“Birds with Human Souls”

    A delightful book called Birds with Human Souls, A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Beryl Rowland, 1978) was given me by a dear friend (Cindy! You!). Amongst many a wonder, it tells of ancient Athenian coins on which “a chubby, smiling goddess with a plain helmet appeared with a well-groomed, self-confident owl.”
    It mentions the great flock of owl coins produced from the Laureotic silver mines, and quotes the most charming depiction of financial prosperity I’ve ever read:

Little Laureotic owlets
Shall be always flocking in:
You shall find them all about you,
As the dainty brood increases,
Building nests within your purses;
Hatching little silver pieces.

              ~ Aristophanes, The Birds, c. 414 BC

May many dear little owlets roost with us all during the coming year...

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My Mother's White Whale

"White Whale" by Lou Rogers. My mother painted this when I was quite small; it's one of the images I remember best, growing up. Happily  it is still with me. I hang it again today.  My mother loved Moby Dick, and spent a good bit of time in high school limping, being Captain Ahab. All her life she pursued the numinous. The solitude in her work speaks not of loneliness but of relationship with the vast and transcendental.

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Dance Upon a Chimney Pot

    Sitting in the coffee shop window this morning, thinking and planning and worrying, and drawing on a napkin, I looked out and saw against sky two pigeons silhouetted on a chimney pot.  It is a bright, frozen day, with only a distant chill whisper of spring, but one pigeon was doing his bowing dance to the other, circling and bobbing, rounding his chest, no doubt cooing his burred song.  He made me smile, and watch, and forget my thoughts.
    Soon, his lady flew away.  The pigeon paused in his dance.  I thought he would stop, or fly away, too. But after a moment of looking this way and that with his tiny head, he began his dance alone against the clear blue, turning in a pattern which, however instinctual, was a very song of delight, of joy in being, of love without care of return.
    No cramping fear of the morrow, though one pecks a meager living on a sidewalk, no shadow of foiled desire, no shame in the perception of others, indeed in a small gray bird a pure call to cast one's very soul upon the waters.

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My Sculpting Tools

    A fellow artist wrote me to inquire about sculpting tools for fine detail. I'd been pondering the same subject. It's a case of   "do as I suggest, not as I do." I'll post part of my answer here, in hopes it may be useful:
    A good question, tools, and funny you should ask, as they say: I've actually been looking at my two favorite tools and realizing they're incredibly clunky for the size critters I'm now making. I've been attached to them for ages -- years, I'm sure -- and just not taken the intelligent step of adding more and finer implements. I've been using a plain old #11 exacto knife, and an odd, small burnisher really meant for engraving:  

    I don't think any  other tools touched Eros, whom you'll find below (except sandpaper, nail scissors on the tiny leaves made of copper foil, and toenail clippers for cutting wire). Now, this is silly -- if  I saw somebody else laboring on tiny things with the above, I'd point out that there are much finer tools available. Indeed, I think I'll order some soon myself. The best choice I know of, for my particular needs, at least, seem to be the 'Perfect Touch' tools. The site:
PerfectTouch.com
    Some like the wooden ones, some the metal. Ideally, one might have some of both, I should think.
    Now, back to my great, blunt burnisher and the work table! You've put it well, Deborah: the burnisher is such a habit that it did indeed become like an extension to my hand. I know I've been equally attached to other tools before, usually faithfully, one at a time.  Monogamously. That's sort of unwise, given that when I lose the favored tool, I'm temporarily pitiful and helpless, till I bond with the next one...

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Forget-Me-Nots for the Dodo Bird


"The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."
                                                                        ~  William Beebe


(With thanks to Bob Bills for the quote above.)

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An Animated Animal Dream

    When a child, I had extremely vivid and usually rather frightening dreams. I suspect many of you have had likewise (and I would love to hear them). It seems to come with the creative realm, somehow. I wrote some of mine down; others have remained impressed upon me with no external help.
    The first two most striking dreams I recall came to me when I was very young indeed, I would guess four or five years old. 
    The  very first was quite charming: I dreamt that I was swallowed by an animated Dragon -- I mean a dragon drawn and painted like an early Disney film. It was an Asian looking Dragon. Inside the Dragon I found all sorts of other living animals, including an enormous rooster, all appearing as in an animated movie. Very colorful. We all wanted a way out of the Dragon’s belly, and at the end of the dream, I was inside the Dragon’s mouth, looking at the inside of its neatly drawn, tightly closed teeth, and wondering how we would escape.
    At that point, the great mouth opened, and I saw, behind and below the Dragon’s Disney fangs, my mother reaching up from the bed and holding the creature’s mouth open with one hand.  My mother and the bed were photographic, ‘real-life’ images, while the Dragon’s teeth were still drawn and painted, forming a frame around my ‘real’ mother. Really pretty wonderful. I’d like to have more dreams like that, but as far as can recollect, I never have.

