You know our cat, Mouse, is part of our family. She is 9 years old already, older than you! She enjoys many of the same things we do. Snuggling….
This is my mommy….
Listening to stories….
This is my mommy, too…..
Decorating for Christmas,
My lights….
and getting to know the neighbors.
Interspecies detente
Sometimes she is even part of the decor.
You know whose Bear this is, right?
So of course she gets Christmas presents.
I have sewn cat toys for our Mouse and Auntie Katie’s cat, Pixel. Pixel is 15, and a real old lady cat, but she likes toys, too.
For Mouse
It doesn’t take much! Some felt leftover from other projects, part of an old shredded sheet for stuffing, and some cat nip from the grocery store. A little bit goes a long way! And since cats are not very critical, this is a low-stress art project.
For Pixel
I like being able to celebrate Christmas with all my loved ones, even the furry ones!
There is nothing like art to change your world. I don’t necessarily mean it changes the world on the outside, although that could be nice.
Shapes and reflections in Van Gough
I’m talking about when looking at art changes the way you see the world in general. Spend an hour or so in an art museum, staring at shapes and shadows and reflections. Then go outside, and what do you see? More shapes and shadows and reflections, art forming from reality right in front of your eyes.
It is wondrous, and it has happened to me many times.
Shales and reflections in a town square
Making art is a newer experience, but it has the same effect of altering my observation. It’s like my brain has created a new network that allows me to connect different parts, seeing a new whole.
My creation, “Paradisi Crow”
A few weeks ago I made a collage based on Julianna Paradisi’s “Quickened Towards all Celestial Things”. I wanted the shape of the crow to be just right, so I cut a prototype out of cheap paper and then traced that onto card stock for the collage.
Just being a crow…..
Then I had this perfectly good template. Just sitting there. Being a crow.
I kept looking at it over a few days, knowing I wanted to use it but not knowing how. Over the last however-many-months of quarantine I have learned that if I take my time, the right idea will come. Finally, it did.
Starting with watercolors and working up to acrylics, I laid down some patches of color and then used an old toothbrush to flick paint, layer by layer, around my crow stencil. It took days, flicking and staring and adjusting. And last night, it was finished. The background layers of crow silhouettes became dense enough just as the built-up speckles on the crow became dark enough. So I glued the crow in her final position, and …. done.
I wish now that I had taken pictures of each stage, but I think I was afraid of jinxing the process. This sort of creation is still new enough to me that it feels like a delicate magic.
We had a slow walk around Laurelhurst Park on Thanksgiving, to settle our dinner and enjoy being out in the world. Laurelhurst was planted in 1913, so most of the trees are huge. It feels like a tame forest and is my favorite place in the city.
Auntie Bridgett takes some pictures
This Fall, Firwood Lake is covered with duckweed and looks more like lawn than a pond. It is oddly beautiful.
Firwood Lake and oak trees
The old-fashioned lamps look beautiful against the trees in any season.
Ginkgoes and lamppost
The bright yellow of birches and ginkgoes brightens up the darkest corners of the woods.
Ginkgo glowing down the way
On a day when we were not with friends or family and were feeling a little sad, it was good to get out and be part of the beauty.
This past Friday evening, a 75 foot Christmas tree erected in Pioneer Square, also known as Portland’s Living Room, was lit up beautifully as the whole city sang. This has happened the night after Thanksgiving every year for 36 years.
Thousands of our closest friends. downtown in 2019
Thomas Lauderdale, China Forbes, and the rest of Pink Martini played and sang Christmas Carols. Thousands of Portlanders sang along, led in the lyrics by a projected Christmas tree bouncing along the words. It was just like always!
Except that this year we were in our own living rooms and Pink Martini was on television, broadcast by local station KGW. We were sitting down and warm instead of standing up and freezing, we had our cat on our laps, and it was cozy.
But I still miss the crowds, the being together-ness, the palpable feeling of goodwill and community. Christmas isn’t just a time for family and friends, at least not in a big city. It is a time to make merry, eat, shop, walk, and sing with a whole bunch of strangers.
Auntie Christy, Grandpa Nelson and Auntie Bridgett with the tree last year
Thinking forward, we will be in for New Year’s, as well. Two years ago we went to Pink Martini’s show downtown, walking for hours between a fine dinner and the 10:00 show. It was cold, alright, but so beautiful. I took one of my favorite photos ever of the tree all lit up and the New Year’s moon.
Living Room tree and a New Year’s moon
This year will continue to be different, and I go back and forth on how I feel about it. Usually, my parents’ good natures win out and I know it will all turn out right if we all hunker down and do our best, but every now and then I get cranky and feel very put upon. That is when I try to have some alone time or take a nap, to keep from spreading the virus of my melancholy to the rest of the household.
Happiness, as Ruthie says, is a choice. So I will choose it.
We are just feeding the three of us this Thanksgiving, but whatever it is that makes me want to cook, once the cold weather hits, doesn’t care. The Neanderthal instinct to make heat and lots of food is strong.
Tuesday I baked a batch of Oatmeal Everythings. These cookies have evolved over the years and contain oatmeal, whole wheat flour, raisins, walnuts, flaxseed, chia seed, and whatever else looks good. We are already up to our eyebrows in food, so these went to the neighbors.
Lots of cookies!
Wednesday was the the pumpkin pie. I found a less sweet version online and gave it a try, using the last of our Halloween pumpkins, roasted and puréed. I found an all-butter recipe for pie crust, because I don’t like shortening. There will be pie crust cookies with the leftover dough, of course.
Katie’s pies last year… so good!
And on Thanksgiving, of course, the Turkey drumsticks and thighs go into the crockpot early and cook all day. Auntie Bridgett will make sweet potatoes with goat cheese, Grandpa Nelson will open a bottle of wine, and all will be well.
AND…. Auntie Bridgett roasted chestnuts!
Auntie Bridgett’s chestnuts
Happy Thanksgiving! We all have so much to be grateful for.
The big election is (finally) over, and that means 2021 is on the way. We are holding off getting a Christmas tree until the day AFTER Thanksgiving, but we already have one necessity for next year.
This page will be for next November
A New Calendar, from Ruth Inman, my artist friend Illinois. To see her wonderful artwork, you can go to http://www.ruthinmanart.com/.
August….
When I was teaching, how my calendar looked was not important. It could be plain as a mud fence, but it needed giant squares to write down the countless meetings and deadlines, units to be taught and parents to be met with. It wasn’t so much a decoration as external storage for my over-filled brain.
January…..
But now, between being both retired and quarantined, the look of my calendar can set the mood of my day. After Auntie Bridgett’s face, it is usually the first thing I see in the morning, and it’s nice to start off with something pretty.
May….
Ruth’s calendar has twelve beautiful, bright alcohol ink prints. The colors are amazing and the paper they are printed on is heavy enough to frame (once their month has passed, that is). It is nice to know we are starting 2021 on a cheerful, colorful note.
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.
Just us three
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.
Ready for roasting!
I hope you have a fabulous, delicious, grateful Thanksgiving, and we will see you next year.
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.
Waiting for the Queen….
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.
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.
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!
Dear Liza 