Drawing of leaves and nuts from the Marri tree, found in the Southwest region of Western Australia. This majority of trees that surround my property are the Marri from the Myrtaceae family is endemic to this area. They grow upwards of 40 metres and are a favourite food to the protected Red-tailed Black Cockatoo.
I have been watching a lot of sci-fiction lately. Like so many others my age or younger, the weight of global warming sits on my shoulders constantly. I imagined the final trek through a wormhole as someone sees their new solar system for the first time. I enjoy the bright colors and such but wish I conveyed a more bittersweet emotion.
A horizon of chalk—black sky heavy with silence, gold earth glowing with embered breath.
Between them, a thin line of turquoise, the pause where one world ends and another begins.
It is not sky, nor sea, nor sand alone. It is the threshold—a doorway, where silence teaches and light remembers.
Stand here long enough, and you may hear it breathe.
inking and seeing for better being — https://forming20.com/
For these Grahams Up the Tree drawings I used a Pilot Custom 823 with FA nib. This pen is legendary. It has a very soft nib and a giant vacuum filled tank of ink so you can write and draw for days.
4 year old Henry engaged fully with thick applications of watercolor and oil pastels. He said it was a stormy sea with a small boat. This was at the onset of the pandemic, when we were all a bit uncertain and confined to our homes. I was reminded of an insight by Kierkegaard written in the early 1800s: “When the sailor is out on the sea and everything is changing around him, as the waves are continually being born and dying, he does not stare into the depths of these, since they vary. He looks up at the stars. And why? Because they are faithful – as they stand now, they stood for the patriarchs, and will stand for coming generations. By what means then does he conquer changing conditions? Through the eternal: By means of the eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the foundation of the future.”
Watercolour painting of a Prickly Hakea. I started drawing different plants last month from the area where I live. This month I am turning them into watercolours, with the Hakea being one of the first.
The forest nearby is full of baby banksias growing in poor gravelly/sandy soil which they do better in. The little one was growing on the edge of a gravel road.
The nearby pine tree has dropped quite a few pine cones, all in different states of decay. I enjoy looking at the different shapes, sizes and colours of each cone, each with its unknown story.
My first attempt at a concertina birthday card. While simple to make, it can be a bit fiddly and getting the proportions and placement of objects right for each layer is important so that everything can be seen once the layers are overlapped. It reminds me of printing processes, where each layer is gradually added. It was quite an enjoyable process.
A wonderful reflective poem from Wendell Berry entitled "How to be a poet" is a fantastic foundation for an art curriculum. The last of three stanzas reads as follows:
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
