Autumn Equinox

Transit of Venus 12 X 12

Autumn is here; I can feel it in the twilight crispness of the air, as I sit beside the pond at the end of the day. I can see it under the bright harvest moon that lights the way for the bunnies to eat our newly planted fall garden.



For me, last week was a time of gathering and celebrating. On Friday I attended the 20th Anniversary Reception at the Pryor Fine Art on Bennett Street. The show featured the work of Susie Pryor and doubled as a benefit for Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. A portion of the proceeds from pre-sales and the first week’s sales were donated to CHCOA. Susie, whose work you can see here is one of my very favorite contemporary American artists. Her new paintings, which incorporate broad brush strokes and lush palette knife work, depicts a variety of subjects including children, coastal scenes, and still lifes. She manages to capture that world between abstraction and reality that I so love. This is one of my favorites of her new paintings.



Make a Wish 60 X 48

And then, on Saturday, I treated myself to an all-day workshop with Melissa Payne Baker at the Sandy Springs School of Art. I had been a fan Melissa's bold colorful abstracts for some time, and, when she announced that she would be teaching a class called "Loosen Up With Melissa Payne Baker," I knew I had to go. I spent the day watching Melissa paint, learning how to use a palette knife, and just generally having fun with the other talented women in the class. You can see Melissa giving us a demonstration below:




and here's one of her new pieces:


Paysage II 30 X 40

On Sunday, I spent the day working on the two large pieces that I started in class, and I finished the small one that you see at the top of this post. Actually, that one was done at the last minute, before my son's birthday celebration Sunday night. I realized that I'd been so busy all weekend that I hadn't made him a card, like I usually do, so, inspired by the moon and the magic of Melissa and Susie, I painted this for him.


Autumn is a season of ripe beauty, a season of myriad colors, a season of abundance and balance and gratitude. Autumn is


"A brimming of golden sweetness in your dreaming eyes
Fills the world with the beauty of a realm divine,
The sun's last rays serenely trickle from your purple skies:
I send my love and song and call your blessings mine."

Abhinabha

Grace

This entry is for Mixed Media Monday's Nature Challenge and also for Collage Play With Crowabout. It also works for My Time To Craft Animal Antics. This is really more about redemption than nature. We make messes of our lives. Perhaps that is the nature of things. We try our best to be good people and to do the right thing, and, though we often succeed, we inevitably mess up. We hurt other people; we hurt ourselves. We succumb to weakness, to greed, to self-indulgence, to addiction. We try to fix things ourselves, but it seldom works for very long. My father told me once that he tried, unsuccessfully, for a long time, to fix his life. He thought that he had enough strength to overcome the addiction that cost him twenty five years of frustration, failure, and, eventually, his family. During those years he was a miserable, angry, explosive man. At some point it dawned on him that he could not repair himself. He told me that it was a huge blow to his ego to admit that he did not possess the strength of character to be the man he wanted to be. So he asked God to help him, and God did. Daddy found AA and a group of men that he sheepishly called his "support group." He spoke with great humility about being part of this group, but he was really very proud to belong.

Daddy never wanted to be a bad man. He always wanted to do the right thing, and he often did. But he hurt people; he ruined a marriage, and he alienated everyone who ever loved him. He struck fear to the hearts of two little girls who wanted just to adore him.

He got a second chance because he told God that he wasn't strong enough to fix his life all by himself. The last fifteen years of his life were the happiest. It wasn't easy for him, and he was never a perfect man, but during those years, he changed. I never again saw his anger. He was there whenever I needed him: for celebrations and for sad times. He was there for me when my husband had cancer, and he jumped in his truck to drive three hours, when he had leukemia himself, to pick my sons up at the hospital and comfort them. I could count on him, and his grandchildren adored him. He took them sailing and to the fair; he taught them about computers and Ham radios, and he bought them fireworks and Christmas trees. They were never afraid of him.

