Daily Painting

The Honey Tree

Two watercolors from my moroccan sketchbook.  Done from my bed in the orange blossom scented Hotel Du Tresor in Marrakech.  (I cannot wait to go back.)  Last week I bought American Primative by wonderful poet Mary Oliver.  Intoxicating.  Today the Honey Tree, is on my mind.

Breathless from the Plunge

"Everyone knows the feeling with which one stands shivering on a spring-board, the shock when a friendly foe steals up behind and huls you into the flood, and the ardent glow which thrills you as you emerge breathless from the plunge."  

-from Winston Churchhill's Painting as a Pastime.  One of our partcipiants handed it to me before we parted in marrakech; it was like a surprise chocolate bar on my journey home (after a whole week of glorious surprises).

Now here I am, Michael and Benji (Captain Spectacular) are more lovable than ever.  I had to pinch myself on my adventures and then again on my return home. And this morning the studio?  Who's marvelous life have I stumbled into?

A group of us stayed at the peaceful oasis Hotel Tresore for a few days before the retreat.  The watercolor above is the view into the courtyard from my beautiful second floor room, where I sat on my bed for hours, drunk from jet lag, happily absorbing the aroma of oranges while listening to the birsdsong and distant sounds of the city just outside the thick walls of the riad.

Too Excited to Paint

Here are a few things in progress.  All excited about Morocco I am having trouble concentrating.  Also I am currently on a sewing binge (some flowy linen dresses and art supplies bags for the trip).  Its also vacation week and just now Captain Spectacular is beckoning me to the couch to read "What Happened at Midnight",  #10 in the Hardy Boys series. (Do you know that the Hardy Boys went to Marrakech?  They did!  In #54, "The Mysterious Caravan".  A copy of which just happened to fall into our hands a few weeks ago; it was on sale at the library for pennies!)

Imagining Morocco

"From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there).  And the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there on the dark, the slumberous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not yet realized but turning in their darkness, catching here and there a spark of light.”

 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

 My book of sketches, Imagining Morocco, begins with the above quotation.  You can now download the book for your ipad/iphone or purchase a hard copy here.  

 

Last Night I Dreamt

Calling all Jungians!  It seems like a hopeful dream.  Are teeth a symbol of strength and self expression?  If so wouldn't molars be more so?  Also they are referred to as "wisdom" teeth. So perhaps it could be interpreted as a dream that I had discovered a new strength/wisdom that is decayed but can be restored.  

Makes me want to hunt for more Marion Woodman books.  Her book The Owl Was a Bakers Daughter Was Facinating, others sound so provacative.

It was satisfying to draw this out.  My son Benjamin (aka Captain Spectacular) began the drawing with the center left image.  try it!  if you need encouragement ask your children to illustrate for you.

"all the blasts of doubt"

"Always...before exchanging the flow of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy precipice and exposed unprotected, to all the blasts of doubt."

During my trip to Missouri I had the time to luxuriate in "To the Lighthouse".  My copy is a loan from my friend and  poet Sarah.   I am floored by how eloquently Virginia Woolf describes the feeling of vulnerability and the raging cacophony of threats from within that usually assail one before settling in to make art.  (I also like how I come away from her writing feeling that I have permission to go bananas with run on sentences and adjectives, though that may be a burden for my readers.)  

Paintings #s408 and 409 are 6"x6", oil on masonite, available here and here, respectively.  That is the very last of our pears this season.

Daily Painting #197.

Thinking of childhood.  Reading Reviving Ophelia by Dr. Mary Phiper which is an excellent book.  Oil on canvas, 11"x14".

Daily painting #157, sometimes its more of an accident.

There is a part in Winnie-the-pooh that goes like this:

C. Robin:  "Now then Pooh, where's your boat?"

W.T.P.:    " I ought to say" explained Pooh, "that it isn't just an ordinary sort of boat.  Sometimes its a Boat, and sometimes it's more of an Accident.  It all depends."

C. Robin: "Depends on what?"

W.T.P.: "On weather I'm on the top of it or underneath it."

 

 

 

Daily Painting #43, Ogden Nash on the brain.

Ranunculus ranunculi,

bendy-limbed, I wonder why.

Ranunculus ranunculew,

I wish you in my garden grew.  

We read Eric Carle's Animals Animals (delightful, illustrated by Carle, includes a variety of poets) at bedtime and as a result I was rhyming as I painted last night.

I included some of my bulletin board with its inspirational quotations-most from "The Writer's Almanac".  Actually, now that I examine them, "Just to continue..."  is from "Zen Mind, Beginners mind"  and "Put the big rocks in first" is from "Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung", a terrific, funny little book of stories written by a buddhist monk, both of which I bought at Myopic Bookshttp://www.myopicbooks.com/ on Wayland Square in Providence.  "Fail better" is Samuel Beckett and I have no idea what the context was but it keeps me moving.