Easter, Flowers wild and domesticated and loosing Tom

 Busy when spring comes we get going after our extra long snowy winter. Gardens perk up and the trees start to flower and Easter gives us a chance to get together with family for good food and company. We visited my mother and brother in Virginia for a night and saw a pretty sunset, ate home made coconut cake among other goodies and enjoyed the great tulips, flowering dogwood and, redbud in the yard. Mom always decks the halls for the season...

 Keith had a nice piece in the third week of the Ikebana exhibition at the Bonsai Museum so we took a minute to go see the wild flowers over in the Fern Valley Forest of the Arboretum. Virginia Blue bells, white and red Trillium, Yellow Rue and Trout Lilies were all flowering and the fiddle heads of ferns were unfurling. A chance sighting of a ground hog in the hollow was a treat and a chance to try my new camera's zoom lens. I was over 100 feet away and got his head in my view finder. These woodland wild flowers bloom and vanish so quickly you have to race out to see them. Only blooming in the short window between warming spring weather and the leaves coming out on the trees. It's about 2-3 weeks window of glory that changes from day to day.

 This morning I found the chill after heat wave hasn't hurt anything in our garden and after a couple years of no flowers the ancient lilac has a few blooms which we have been hoping to see again. With spring came some sad news yesterday. My friend Tom Palmer gave up his struggle with HIV and Cancer after a very long battle last Sunday. The call was a surprise to me because sadly, I wasn't in touch with him very often after he began the treatments for cancer which are so debilitating that having visitors is difficult.
He was a great guy for so many reasons and I am proud have been one of his friends and supporters. We coped with AIDS or HIV and both nearly died back in the middle 1990s We both were artists who loved drawing and the figure. He came and drew with my male figure drawing group and even posed for us a few times with his great figure and handsome face and generous personality it was a delight to have him join the group. He inspired so many people in different ways and for me it was a mutual support for making more art and living life fully with our health difficulties. He was a big fan of my metro character sketches and photos of flowers, hostas leaves and more recently the quilts. What a rich feeling it is to have had his love in my life, my heart aches at the thought of this loss but I know I was very fortunate to have Tom Palmer as my friend.

Taken by one of Tom's close friend Michael Pipitone on the 1997 AIDS bicycle ride where we riders all hoped to get to know the handsome Water boy!

ten minute sketch of Tom from 1998 using reed pen and ink wash on toned paper 

2007 on a visit Tom takes a tour of my iMac, he's  showing off his big warm smile. 

busy discovering

Freer Museum: Japanese black lacquer tea box with inset mother of pearl and brass wires

This past week has been busy discovering new people and places and enjoying the many projects I have under way. My partner Keith Stanley has made great efforts to stick to his plan to keep making a new Ikebana arrangement each day and photographing and posting these for the world to see. That is a huge commitment of effort and time and daring to promise one's self that you will do this for 365 days consecutively with no holidays! I want to salute him for his efforts and success with this creative Ikebana blogging project as well as completing his teacher training certificate to be certified a full Sogetsu Ikebana teacher . If you haven't seen it, you ought to take a few minutes to review some of the 150 arrangements that have been done since he began. KeithStanley.com 


As a result of his work and displays on the Internet he has made friends around the world with similar interests in Ikebana flower arrangements. One in particular who also just completed his training to be a Sogetsu Ikebana teacher is Lennart Persson who also blogs about his work in Norway The Nordic Lotus Ikebana Blog. The fun part of this friendship for me came this week when Lennart and his husband Svein arrived in Washington DC and contacted Keith to say they would like to meet us. We spent a couple days visiting and touring together while they also visited a 19 year old niece who is here studying journalism for a year in Northern Virginia. We shared a visit to the Sackler and Freer Asian Art Museums with a tour through the lovely Peacock room decorated by Whistler and currently installed with a huge collection of Asian ceramics. Then last night we took them on a special nighttime tour of some of the big monuments and the Christmas tree at the Capitol. They were great fun to visit with and we found we had lots in common, not just ikebana flower arrangements.

Keith, Lennart and Svein at the Moon gate garden between Sacker and Freer art museums 

Keith passing by one of the displays of Japanese ceramics 

Chinese brush painting of plum blossoms and pine

Japanese 12th century temple guardian figure 

Demon suppressed by the guardians 

another demon underfoot all wooden sculpture with polychrome decorations 

Svein and Lennart at the MLK memorial camera ready 

Svein and Lennart at the MLK memorial

The new MLK memorial is very dramatic at night 

four of us at dinner taken by the waitress at Svein's request! 

Svein's photo of us at Jefferson Memorial 

We finished up our evening tour at the huge and colorful Christmas tree on the lawn of the US Capitol grounds. I didn't get photos of it but it is spectacular and Keith mentioned how he had missed seeing it for a number of years. There it was getting cold and we were hungry so we drove over to an old favorite spot of ours to eat dinners late. The neighborhood bar and restaurant Mr. Henry's was the perfect way to finish up our tour. Both Lennart and Svein are ministers in the Norwegian Anglican Church and they were very excited and delighted to find the offices windows of Caldwell Real estate Brokerage full of delightful Christmas decorations. Apparently this is much more elaborate decorating than anything they have in Norway during this holiday season. Svein took lots of photos and promised to share them with us when he gets a chance to download his cool Olympus camera, a digital that was modeled to look much like a vintage camera.

