Lilacs
Isn’t it nice to think that Don Wentworth’s poem may be true? Today, just letting it be the wildflower picks you Have a great weekend.
At Last
Each year we wait. We count the days, watch the weather, complain, wait longer. Our patience stretched thin by the cold and by gray skies that are slow to yield to clear blue. Then suddenly, at last, we are surrounded by green. I can never keep up; never find time enough sketch or paint it all. Still, this year as in the past, it is a pleasure to try. Tips & Techniques– The window for capturing spring ephemeral wildflowers is very short– miss it and you have to wait a year. This page… Read More
Paint Box Colors
Ranunculus blooms in a riot of paint box reds and pinks. Brightening the countertop, they are perfect for April, when the Northeast is slowly greening, but I am impatient for more. Tips and Techniques: Here’s a look at my basic kit: 2 Micron archival pens, black, 02 and 005 3 Escota Versatil travel watercolor brushes, sizes 2, 6, 12 2 Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencils, F and 2B pencil sharpener Watercolors (Winsor Newton and Daniel Smith) in an altered Schmincke tin: cobalt blue, phthalo blue, ultramarine blue, indanthrone blue, phthalo green*, sap green,… Read More
In the Quiet
No bigger than a small lemon, and with an equally yellow cap, the golden crowned kinglet is a tiny harbinger of spring. Never still for more than a few seconds, it flits busily among the trees, its high-pitched song easier to hear than the bird itself is to find. So I sit quietly, binoculars in hand, and wait. Soon enough, several appear—and disappear, and appear again, in a game of hide and seek that goes on for most of the afternoon. I can’t capture the movement, so I go for the lemon… Read More
Seeking Spring
Is April the new March? Or am I too impatiently, too desperately, seeking spring? I go in search of greenery each week—into woods and wetlands, along meadow paths—and I can say with confidence, and disappointment, that my palette remains largely ochre and brown and overcast blue. Still, there are a few buds, and the Eastern phoebe wagging its tail in the still-bare maple, a hint of green under last year’s grass, and daylight past seven. Hold on and wait, they remind me, just around the corner is renewal. (click the image to… Read More
The Intersection of Art and Nature
I love finding myself at the intersection of art and nature. My passion for those two roads has led me to great places, wonderful people, and to beauty, insight, and mystery. Here, a simple fern in the Lyman Conservatory at Smith College has transported me half a world away to the rain forests of Malaysia. It has made me think about symbiotic relationships and to wish I had taken Latin. It has given me hours of artistic challenge and pleasure. And it has left me both grateful and eager for more. (click… Read More
Green Fix
Where to begin? Presented with 3,000 plants in every shade of green and every texture and pattern of leaves, choosing a subject was no small task at the Lyman Conservatory at the Botanic Garden of Smith College in Northhampton, Mass. I spent the day there sketching and generally getting a much needed green fix after months of winter browns. Here’s the first of the pieces I did there, an exotic pitcher plant native to Borneo. Tips and Techniques: What could be better for practicing how to mix greens? Use house plants… Read More
Nest Trio
I get up early to make the 1.5 hour drive to the small town of Granville, New York, not far from Vermont’s Green Mountains. Arriving just before 10am gives me just enough time to buy a coffee before the doors open at one of my favorite places to sketch: the Pember Museum of Natural History. I make this pilgrimage once a year and I’ve already decided where I’ll spend the next four hours: hovering over the glass and cherry cases of Victorian-era bird nests and eggs. The selection is fantastic: eggs of… Read More
The Faint Echo of Spring
I found this nest in the collection of the Pember Museum of Natural History in Granville, NY, where I spent the better part of a day sketching nests that have outlived their builders by more than a century. Somewhere in the weave of stems lies the faint echoes of a grassy wetland, the calls of birds and frogs, the mix of cool air and warm sunshine, of another springtime. I’ve never seen a sedge wren (also called the short-billed marsh wren), and this is as close as I may come. Can you… Read More
Astonished
It was like a crime scene: the beauty lay on the floor, mangled and broken; a mess of soil and tangle of roots lay about her. Alas, it was the amaryllis’s own radiance that did her in. Her blossoms grown so heavy atop the three-foot stalk that she tumbled off the table to the floor just two days after opening. Stricken in her prime— and while having her portrait painted!— I salvaged what I could, dissected one flower for study, and finished these pages. I have spent the last month astonished by… Read More
Drawn In 