Monthly Archives for July 2012

To celebrate the end of the drought…

I bought a bunch of cacti.

Why? Because cacti are great. Mostly, I like the names. The spikey yellow guy is a Moon Cactus, aka a Hibotan. The yellow occurs because that part lacks chlorophyll. Like why leaves turn red and yellow in the fall. Clockwise from that is a Cocoon Plant, which  has fat leaves covered in like a weird, dense white hair. Then there’s Split Rock, a native to Africa, that looks like a broken alien egg creature. Weirdest name goes to Baby Toes. Each “toe” has a little translucent window on top where sunlight is filtered in. Science facts!

It was, I think, super easy to make, but I guess it remains to be seen whether these little guys survive. If they do, super easy project. If they don’t, the internet lied to me and it’s actually very hard to grow cacti.

Anyway, step 1: Buy pot, cacti soil and cacti. 2. Paint a bit of wood and hot glue it to half a chop stick. 3. Write the names of cacti on said wood. 4. Pour soil into pot. 5. Plant cacti in pot in aesthetically pleasant configuration. 6. Find pretty rocks in the path by your house that you don’t really use because your landlord basically made it by just dumping rocks on the ground in a straight line. That is not more fun to walk on than grass and you can’t shovel it in the winter, so why… 7. Plunk sign alongside cacti. Project complete!

Wild geometries

Here are two prints I did in 2009, while I was living in Michigan’s upper peninsula. I was taking an art class at a little local community college, which turned into an independent study, which led to me being part of a committee to start a gallery in the college’s basement.

I moved on from that town, but being on that gallery team was great. We wanted to paint a room, put up lighting and host the kind of art displays we’d always wanted to see. We were a little judgy – this town needed some high-class art, and we were obviously the people who were going to bring it to them. But we were also just excited. We wanted to have a space open for people to try their own thing, a stage for music, maybe a projector for movies. Heck, we even kicked around the idea of a coffee shop.

I moved before it got past the planning stages and I wasn’t sure if it ever came to anything. But it turns out the group kept on. They opened the gallery about a year ago with a student exhibit of charcoal sketches. Very, very cool. I’m glad I moved, but I wish I could have been around for that gallery opening.

I did these two paintings with watercolor and Sakura micro ink pens. The gallery committee was talking about doing an exhibit that embraced the place where we were living, with its pine forests, deer and wolves.

It wasn’t all idealized wilderness. The deer had a bad habit of treating speeding cars like long-lost family members they wanted to hug and half the town was lobbying for the right to shoot the (endangered) wolves on sight. But if you let go of the gritty day-to-day reality, you remembered that there was a reason you couldn’t look away from these animals when you saw them, or get enough of hiking in those woods.

So deer, wolf. The extra lines are part of how I draw, and I thought they added a little movement. Then I added some geometric shapes, because, I don’t know, this was supposed to be a high-class gallery, and nature and geometry are a fancy pair because juxtaposing, or something?

I’d like to think that when professional artists are asked to explain the things the make, they sound as incoherent and full of nonsense as I do. But that couldn’t possibly be the case.

But I’m not a professional artist, so I don’t feel bad about saying: I think that deer painting would look great writ large on a T-shirt.

The case of the terrible garden

The garden still exists. But we’re currently in the middle of a drought in southwest Michigan, so my garden goes through droop-normal-droop periods. I’m hoping the fact that the plants all look pretty dead before I revive them with water doesn’t do permanent damage. It probably does.

But! There are other, worse culprits than an abundance of heat and a lack of water. Exhibit A: My planter of broccoli seedlings. Full of life when I stuck them on my porch and now leafless. Just sad green stems sticking out of the dirt. There was a little depression in the soil, almost like a comfortable little seat that a small creature might dig for itself before laying into the feast I planted for it. Last week, I caught said creature in the act.

So, here it is, one of the several reasons behind my failing garden.

Noooooooooo, tiny chipmunk, why?! There are so many other plants for you to eat. Well, there were, before it stopped raining.

So I guess my garden is keeping the neighborhood’s small adorable rodent population going during these hard times. Yaaaaaay I am so happy about that (that was written mostly with sarcasm, but there’s also a part of me that is legitimately okay with providing rodents with food. Don’t judge me).

I have more Garden Failure sketches coming up, because there have been (sigh) many more garden failures.