crow tail
March 25, 2012
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.
Category: circle a day
casting class
March 24, 2012
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
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
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
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.
Sycamore
March 19, 2012
Stopped under the champion Sycamore tree in the center of Sunderland, and talking with Rose about what it would be like to explore the tree, if I could just climb up there. The first fork is enormous – it looks more like a landscape than a tree. Some branches are large enough to fall asleep on.
This is a good start, but the view up into the branches needs more twigs and smaller branches.
copper beech tree
March 18, 2012
Beech trees always look like elephant legs to me; thick and gray and sturdy and wrinkly.Tree bark, I've noticed, is very seldom brown. It is shades of gray, and wildly variegated textures, and thus perfect for the March circles. So I am reassured that even with the snow gone, I can sitll find monochrome things to depict.
Kaboose and I went out for a long trail ride today with a younger, more worried horse and his older, more worried rider. She did very well stomping along being reassuring. It didn't warm up until we got back, and then Red Kate dragged me out for a walk which was lovely. It feels like summer. It feels (says a gloomy New Englander) like we're getting away with something.
birch bark
March 17, 2012
Birches up close.
A very long day.
mist again
March 16, 2012
Once I cleaned off the table and flipped over my mat so it was clean there was much less fluff and dust. With less dust, each layer of organza is cleaner and clearer, and it takes more layers to feel distant. Also it looks like substantially less air pollution. Or rain. Or something.
I am very pleased with this one – it is almost precisely what I was aiming for.
mist, try the first
March 15, 2012
I think I am onto something here, but I need to start with a much much cleaner work surface. It is really just layers of white silk organza and black thread stitching. I had planned to add layers of organza until I couldn't see the first layer of stitching, or until a needle wouldn't go through it.
I'm very fond of organza. It is shiny, it is hardly there, it has a nice crunch to it, and I can put layers of it on top of each other and get really interesting effects. Black organza provides the base for most of my ponds, except the iced over one.
Lee Thomson 