Fox & Friend, A Painting for My Grandson

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Nature, art, Family, painting, acrylic, fox, mink, forest landscape

Fox and Friend by Deborah J. Brasket (acrylic)

One of the pleasures of painting is creating something special for loved ones. Both of my grandchildren have a special affection for foxes. This one is for my grandson, which also includes a mink because he mentioned how cute they are, having seen a report on how hundreds had escaped (or been recued) from a mink farm.

The last one I painted for my granddaughter included a fox as well. I was pleased with both, and also with a collage I made for my daughter and son-in-law, commemorating their wedding day.

These paintings for loved ones don’t always come out as well as I hoped. A landscape of a California vineyard for my brother and sister-in-law did not please me. I mailed it anyway, since it was a Christmas present and “okay,” although not as good as I’d wanted. To make up for that, along with it I mailed them another California rural scene I liked better.

I just hope my grandson doesn’t outgrow this painting too soon. He’s a sweeet kid and loves animals but he just turned 15. I’m hoping he sees the humor in the two critters eyeballing each other. A bit of tension there. The mink is safe enough though. Maybe I could have toned down the flowers? But who’s to say young male teens can’t appreciate flowers as much as the rest of us?

My granddaughter will outgrow the paintings I made for her soon enough too. I like thinking these will be passed along to my great-grandchildren someday. Or some grandma in a thrift shop or at a garage sale will pick them up for a couple of bucks to pass along to their own grands.

It’s a sweet thought.

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Painting Again—A Wild and Wooly Seascape

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acrylic, art, Nature, painting, personal, seascape

Seascape in acrylic by Deborah J. Brasket

It’s been awhile. I traded in my pen for my paintbrush these last few weeks. The new novel I’ve been writing is off with beta readers who will give me the feedback I need to continue revising. In the meantime, I’ve been wanting a seascape to go in a special place in our home to complement the model of the USS Constitution that my husband spent three years creating.

I saw an online paint-along of a seascape from a photo reference I liked, and decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, the paint-along format didn’t work for me. I’ve never been someone to draw within the lines. I wasn’t happy with the outcome and turned off the video and, using the photo reference, worked on my own, adding and deleting elements as I went along. It went through several transformations before my husband and I decided it would suffice.

It’s signed and framed and ready to hang. At first I thought this frame was too busy for the painting, but when I tried it with other, plainer, frames, it didn’t look as nice. Besides, I love the frame. The antique look blends well with Old Ironsides.

Seascape in acrylic by Deborah J. Brasket

I haven’t worked a lot in acrylic. Although I’m starting to get the hang of it. Most of what I’ve been doing has been in water color and pastels, or a combination of the two. I just finished another acrylic that I’m pleased with—a birthday present for my grandson. I’ll share that here soon too.

In the meantime, I’m wishing you all a wonderful Thanksgiving Day with friends and loved ones.

The Luminous Mindscapes of Shara Hughes

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abstract, art, artists, beauty, fantasy, landscapes, Nature, Paintings, Shara Hughes

“Attraction Contraption” (1921) by Shara Hughes

It’s not surprising I’m drawn to these so-called landscapes by Shara Hughes. They remind me of Matthew Wong’s mysterious mindscapes and Odilon Redon’s poetic paintings, whose work I’ve shared on these pages as well. The real and surreal, the interior and exterior, the symbolic and psychological wrap around and feed each other. You enter places that feel real and dreamlike at the same time. Beautiful and disturbing, fluid and chaotic, lush and luminous.

Her current show “Time Lapsed” at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland includes this statement about her work: “These fantasy landscapes satisfy our need for beauty on the one hand, but also arouse a slight uneasiness on the other. The nature depicted seems irrepressible and at times even threatening in its exuberant fullness. Shara Hughes’s landscapes are mood pictures that convey feelings, emotions, or memories.”

Perhaps that’s why they feel familiar, like some otherworldly place I’ve been before—evoking dreams, memories, emotions that wait just below the surface and lure me inward.

“Glow in the Dark” by Shara Hughes

“Just Another Pretty Face” by Shara Hughes

“The Delicate Gloom” by Shara Hughes

“My Violet Lullabye” by Shara Hughes

“My Natural Nycintimasty” by Shara Hughes

Slivers of Reality in a More-Than-Human World

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An Immense World, animals, biology, Earth, Ed Yong, humans, imagination, Perception, reality, Science, senses, umwelt

The Secret Garden, by Deborah J. Brasket

We like to think that we humans, with our five marvelous senses, are in full receipt of what this world has to offer in all its glory. But in reality, like all creatures, we tap into but a tiny slice of its vast fullness. We each are trapped within our own perceptual bubble, or Umwelt, that part of our surroundings we can sense and experience.

