May 1, 20212 min read

Renewal

Spring again, and this one feels like more so than ever.

Travelling north, then south again as the seasons turned heightened the transition from winter to spring. Six weeks in Vermont for winter's end and spring's earliest beginning: snow, then thaw, making sugar. And the multi-generational household: it's a pretty special situation, and the essential key to making this a very productive time for painting, too.

Back to Philadelphia just as the cherries peaked. April is for sure Philly's most beautiful month. Going away and returning as everything blooms and the weather warms up for real: excellent timing for fresh energy.

The week we returned, vaccinations became widely available which opened a whole new door of springtime esperanza.

This springtime renewal feels so natural and powerful and inevitable--it makes me wonder about people living in tropical climates and whether they tap into a different rhythm. Is every sunrise in paradise the fresh start I feel in spring? If you know the answer, please write.

Chaos

I hold his essence and amorphous shape,

Till he with Order mingles and combines.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay from I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

--Ansel Adams

Sleep on the Left Side, After Henri Rousseau

Watercolor

11" x 15", 3/2021

Girl on Fire

Watercolor

11" square, 3/2021

Covenant (diptych)

Watercolor

Each 6" x 9", 3/2021

I Still Life You, acrylic on panel, 8" square

and Transformation and Change, acrylic on paper, 8" square

Daily Painting: Winter Into Spring

We Picked Apples Here Last Fall, 8" square

Barn on Delano Road, 6" square

Brook Below Rush Meadow, 8" square

Tappety Tap Tap, 8" square

All 3/2021

April in Paris: Street Tree, 5" x 7", 3/2021

Vernal, 10" square, 3/2021

Veil of Green (Slow Down, Persephone), 16" square, 4/2021

Kites in Trees 2 (Westbrooks)

Acrylic on paper, 11" x 15", 4/2021

Recommended Reading

It's the season for one of my favorite reads: The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.

The hero of this multi-layered allegory is a mother bunny who teaches her 21 children to be independent (notably handing out singing, dancing, and painting pictures as jobs equally important to life as sweeping the cottage, washing the linen, and cooking the dinner). She is therefore able to accept an opportunity to fulfill her own dream of becoming one of the five bunnies who deliver eggs on Easter Eve. Her own dream of being part of something bigger than herself--helping to deliver the beauty, joy, and magic of springtime and its inevitable message of rebirth and renewal.

And one day, when her children stopped being babies and were little girl and boy bunnies, she called them to her and said, "Now we are going to have some fun."

--DuBose Heyward from The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes

Thank you, Mom, for reading me this book, for always encouraging me to keep painting (yes, at times it felt like nagging, but now that I'm a mother myself, I'm wiser and know better), and demonstrating in myriad ways that beauty elevates.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

--David Hume

Beauty is as beauty does.

--My Mother