It’s always hard to know when the last snow of the season
falls, except in my art studio. I
decided to celebrate the last snows of the year by completing a piece I’m calling
Glistening Snow. This is another
composition sparked by my trip to the Museum of Modern Art in Chicago where I passed
through a dense curtain of cascading pearls to enter an exhibit. I was thinking about the pearls and how
striking they look accented with black and red.
I wanted to create a weaving where the snow is gently falling on barren
tree branches that look strikingly black against a pale winter sky.
Adding a pop of red is something I like to do—it
just brings some joy and life to a winter landscape. A bright red cardinal fit perfectly over my
snow-pearl background amid the stark black oak branches, and Glistening Snow is
complete.
Of course I rarely focus on just one piece, and I certainly
need more color in my life. I have
spring on my mind as it wanders to thinking about spring planting in the
garden. Last year Jim tried very hard to
establish a patch of Mexican sunflowers, but the darned deer kept mowing down the
tops of the plants when they began to bud.
Optimistically we would think that it would just make a bushier plant, especially
if we sprayed with deer repellent.
In
the end, though, the deer won and we just ended up with plant stumps in the
ground and very happy deer. To fill the
void I’ve been working on a weaving that will feature Mexican sunflowers and
monarchs feeding on them. I’ve been
slowly making the individual flower petals and I finally accumulated enough to
assemble the flower heads. I did the
background weaving a couple of months ago, and I’ve even created the leaves
with detailed veins. Hopefully by the
end of the week I’ll be able to assemble all the pieces. Watch this space.
The other big news is that I finished and shipped my commissioned
felted tiles to their forever home, and the owner seems very happy with
them.
I really enjoyed the process of
working on the small scale format, and I think that once I have all of the
pieces finished for my next two exhibits I will create some individual tiles
for the summer fairs. Those exhibits
will be good places to see my recent collections. One show is local (Migrations: where have you been and what have you seen) at
the Bloomington Playwright’s Project (BPP) going up on March 26th. I’ll also be at the Ridgeland Mississippi Fine
Arts Festival on April 6 and 7. I’m
hoping there will be some spring flowers on display by then.
I can honestly say I don’t have any pie right now. I did have a slice of a delightful tart
cherry pie for breakfast each day this week, which was wonderful. This morning I had *sigh* toast. It was homemade bread that made really nice
toast (thanks Jim), but it wasn’t pie.
Between the time I launched this blog and now, a tart lemon pie has
appeared, but I think it’s intended for the Second Saturday Soup event tonight
rather than just for me. Maybe there
will be some left over and I can have a slice for breakfast tomorrow morning?
Until next week,
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