May 26, 2007: Day 37
My grandmother was an expert paper-flower maker, creating incredibly accurate and beautiful roses, dogwood, and many others. She would spend hours trying to teach me her craft, but I would become bored and impatient, and when she was not around, I'd take a short-cut and create a simpler, more abstract variation instead.
My father always belittled my grandmother's paper flowers, saying he preferred real flowers or nothing in the house. I learned the same prejudice, even as I recognized my grandmother's talent and envied it.
My mother loved flowers, and spent her life trying to coax them from the earth, not very successfully. I resisted work in the garden because of my spider phobia and general fear of bugs flying or crawling.
A neighbor just gave me a small jack-in-the-pulpit to plant because I had admired them in the woods on our walks. The pot has been sitting on the sink in my studio for several days. It needs to be planted. I must find a shady, moist place for it in the back yard, perhaps near the stream that dries up in the summer. I hope I do it soon.
This morning's drawing is a reflection of my mother's love of flowers, my grandmother's paper creations, and my own abstractions. But it fails at being truly floral beause I began it in a more non-objective way and then couldn't seem to turn it fully one way or the other.
Drawing #36, 11" x 14"
I painted some abstract flowers a couple of years ago at the urging of an art dealer, but I am ambivalent about them:
Yesterday afternoon we did set up the badminton net in between thunder and light sprinklings of rain. We were interrupted when Michael, eleven, got stung in the chest and belly by some bug we were unable to identify. After tending to his bites, we went back out and completed the task. Rachel, eight, joined us to play until the thunder and rain came again. After dinner, Blixy joined us in a game.
(Note: There is a gap between the dates I'm writing and posting because I had to give myself time to get ahead in case we travel and I'm not able to post.)
