'Intense love does not measure, it just gives.' ~ Mother Teresa
Red Roses
Rilke says...
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Surprisingly, very surprisingly to myself, I seem to begin to find myself amongst some of my most ancient answers, this last while.
Harpy face
Venetian Harpy, in progress
She's in air-dry clays. Her surface is mostly in "Premier," which is very smooth and easily formed. Back view:Side view
I can post again!
Here's a small Mermaid to prove it:
She's in Kato Polyclay, and would stand around 7 1/2 inches tall on legs.
Circe, almost dressed
She awaits a leopard.
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.