March 30, 2012

march 30

I find myself wondering if you can intuit emotion from motion. The way a crow flaps, they look insouciant just moving away from you, or scoping out a field. Ducks and geese flap with a kind of desperation I completely sympathize with – it looks like their wings barely have enough lift to keep them aloft. Hawks look faintly impatient as they circle and wait for dinner to show itself.

Some birds look less emotive flying. Blue herons look impossibly ungainly and deeply prehistoric.

another crow

March 27, 2012

march 27

A crow, on a fence. It needs more contrast, but I like his shape.

Another migraine this morning, although I managed to beat it into submission by late afternoon.  Missing Al, who is traveling.

trees and a sliver of moon

March 26, 2012

march 26

I've been looking so hard for things that are (still) gray or white, and I forgot about all the dark things. Like a night sky, and trees against the moon. So I might be able to make it to the end of the month without color, although it is certainly getting more and more difficult.

crow tail

March 25, 2012

march 25

I do seem to be seeing crows everywhere. And geese. Great long skeins of Canada geese are honking and barking across the sky, following the big river and stopping over in the meadows and marshes along the edge.

casting class

March 24, 2012

march 24

Not choosing actors for parts. Not fishing with thin lines and flies. Not throwing things.

Casting and molding class today, a different class at the museum school. I loved the teacher, we did interesting and exciting things, and this is the first thing I made. It reminded me of pressing shells and sticks into sand and pouring plaster into it. I think I made a dragon that way. It was lovely.

This was pressing a lot of fossils and modern shells into clay, and then making a mold of it. I like the way things overlap. You can see two trilobites, and a lot of coiled shells and several brachiopod impressions.

I felt so odd from napping and waking up badly that even though I made a circle it was very ugly.

one lone crow

March 22, 2012

march 22

The absurd weather continues.

Alice was suggesting things I could put on circles, and I kept saying no, I hadn't seen that this month. And I realized the circles this month are very strongly tied to things I've actually seen. Probably as a result of the original inspiration; the snowstorm at the beginning of the month. Which is why I will probably not make one with a moose, unless a moose crosses my path, or a bear, for the same reason.

Aerin's Young Man joined us for circus – he's strong and surprisingly flexible, but oddly floppy in the middle. Handstands are really strange for him. But it is nice to have another sturdy person around.

foggy woods

March 21, 2012

march 21

While the afternoons have been bright and sunny and hot, the mornings have been close and mysterious and foggy. Not quite so foggy I feel I should install a foghorn on my van, but enough that I go carefully. This morning I rode Nuada out into the foggy woods. I felt like a phantom, gray horse, gray day, slipping through the trees and fog.

catkins

March 20, 2012

march 20

The pussy willows are out in force and going from their soft silver to spikier yellow gold and green.

Google says it is the first day of spring. Going by our weather today, and the forecast for the week, it feels more like summer. Fistfuls of horse hair are shedding off all the horses at the barn, and with the ground unfrozen and good for rolling they are all looking their most disreputable. Even the very fancy horse we call the George Clooney horse (because he is such a superstar) is dusty, shedding and itchy.