You cannot make this stuff up

For Halloween week ….a spooky hand manifested on my living room wall, just as I was planning this post. (See it as an arm slanted downward, palm of the hand facing you, with big thumb at the top, and fingers curled into the palm).  It's all a trick of the sun's slant and reflection from car windows in the street below but it was kind of eerie, especially as I'd been thinking about the challenges of painting hands.

 

But it's heads we're still concerned with, here in the Zodiac Café, and this time Capricorn has made his own spooky appearance.  Manly P. Hall describes the typical Capricorn qualities as:--

 

"Head long; forehead high; eyes piercing; nose long; lips thin; chin strong but  narrow; body angular; general air of severity."

 

I'd recently been flipping through last year's sketchbook and came across a drawing I'd made of a weird and wonderful guy on the street -- with deep pink hair and a tangerine shirt.

 

Oooohh….irresistible to give him a try.   I whipped up a little study for the Cardboard Club, exaggerating some elements to match the descriptive text.

 

Here's an early stage of the painting.

 

  

As I worked on that bony forehead, I was reminded that Capricorn's symbolic animal is the goat.  Hmmm…..what do you think?  Any resemblance?

 

 

I might have been more successful if I hadn't been so fixated on his improbable hair.   Enchanted, actually.  Despite the problems anchoring it to his head, it never occurred to me to give him a haircut.  Here's the finale, with the hair much darker than in reality.

 

 

Did I say "reality"?  That's not the name of the game this week, is it?  OOooooOOOOoooo.

 

Earth Art -- it rocks!

 

 

One of my greatest joys has always been digging in dirt.  Dirt and rocks go way back with me, from my earliest pre-school days when a big dirt pile in our backyard was the envy of the neighbourhood, to my small first garden the summer that I was 9, to my first real gardens in early married days in Michigan, in Ontario, in successive houses in Vancouver.  Each of those homesteads always gave pride of a place to a rock garden.

 

My rock garden here at The Yellow House received a happy kick-start from friends L & B, who delivered chunks of  Galiano Island sandstone to form its base.   This August, it reached a glorious overgrown peak (as shown) -- complete with volunteer mini-pumpkin vine.

 

Meanwhile, in my back yard I continued my long-term project of replacing the small lawn with garden -- while next door, the young family continued their enduring project of renovating/rebuilding their house.  At last, in a big clean-up push, they decided it was time to get rid of the chunks of cement that had formed their original sidewalk.   Just what I needed for another rock garden base!

 

So over they came, like the Three Bears -- Papa with the enormous chunks, Mama with the medium ones, and Baby Bear (big kindergarten boy now) with the handfuls.  By early August, my dig was under way.

 

Please disregard, as I did, all the surrounding disorder and overgrown grass.  This was a task that needed focus.

 

 

And it was akin to hard labour.   That lusty grass had originally been laid as strips of sod, which is anchored by miserable and maddening plastic mesh -- virtually impossible for the likes of me to cut through with a shovel.  What's more, the soil beneath is an amalgam of dirt, gravel, small stones, rusty nails, and occasional oddments.  The only way for me to make any headway was to get down on my knees and hand-dig every square foot with my trusty trowel.

 

 

The two little pails of stones represent about a tenth of what I unearthed.  And the blue and yellow plastic bags are covering buckets of dirt, temporarily removed to be replaced later.  Did I say this was Really Hard Work?!  I could handle the chunks brought over by Mama and Baby Bear -- but for the big slabs, I had to channel the builders of Stonehenge and the Pyramids and summon up all I remembered from high school Physics class.

 

 

With the base complete, I made a ceremonial placement of L's Galiano inukshuk, still in the configuration she designed.  And planted right next to it is Twinflower -- also from Galiano, another wonderful surprise from L after she viewed Linnaeus' favourite flower.

 

This past week, with great elation, I completed the fall planting,  leaving space for next spring's annuals.   

 

And then I began to strategize about this post.  I've always said it's about "creativity" which most often means my art projects. 

 

WELL..., isn't this (and any rock garden) an example of Earth Art, or Land Art?  Okay, perhaps not as exalted as Christo's massive landworks, but there are small elements in the notion of "earth art" that are tempting. 

 

Most interesting, I came across artist Jakob Tylicki, who exposes papers and canvas to the elements and then "unearths" the results.  I've seen stuff like this before and it's alternately goofy and beautiful.  Irresistible, right?  -- especially with the promising oddments that came to light in my dig.

 

I wrapped these, along with some studio odds and ends, into a scrap of canvas and produced a small tribute to my friend Y.  Her art career has often involved transforming found objects into small sculptures and assemblages with bird shapes.

 

This little bundle I placed in the hole of the cement base of a long-gone fence post (see the right side of the garden as shown in the photos) and partially capped it with a special rock.  It will stay there through the winter and......hmm, maybe at the Summer Solstice 2021, I'll unwrap it and see how the canvas has re-created itself.

 

What did NOT go into the wrap was a special find I made coincidentally on this same day as I dug deeper in a less creative vein in my front garden -- a 1913 Canadian penny!!  Had it been buried in the earth since the year after The Yellow House was built in 1912?  It felt kind of like striking gold -- even if only corroded copper.