catherine Medici on the grounds of her private estate. They are now what Grandpa Nelson calls “The Best Park in the World”, full of flowers, lawns, and statues, but also cafes, marionette shows and pony rides in summer.

I will tell you about sharing my love of gardens tomorrow.

Love,

Grandma Judy