I don't know exactly whom or what I have faith in. I call it God, for lack of a deeper understanding. But I know my faith is unshakable. I believe in miracles because life has taught me to. My father could not do for himself what he knew he needed to do. He asked for help; he was redeemed and it was a miracle.

Patient Magic

This collage is for the Mixed Media Monday "Generations Challenge" and for the My Time To Create "Red, Black, and White Challenge" AND for the Arty Girlz ongoing "Rycycling Challenge." Several years ago my father-in-law, Ira, who was my favorite person in the world, gave me a stack of magazines from 1905-1908. Ira was always inviting me to go up in the attic or dig through a jewelry box and find something pretty to take home. The art and ephemera in these vintage magazines is just gorgeous. I thought about framing each individual issue, but there's so much inside that would be wasted. Finally, when I started making collages, it occurred to me that I could copy and use the images and still leave the magazines intact. So, here's my first collage using the cover of The Burr McIntosh Monthly from July, 1908. I chose this lady because she's a natural Zetti model. I brightened her color a bit with Prismacolor pencils, and I used bits of leftover scrapbook papers from my scrap stash drawer. Many other pieces in the border were snipped from various design magazines. When Ira lived with us, we watched a lot of Gunsmoke and Andy Griffith, and often I'd sit cutting and pasting on the floor in front of his recliner. He always seemed to get a kick out of what I made, and one afternoon he said, You are such a girl!" I wish Ira were still here to see what he inspired. He would be so tickled.

The Spy Who Loved Me (or How To Put the Fun Back in Dysfunction)

During the Cold War, spies were all the rage. There was James Bond, The Man From Uncle, and Maxwell Smart. There was Emma Peel, Agent 99, and Jethro, the Double-Naught Spy, but, most notorious of all, was XLo05. Ava and I had a slightly dysfunctional, somewhat unpredictable, magically creative childhood. The magically creative parts were due to one lovely, irreverent crazy woman we fondly call "Mother." Other mothers in the '60's, were known as "Mama" or "Mom," but our grandfather insisted that we address her by the very formal "Mother." There was little else formal about her, except, perhaps, her manners. Almost all of her other appellations, suited her better. There was "Pot," (a nickname given her by her sorority sisters in college, mysterious because it was a decade too early to have today's connotation). Then, there was the affectionate "Nan-nan," a name I invented as a toddler, attempting to pronounce her real name, Katherine Ann. This was also the name her grandchildren would be allowed to call her, since my grandfather wasn't around to encourage the use of the very proper title "Grandmother." To her high school students, she was "Flash Gordon," the hip, five-time Star Teacher of Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, romantic poetry and American transcendentalism, yearbook sponsor, Scholastic Bowl coach, and stage director of high school theater and beauty pageants.

But to Ava and me, behind closed doors, she was.....XLo05! On muggy summer afternoons, when it got too hot to read or decoupage purses in the carport or even run through the sprinkler, she would beckon us into her bedroom, turn on her window unit, shut the door, and dole out a strange blue candy we'd never before seen. The candy looked like Jolly Ranchers, but Jolly Ranchers didn't come in that color. No matter how we begged, she refused to tell us where she bought them. She remained enigmatic on that subject, and, with a barely straight face, she informed us we didn't have proper clearance. She would divulge the name of the candy, however: XLo05. In the murky underwater dimness of her bedroom, we whispered and giggled and gossiped. She told us stories of secret missions and dangerous feats in which we were the heroes; alter egos for the all of us were born; we were intrepid spies of international fame and fortune. On those afternoons, she was quite a different person, nothing at all like the other mothers we knew, who played Bridge and attended Junior Auxiliary meetings. She was a co-conspirator of silliness, a collaborator of folly, a spinner of tales of mischief and adventure. Behind her closed door, in the the damp frigid air of her bedroom, she created a secret triumvirate of superheroes. She instructed us in the martial arts of spreading magic and mirth throughout the universe. She gave us the armor of laughter and imagination. She made us believe we could do anything. We were undefeatable.