At a loss
Thanks to ties that bind bloggers, I have worked on a star to send to Jillian Curtis, who is collecting stars for a Holocaust Memorial in her yard. One mother’s act to educate her children about history, horrific persecution, and genocide. An act of remembrance. A few summers ago, Faith York, island neighbor, songwriter, and musician, led the Peaks Island Chorale in a performance of Songs of Freedom. One piece was called I never saw another butterfly based on a poem written by Pavel Friedman, a child in the Terezin Concentration Camp in 1942. Faith asked my daughter to sing a solo with...
Read MoreOne Morning in Maine
These are the days I wish I could bottle. May is a favorite month for many reasons: On the island, it is still nippy. You’ll need a fleece vest in the morning. It is the time before mosquitos and swarms of SUVs from other places. We have what is called a winter waterview, in that from the pantry door, I can see a slice of the ocean and guess the tides. I bring plenty of pockets and an open mind on the daily ventures to the shore that stretches from Trefethen Landing to City Point. These days my only witness (other than the dog and sometimes my daughter) is the hired mower working to...
Read MoreMixed metaphors
I’m working on the cover of next year’s Lunar Calendar which is both fun and daunting, since I have great freedom. My so-called personal work is always an amalgam of whatever is cluttering my drawing table/mind at the moment. With Rickshaw Girl bringing good news, I have been revisiting all the scads of reference material for that project that went unused. In short, I decided to do a Hindu goddess/chimera…part tiger and part queen, since I just finished reading about Mabel Stark, the famous female tiger trainer from the 20’s. During a break, I opened up the local...
Read MoreSprouts at the GEM
Peaks Island’s best little gallery in Maine has reopened. Marty and I designed this little ditty to announce the first group show of the season. The Gem Gallery is a collective of island artists, mostly year-round folks and a few newcomers. We are quite a bag of tricks, from Connor Flynn, a high schooler creating dazzling glass vases, to Victor Romanyshyn, a photographer of nature’s divine details. The openings always bring out a festive crowd. Carol Cartier and Diane Wiencke are the hangers of all shows: they are amazing artists and find just the right way to show off all the...
Read MoreRickshaw Girl wins again
I am still glowing with the Lupine Honor and now comes another: the Jane Addams Honor Award for Rickshaw Girl! From the Jane Addams Peace Association press release: Three books have won honors in the Books for Older Children category. Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins, with illustrations by Jamie Hogan and published by Charlesbridge, is a contemporary novel set in Bangladesh. In clear prose and detailed black-and-white drawings, ten-year-old Naimi excels at painting alpanas, traditional designs created by Bangladeshi women and girls. Her talent, though valued by her family, cannot buy rice or...
Read MoreLegal sketching
When was the last time you drew on a placemat in a restaurant? That was once a favorite pasttime of mine, back in the Crayola days. As an illustration teacher, I keep telling students to draw all the time, but do I? Hardly. But my daughter, 11, is doing that. She adds a little drawing to the grocery list on the counter, to the cover of a catalog on the kitchen table, and draws on the edges of her homework. When we walked across the street from our Boston hotel recently, I brought along my sketchbook, not sure there would be paper placemats at Legal Seafood. The wall murals had Dick Dale...
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