Nature Morph

random bits

It dawned on me that I've been blogging for about a year, and I went back and checked, and lo and behold, I typed my first blog post [on my short-lived time at naturemorph dot blogspot, before moving over to typepad] on July 27th, 2007.  So I think I need to do some sort of blogiversary giveaway.  I will figure out something over the weekend and post a name-drawing contest on Monday.

It is late, and I am wondering where this night has gone and also where the summer has slipped away to...  (And I know that's bad grammar.)  My deadlines are rapidly approaching.  (And if you are a regular reader, you are surely asking yourself: well, what else is new?)

Here is a bit of randomness for the weekend:

My daughter dancing on the rocks at the beach at sunset in Menemsha.

A collaged card I made for a friend.  Wow, real paper correspondence!

And the table drawing I made recently with my daughter at our favorite family-friendly restaurant (where, I might add, I recently saw Ben Affleck and his family, and I acted like no big deal.  I did text about twenty people from my cell phone, but other than that, I was cool.)  So the bird and the nest grow directly out of the tree, you see.

ebay loot

Thanks to the advice of my friend Peter, I've been scooping up some fabulous collage source material on ebay lately.  My most recent prizes are pages from an old German botanical atlas, and book plates from a mushroom guide dating back to the late 1800s.  As we used to say back in the day: score!

I am so excited to turn these into collages (the ideas are already brewing in my head), though I'm sort of paralyzed at the moment.  All you collage artists out there must know the feeling of not wanting to cut up new material right away... sort of like that moment of looking at a blank piece of drawing paper and being terrified to make the first mark.  So I just need to go and chop these things up!

I also owe buckets of thanks to all of you readers and fellow bloggers out there who have given me kudos and kind words lately.  Carol from Barnacle Goose, Karen Blados, and Nina at Corvallo (and others!): thank you.  You inspire me, too.

available now!

**UPDATE!!!  Thank you to all the collectors who snatched up the small small AND medium prints so quickly that they are now sold out!  Wow.  That made my day.  You can still get a medium or large print if you act fast...

I was confused about the release date and thought it was tomorrow, so I'm sorry I couldn't give you more advanced warning about my print on 20x200.  You can buy my Duck Magnolia print here now.

 

Big thanks to my friend Jonathan Goldman for giving me a heads up that the print is live!  I've been on the Vineyard for the past few days and am just now getting back up to speed on all things art-related, and clearly my head is still a bit fuzzy from all the sun and surf (and dare I say vino). 

Back soon with more from the studio...

foxy

First, my apologies to all of you who thought I was going to have a print released this week.  That was indeed going to be the case, but then there were some hold ups, so it's been pushed back to later in the month.  I promise to post the exact information as soon as it is nailed down.  I'm sorry to have confused you!

So this is my newest painting:

And a detail:

My daughter has two favorite stuffed animals right now, identical versions of each other, and each named Foxy, and they pretty much found their way into my work.  Here we are with said creatures:

This is the original photo that I used for the painting -- a rescue fox from the local audubon farm:

So this is my first foray into the hunter/hunted idea... clearly there are a million directions to go with it, and it's all still swirling around in my head in that languid summer way, but I'm excited to see where it goes.  Foxy!

weekly wrap-up

What a week.  I kicked things off on Monday with my first Red Sox game of the year (and it looks like I'm going again tonight!).  I had seats about 30 rows straight back from home plate.  Wow!

There's been a bit of a firestorm here in Boston over Ron English's "Abraham Obama" mural installed literally right outside the windows of my studio.

You can read the Boston Globe's coverage of the brouhaha here.

I've been working on the initial stages of many new drawings.  I am enjoying the hopping-around from piece to piece that this allows, though the down side is that nothing is getting completed.  Here are some snippets:

I'm back to being obsessed with my backyard birds, notably the blue jays, and I'm also thinking about the hunter/hunted relationship.

And: a little teaser for something getting released next week.  Once the details are fully hammered out, I will post all the relevant info.  Let's just say that I signed my name about 250 times last night.

Have a great weekend!

holiday, animals

Hope you all had a great 4th of July weekend! 

I've been keeping busy with the kiddo.  We drove out about an hour west today to the EcoTarium, a science museum where they have a planetarium and also a lot of rehabbed rescue animals who can't live on their own in the wild, which is pretty much the only way I can bring myself to look at animals behind bars.  I've long been fascinated by birds of prey, and I took some photos that might figure into my work down the line.

The place also had, somewhat inexplicably, a polar bear.

Closer to home, there is a robin sitting on her nest in a tree right outside my daughter's window, and we've been watching it and eagerly awaiting the babies.

Over on her blog, artist Jeana Sohn has also been watching and photographing a bird's nest (so cute!).

Finally, a gratuitous shot of our resident rabbit, who has been the star (or the relative of a star) of some of my recent paintings.

Back to the studio tomorrow!

back with loot

It had been my plan to blog yesterday and to commit to typing a post a day this month, but I already missed July 1st, so it's not looking good so far.  It can only get better from here, right??

The Cape was wonderful, but now I'm back and trying to get into the grove in the studio again.  I went to the famous flea market at the Wellfleet drive-in theater and scored some excellent finds, chief among them an old musty tome full of old Harper's magazines with the most amazing illustrations which will hopefully find their way into my work.  I sense a sea monster series brewing...

I also got these:

 

Over on the other coast, my show at Rare Device is winding down, and Cynthia Houng gave it a great review over at KQED's Arts & Culture blog.  Thank you so much, Cynthia!

It is entirely possible that I'll be back tomorrow with another post...