late afternoon lighted river birches in the winter treeline

I suppose you have your own idea/image of a treeline with river birches lighted by the late afternoon sun.  You can conjure your own image now;  my image follows the mourning dove painting below.

a mourning dove returned last week

Mourning doves come and go in our yard during the winter.  We hadn't seen any for awhile.  This dove came around last week to feed on the seed I'd scattered on the ground, but also appeared later on the deck rail, turned into the west-blowing wind, turned toward the window where I watched.  Here I've sketched the mourning dove on a branch, turned.  Pastel, charcoal, graphite, and gouache are in the sketch.  The size, 5x5 inches, is the same as dove-images at Toughdoves.com.  Maybe this mourning dove will become a Toughdove.

river birches, winter (spring)

If your eyes move fore-to-aft, side-to-side, color-to-color here, good, I'm glad.  The sun was setting and highlighting the river birches, but also there was somehow a bit of spring-coming in the site, in the sight.  I tried to get some sense of that spring-titillation.   Does this image at all merge with your own of river birches in a treeline?

january, park

I was the only one there.  Not even a squirrel appeared.

A highway is just beyond the trees; there is an orange plastic snowfence sprawling just left of view.  My thumbnail sketch from this site is quite active--lots of pencil marks and instructions.

Some of the quiet of the place has come through in this pastel-on-paper version that I did later in the day.

january, path

We have had a lot of powder-light snow this winter.  Yesterday, some more came down.  This pastel sketch, though done quickly, recalls a still, quiet place, west of town.

wonderful Ivo's poem

Look at this wonderful poem that Ivo sent us for the new year. It is so light-stepping amid thought thickets:


To think is: to show, to let appear

But not in figures, forms of sound and light—
It’s to go back into the very letting

Which is when anything appears—
For this appearing. What is

Toward appearing is: a Weirdness
Suffering whose truth is—thinking, is

Smartness that soothes the steep
Weirding of the Weird—(open: “majestic”)—

Whose instress is sheer (nothing but)
Parting: Stillness returning

Falling to itself, mildly: the one and only
Irrevocable Gift. Thanking which

Is thinking: foundering answer, There to the
Silently greeting

Towardness in all “shows itself.”
                                                                        -Ivo De Gennaro   ©


Ivo lives in a mostly German-speaking part of Italy. Still, his English is good, really good. How to account for Ivo’s jokes in English/ about English, like firecrackers in our conversations when he visited? Lighting up words in such a way, he must just delight much in them!

By the way: the “weirdness,” Ivo tells M, gets to a thought thought in German. And “instress,” yes, he tells M, is from Gerard Manley Hopkins. I think “majestic” is a generous nod to my New Year’s blog entry. And I think Ivo’s poem resonates with JT’s poem (in the December 13 blog entry). Do you “see” this too, and, also, more?

Happy Birthday Jack Levine

January 9th is Jack Levine's 95th birthday.  Jack is a great painter.  I've followed his work and visited him infrequently ever since, years ago, I apprenticed with Ruth, a terrific painter, Jack's wife, Susanna's mother.

An exhibition of Jack's paintings will open at DC Moore Gallery in New York City:  this Saturday, January 9, is the opening reception and celebration of his birthday.  Let us honor him and (re)view his awesome works, in museums of many of the cities of the world or, for now:  dcmooregallery.com/levine.htm.  Cheers, Jack!

winter, majestic

deer in winter

The winter can be carried majestically.

Find your majesty, en JOY .

winter

Mergence has been a motif in the last few blogs, and also memory. Winter often blurs the land and the sky; snow can make the sky and land snow. Of course. These snow-made mergences can make a still scene moving.

The images here are mostly pastel, many-layered, on paper.

JT's gift

Here is a wonderful work by JT, a quiet, small, bright good-friend.
in those rare moments,
      of unexpected clarity
when we and what we see merge,
and we cannot later describe the sensation,
      not even to ourselves,
in those transient moments--
      the iris, the sunset, the ocean wave
      and we become one--
we glimpse the center
from which we have fallen away.

no act of courage or kindness
      can restore us to our home,
only longing--the common stream
      where our thirst was born.

©

blizzard

goldenrod

We are in the midst of a blizzard here. Autumn, any vestige of its color, is gone.

birdwoman

Lorrie Moore writes, with some passages of woman-bird transmergence, about a breakup at the end of her story, "Willing." Haughty, distressed Sidra gives up on a waffling Walter. The tawdry scene is relieved for us by the words themselves. Gosh.

She sat down on the piano bench. Something dark and coagulated moved through her, up from the feet. Something light and breathing fled through her head, the house of her plastic-wrapped and burned down to tar. She heard him give a moan, and some fleeing hope in her, surrounded but alive on the roof, said perhaps he would beg her forgiveness. Promise to be a new man. She might find him attractive as a new, begging man. Though at some point, he would have to stop begging. He would just have to be normal. And then she would dislike him again.

He stayed on the sofa, did not move to comfort or be comforted, and the darkness in her cleaned her out, hollowed her like acid or a wind. . . .

. . . he was saying. But she was already turning into something else, a bird--a flamingo, a hawk, a flamingo-hawk--and was flying up and away, toward the filmy pane of the window, then back again, circling, meanly, with a squint. . . . and she was gone, gone out the window, gone, gone.

Lorrie Moore's book of short stories where "Willing" appears is titled Birds of America.

albino bird, sparrows, and red-headed woodpecker

albino bird among sparrows

Some birds are more special than others.

Red-headed woodpecker, whenever he appears in our yard, stops me cold, for a good long time I watch.  Fred Astaire in a smartly tailored tuxedo and bright red fez of the bird world. Simply stunning.

For the second year, albino bird has come into our yard, flitting and pecking around the feeders in the company of sparrows. Albino is slender and slightly dun on the head, blackless on the primary featheres and tail--surely not a Bunting then, and probably a female. Probably a "partial albino," because her eyes and beak are not red or pink. She is not bullied, as some odd birds are; she seems to be another sparrow. Except that she is a special bird. My eyes go to the sparrows around her only to compare: is she slightly larger? does she feed, does she move in the same way as the sparrows? I look for her in the yard, and when weeks, months, go by I wonder if she is lost. My spirit hops when she reappears.

Here is a little painting I have done of albino bird (white sparrow) among the sparrows. It is gouache and graphite and pastel on paper.

Sketches of Red-headed woodpecker and white sparrow are in the next (previous) blog entry. These sketches are lost, try as I might to find them. At least I have the photos. Still, I will have some bit of joy to see the originals again, if they reappear.

lost and found backyard birds

To be explained tomorrow, these sketches of a Red-headed woodpecker and a white sparrow?. Come again?