For the Unknown Feral

Passing grey feathers flattened in the road, I thought I would re-post the following, in honor:

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.

Baba Yaga's Hut

Minus the bone fence it now sports...

"Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice DEEP LOOKING directed toward the other person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha."

                                              ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Another Angel

From the Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Cathedral. It was still on canvas in the studio when I took this photo. It was an interesting problem, or play, to choose the colors for all twelve, their robes and feathers. And their fluttering ribbons. The ribbons perpetually flutter to symbolize the constant murmur of God in their ears. Again, about 9 feet tall, 14 foot wingspan. I made the wing tips separately; it was easier to position them that way.

    I’ve been remembering, finding more photos and adding a few, little by little, to the Liturgical Art gallery -- see thumbnails over yonder on the left side (had to think about that a second -- left -- right... never very clear in my mind. Lucky the angels were in a circle.)

"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony."

                                                         ~ Benjamin Britten

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

                                                   ~ Albert Einstein

Missing the Dome

    While doing dental work on the 1 mm teeth of my tiny dinosaur -- he has 60+ and they vary in size -- I find myself missing the work my mother Lou and I did on the murals she designed for the Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Wilkes-Barre, PA. It was as much in the Eastern style as we poor westerners could muster. We both found it a deeply congenial language, though we were surely interlopers: women and heathen, and who could say which was worse in the eyes of the Old Believers. Indeed, we were declared Anathema (or was it Abomination -- I forget). That seemed to me to be rather an honor, altogether.

    A ring of twelve angels were my job, and each had a 14 foot wingspan. We were about 60 feet up on scaffold (constructed by persons who liked to have a mighty good time in the evening; there was an element of suspense). The church bell would strike the hours, which, somehow, gave a timeless rather than a timely sense. Self and Angel, so long ago:

I was able to draw each angel on heavy mural canvas, mostly paint it, cut it out like an enormous paper-doll, adhere it to the ceiling and finish the painting there.

When Mr. Dinosaur and several other belated Entities (bless your patience, Friends) are complete, I may have to pause and do something Large.

Study for a portrait of my Grandmother

So long neglected it's almost antique, but I want to get back to it soon. Actually about life-sized and full figure, on canvas:

Marion Richmond Gardner Rogers, my paternal grandmother and one to whom one could confide anything without hesitation.

Memorial Day

Thinking of those far from home and under duress.  And those left behind.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
   Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
  The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

                ~ Wilfred Owen, from "Anthem for Doomed Youth"

In Memoriam

"Shaman," by Lou Rogers, my mother.

    Memorial Day was the day my father was found in the river by a fisherman.

    Those pins of fate around which lives turn -- his disappearance two weeks before was the first one in my life, though I was unaware, being a baby. My mother was 27, and how she managed I do not know. Though I believe she already dwelt largely in an internal world of tales and visions, and that she fled there.

    I woke at 4 this morning with yet more clear a sense of the echoes down the many years of that first event in our tale. Things of great regret, yet perhaps necessary.

    What do we do with these things, for our own healing and perhaps the helping of others?

    I remember seeing great barges turned by tugs on the rivers of Pittsburgh, slow, slow and with so wide a wake. Turning a life seems as gradual, though with moments of sudden, forward clarity if one is fortunate and receptive. One thinks one is there, and one is not, yet. And the rocking of the waves stirred in the process, what currents and cross currents do they send out that wash through the lives of others in ways we cannot know.

   I am convinced that this life is a dash in a continuum, that there are no throwaway beings, nary a flea, and so I think we have no choice but to pour all our misadventures into an alembic and strive to transmute them.

    Will we never be who we might have been, or are we who we were meant to be, precisely because of our blunders and the patterns of mischance?

By Lou Rogers, my mother. Oil on canvas. I do not know the title.

Little Mermaid, again...

Still on the year's Carnegie Dinosaur toy prototypes.  Alas, I cannot show them to you yet. Safari, the company producing them, very much wants the subjects to remain a surprise until they are released for public consumption. But thereafter, I’ll post some in progress images, and further develop the Carnegie Museum Dino page.  Meantime, here’s the Little Mermaid. You likely saw her before, but...  I aim to do more with Hans C. Andersen tales over the next while.

Almost...

...out of this year's dinosaur marathon. But meantime:

"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---"

                                   ~ Emily Dickinson

One of the great uses of art, I think. And also sometimes of humor.

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."
                                              

                                                                    ~ Thomas Merton

Interview with Prehistoric Times

I was honored to do an interview with Prehistoric Times, a quarterly publication for dinosaur enthusiasts and collectors. It appears in the current issue (no. 92) and was instigated by Dan Liebman of Dan's Dinosaurs, who asked excellent questions.

Yuki Onna

My take on a little Yuki Onna, snow spirit:

She's a miniature in Kato polymer clay, with silk and mohair.