A Coiled SPRING Of Industry…

Well, I didn’t mean to leave that last post up so long, especially since it represented such a awful experience… again. Actually, as awful as it was, I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve done it so many times now that I’m getting good at it. I just drag a trashcan from outside, put it under the lowest horizontal pipe where I have a hole drilled and covered with duct tape, rip the tape off and almost all sewage drains into the can with nary a speck of dung getting on me. Then, with the snake, it’s getting to be like a good fisherman who can visualize what’s going on at the end of his line by the way the line feels running over his finger. As I feed the snake into the pipe, I’m starting to notice slight differences in the way it feels and am able to visualize the tree roots blocking the drain. This is not something I aspire to be good at though. So that was last weekend and this weekend is the beginning (I think) of real spring weather. Yesterday was yet another idyllic Sofia and Dad day. It was sunny and warm and we were going all day. We hung out a bit in the morning and had coffee with our neighbor. Off to Vietnam Kitchen for lunch, here’s the bug “patiently” waiting for her soup…

While waiting they were showing the tragic devastation in Japan from the tsunami. Sofia started grilling me on all the different kinds of natural disasters and how they are caused because she wanted to rank them from bad to the worst. Anyway, that led to talk of our own little flooding going on down at the river and we decided to stop at the waterfront and see what’s going on. Here’s you tour guide…

Here’s a shot of the submerged staghorn sumac…

Here’s the bug with some driftwood and an action shot as she adds to the debris…

After the river extravaganza, we headed home to walk the dog and get cleaned up for Sofia’s friend Eva’s birthday party. It was a veritable cuteness overload with 10 or 11 six year old girls. Eva’s mom and dad were pros and had all sorts of activities planned and kept things moving throughout the event. One such activity was a floor covered with balloons and inside of each balloon was some candy. The idea was to pop the balloons to get at the swag and the lot of them descended on the balloons like a school of hungry piranha…

On Thursday my great friend Kathy and I went to the “closing” of an exhibition of drawings by my/our first drawing teacher ever at Murray State University in 1977…

The drawings were by Dale Leys and not only was Dale my first drawing teacher, I was in his first class as a teacher. Here’s Dale in front of couple pieces…

If you get a hankerin’ you can check out Dale’s drawing at his website. There were lots of beautiful drawings and many were from Dale’s trips to Italy and were drawings of Venice and Firenze. These two and a detail (with corvi) were my favorites and seemed evocative of the work he was doing when I was still in school. I apologize for the photos, I had a hell of a time trying to get a nice shot…

And while I’m on the subject of drawing teachers, my good friend Vern (who was my second drawing teacher ever) sent me this pic of his latest digital piece…

In other news, my decoration phase is in full swing…

Here’s some texture closeups, I like the last one best but it took so long that I doubt I will be doing many like it…

Last but not least, the bug was in a particularly hammy photogenic mood as we got home last night so I took some spring pictures with the obligatory stump picture. I should go back through the old posts to find other pics of her on the stump just to show how fast she’s growing, it’s amazing how much just since I started this blog…

Well, busy week coming and weather promises a bike ride… hopefully another week won’t past before I get around to posting again.

Good News Or Bad?…

So Sofia and I were at a local nursery this weekend to get a butterfly bush for Mom’s birthday. Over the last few years I’ve heard over and over (not only from potters) that the cheap imported pots, big pots and little ones too, that nurseries and places like Garden Ridge sell are so inexpensive that US potters couldn’t possibly compete. I believed this implicitly and still do believe it but I honestly never really went around looking at the prices. So we were at the nursery (I wish I had my camera with me) and amongst the peonies which were on low tables the top of a large jar poked it’s head out… it was probably 40 – 45 inches tall, relatively narrow, had 4 very crudely formed loops around the rim, and was glazed with a glossy bluish glaze. I reached down to see what they were charging with my prejudgment about cheap imports in the back of my head, thinking 150 – 200 dollars maybe… but what do I know?, like I said I usually don’t pay attention and it was 1000.00… actually 999.99. I thought this was wrong and asked a woman that worked at the nursery and she said “yes, that’s right, it’s Vietnamese”. I said I was surprised and she said “oh, I’ve heard the clay they use is glorious”. I thought wow, glorious? So, good news or bad? This was not a corporate run nursery, it was a local one and they had similar pots scattered throughout the place. Are there really that many people paying a grand for a mediocre pot to put in their garden? I’ve got nothing but questions. Anyway, we came home and planted the butterfly bush and some Korean avocado squash (I hear their squash is glorious) in the front yard… hopefully the squirrels will leave them alone, wishful thinking I know. Here’s another drawing and another bowl…

If I Had A Hammer…

I’d ask Dad a hundred times what I could hammer. Can I hammer the porch, can I hammer the sidewalk, can I hammer the floor, can I hammer the books, can I hammer the couch, can I hammer the stairs?… you get the idea. We settled on the stump and the sidewalk. In the background is a bit of what happens when a ’93 Taurus peeks it’s nose out in front of a late model Chevy Suburban whose driver is on the phone. Here’s a pic that says…”don’t get between me and Thor’s trusty ballpeen.”

We went to visit some lifelong friends who happen to have some antiques at their home and what do you think they had? One of these…

This is a box for transporting bees with a small compartment on the top to segregate the queen bee from the swarm/part of swarm. The only thing I’ve seen nowadays that’s similar is if you get bees in the mail, the container is wire mesh stapled on a wooden frame with a little open wooden compartment for the queen… not nearly so nicely made. On the way home, we got held up by a train. We never mind this because Sofia and I have been admiring the nice drawings on the side of the train since she was very young… of course you get what you get, sometimes not much but every now and then a real winner. This day was different because I had a camera with me. But alas, it was a mediocre train graffiti-wise. Not to make something out of nothing but even the tags that aren’t particularly beautiful (I understand I may be in a minority here) mostly display a quality of certainty of mark making that sometimes makes me envious. This also coincides with a concept put forth in a book called “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell which I read about on Scott Cooper’s blog that talks about The 10,000 Hour Rule. Apparently suggesting that 10,000 hours is a threshold which distinguishes elite musicians from very good ones. I doubt that these graffiti persons have necessarily logged 10,000 hours but they sure have made the same image many many times and the result, aside from the image itself, displays this confident certainty that I mentioned. Anyway… maybe I just dig graffiti on trains…

Love This Drawing…

I wish I could get her to draw these on my pots… it would be great.

This is what’s left when you’re trimming and you forgot that pot was the extra thin one. I flipped it over and this neat little circle fell out.

Look At The Size Of That Ear

Here’s another collaboration effort… I found a larger pad of paper so I can scribble happily away on one side while the really cool stuff is happening everywhere else. This is my favorite so far.

Collaboration…

More drawings of ballerinas and pots… they’ve become collaborative at this point and if one looks at the progression, one can see that the pots are starting to like more like cartoon heads than pots. Sofia was halfway to what I believe is a “regent”-style moustache and got distracted I guess.