Loomis begins with the artificial horizon and pretty soon has it filled in with trees and houses set along curvy roads, and another bikini girl posed on a set of stairs. From there the book moves indoors and explains how to lay out a room in 2D.

And that’s how I came to spend the weekend drawing the front room.

I’ve surrounded myself with piles of old recipe cards from my mother and her sisters to be sent to one of my nieces, boxes of Irish crochet pieces to be assembled into something I can wear or given away, a satisfyingly large bag of trash, and some old paintings.

I gave up on oils nearly five years ago. The switch to dry media was driven by time and method considerations that haven’t changed so I won’t be going back any time soon, but it’s interesting (for me) to see what I was doing with a brush and liquid. This small painting of grapes in a bowl purchased with Morton salt coupons in the 40′s was done about 10 years ago.

Now, back to editing my life. We’ll see what else turns up. . .

The amount of stress relief available from a black pen on smooth, heavy, finely finished paper is amazing. The Exacompta books start with the month of December of the prior year, so I’ll be switching over to 2011 tomorrow after recording notes about the “Boxing Day Blizzard of 2010″ (15″ of snow over two days here on the island) and what we had to eat on Christmas day in 2010. It’s always a wonderful feeling to start in on newly opened pages. Below is a small beastie from a short staff meeting in 2010 – Happy New Year!

The autumn studio is home to still life set-ups featuring pumpkins,poppies and pink, angled October light – fodder for big paintings during the long, cold winter ahead.

Raspberries (also razberry, raspberrys, rasberry), jam, pie, bush, growing

Still life (also still lives, stull life and still)

Hamburger stand inventory spread sheet. (Really?)

bad composition painting

bed construction (presumably garden beds)

Cinder blocks, cinder block construction, use cinder blocks, cement blocks – one of my biggest referral sites is a cinder block construction company in Arizona.

Blue mason jar

Screw down trivot photos

Amy Pollien, amy pollien, amy pollen, amy pollen bees

Time is but the stream

Poverty cake

Dumping bees into a hive at night time

George Dorr’s caretaker’s cottage

Yokkana seeds

Bonsai sisr

MDI Skate Park

Painting like Janet Fish (Thanks!)

I have one more drawing planned from my set-ups in the hoop house over the summer. The light in there is diffuse and very white. I plan to start the 2010 flower season by  constructing a table-top  in the house to take advantage of a large south facing window for compositions with bright slanting planes of lights and shadows, yellow highlights and winking green glass bowls. I’m looking for an abrupt transition from Renoir to somewhere past Janet Fish – can’t wait!

I memorize a poem each season, using the time I spend commuting to work and the conference calls and meetings to which I go, but am not expected to contribute past putting out the occasional fire.  My choice for Winter 2010 seems strangely appropriate, so I’m leaving it here as a placeholder. “You, if any open this writing. . .”

Epistle to be Left in the Earth

…It is colder now
there are many stars
we are drifting
North by the Great Bear
the leaves are falling
The water is stone in the scooped rock
to southward
Red sun grey air
the crows are
Slow on their crooked wings
the jays have left us

Long since we passed the flares of Orion
Each man believes in his heart he will die
Many have written last thoughts and last letters
None know if our deaths are now or forever
None know if this wandering earth will be found

We lie down and the snow covers our garments
I pray you
you (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names
I will tell you all we have learned
I will tell you everything

The earth is round
there are springs under the orchards
The loam cuts with a blunt knife
beware of
Elms in thunder
the lights in the sky are stars
We think they do not see
we think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us
The birds too are ignorant
do not listen
Do not stand at dark in the open windows
We before you have heard this
they are voices
They are not words at all but the wind rising
Also noone among us has seen God
(… We have thought often
the flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous
The wind changes at night and the dreams come

It is very cold
there are strange stars near Arcturus
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky

Archibald MacLeish

My family wrote hundreds of letters when I went away to college. Going away to college was new, but they’d had experience with going away to war and that’s how they approached it. Hundreds of letters about food. About their lives back home, actually – but I’d never realized that food was so much the overarching motif of those lives. I’m working the letters up into a collection. The Old World sent food, but the New sent a facsimile – a Jerusalem Airlift.

Mary came back to the Firehouse after, and we arranged platters of meats, breads and salads for 100. They gave us much more and also sent a beautiful whole ham for Mother and Ben. Dad cut it in chunks last night with the big knife so it could be divided easily. Mother froze the bone for soup later on. PS Thought I’d send nuts – maybe you can use a hammer and something for a pick.

It is supposed to snow this afternoon 2 – 8″ stopping around midnight. I am working overtime tomorrow, then on Sunday we are having your father’s birthday party. He wants that coconut pineapple cake of Doris Watkins’. It always falls apart, but he always asks for it.

I have plenty of excerpts to work with, and hope to begin setting up material to draw as illustrations. (I’m going to skip the ham.) A perfect frontspiece for the book, I think, will be a picture of me standing ghostly in the back yard, holding a layer cake.