Happy Halloween

And for Halloween, some masks from a visit I made to the University of Oklahoma several years ago. Detailed photos of Olivia's movable wings to follow.

Commute Curiosities

More of the things I drive past on my way home from the studio.

Almost Home

Murals Under the Highway

I'm determined to pay more attention to the weird, quirky things Philadelphia has to offer. I've been driving through these murals on my way home lately. Yesterday I had my camera AND no one was behind me!

Stuff

Yesterday I took my sewing machine in for repair. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they can fix it. I spent most of the rest of the day driving around enjoying the fall colors.

Tree

I've been painting a lot of trees for the past...oh I don't know...three years. This photo is from 2006. I'm digging through the "archives" again since I haven't taken very many photos this week. Anyway I'm thinking I need to take this photo to the studio.

Looking Up

Guidelines

Blimp flew past my studio

Memory Lane circa 2002

I photograph almost every painting I make. I try to keep them in albums but since I've gone digital they are primarily on the computer. I go through them every now and then. Usually it cheers me up to see how far I've come. Today I found the experience kind of painful. Partly because some of them are so bad and partly because I really love them. Sort of in the way one might love an mean, ugly dog, but still it's love. This painting was born, grew up, and died in a fairly short period of time. I used to think I killed it but I think the truth is more complicated. There are bits and pieces in each phase that I really love. And since we're looking at the photographs and not the actual paintings, I yearn for them. Seriously, I want it back, especially the second to last image with the legs and black dog shapes. I know that I got rid of it all for good reason but right now, looking at them again, I miss them.

Phase 1


Phase 2


Phase 3






Phase 4


Phase 5




Phase 6

Fall

Robins

More images from our Columbus Day hike around Heinz NWR. We saw hawks flying through the trees, bald eagles soaring over the water, flocks of various song birds (i.e. we couldn't identify them), lots of water birds- herons, egrets, geese, and several types of ducks. These robins were pretty much the only good bird photos I took. I'm calling them good because they are pretty. Besides you already know what a robin looks like.

Run!

I looked down from taking a picture of this tree just in time to see this guy run across the road. He didn't quite look like a ground hog to me but I think that's what he is because my research indicates that muskrats have scaly tails. So maybe he's just a baby.



Here he is pretending I can't see him.

Hiking Heinz

Olivia and I took a long walk around the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge. It was a beautiful, warm day and lots of birds and animals were out enjoying it. Just as we got back to the parking lot we saw two young deer.





After nibbling his way out of the brush this guy snuck past me. I could have reached out and touched him as he went by. Just after passing me he took off like a shot.

Free Time

The "I-can't-remember-if-I've-told-you-this" syndrome is hitting my blog. Usually it just crops up in conversation. Some people answer "yes" to this question before I've quite finished asking it and LONG before I said what I was going to say. Hmm.

But anyway, last year Olivia brought a friend to the studio. The friend walked into my studio, looked around and said, "WOW! You must have A LOT of free time."

So for lack of a better explanation, I used my "free time" to take several thousand photos in Maine. Several hundred of these photos were of eider ducks. A few of them are of the ducks doing something other than floating and a few of those were close enough to actually see. So here they are.

Illusions of Solitude

I don't know what category these growths fall into, mold, fungus, lichen, all of the above??? But they are amazingly varied and very beautiful. These all come from the top of Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island in Maine. I visited the Mountain several times while I was in Maine. It was always horded with people. This time my friend and I found a path that no one else was on. It's so much more fun to be the only people in the wild. Okay. It's so much more fun to maintain the illusion of being alone in the wild. Tour buses full of people make that illusion hard keep up but this time we pulled it off.

...

I should have kept track of how many needles I've broken on this thing. Suffice it to say that I broke 8...yesterday. I ambitiously hoped to be done sewing today. Unfortunately 5 hours of sewing and cutting produced...5 inches. So...it might be a few more days and probably next week. I'm in love with it but once they get so big and heavy it's a major pain to sew more rows. As a result I can't wait to finish sewing and start drawing on it.

The Beautiful Sky

Wednesday was a great day to take pictures. The sky put on a beautiful show. The first two photos are from my garden in the early morning. (Well, technically those flowers were my neighbors garden...) The third was late afternoon. I missed a whole bunch of great images in the middle of the day because I made myself do other things. sigh.

Seaweed

Early Fall on Cadillac Mountain