When will they ever leave?

Continuing the oak leaf chronicles:-- The medium-sized oak tree in front of our house is one of five similar trees along the block that produced beautiful red burnished leaves in the fall. I snagged a few clusters of these for a painting and then ran out of my artist's paper.

Meanwhile, one of the five trees dropped its leaves almost in one go, while on the other four trees, the leaves held fast...and held and held and held. Even through this winter's raging rainstorms and occasional gale-force winds, the leaves remained intact. Our tree looked no more bare in the first week of February, when this picture was taken, than it had in October.

I began to think that our oak tree was hanging in there with me, waiting till I started to paint. By late February I'd finally laid in a new stash of paper and arranged my still-life set-up, in which the "red" leaves had faded to brown:

Resuming work on paper was a slow process for me, and I seemed to lurch from one mistake to another -- having overlooked some of the lessons I'd only just begun to re-learn when I began work in my new studio last September. Our oak tree, too, was in slow motion -- de-leafing only very slowly until the equinox arrived. Suddenly, it started to show some action, and now our tree has few enough leaves that one could feasibly count them. As of this morning, tiny leaf buds are evident.

And my painting is finished! You can view it as a work-in-progress here  and the final version of "Red Repose" (copyright 2013) here:

That glass jug, by the way, was in my mother's family from at least 1910. She kept it as a memento of what she called "my daddy's farm" and remembered it storing "scuppuh-nung" wine (as her South Carolina accent handled "scuppernung" -- the famous Southern grape). It's surprisingly heavy -- thick-walled and reenforced around the neck, with an interesting mark on its base. I suppose it's four to five times as old as our slow-deleafing oak tree.