“Genuine love is a personal revolution. Love takes your ideas, your desires, and your actions and welds them together in one experience and one living reality which is a new you. ”

                            ~  Thomas Merton, Love and Living

February 14

Sonnet XLV

For every lovely ordinary thing
My heart would do with thee apace each hour:
Because these cannot be, Beloved, no bower
Holds that bright true center, and spread of wing
O’er tossing hollows blown doth truer sing
Our tale than nested wren or nightingale's lure;
Let us embrace the harsh high cry, grieved pure
Call of sea bird bowed in wind, and wring
From aerie solitude a liquid silver link
So bright and darting strange that none may sunder
This heart from thine, though tumbling chasm brink
Should yawn between. Thus sleep quiet, wonder
Of the daily round, dear in fading ink,
Whilst Love doth run the racing salt-sewn thunder...

                              ~ Isabelle Rathbone Greene,  c. 1894

The Snow Maiden

Another wonderful Russian being. I wanted to present her in the act of melting:

My first sculpting experience...

... I think.  On the beach with my artist mother Lou, working on a giant sand-toad:

Who are we, and whom do we wish to become?

Do we or do we not care for our brothers and sisters?

"House Speaker John Boehner's new budget proposal would require deep cuts in the years immediately ahead in Social Security and Medicare benefits for current retirees, the repeal of health reform's coverage expansions, or wholesale evisceration of basic assistance programs for vulnerable Americans. The plan is, thus, tantamount to a form of 'class warfare.' If enacted, it could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history. This may sound hyperbolic, but it is not. The mathematics are inexorable."

~ Statement of Robert Greenstein, President, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, July 25, 2011

Miragaia, Carnegie Collection

The original Miragaia model in Kato Polyclay, for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's line. This was taken prior to final approval, as I recall -- some changes were still to be made.

Carnotaurus head

Carnotaurus head, then underway in Kato Polyclay. For the Carnegie Collection, produced by Safari, Ltd. This photo is considerably enlarged. Note: the teeth had to be deliberately blunted, to satisfy toy safety regulations. Though to my mind, a serious bite seemed improbable!

From an AnatomyTools.com Workshop

A section of my interpretation of a fascinating and enigmatic Creature designed by Carlos Huante especially for a workshop with Anatomytools.com. It's in medium hard Chavant clay. I highly recommend Anatomytools, run by sculptor Andrew Cawrse. The two workshops I've taken there have been amongst the best experiences I've had as an artist. The instructors, models and fellow students all inspire.

I aim to  continue with this clay, and approach some ideas I’ve not had opportunity to express before. They may require their own Creature page here, as they’ll be of a somewhat different species than any I’ve brought out thus far.

Frost Spirit, underway

An unfinished miniature in Kato Polyclay -- she was afterwards painted. She'd stand about 8 inches tall in stocking feet. Done listening to Vivaldi. Must admit, all of his Seasons sound wintery to me.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

                                                     ~ C.S. Lewis

Carnotaurus for the Carnegie Museum

Carnotaurus, original model in Kato Polyclay, for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's model dino line. He (she?) was a fun one.  Safari Ltd. produces them, and this one's now out and about. I still aim to get my Carnegie dino page up and going in a lively fashion!  Plans of mice & dinosaurs...

"To regret one's own experience is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."

                                           ~ Oscar Wilde

A Bright Midwinter to You

'Intense love does not measure, it just gives.'          ~ Mother Teresa

Red Roses

Rilke says...

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

                                     ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Surprisingly, very surprisingly to myself, I seem to begin to find myself amongst some of my most ancient answers, this last while.

Harpy face

Venetian Harpy, in progress

She's in air-dry clays. Her surface is mostly in "Premier," which is very smooth and easily formed. Back view:Side view

I can post again!

Here's a small Mermaid to prove it:

She's in Kato Polyclay, and would stand around 7 1/2 inches tall on legs.

Circe, almost dressed

She awaits a leopard.

For the Unknown Feral

Passing grey feathers flattened in the road, I thought I would re-post the following, in honor:

Dance Upon a Chimney Pot

    Sitting in the coffee shop window this morning, thinking and planning and worrying, and drawing on a napkin, I looked out and saw against sky two pigeons silhouetted on a chimney pot.  It is a bright, frozen day, with only a distant chill whisper of spring, but one pigeon was doing his bowing dance to the other, circling and bobbing, rounding his chest, no doubt cooing his burred song.  He made me smile, and watch, and forget my thoughts.
    Soon, his lady flew away.  The pigeon paused in his dance.  I thought he would stop, or fly away, too. But after a moment of looking this way and that with his tiny head, he began his dance alone against the clear blue, turning in a pattern which, however instinctual, was a very song of delight, of joy in being, of love without care of return.
    No cramping fear of the morrow, though one pecks a meager living on a sidewalk, no shadow of foiled desire, no shame in the perception of others, indeed in a small gray bird a pure call to cast one's very soul upon the waters.