While I'm on this track - two more Calla Lily variations -

Calla Deco

Calla Day

Catching up - the top image was in the online gallery of last year's CPA juried show. Both started with pictures of a calla lily and sunset taken with an old iPhone and manipulated in Photoshop CS2. 

A Leonardo-like version of Michael's Hill.

How'd I Do It?

As daughter Sue announced to friends on Facebook, an image of mine is in the Juried Exhibition at The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel. It was great to have her there at the opening, mirroring back all the happiness I was feeling.

How did I do it? I'm just very lucky. I like what someone wrote in the press release - that 'the works represent experiments, trends and currents coursing through the photography world'. 

How did I make this image? It was all done with my iPhone. I photographed an old gouache from my sketchbook of a view from a Big Sur window and used several apps to get an effect I might have painted. 

Yesterday I heard that my first art professor at Oberlin died this summer. My parents had met in art school, so I had not been without instruction and too much 'help' on school projects, but college was my first time in any sort of class. What I didn't realize then was that since his career had been delayed by a stint in the army, Drawing 101 that year, '46, was also Paul Arnold's first class. I don't know where I expected we would start, but certainly not with the bicycle he wheeled into the center of the studio.
                                             
This is a screen-grab of an image I found when I Googled bicycle. It may be close to the concept I had then of 'bicycle', but was not the view I got from my stool - so - - -
It would be nice to think I 'got it' that day–that you really need to look hard at things to draw them. But that was then, and what I thought a lot about yesterday was that he should have just wheeled that thing in every day until I/we did get it. I don't remember any other days except that first one.

Some evenings there is pink like this.

A few evenings ago

I thought this screen-grab on my iphone might apply someday, as today when I'm wondering if I can still make the trip to Big Sur.

With mention of my blogspot appearing today in the Focus newsletter for the Center for Photographic Art where I am the featured volunteer this month, I am spurred to post more than sporadically and change my 'focus' to a gallery. So - where to start again?

This is from a project based on Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - added after seeing yesterday's post at A Year with Rilke: Birdsong.

You've heard of -

- - - people eating the ears off chocolate Easter bunnies. 

Some context: The duck, squirrel. owl, cat and bear remain intact in a Pacific Grove yard.

Easter in the 40's -

- - - in Lakeside, Ohio.  Mother was so proud of us!

Superman - Favorite story of the day

I love the image of this man flying in the storm and keeping his eyes open to see it all.

from Berger's To the Wedding - (earlier post)

I like quoting ancient verses when the occasion is apt . . . and I listen all day but sometimes I do not know how to fit everything together. When this happens I cling to words or phrases which seem to ring true.

Foreword from Ian McEwan's Black Dogs

and from Franzen on writing what you know:

"What else are you going to write about: The problem is figuring out what you know.

Well, it's been awhile. As someone said, "If it turns out to be not worth doing, I haven't done it."

Cover of book by John Berger

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. Henry David Thoreau

from notes on another book of his. . . bride immediately transformed into a stranger. . . newcomer. . . from over horizon. . . veiled

Beginnings are always delightful; the threshold is the place to pause. Goethe, quoted in:

The book begins:

It is [almost] June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today . . .

If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself . . . Perhaps . . . Maybe the shadows will suffice, the light and the shade . . .

So,

I begin again . . .

on my pile of 'yellowing incompletes'

like those of the 'hesitant intellectual' she described, whose 'years fly by like a day'. . .

Tuesday I was going to say, "Yesterday I had tea and cherry-cheese Danish at Carolyn Berry's. She invited me to see the 'altered' book on Rauschenberg that she had just finished before she sent it off to her agent". This is the fabric cover and another quilt section.

Yesterday I watched the live feed of the Hornby Eagles on WILDEARTH.TV. I was lucky to see the baby fed after one parent returned to the nest and the other flew off. Today the chick is already obviously larger and more active. The other egg will probably not hatch.

The view with coastline and sounds of activity at houses below made it feel like being on the ridge in Big Sur.

The 4th of July rose by the front door is bursting into bloom