“You have a magic carpet That will whiz you through the air, To Spain or Maine or Africa If you just tell it where. So will you let it take you Where you’ve never been before, Or will you buy some drapes to match And use it On your Floor?” – Shel Silverstein Ours was [...]
Category Archives: Artists
June’s bounty
June 23, 2010, 1:06 pm
What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade. ~Gertrude Jekyll Drawing my amaryllis With the summer solstice just past and the Fourth of July [...]
Uptown Marion is abuzz!
June 3, 2010, 8:44 pm
Periodically I am reminded that I share Uptown Marion with an assemblage of personalities who are all laboring in a universe roughly parallel to my own. Sure, the variables change, but they too ponder hours and staffing. They fret over display, and delight in sharing their goods with their customers. I had one of these [...]
Artist Talks: Carlos Ferguson & Peter Feldstein
May 21, 2010, 6:40 am
I found myself laughing out loud all this week when I recalled how Charlotte, our seven month old granddaughter, would squeal as loudly as she could, until she turned red in the face, to see how excited we would be by her antics. Blowing on dandelions with Charlotte at Squaw Creek Park Other than play [...]
Spring ephemerals
April 30, 2010, 9:06 am
…”springtime ephemeral –simply meaning it disappears back underground after its early display…” Violet “These will be so great for a Mother’s Day post!” Maggie crowed after I sent her my first drawings of some spring ephemerals that we hope to use for a collaborative project. In short, I’ve done the drawings and the plan is [...]
Orthodontics Through the Ages, or How I Spent My Winter
April 22, 2010, 7:04 am
Dr. William Olin I have done a lot of crazy things in a lifetime lived as a “working artist”. Pair that status with a lifetime spent with Craig (easily the most outrageously creative person I have ever known), who seems to have an inexhaustible supply of great ideas, often, (but certainly not always!) executed by [...]
Ladislav Hanka & Stan Fellows
February 22, 2010, 4:17 pm
Though there’s a light, fresh blanket of snow, water is running in the streams. There are frequent snippets of bird song as Buddy and I run along the creek each morning. And, that’s the sun sending shafts of light through the bare trees- just a bit earlier each day. There’s nothing like an Iowa winter [...]
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”
December 22, 2009, 1:59 pm
I haven’t spent a part of these last two Sundays of the advent season within a church. Rather, I have begun them, as I begin most days, with a run with Buddy. The snows of December, however, have made me amend our routes, so on both Sundays, Buddy and I were jogging past snow-covered hills [...]
“You can tell a lady by her handkerchief.”
December 7, 2009, 5:06 pm
“Remembrance, like a candle, burns brightest at Christmas.” Charles Dickens My grandmother, Gertrude Gill My grandmother discovered just how important working outside the home was when my grandfather retired from a successful career in construction engineering. He established a studio in the front bedroom of their Philadelphia duplex and painted with a devotion that filled [...]
Aaron Sinift + Holiday hours
November 19, 2009, 12:05 pm
With my own nose pressed firmly to the glass of a miniscule window on “the holiday retail season”, an old friend reminded me of a larger world spinning beyond the spheres of American consumerism. At the turn of the millennium, Iowa City artist, Aaron Sinift, traveled to India. His work was forever changed by that [...]