An Independent Nature...

This 4th of July celebration was spent well outside my city limits. I ventured west to my brother's house and enjoyed a real neighborhood celebration. It was an amazingly different experience for me. It was Urban Americana at it's surreal best.

The neighbors all had the BBQ set up with lawn chairs in place for their little neighborhood fireworks display. Cute kids ran about like fireflies. Each man of the household pulled from their own bounty of fireworks as they took turns one-upping each other with lighting the next round. Not even a slow steady rain would slow them down. It took a brave old toad hopping through their battlefield to provoke a time-out. The rain continued, but it was my brother, the one who hangs with the Mensa crowd, who got under a big black umbrella as he lit one of the ‘big ones’. My brother is not a quitter. He played his best game. I believe he won the game with this move, sadly no one noticed due to all the smoke and rain.

As I left a few hours later, I paused to take in the quiet clean air, however it was thick with the most intense sounds from the neighboring nature. Frogs, crickets and birds, all boldly celebrating independence.



(My little American sparrow drawn as vectored lineart in Illustrator - 2009)

Possums...

...made with using an old wool sweater, some scrap fleece, yarn, thread and lovingly stuffed with bamboo fiber-fill. Shown here from two angles; it's a stuffed possum I made for my youngest nephew.

'Possum' was his nickname before his birth. Thankfully now, he's too cute to keep that name.

Most Resourceful Art...

Another week has passed with no time to create any thing new as there’s been some paying work around, cluttering up my world. With all that clutter about, I just fell in love with this piece of art made from someone cleaning up the area's trash. It was recently posted on the Wooster Collective (http://www.woostercollective.com).

The resourceful artist, Jim Darling, was perhaps a Bower bird in a former life.

The male Bower birds gather all sorts of found objects into collections that decorate their unusual nests. Many fancy bits of bright or shiny litter add something special to the mix...



Andy Goldworthy is the most famous of former-life Bower birds...


I don't know that he's ever worked with litter, however he's cleverly resourceful with just some icicles and spit...

And of course he is the master of building cairns...


There's a mysterious cairn builder here in town. As I drive west to the county on Hwy 44 each week, I've been watching a growing group of cairns perched on a bluff. The location's too precarious a spot to stop and snap a photo, but it does look a lot like this group found in Canada.


Now, if "we" can just be as "Darling-ly" creative with our local litter.

Mine...

...I bought this because I love the honesty of it's story.


It was painted by my dear old friend, David Classe´. It tells his story.

Pick 3... Any 3.

Drawing live portraits can be most awkward.

An older man once hired me to draw his portrait. As I was starting, he whispered to me instructions to leave out his double chins. I did. He was happy and paid me very well. It looked nothing like him.


This girl's portrait was from my 3-color phase. I would draw using only the three colors the subject chose. I liked the openness it allowed me. Besides, if I didn’t do such a great job with capturing their likeness – at least they liked the colors.

The Monster Behind the Bar...

I worked thirteen years at the Broadway Oyster Bar, seeing it through three ownerships. I fell madly in love with the place from the very first time I walked through the door and had to step over a dog sleeping in front of a glowing fireplace. There was a black and white cat hanging out on the bar. Her name was Pearl and she lived there. The Oyster Bar suddenly became the axis of my world.

The place had real character and soul. Burkhardt had started the bar with a solid foundation of amazing characters. He was the Piped Piper of building bars, and his following consisted of writers, poets, artists, musicians, carpenters, rivermen, smugglers and a real life, rail-riding hobo, named Smokey Joe.

Burkhardt called me one day and asked me to take over his shifts. It was his birthday and he didn’t want to work the bar any more, he just wanted to build them. I was 22 years old.

I would always hold great respect for those regulars, soaking in their tales while becoming more aware of the old soul deeply embedded in the place. The building itself was really old. It seemed to carry a good energy within it’s 150-year-old walls. Sadly the wall that held the back bar was later dismantled and moved back a few feet by ownership #4. Nice folks, who just wanted to gain more space, but ended up releasing the spirit that was once a part of Burkhardt’s Oyster Bar, that indescribable feeling of soul when you walked through the door.



This drawing, a self-portrait, was done one night as I attempted to wind down from a shift tending bar. It was around the beginning of the Broadway Oyster Bar era, (ownership #2), where business was tighter and money was being made. We were getting busier every day. The baseball crowd found out about us despite the lack of signage. The place was really changing and so was I. I had quit smoking and drinking because I was pregnant. My whole being was evolving towards its motherly side and it was a strict mother. We were busy enough without having to scold folks for messing with the trees, climbing the fence and just being rude. I was becoming the monster behind the bar.

The Delmar Forsyth Line...

Our local transit system's recent cutbacks have reminded me of the days when I had weathered through their limited routes...

There was a time when I depended entirely upon the city’s mass transit system. I lived in Lafayette Square and worked out in U-City. I would take my two buses to get to work however the system would shut down before midnight, leaving me stranded half way home so I had to improvise. I would simply ride one bus all the way downtown and walk across town to my favorite dive bar. But this required a game plan to to stave off the possibility of any trouble.

My plan was simply a three-foot long, cardboard box filled with freshly popped popcorn. Of course! I worked at the coolest movie theatre in town and would box up the leftovers in one of the long, narrow boxes that the cups came in. I carried this along with my sketchbook and newspaper. The bus rides weren’t bad, I learned quickly to avoid making eye contact. My concern was the walk late at night when all the bad guys were out cruising the mean streets of our deserted city. Ahh, but I took comfort with my plan. Should someone bother me I planned on bashing them about the head with the cardboard box. I pictured popcorn flying everywhere that would instantly startle them, allowing me time to quickly run away! Surely they would leave the crazy girl alone. It tied in perfectly with the fact folks at the bar were eagerly awaiting the delicious popcorn each night and would take notice if I didn’t show up.

Such a beautifully brilliant plan which I never got to try out.



This is one of my rough sketches from the Delmar-Forsyth line.