Fire on the Mountain

A heavy tanker drops fire retardant while fighting the Flagstaff wildfire on Tuesday, June 26, in Boulder." (Jeremy Papasso / Daily Camera)

There is a forest fire near enough to sting the eyes and roughen the throat, billows of smoke rolling east to be seen looking up our street this afternoon. We here, and the nearby university, should be OK. But there have already been evacuations on the mountain, and for the animals an birds... alas.  Best thoughts to those fighting the fire. One of the quite heroic planes.

“Genuine love is a personal revolution. Love takes your ideas, your desires, and your actions and welds them together in one experience and one living reality which is a new you. ”

                            ~  Thomas Merton, Love and Living

February 14

Sonnet XLV

For every lovely ordinary thing
My heart would do with thee apace each hour:
Because these cannot be, Beloved, no bower
Holds that bright true center, and spread of wing
O’er tossing hollows blown doth truer sing
Our tale than nested wren or nightingale's lure;
Let us embrace the harsh high cry, grieved pure
Call of sea bird bowed in wind, and wring
From aerie solitude a liquid silver link
So bright and darting strange that none may sunder
This heart from thine, though tumbling chasm brink
Should yawn between. Thus sleep quiet, wonder
Of the daily round, dear in fading ink,
Whilst Love doth run the racing salt-sewn thunder...

                              ~ Isabelle Rathbone Greene,  c. 1894

Carnotaurus head

Carnotaurus head, prototype for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's model dinosaur line.

Carnotaurus head, then underway in Kato Polyclay. For the Carnegie Collection, produced by Safari, Ltd. This photo is considerably enlarged. Note: the teeth had to be deliberately blunted, to satisfy toy safety regulations. Though to my mind, a serious bite seemed improbable!

From an AnatomyTools.com Workshop

A section of my interpretation of a fascinating and enigmatic Creature designed by Carlos Huante especially for a workshop with Anatomytools.com. It's in medium hard Chavant clay. I highly recommend Anatomytools, run by sculptor Andrew Cawrse. The two workshops I've taken there have been amongst the best experiences I've had as an artist. The instructors, models and fellow students all inspire.

thing-section-464wb.jpg

I aim to  continue with this clay, and approach some ideas I’ve not had opportunity to express before. They may require their own Creature page here, as they’ll be of a somewhat different species than any I’ve brought out thus far.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

                                                     ~ C.S. Lewis

"To regret one's own experience is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."

                                           ~ Oscar Wilde