The biodiversity library on flickr has an amazing collection of botanical images.
Harika, a blog I just found today, via @pollygannon on twitter.
Some Minneapolis friends and I are having a handmade market on December 19.
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I bring you candles in the early dark hours. I bring a photograph of the moon half-full, walking through a bright blue sky. I bring the yellow leaves lit up by low sun. I bring the smell of burn.
I bring the peat fire, wet blacktop, bodies of spiders curing in corners, rosemary, the grass wet in the morning.
I bring a wool cloth, a linen cloth.
In the dark part of the year we find a scratch of light where we can get it. The stars are brilliant. The snow when we have it shines. We are walking together in the darkness, in silence or talking, the sounds of birds and animals, the hanging boughs of yew with their bright red, translucent berries.
* * *
For the dark part of the year, I bring you a calendar full of drawings from my travels this year. I bring you warm words, bunnies flying kites, robins & rosehips, the Belgian winter. I bring you my child-self, and early mornings in a kitchen an hour outside Ghent. I bring the young women working in warm, bright cafés at winter’s early nightfall. I bring you something to read with your tea or coffee, on the bus or walking to work (careful, there!).
* * *
Thank you for being here, for reading, for sticking with me, and for all else.
Maybe you remember that last year I made a calendar. I enjoyed doing that, and I wanted to do it again, but since I’ve already used up most of the sketches from my England-sketchbooks, I wasn’t sure what to do. Looking through my project list, though, I realised that one of the things I want to make could be combined with–or, to put it more directly, could be–the calendar. I’ve been making drawings and trying to let them take me where they want. Last year I didn’t have a definite idea about the overall form of the calendar until later in the process and I think that kept me from being too rigid about what could go in or how to draw for it, and I want to try that again. When I get a sharp idea of what I want, I often end up either not having fun making it (because in conceiving of it so completely I feel as though I’ve already done the work, somehow!) or limiting myself and feeling like what I make is not as ‘organic’ as it could be or as though a form has been imposed by my expectations or my idea of others’ expectations of my subject/project.
In any case, these are three drawings from my sketchbook in the last week or so. They may or may not end up in the calendar, but here they are.
Recent beliked things:
Paper Darts.
Airmail fabric, and lots of droolworthy linen in the same shop.
Agnes DeMille. Makes me want to dance in Rodeo.
That’s all for now. I’m buried in the last weeks of the PhD and kind of starry-eyed that I will get to hand it in (on 1 Sept., if all goes well) and also nose-to-the-grindstoning it. I can see how it would be easy to panic but for now I feel happy, excited, competent, and calm.
Which of these do you prefer? Why? Any adjustments, criticisms, changes, things you like or don’t like in particular?
Thank you for taking the time to help me with this. More on this project soon.
