Tradescantia, pedal pushers, and Rx victory

Yesterday finally, after eight days of back and forth and checking and pushing, and my referring eye doctor, not the one who was supposed to call in the Rx,  sternly telling me to keep calm (!) the Rx finally arrived. 

At least two of the three did, one back-ordered. So I can start breathing again. After this the actual procedure will probably be a lot less stressful. Anyway, so far so good. Handsome Son will pick up the stuff. 

This is also showing up in the groundcover, lovely spiderwort, aka tradescantia virginiana

Sparks of brilliant blue flowers. It's one of those flowers, like daylilies, you can either spot everywhere growing wild, or buy and plant. It's also one of many discoveries aka thefts, from the New World, made by John Tradescant, here

I love how solemnly they say he's the father of JT jr !  Anyway I'm glad the namers acknowledged Virginia in the name since that's where he plundered it from, back when Europeans thought the Americas were there for their browsing benefit, rather than the native land of ancient peoples.

And yesterday, largely as displacement activity before the arrival of the text about the Rx, I finally did one of those jobs you think about for months, nay, years,  then polish off in twenty minutes.

These are supposedly capris, but on arrival turned out to be more like high waters, brushing the top of my socks. I've been wearing them while planning to fix them.

Simple enough. Cut off several inches, hemmed up, done.  Much more useful now.

Then I finished the second sock of, I think, Pair Seventeen, did the finishing, and started sorting colors for the next. 

These have  shaker stitch tops, and an elastic insert to keep the shape,  so it doesn't stretch out in use.

I always mean to take an interval between pairs but once the needles are vacant suddenly need to fill them again.

A passage from The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas in progress, struck me as so applicable to studying the technique of art

It's about  familiarizing yourself with any artwork in order to really experience it.

I know writers who make a practice of writing out passages of favorite authors just for the insight into how they did it. It's done to learn, not imitate, like playing scales to develop finger expertise.

I've done it by copying Picasso drawings just to get into the vision and it's very demanding. You come away with such respect for the artist. Even copying is demanding, imagine conceptualizing in the first place. 

During the Fischer Spassky chess tournament, the games were published as played and Handsome Partner and I, chess players back then, replayed them as they came out, marveling at the insight and anticipation of each player. We were plumb wore out just replaying, never mind doing the actual original thinking.

Copying art for learning now and then is fine, but not for thinking you're making art. The art, all its life and energy, lies in the maker's original concept.  

Dusting off the teaching soapbox now and retiring it to the corner of the stable where my hobby horses live.

Maybe I'll stitch a bit of my vest while listening to a Mrs Pargeter audiobook today

I love Mrs Pargeter, so funny, and the cast of characters never fails. 

Art also, never fails to keep a person on the rails. Drawing, the guardrail of daily life.

Happy day everyone! Grateful for guardrails and the ability to know they're there.

Garlic, mystery trees, Textiles and Tea, and Larry

The garlic I planted outside is pushing up scapes, now that the indoor pot is done

Gary planted these, maybe peppers, outside the fence among the daylilies. I like a combo of food and flowers, too.

And the tree that was planted on the street to replace the dead maple needs a blogista to identify, please. I feel I should know it, but can't find it in my tree books. 

Pictures to show size against houses, foliage, bark. The leaves are purplish like my Japanese maple, but the leaves are not maple. The trunk looks like a cherry to me. No blossom. 

Any help gladly accepted by neighbor Karen and me.

But the tree books did come in handy as models for a few minutes of drawing 

Yesterday's Textiles and Tea featured Sarah Saulson, a weaver largely of commissioned Jewish prayer shawls , observing the ritual rules of the two thousand year tradition, while applying her own inventive design

She also creates other woven artworks such as these three pieces, retirement gifts for three physicists, each noting their key work in the field, using graphs from papers they'd written.

And garments like these

Where she paints the warp with dyes

She's also active with weavers in Ghana, Guatemala and India in the WARP (Weave a Real Piece) project where artists from different cultures and traditions work together. 

Here she's showing the strip weaving work of Guatemalan women, in their case to be worked on a backstrap loom

In the course of searching for the tree books, I came across an old book of Larry cartoons, had to share a few favorites

Happy day everyone. Yesterday a brave New Jersey lady testified in the January 6 hearings. Cassidy Hutchinson is from Pennington, a skip up the road from here. 

NJ sends many stars, Queen Latifa, Bruce, Bon Giovi, and writers, Joyce Carol Oates, John MsFee, sports stars, politicians, Booker, Katzenbach (stood up to Nixon) loads of great folks. Alas we also own Christie and Alito, further down the animal kingdom. 

But Cassidy may prove to be the greatest mover and shaker of all, if she brings down TFG. Let's hope.

Birthday drawing and other small things

Yesterday was a lovely day for sitting outside and drawing, cool, cloudy. And the daylilies are coming into bloom. They're a symbol of human and animal life -- each blossom lasts only a day, but there's a succession of them, and the parent plant goes on flourishing indefinitely.

So it seemed right to celebrate Handsome Partner's birthday with a drawing of a daylily he used to know, in my favorite drawing tool, the fine point black Pilot pen.

