Drowsily, J asked for airplanes for breakfast.

So I painted this before I went to sleep:



J said "Mines?", and asked if we could draw Orange Ladies. This morning's task.

A lot of the pictures I draw or make are art directed by J.

The first or second day we were here he asked for a boat-- so I painted his toy boat, an old jack-in-the-box, and then his new horse. I started sketching his Zebra.


But he was way ahead of me... he asked for the ocean, the ocean in the storm, stormy ocean with our blanket, and mama’s pink bag.


This last request I was very interested in: while we went to the same beach during the storm (Cahoun Hollow) and two days later, we certainly didn’t unfurl the blanket and eat beach snacks in the driving rain.
He told me good job, but I’m still wondering what I was to be capturing.

We're on Cape Cod, and as always I am  so struck by how different the colors are here from  San Francisco. Mostly it's yellow vs grey, but looking at these photos I realized that some of the greens are really tonally different. They have a blue-ness that I don't recognize out west. I am not sure, quite, how to describe it.

J's color palette seems to have changed too, this is a collaboration between the two of us, but he painted the yellow and some (most) of the violet:



Ironically I think these are cooler colors than he usually picks.

J is really looking forward to going to Cape Cod and seeing "fishies in  ocean!' (oh, and Nonna and Babbo, too).

He asked for more fishies and I obliged:



Schleich animals are, in general, a bit pricey, but at $4.99 he might just get a fishie to play with at home, too.

I  know,  I just declared a handmade Christmas throwdown, but J gets a (little bit) of a pass. And Schleich-type animals are recommended for the Reggio Emilia and Montessori approaches. In general,  I  try to be guided by Reggio, Montessori, and Waldorf toy principles. Mostly, I look at toys that seem like they will enable imaginative play and reflect/encourage what seems to be  children's innate sense of wonder/attachment/engagement with the natural world. I have learned so much, and had my heart opened so wide, just from watching J look at a leaf, stare at a pond, touch some sand.

After Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar for the The Hurt Locker, we declared a Bigelow marathon. We’ve watched all of her movies, and I went so far as to check a monograph out of the library.

Watching all of the movies together I noticed how painterly and image-oriented her work is. Which makes sense, she started out ass a painter. In one of the interviews in the monograph, she describes her teenage technique of copying Old Masters, expressly so that she could understand their millieu and though, what the subject matter meant.

I was really struck by this approach, partially because K-19 reminded me so much of Bruegel:





But also cause it sounded like a fun thing to do with J.

We’ve painted Jackson Pollock (I never realized how much figurative imagery is actually in his work; Number 1, 1948 has a dog, so many handprints, a bird... or maybe it’s all just a Rorschach!





This week J asked me to copy an illustration from the Zora Neale Hurston book we are reading, and then he asked if the figures were playing or dancing:







I’ve really enjoyed this way of learning, and I think J does to. We’ll keep doing it. I’d love to see his interpretation of Bruegal, some day.

The past few weeks I’ve been engaged with trying to research and write an article for a local/community print paper. Like other stuff I write, it was intended to be about something local plus a kid’s activity, but unlike other stuff I write, there is a long lead time—two weeks.

Really, I should have done something simple, like write about how to make your own butterfly net, about the butterflies in the OpenSpace behind my home, their entomology, or the native plants they like to eat.

Or about the nasturtiums that grow wild here, picking them and making a salad.

Or the fennel that grows wild—and how it can’t simply be picked and used like the domesticated variety.

Instead, I had to research an obscure artist, throw in references to shovel ready projects and the W.P.A, Russian religious separatists, and urban homesteading.


All of which actually would have been fine if I had allowed myself enough time to write the thing. Instead, I got sidetracked—or should I say, engrossed—in Sanborn maps, the local history of backyard chimneys, and brands of watercolor paper. Plus, M went out of town for a few days and then it was Father’s day. I got it written, and it’s good, but not what it could have been. Something I remembered while writing—and that I’ve remembered while watercoloring—is the need for warm up. May arm literally becomes looser the longer I paint, so that the 2nd or 3rd watercolor is axiomatically better than the first, even if the light shifted and I ran out of blue paint along the way.

Writing works the same way. Someone once called it “the importance of the shitty first draft, and it’s a lesson I seem to need to learn and re-learn over and over again, perhaps even every day. It’s the difference between decent and very good. Practice mastery.