Miss Peach

Did any of you ever read the Miss Peach comic strip? Do you remember Arthur? Arthur's weed patch?

To my surprise, I could find no link to Arthur's weed patch online.

No matter.

I think I wandered into Arthur's weed patch this afternoon. Either there or into a neighborhood vacant lot with a few scraggly weeds and some litter … which is to say, into the littered vacant lot of my mind.

Great place to play! I added discarded items from other sources into the lot and fiddled around with arrangements and rearrangements. Will return tomorrow.

playing in a new patch,
work in progress within a work in progress

A Little Bit of a Hard Place

Once I'd set up what felt like a basic working structural composition for my Nova Scotia rocks, my sense of operating from a space between a rock and a little bit of a hard place dissipated and I just leapt from rock to rock intuitively to complete this piece.

newest patch in grid-format work-in-progress

newest patch, in the bigger picture;
working title: Core Values

newest patch, rotated;
undecided about my preference for orientation

Further Investigation

If my cursory online research is correct, one bit of the lexicon of Nova Scotia coastal poetry may read somewhat along these lines, like a science geek's jump rope song:

Arsenopyrite,
chalcopyrite,
dolomite,
ferberite,
galena, and
gold.

Greigite,
pyrite,
pyrrhotite, and
quartz.

Scheelite,
siderite,
sphalerite!

I follow a link to chalcopyrite (CuFeS₂) to see what more I can learn. Chalcopyrite is typically found as equant to wedge-shaped pseudo-tetrahedral dispenoidal crystals, often modified by tetragonal scalenohedral faces.

No wonder I was bowled over!

How to capture such wonder in paint?, I wonder.

And so I continue to investigate, hoping to find a balance between dollops of representational detail and passages of intuitive expression, hoping to share the feeling of being part of this poem one afternoon.

patch in progress on Core Values grid-format work-in-progress

Fissures

So much poetry in the dictionary entry for fissure:

a long, narrow 
opening 
or 
line of breakage 
made by 
cracking 
or 
splitting, 
especially in rock 
or 
earth. 

So much poetry in fissures themselves. Since my earliest days, I have been drawn to rock, drawn to the fault lines and fissures in rock. On vacation in the small village of Feltzen South in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, Canada, two summers ago, I was wowed by rock formations at Ovens Park. They were poems writ large.

So, I tape out a quadrilateral on my Core Values grid and get out ink and paint. Start working my way along.

tape out a quadrilateral in the grid,
lay in some lights and darks

add color

ink in some fissures

Who knew?

Remember that day last week when I felt like I had a mesh cage in my chest?

Look at what I discovered with a slight shift in perception.

took this

rotated it

ended up with this revised patch on my grid-format work-in-progress

detail from revised patch

revised patch in the 'big picture,'
working title: Core Values

Finger Painting

Had a whole bunch of ideas in mind when I headed for Core Values today. Most of 'em never saw the light of day.

But I had a good time working out the 'problems' that showed up in front of me. 

Did most of my color mixing right on the foam core, squeezing directly from paint tubes. Jumped ship on brushes just minutes in. Loved using my fingers instead to mix, blend, create soft transitions between values, push, dab, and spread.

taped off a double patch that had
some drips and collage in place from weeks ago,
did some mark-making with a black paint marker

started finger painting with reds and black

played with analogous colors,
scratched through to earlier layers with a metal skewer

added collage,
brought in some pastel line work,
got some interesting textural stuff going in the green-blue area
(but, really! what is it doing there?)

ta da!
newest (double) patch painted onto grid-format work-in-progress

detail from new patch

new patch in big picture,
working title: Core Values

Front Stoop Refreshment

SOOO lovely, after waking to the brittle fricative click-click of sleet on our skylights last Wednesday, to have the day warm enough by early afternoon that I could take myself outdoors to make finishing touches on my Core Values patch-du-jour while sitting on our front 'stoop.'

The fact that Core Values is by no means a lap-sized project? No matter.

Birdsong.

Fresh air.

Neocolor pastels softened by the sun.

Heaven.

newest patch painted onto grid-format work-in-progress

detail from patch

patch in the "big picture"—
working title: Core Values