And while I was out there, to see this visitor on the marigolds

And a bee scoping out the daylily, huge area for him to work

While the self seeded Thai basil seedlings get to work

There's a lot of life in this little space

And while I'm still pursuing the eye doctor to get the Rx called in, hasn't happened yet, a week later,  stress levels high over this, I'm reading this

The cover image, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, is appropriate, since it's described early in the narrative though not by name, but unmistakably.  One of her deliberately naive passages.

I saw this painting many years ago at a joint Picasso/Braque exhibit at the old MOMA, and was stunned by its size and power. The color alone is enough to knock you down. 

In fact I had to go sit down to recover, and wasn't able to take in much of the rest of the huge, significant,  show.  

This is why I like to go to art exhibits alone, so I can leave when I can't take in any more, quite often after seeing only a couple of works, even if it was a long trip to get there. 

I can't wait for the new Princeton art museum building to be finished and opened, short trip to see small and wonderful exhibits, on a campus filled with great outdoor sculptures.

Still reading the Winterson art essays, and with a Maisie Dobbs audiobook to accompany Sock Ministry knitting.

Hoping for Rx success today..

Happy day everyone, press on, push voter registration and help the good guys, applaud the G7's clamping down on Russia's economy to help starve  terrorist Putin's armament funding.

Handsome Partner's birthday

A drawing I did of him sleeping, with his cat, in 2005. Sepia ink. 

This would have been his 90th birthday. I usually celebrate him today rather than the day he died, in 2011, since that was on our son's birthday in August, and I thought it should be kept as a happy day for Handsome Son .

Happy day everyone.

Photo AC.

Art does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.

Jeanette Winterson 

I'm reading this, gripped by her intensity and the honed-steel intelligence behind every word. 

It's hard to read for long because she keeps stopping me dead with the total accuracy of her observations. Like the one I used here as a title.

She knows writing  -- Oranges are not the only fruit, Why be happy when you can be normal, she's that Jeanette Winterson. And much more, dead-on brilliant, writing.

Here she's writing essays on art, starting with her own self-education in the visual arts, in which she honestly acknowledges being a beginner. But what a beginner! 

And her grasp of the history of art and literature is dazzling. Easy to follow but very much in-depth in its observations.

She reminds us that art and music we accept now in the canon was originally groundbreaking and caused ructions. Not because the makers wanted ructions. They were just doing their job.

We know the first French impressionists' exhibits were physically  threatened, critics hated and condemned them, screamed names at the artists. 

She doesn't mention the opening performance of The Rite of Spring, but it literally broke down into a riot. People get very upset at new stuff, you might say. 

Also at pictures that aren't a representation of something familiar, or tunes you can't sing to. Yet that's the job of art, not to confirm what we already know but to open new connections and possibilities. It's not about creating documentaries.

Every writer, any kind of artist with their own vision, in other words, doing their job, not just copying what's familiar, of any stature, even one as humble as your blog writer, has encountered ridicule,  all the way to scorn and furious opposition and who do you think you are.

Today's Twitter pile-ons are just the modern version. It's okay, it's a feature, not a bug. You don't need to bother about outside negative criticism, because you can supply plenty of self criticism any time. 

And artists are quite quick enough to jump on one another anyway, witness the parade of artists, Matisse, Braque etc who piled on Gertrude Stein because they claimed her Autobiography of Alice B Toklas was not factually correct about them! 

Failing to see the whole thing's a put on! And that literature can play fast and loose with shapes and concepts. Just like painting..oh.    A good bit of sexism there, too, I'm guessing.

Just read Winterson. She gets it. She's not angry, just explanatory, and very readable. 

And please share your opinions if you have read her.  I now own the Alice B Toklas on my Kindle at an amazing level of cheapitude. About time I read it.

Chop wood, carry water. Today was also about making a big pot of soup, which doesn't heat up the kitchen. 

Butternut squash, red lentils, carrots, the last couple of potatoes from last week, home made stock, milk added at the end. 

That day I spent sleeping also involved doing laundry and baking a batch of bread, seen here, the bread, that is. Wholewheat, white and oatmeal.

I'm now set with a week's worth of soup and bread and fruit.  I think I'll survive.

Still prey to nerves about the upcoming paperwork for the surgery, despite checking out yogic approaches to calm via the vagus nerve. 

I'm usually more stressed out about the location, finding it, and the administrivia, than the surgery. I have excellent doctors. My own clerical/technical skills maybe not so much. 

Since I have a complete set of vax and boosters, I don't need a Covid test before surgery. Just send a picture of the  certificate. Still don't have the eyedrop Rx. I'll check again tomorrow. I'll be getting a packet of info in a a couple of days to tell me all the procedure again that we went through on the phone.

This has completely overtaken the osteoporosis concerns about which I'm seeing a rheumatologist next week. This is shaping up to be the Summer of the Doctors.

Well, Winterson and soup kept me happily occupied today, so there's that. Art and good food.

Graphite sticks, sharpie, colored pencils, watercolor crayons.

Still we rise.

Happy day everyone!