In between visits with the Nordic fellows I have been working on bookbinding, crazy quilt patch working and my daily sketches.

8.5 x 5.5 inches my new sketchbook covered with paper stained to look like old leather.

Inside the new sketchbook is the Williamsburg marble paper we bought  in late October

New sketch book has Tortoise shell colored glass beads

Virginia's red cedar branch I did back in 1999 is added in now

foxglove or digitalis embroidery adding in to the new block

New crazy quilt block before the line embroidery is added 

Several new blocks laid out together almost ready to attach and embellish 

in the studio

sunrise at the bay seen from the red house

Back out on the porch today to draw with cold wind and showers it's like November not the first of October. This afternoon I am heading out to the red house in Fairhaven Cliffs to spend a week alone. I am going to miss my partner who has too many things to do in town this week to join me but we both like having time alone. It's a chance to do things at our own pace. This morning the ikebana arrangement he left was the subject of my sketch. I will miss having flowers arrangements to turn to as I draw but there is the bay view which will fill in it's place or other curious things that I don't have access to here at home. I am looking forward to some time to spread out and get to work sewing on my bay project this week and visiting with the Rupperts.

drawing

Keith reading at the laundry 

ikebana arrangement 

I have been drawing sketches daily for over a year now. I began after my male figure drawing group had been on break for a few weeks last year. We left the Warehouse gallery space and were between venues when I decided I wasn't drawing often enough and I needed to do something to keep my skills sharp. I started drawing little things around the house like NYC artist Danny Gregory recommended to us in his books years ago. First with just sepia-black ink then sometime last year I added watercolors to the daily sketching. I make my own sketchbooks. The size at first was small. I began using little 5.5" by 4.25" books I call "pocket books" because they used to fit in my jeans hip pocket. Initially the drawings only took about 10 to 15 minutes. Sometimes if I chose a complex subject it could take me twice as long but it always seems worth the effort to draw something every day. Drawing this way began just for myself only because I wanted the practice. I feel like drawing is a meditation technique I am lucky to know how to do and not using it daily is a waste. I soon realized that I need affirmation and showing my work always makes me fell better about myself and my work. It also elicits complements and everyone likes those. I am lucky to live with Keith who is a floral designer and a great gardener which means we have flowers around the house and yard nearly all year long. I love flowers and really enjoy the challenge of drawing them. Still life seems to be my most comfortable form of daily sketch for me at this point. I have been thinking that my membership in some of the Urban Sketchers groups is a bit odd. My work tends to be still life not urban life. I don't do much with cityscapes or buildings and I don't hang out in public places very often since I live in what is almost a suburb which doesn't have a Starbucks or a nice cafe with interesting people to draw. I do draw metro riders bumps and jarring lines included free of charge by the erratic drivers of the trains. I sometimes sketch visitors to galleries but people are always moving in the city and it's hard to get good representations of them unless you can get them to sit or stand still. I don't get to ride metro everyday or visit museums and galleries or cafes regularly.  So flowers, fruit, bottles and stuff around the house are still and don't change quickly and make good study subjects for a simple morning meditation with pen and ink or a pencil usually colored with my watercolors.
This year I enlarged my sketchbook to 8.5" by 5.5" and it takes a little longer to draw and paint in a bigger sketch allowing more room to make detail. I even made myself a special project book, a huge book to use out at the Chesapeake bay retreat thinking about how much time I would have there without the computer nor television to distract me. That book is a 10" by 13" and required bigger brushes and more time to finish even simple sketches. Size matters and I got a recommendation from Janis Goodman that I should draw my plants really big, like on the wall big. She didn't know that I live in a shared one bedroom apartment and have no room to create such drawings or paintings and even if I did where would I put them? How would I afford frames to protect them or show them? Big has many draw backs but I gather it also adds importance to the finished product if it is big. I enjoy small things and ever since I left collage I realized I was going to have to work smaller than I did back at Pratt Institute in the 1970's.
Showing work on Facebook and Flickr.com has been a lot of fun and I have received many clicks on the "like" thumb or the "favorite" star from all sorts of friends family and even strangers. I want to share my sketches and I am thinking I ought to do something like my partner Keith is doing. He has decided to show his flower arrangements daily on his own website. www.keithstanley.com  for an entire year. I am wondering if I shouldn't do the same here on my orange blog. Daily sketches of my drawing books posted here  instead of the postings on Facebook where I am always distracted by other interesting posts. On Flickr.com I often get side tracked and many times inspired by looking at my contacts photographs from around the world.
Drawing daily doesn't mean I am going to post every day. I find the routine is kind of hard to keep up while traveling. I can draw but having access to post them and time to edit the photos of them is often impossible when I am out of town. So I am going to allow myself the luxury of posting daily sketches as soon as I can not every single day of the year. I will start with today's sketch of the arrangement Keith did yesterday. It is fun to see the sketch and the photos of the sketch subject side by side. I often find that looking at the finished painting next to the subject in a photo of the two together gives me tips on ways that I could improve the painting and drawing. In today's sketch I see the begonia leaves are much too light a green so I went back later and added more. Your comments are welcome here just like on the other venues where my drawings appear but I want you to know that I have to approve them to avoid spamers from sending ridiculous messages via my comments section.

Metro riders bouncy and moving 

metro riders 

National Gallery of Art waiting for a lecture by David McCullough