Spring bulbs are shooting up so it's time to remove my mesh squirrel baffles -- no more Picasso-esque Found Art in the back yard! The garden returns to its mostly natural state.......
....and that's just where the truly great Found Art can be spotted.
Consider this:-- Underfoot along our shores here, one doesn't have to walk far to find something covered with barnacles.
I've loved barnacles since my one childhood trip to my mother's ancestral homeland of South Carolina. One day at the beach there, I found a bigger-than-a-shoebox chunk of massed barnacles that I brought home and kept for years. I wish I had it still, but at least I can enjoy vicariously my friend L's amazing beach find:-- A big nautical chain encrusted with barnacles that she's brought home from her island paradise to her North Vancouver garden. Can you imagine??!
And meanwhile, I have plenty of special finds on my studio shelves, barnacles among them:
-- bringing us to the Found Art of seashells. Could anything be more enchanting, whether in whole or in part?
From a low-tide excursion on Vancouver Island, another friend brought me some wonderful beach finds -- like this pearl of a rock, encased in an oyster shell.
At our cabin property, JT found a similar treasure -- a root-snagged rock .
A childhood pal and I still laugh together at our experience as 9- and 10-year-old entrepreneurs. On our rambles, we'd regularly check the farmer's field bounding a nearby golf course and routinely find a few lost balls which we'd sell to passing golfers at the nearest green. One day, two men studied our offerings and kindly purchased all we had at our going rate of ten cents each. One of them asked, in that tone that some people use with small children, "And what do you little girls want to be when you grow up?"
"I want to be an archaeologist," my friend said.
"And I want to be a geologist," I said.
Jaw dropped -- not what he expected! And little did any of us realize that my aspiration was based solely on the belief that geologists spent their time collecting pretty rocks.
JT's and my shared fascination with Interesting Stuff Found Underfoot goes way back to our courtship days. On a camping trip in our then-home-state Michigan, we were lucky enough to find our one and only Petoskey stone, the "state stone" of Michigan. It's a fossilized coral that is said to occur nowhere else in the world. Strictly speaking, that's probably true, but I've seen photos of a similar fossilized coral that can be found on Vancouver Island.
In a similar lace-like vein, here's one of several extraordinarily tough desiccated magnolia leaves, 8-10 inches long, that I was thrilled to find in scattered masses at Vancouver's VanDusen Garden.
And how about this wood slice that seems to combine all the swirling shapes that I put together in my "Eyes of the Northwest" project:--
I really should stop now, shouldn't I? So here's my "just one more".
Our one-time favourite Thai restaurant (which has since changed hands and, most regrettably, the recipe for its unequalled Pad Thai) always had at its entrance the typical display of intricately carved fruits and vegetables. Arriving at our usual seats one evening, we found that each table had its own elegant mini-centrepiece that echoed the larger carvings:-- on a small bamboo mat, a single perfect pinecone with just a dusting of iridescent paint on each tip.
Can you imagine the thrill felt by these immigrants from Thailand when they first happened on North American pinecones, perhaps a whole tree's bounty underfoot, so beautifully reminiscent of their own specialized art form?
