Nest Building

Nest Building

A soft brown wren pecks for tiny seeds

strewn from yesterday’s weeding.

On closer look I see

she collects not seeds but tiny dried grass –

slight as a thought.

A beak full of bristling grass,

mustachioed she tilts her head,

making me laugh.

Then she lifts off, flies west toward home

to line her silky nest.

April 24, 2011

White Bouquet Vision


When I am in the flow of artmaking and the flow is going very well, I close my eyes when I am going to sleep and I see many visions. Because I have used this black paper for so long I believe my art guides are feeding me the beauty of their dreams. This came to me as a twisting, writhing, dancing bouquet of white flowers on an an inky dark background.

Two Composition Assignments

A Conversation I Keep Having with Myself
Rainbirds  of Wenatchee: A Quilt for Toren

These two paintings are in response to assignments from the Steve Aimone book I am in love with right now. Here is the link in the side bar. The top one is putting angular shapes and curvilinear shapes in to what Aimone calls a conversation. I really have the sense of the ovals/circles being the soul and the geometric shapes are the world. The lines say that I both struggle to integrate AND embrace the geometries of the world from a soul place.

The second assignment was to draw a grid as a foundation for a composition. I got the grid and it was fields. I but the fan shapes on, and they were Rainbirds of the Columbia Plateau. I got a rubber stamp and stamped in the rainbirds, but it still seemed incomplete, so I started writing in all the names of our family and friends and placenames of Wenatchee, and it became a memory quilt.