Blast Mats

I mentioned that I love the snow. But do you know what I also love? The sun. I'm so ready for sun and blue skies!! All of my recent pictures are white. I need some variety. So I've dug through my Maine photos and pulled up these blast mat photos. No sunshine, but woven tires are pretty cool.

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.

Seaweed

Early Fall on Cadillac Mountain

Least Sandpiper?

This cute little guy joined me in an evening low tide stroll. He didn't seem to mind my being there. He just kept walking along picking up treats to eat. I think he's a Least Sandpiper but that's just a guess.

Back to Work

Now that I'm back from Maine it's time to get ready for my show at Fleisher in January. But first I installed all my drawings from Maine. I wanted to see everything I'd done and, um, I wanted to stall a little before getting back to work. Or maybe the word is transition. I wanted to transition from sitting outside all day watching the ocean crash against the rocks and birds float in quiet ponds to sitting at my sewing machine in my studio in the dark rain that fell for two days. And for good measure I also installed some of the works from last years Arizona trip. Then finally there was nothing left to do but get back to work.

(Top photo drawings from Maine, bottom photo on the right drawings from Arizona)

Surprise!

I'm at home now. It's going to take me awhile to sort through all of my images. After three weeks using various borrowed computers it's very nice to be back to my own.

The trash dumpster at Schoodic was a Fort Knox-like affair. You absolutely need an opposable thumb to open the door. It's clearly labeled with multiple signs warning you not to forget to close it up.





So imagine my surprise when I opened it up to find these guys! I'm not sure how they got in. The front lid looked a little more beat up so I think they shimmied in that way.

Artist in Residence

I haven't shown many images of what I've been drawing all this time. So here is a peek at my living space and the works I've made while on residency at Acadia National Park, Schoodic Penisula.

Common Ground in Unity, Maine

Friday we went to the Common Ground Country Fair in Unity, Maine. We saw all sorts of interesting things. Arts, crafts, grasses, wool, etc.



Guys with big muscles wielding axes.




Dogs herding sheep and, um, ducks.





Yummy veggies of gargantuan proportions.

I always love a good cabbage.

Farm animals of all sorts.

We drove home through a light, beautiful fog. My last weekend in Maine off to a good start.

A Few Things to Love About Maine

These purple tinted flowers are one of many types of wildflower blooming this fall. You find them in the most surprizing places, tucked in the forest or hanging on for dear life on windblown rock ledges.



A spider web catching the sunlight over the ocean.



And the adorable porcupines here, there, and everywhere.

Fixing Dinner

It was good to see a seagull acting like a wild animal. I tried to get an image of the seaweed pod droping onto the rocks. He was working very hard to get something tasty out of it.

This guy, on the other hand, appears to be DROOLING in anticipation of some food he thinks I have. Again. Oil pastels are NOT edible.

Waves

I started this post a few days ago when I thought this was a wave. I thought it was cool that I could see the seaweed in the wave.

Now I know that THIS is a wave:

Tide Pools

This is how you tide pool:



This is what you see:

Eider Duck Etc.

The eider ducks are in the process of changing into their winter coats. I've seen hundreds of them floating in the ocean but it's tricky to get close enough for a good shot.

I think this is some kind of Teal. But I'm really not sure. It's hard to get an idea of scale but they were pretty small ducks.