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A Curious New Dream about an Old Dark Dream

    The second dream I remember from that earliest time was far darker; perhaps for all its simplicity it could be called nightmare. This one reappeared, within a new dream, a night ago.
    In the original vision, I was a child underground in a long, very long tunnel. It was of damp stone, ancient, low and rectangular, stretching away into darkness behind and before. There was no visible source of light; it was a blackness in which I could yet see.  Far, far ahead of me, and drawing steadily away, was a tall black figure, whom I knew to be my mother. She was remote, and vanishing, and did not know that I was there. 
    I do not now remember whether I stood and watched her dwindle, knowing there was no hope, or whether I moved forward. But soon I heard a slow and regular drip, drip.  I saw to my right and ahead a bucket by the wall of the tunnel. Above the bucket, hanging from a hook by its white, white hair, was a paper-white and severed head, dripping, drop by drop its wine red blood, the only color present in that black-gray realm. It was a solemn and strangely meditative head, oval, almost stylized, rather like the head of a Buddha. Detached, you might say, in more ways than one.
    Nonetheless it woke me.
    This has always been to me The Dream of the White Head. It was one of those which impress beyond the telling, by an atmosphere not conveyable. It has come back to mind, for obvious reasons, since my mother’s death last year.
    A night ago, I dreamt that someone showed me a drawing, in black ink. At first it made little sense. Turning the paper, I saw that it was of a tunnel. Looking longer, holding it up, it shifted in a vertiginous moment like an M. C. Escher image, gaining real, sinking perspective of a sudden, and I saw it resembled The Tunnel, where the White Head hangs. At once upon this thought I also perceived the Head, with its bucket, a tiny scribble in black, but most definitely there.
    Whereupon, I woke again.

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Charles Batte! A Guest Artist


'Mephisto," by Charles Batte, of ChasBatte Studio
Click on the image above to visit ChasBatteStudio.com. Don't miss Charles' fabulous collection of Hallowe'en figures!

Friends, I've finally got an honored Guest Artist for my decrepit Guests & Links page. May I present the one and only Charles Batte: (a certain photograph should go here, but given its striking nature, permission must be obtained first...)
Now, having enjoyed that excellent program Inside the Actors Studio, and being particularly entertained by James Lipton's adaptation of Proust's Questionnaire, I've ventured to concoct my own version, Forest's Pseudo-Proustian Artist Questionnaire.  Charles has answered my queries with irresistible Batte charm and wit, not to mention patience. Excerpts below:

Forest:    What quality do you value most in your own art?
Charles Batte:  Insight, when and if it should come.

F:    What quality in a new artist’s work do you find most encouraging?
CB:  A willingness to explore new things rather than repeating the tried and true.

 F:    What alternative typographical symbols best express the foul word you use most during your artistic process?
CB:  My favorite foul word doesn't even require symbols:   PIFFLE!

F:    What piece of art are you most proud of?
CB:  The one I am going to do next.

F:    What is the most absurd object you’ve ever created?
CB:  Slipcovers for Apollo's feet.

F:    In Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen, Babette quotes Achille Papin: "Throughout the world sounds one long cry from the heart of the artist, 'Give me the chance to do my very best.' "
What is your cry? (It’s ok to steal Babette's, if she and Papin are right.)
CB:  I am afraid she is right. What else is there?

F:    If  you were about to be irrevocably changed into a mythological, fairy tale, or fictional critter or character, what/whom would you most want to be?
CB:  A phoenix.
And, what would you most likely be?  Really?
CB:  A house elf (Dobbie, and I would never get that darn sock)

F:    If  your visual art were transformed into literature, what genre, author or style would it be?
CB:  French Neo-Classic Tragedy, with 5 Acts in rhymed couplets.

 F:    If you feel misplaced in time, in what era would you feel most at home (setting aside dentistry, plagues, horrid social injustices, etc.)?
CB:  Eighteenth century Venice.

F:    What is the very first piece of art that moved you deeply? Can you explain why?
CB:  A portrait by Andrew Wyeth of an old African-American gentleman.

F:     Assuming you arrive at the Pearly Gates (and not elsewhere), what would you like to hear God say about your art?
CB:  Welcome. We have put you in the room next to Michaelangelo.

F:    And if it is the Devil:
CB:  Welcome. We have put you in the room next to Bosch.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That last question was added by Charles himself, and what a fine one it is. It shall be known as the Charles Question. You can read the rest of our questions on the guests page, Unexpected Figures, or much better yet, go see Charles himself: ChasBatteStudio.com

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