I broke the blinds to better see the moon
My passion for painting animal skulls came about one day while walking through the woods of my parent's property. I came across a lone bleached deer skull, lying in the short grasses under a dogwood tree. It seemed to have a purpose for being there. I stared at it for awhile, turning it over with a stick. Then I continued on my way down the trail.
As I came to the river I found another skull. A young button buck, again lying alone in the grass with no accompanying bones. I walked to the river's edge and found two small buckets that had been washed up by the flood waters earlier that spring. Balancing the skull on the end of a stick I placed it into one of the buckets. Then I returned to the original skull and gathered it into the same bucket and walked back to the house.
I placed the skulls in the snow by the outbuilding and waited for nature to take her course.
My years of studying and admiring The Plains Indian's cultures and art finally had purpose. I knew then that I wanted to paint these skulls. Not as some type of macabre expression, but as homage to the animals that roam our planet.
Some can say I have the best of both worlds. I have the woods, the mountains and river...........I have the lake and her shore. I can travel by foot across the ridges of the highest elevations onto land that remains primitive. I can oar my way out past the breakwalls and watch migrating yellow warblers seek their summer destinations.
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| Skulls bleaching on the enclosure used to keep deer out of my sunflowers |
The woods and the river are my truest passion. Areas so untouched by progress that primitive stone piles remain intact. This is where I walk and seek out the bleached bones of the animals. My friend and I have achieved a keen sense of detection. We walk along deer trails carrying old white buckets. When we spot a skull or carcass we place a bucket in the tree. Most skulls are still too fresh to be carried away. So the buckets mark our spots for future collection. Some buckets can be seen from the road and I can only wonder what the passer-by must think of them.
Surfs Up
I live on the lake..........the lake that is Erie. On any given day I can be found walking, head down, at a snails pace seeking out the precious beach glass. Some days I fear I will walk off the edge of the earth because I rarely look up to see where I am. And to the naked eye I must appear a bit loony as I talk to myself during my search, giggling when I find the glass and giving a "whoo hoo" when a truely spectacular one comes in view.
Finding beach glass is not as easy as it seems, at least not at my age. I have to allow for my eyes to adjust to the distance between me and the sand and the piles of pebbles and zebra muscles that cover the shore. I blink and squint, bend, retrieve, stand, blink and squint. I should be blind in 5 years!
Beach glass is a tricky little gem. You may find one and as you're bent down recovering it, several more pieces appear right next to it. It can be maddening. But mostly it's fun. Then you think you see one because your eyes are starting to "see things". You bend to retrieve it and nothing is there.
This past summer I had an ingenious idea......I put a lawn chair in the water and sat down with bucket and strainer in hand. As the waves pounded over me (I've since learned this is best done when the waves are very small) I would scoop up sand from the bottom and let the water sift out the smaller items. Nine out of ten times I was left with at least 3 beautiful glass nuggets in my strainer. As I continued a thought occured to me. These are the very waves that carry huge pieces of driftwood, railroad ties and trees onto the beach. I had no way of knowing what was being churned out there, just feet away from my chair. And if a log did come flying out of the surf and knock me out of my chair it would be days before anyone noticed me missing. At least not until they got hungry or needed clean clothes.
