Sabbatical Pleasures

Linocut #10, proof on newsprint, 2020

The studio is hot with ideas. I am painting and printing, photographing and drawing. This is a perfect time of complete isolation and generation. Away from everything I have time during my sabbatical to not only focus but have the thread of my ideas uninterrupted.

 

From the Archive

From the Archive, Found Poem #14, 2014

I’m sorting through things in order to make more space. My little house has no closets nor bookshelves, so I am in what feels like a perpetual state of reorganizing and sorting.  This is from a series of 20 Found Poems I completed the last winter I was in New York.  My cobbled together film camera, a Hassie, took some marvelous shots and I just used the contact prints.

Deoxyribonucleic Acid

Zach, Zip and Ruthie, 2020, Archival Digital Print

My geese are not even a year old but full of personality and distinctive traits. Like all living beings, DNA is far more powerful than we can reckon with or understand. For anyone who has spit into the tube or agreed to a mouth swab, the marvel we discover is how firmly our ancestry has stamped us.  I wonder at all those philanders of the past and how innocently they spread their seed never thinking that the chickens would come home to roost.

 

The New Year

The Pond, 2020, Archival Digital Print

I’m always relieved when the media’s looking back at the last year is finished and the year actually begins.  2019 was so productive, so full of new things and new experiences, that I’m looking forward to it continuing.  Just adjusting my point of view changes things.  I rarely think to walk to the other side of my pond.  Usually I think about it in the summer when it is a lush tangle of plants and thick undergrowth.  So I don’t bother.  But, yesterday I took advantage of the frozen growth and the felled dried plants and decided to walk around the pond to look across at my homestead.  Just seeing it from a few yards away at a new angle was so pleasant.  How beautifully sited it is!

The pond is no longer frozen for this interlude before the deep cold returns.  The Solstice has been crossed and now the days will start to get longer. Of course I dream for spring.