When we watch a bird coursing through the air, we might try to imagine what it feels like to fly, to have a birds-eye view of the world as it does. And yet what a bird in flight actually experiences with its wraparound vision, seeing in all directions at once, surfing air currents that are as palpable to it as they are invisible to us, tapping into the Earth’s electromagnetic fields to guide its migrations, seeing colors we can’t see and hearing sounds we can’t detect—it’s full bubble of experience—is beyond anything we can experience, even if we could fly.

This is true for all the other creatures that inhabit our backyards and the world around us, as revealed in Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness,” he writes.

The thing is, while a mocking bird will never know what a bee sees, nor a cat know how a bat navigates, or a mosquito see a spider’s web even while caught within it, for all our sensory limitation, we humans are the only creature who can pierce to some degree beyond our own sense bubble. Through our curiosity and imagination and intellect we can create the tools and technologies to penetrate, at least to some degree, this more-than-human world. We can begin piecing together all these slivers of reality into a much fuller sense of the world in which we are embedded. The technologies we create are just crude tools for piercing that darkness. But they open up windows into the far reaches of reality where our minds and imagination can soar.

I wish I could experience the wraparound vision of a bird, or the 3-D hearing of a dolphin, or smell the smorgasbord of earthly delights wafting up the hill as my dog does. I can only imagine what it might be like to do so. And because of this—my imagination—I expand my sense of the world’s vast potential, and deepen my appreciation for all its marvels. It’s an amazing gift, to be able to tap into other creatures Umwelten. This is our greatest sensory skill, Yong tells us. It carries with it an enormous responsibility for cherishing and protecting all those life-forms that expand our understanding of reality. We must ensure they do not perish from this Earth through our own neglect or indifference or ignorance.

That is one of Yong’s main messages in his final chapter about noise and light pollution: “Save the Quiet, Preserve the Dark.” He reminds us that as “the species most responsible for destroying sensory realms, it falls on us to marshal all of our empathy and ingenuity to protect other creatures, and their unique ways of experiencing our shared world.”

Other-Worldly Encounters with a Feral Cat

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animal kingdom, cat, environment, feral, Nature, Perception, pets, reality, umwelt, wildlife

She sauntered into our yard about a month ago, this young orange tabby with a white bib. Her gaze passed over me as if she did not see me at all, as if I was part of the patio furniture where I was sitting. When our eyes finally did meet, I still saw no recognition that I was a human or animate or alive or anything at all. It was eerie—being so unseen, unrecognized—her complete disinterest in me. Even the deer and wild turkeys I meet see me, and seem wary and apprehensive when they do. They recognize me as something apart from my surroundings, something to pay attention to, keep an eye on. But not this kitty.

Until she mistook me for food. I’d dropped a couple pieces of lunchmeat on the patio for her, which she gobbled up. But when I held my hand out to her after that, which must have still smelled of meat, she slowly moved toward the smell. She sniffed at my fingers, and then took a bite. Not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough for me to draw back and for her to skitter away.

Later as I was sitting there reading, and apparently wriggling my bare toes, she approached again, stealthily. She saw my toes as prey—not connected to something larger. Then she pounced and bit, harder this time. I cried out. She dashed off again.

Since then I’ve been putting food out when I see her in the yard. She now seems to “see” me as a food source, rather than as food. She won’t eat until I’ve put the food down and move away. If I stay in the yard, she keeps an anxious eye on me, and if I try to approach she darts off. Sometimes she’ll even stand by the door where I go to bring out food, as if waiting for her food source to fulfill its mission.

But she’s still a wild thing, with wild behavior.

We’ve watched her run full tilt at trees and dash up and down the trunks as fast as she can. One tree after another as she makes her way up the hill. For no apparent purpose but for the pure pleasure it brings, it seems. Once when my husband was pruning our plum tree, she dashed up its trunk and then wriggled like a worm through its tight branches.

At wild cat at play in a wild world.

I’ve watched her stalking birds at our birdbath. At first she tried to get them while standing beneath the bath and reaching up. Now she’s learned to take a running leap at them, flying up over the birdbath stretched out like superman, her back legs trailing in the water while her front feet try to grab the bird. She’s yet to catch any while I’ve watched. But we’ve seen her more than once climb up the hill toward the tall grass with a large furry creature in her mouth.

Now that she recognizes us a food source, she hangs out here more often, sometimes grabbing a drink from the pool or the water-can we keep full for her. Sometimes she drinks from the birdbath. She’s found a favorite padded patio chair with a pillow where she likes to snooze. Although a narrow wall will do just as well.

Sometimes we don’t see her for days.

When we do, I don’t try to tame her. I want her to stay wild and independent. But I also want her to see our home as a safe haven from the predators who see her as food—the coyotes and foxes and mountain lions that live beyond our fence. She’s small enough to squeeze through. They aren’t. And I want to augment her diet during the lean times to keep her healthy but not dependent upon us for her meals.

She reminds me—even more than the deer and coyotes and other wild things that live nearby do—that there’s an entirely different way of being in the world and perceiving it that’s unlike anything we humans could ever experience. Insects, birds, bats, orcas and others species each inhabit separate and distinct slivers of reality known only to them. There’s a word for that—umwelt.

We tend to anthropomorphize the animal kingdom, especially our pets, remaking them in our own minds in our own images. But what they are and the world as they experience it is so extraordinary and other-worldly as to make our own pale in comparison. More on this and the umwelt next time.

Capturing the Spirit of Our Kindred Cousins

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animals, art, bronze, human nature, inspiration, kindred spirits, Nichola Theakston, sculpture, spirit, wildlife

Bronze sculpture, ‘Macaque and Infant’ Detail, by Nichola Theakston

Sculptor Nichola Theakston works in bronze and ceramics to capture the spirit of creatures found in her native Wales and in the wilds beyond its borders. “The notion that an individual creature may experience some ‘otherness’ or spiritual dimension beyond our understanding of its instinctive animal behaviours, is the premise behind much of my work,” she tells us on her website.

I discovered her work on a blog I follow at Colossal, and fell in love with the tender and tranquil faces of her primates, the curious and inscrutable felines, the proud and majestic wildlife.

We learn something about ourselves as humans when we see these qualities in the more-than-human world around us. Is it our own spirit we recognize in them? Or a Spirit that enlightens human and non-human alike, that compels us to see ourselves in the Other.

What do you see when you look at faces of our kindred cousins?

‘Sacred Langur’ in Bronze

Bronze sculpture of “Bastet”

Bastet Study in Bronze

“Still Rhino” in Bronze

‘Standing Silverback’ in Bronze

“Fleet Hare” Study, in Terracotta

Beauty the Brave, the Exemplary, Bursting Open

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beauty, bravery, flowers, inspiration, life, Mary Oliver, Nature, Peonies, poetry

White Peony, Jan La Roche Photography

What is it about the fragile, fleeting, and flagrant beauty of flowers that can so break a heart?

I wrote about this once in a photo-essay called Riffing on Roses. And then just this week I found this new-to-me poem by Mary Oliver, Peonies, which broke my heart again.

The poem speaks to the flagrant beauty of flowers that gives itself away, all that it is, so freely and readily to all that comes its way: the ants, the breeze, the sun’s soft buttery fingers, the poet’s breaking heart.

“Beauty the brave, the exemplary,” indeed.

I wish we all could live so bravely, so carelessly, giving all that we are to all there is. I wish we all, like those ants, craving such sweetness and finding it, would bore deep within that sap. We must cherish and adore all we are, all we have, all that is, while it’s still here to have.

Peonies

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
   to break my heart
      as the sun rises,
         as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open —
   pools of lace,
      white and pink —
         and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes
   into the curls,
      craving the sweet sap,
         taking it away

to their dark, underground cities —
   and all day
      under the shifty wind,
         as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,
   and tip their fragrance to the air,
      and rise,
         their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness
   gladly and lightly,
      and there it is again —
         beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
   Do you love this world?
      Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
         Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
   and softly,
      and exclaiming of their dearness,
         fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
   their eagerness
      to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
         nothing, forever?

 Mary Oliver,  New And Selected Poems. (Beacon Press; Reprint edition November 19, 2013)

Thank you to The Vale of Soul-Making where I found this poem.

A Deep-Dive Through Time and Space

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Consciousness, Earth, here and now, humanity, inner-space, outer-space, paradox, photography, quantum physics, space, time, universe, Webb Space Telescope

Deep space, 13 billion years ago. Photo From Webb Space Telescope

By now you’ve probably seen the stunning new images from the Webb Space Telescope, which takes us 13 billion years back in time. That’s 8 billion years before the Earth was born. We stand here now looking back at a time before there was ground to stand on, or a human consciousness to see or grasp anything at all. We are looking at a speck of sky no bigger than a grain of sand, they say, yet filled with millions of galaxies and trillions of stars, and who knows how many planets or moons or intelligent life-forms looking back. Only they wouldn’t see us. For we don’t exist yet.

It’s mind-boggling. And certainly puts the turmoil we’re experiencing here on Earth into a new perspective. No less urgent or relevant for our fire-fly timespans. But it points us away from the personal and relative “here and now” into one that is infinitely larger than our selves and the tiny blue marble we call home. Our “here and now” encapsulates not only the present moment but the “here and now” 13 billion years ago. We are the link that spans that distance through time and space. Our consciousness. Mine. Yours. Now. Enfolding all that. Surely it means something significant.

When we turn the eye inward rather than out, into the micro-universe of atoms and particles swirling inside us and everything that exits, we grasp a new paradox. Quantum physics has shown us that those inner worlds at the most infinitesimal level exist only as clouds of potentiality rather than as concrete substance. These clouds of potentiality only become “real”—that is, fixed in time and space—when observed. Unseen they exist only within a hazy realm of the possible.

In comparison to the infinite universe swirling around us and inside us, we humans may seem pathetically insignificant. Not worth a mention in the footnotes of atomic and astronomic legers of Science. And yet we seem to play an essential and outsized role.

Without the human mind to grasp the universe there would be no universe to be grasped. Our bodies may have been evolved from star-dust. But it’s our minds, our own conscious grasping of such, that moves “star-dust,” and all else, out of the realm of the potential and into the realm of the real.

Such is the circular and utterly paradoxical wonder of a world we live in.

The cloudy realm from which stars are born. Photo from the Webb Space Telescope.

Rainy Morning Reveries in Photos

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backyard, beauty, California, Central Coast, color, Nature, photography, rain, rainy day

We’ve been blessed with more than usual rainfall on the central coast of California recently. I love the way the gray skies and damp, rain-soaked surfaces around our home make the colors seem more rich and vibrant. The ordinary becomes extraordinary. Wet cement and a shovel can look like abstract art. While fallen tree branches take on the purple glow of a Fauvist painting. Even a little hummer left behind this winter came out to dazzle me with its red-throated splendor. I hope you enjoy these photos as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Satie’s Gnossienne, Forking Paths, and Time’s Ever Presence

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art, Erwin Schrodinger, Gnnossienne, Jorge Luis Borges, literature, music, past, Philosophy, quotations, Rilke, Satie, The Garden of Forking Paths, time

Japanese Style Landscape Paul Ranson

Time-travelling—that’s what it feels like when listening to Erik Satie’s Gnossienne. When I close my eyes and let the music move me, I’m transported to faraway places and distant times. I can see the mist rising from the river, the arched bridges, the damp gray stones of gothic towers tilting toward sullen skies. I can feel the cool breath of the river, smell the sweet-dank dampness of rain-drenched streets, hear the clatter of distant hoofs on cobblestones. It’s almost as if I’ve entered some strangely familiar dreamscape, or the distant landscape of an idealized past.

These dark, insistent, melancholy notes play us and ply us across space and time in rapturous eloquence. It reminds us that we share so much of our common past, our common humanity, to the art and music and literature that inspires us.

I’m reminded of the short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges, and this particular quote:

“This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries –embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words but am in error, a phantom Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures. — Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Collected Fictions. (Penguin Books September 1, 1999) Originally published 1941.

And also, this from Rilke:

Even the past is still a being in the fullness of its occurrence, if only it is understood not according to its content but by means of its intensity, and we–members of a world that generates movement upon movement, force upon force, and seems to cascade inexorably into less and less visible things–we are forced to rely upon the past’s superior visibility if we want to gain an image of the now muted magnificence that still surrounds us today. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from “On Life and Living,” The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer (Modern Library, 2005)

And finally, from a Nobel Prize winning physicist, this:

“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world’.

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering.
And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”
― Erwin Schrödinger,