Many and many thanks for your Comments here, bright Visitors: you buoy the spirit and bring tidbits as intriguing as anything I post...
These days my mind acts like a skipping stone, plashing skittish over things, or sinking murky to the bottom. But I treasure the great trove of kind words come to me by comment and by e-mail, and ultimately, unless I keel over first, they will be answered with care.
Thank you for coming!
A dream (with which I suspect many of us could identify at one time or another) reported by novelist Edith Wharton, 1913:
“A pale demon with black hair came in, followed by four gnome-like creatures carrying a great black trunk. They set it down and opened it, and the Demon, crying out: ‘Here’s your year - here are all the horrors that have happened to you and that are still going to happen’ dragged out a succession of limp black squirming things and threw them on the floor before me. They were not rags or creatures, not living or dead - they were Black Horrors, shapeless, and that seemed to writhe about as they fell at my feet, and yet were as inanimate as bits of stuff. But none of these comparisons occurred to me, for I knew what they were: the hideous, the incredible things that had happened to me in this dreadful year, or were to happen to me before its close; and I stared, horror-struck, as the Demon dragged them out, one by one, more and more, till finally, flinging down a blacker, hatefuller one, he said laughing: ‘There - that’s the last of them!’
The gnomes laughed too; but I, as I stared at the great black pile and the empty trunk, said to the Demon: ‘Are you sure it hasn’t a false bottom?’ “
~ Edith Wharton, October 1913, from Edith Wharton, by R.W.B. Lewis, 1975
"The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places;
but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now
mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."
~ J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
O western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
~ Anonymous
Kind friends,
I'm still here in Colorado, far from home, attempting to get my mother's paintings gathered, her house laid straight and clean, and her business settled. Thank you so very much for your kind many words, both here and via e-mail. I hoard them, and will -- yes, really, really will -- be responding!
Forest
'Bast' by Lou
'Not Far' by Lou P. Rogers
“The Ancient Cloak”
by Lou P. Rogers,
a.k.a. Villiers, Dyson and Vaughn
a.k.a. Greenwood, Wingfield and Underhill
a.k.a. Marl Jones
a.k.a. Orion
Kind Friends:
I must go to Colorado, likely to see my mother, Lou, out of this world within a few weeks. One thing I plan to do is post a lot more of her work. It would be a great thing to have your comments on it when I do, that I might share them with her. So, please check back here before too long -- perhaps a week or so!
My thanks for the kind and buoyant words so many have already sent and left -- it makes a great difference in the artist’s world.
My best,
Forest
In Kato Polyclay, with mohair.
Another piece by my mother, oil on canvas. She has sculpted and painted a large population of fauns and
greenmen.Friends: one of those human crises that rise up and shatter the round of one's daily world has reared its head here, and I may be MIA a while longer.
Meantime, many, many thanks for the bounty of kind words that you, gentle viewers, have left for me. I am no good at all with Time, at least not in its finite, measured guise, as you who've written me and not yet heard a peep will have gathered. But rest assured I hoard all you comments and questions, and you will eventually get an answer, antique though it may be...
Yours,
Forest
A Selkie and her Seal to appear soon... And I myself shall reappear, as well.
When she’s finished, this strange little hybrid herb-gatherer is going to live with a kind (and exceedingly patient) friend in London, who is herself an herbalist.
Kato Polyclay over full armature of gold-plated wire and Aves Fixit Sculpt. Wings are distressed silk gauze.
Brushed Kato Polyclay over gold-plated wire & archival tissue paper. The tissue paper & wire were coated with PVA glue and allowed to dry, supplying the clay with a congenial surface. Several colours of Pearl Ex powder, from Jacquard, were brushed on, as well. This was the first pair I made in this way, actually. Now I prepare to attach them to somebody.
And then there’s social media, of course: