In the wake of the momentous floods of 2008, I found myself without a framer. The Art Cellar, which had so capably put up with the specificity of my idiosyncratic framing needs for over twenty years, had been, along with the rest of downtown Cedar Rapids, inundated by 8 feet of the teeming waters of [...]
Category Archives: Asides
“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 all [...]
Bittersweet
November 10, 2009, 10:18 am
Aunt Iva
Craig’s Aunt Iva went to her grave without divulging where she found the bittersweet that she decorated her home with every fall. I love bittersweet as well. An invasive, parasitic, and noxious vine which is strangling trees in the Northeast, bittersweet is somewhat rare around here. And, in large measure, its odious qualities are [...]
Gateway to Marion
July 29, 2009, 8:03 pm
I really didn’t want to give up the studio time I knew it would require to draw Craig’s idea. After the Fourth of July, the loosely conceived projects of summer are subjected to their first deadlines, and time reclaims its irrevocable, dictatorial pace. But, when Craig described to me an idea that he felt needed [...]
Karen’s flowers & Maggie’s journals
July 15, 2009, 5:43 pm
“The world is so full of a number of things I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” Robert Louis Stevenson
It’s high summer in Iowa. The restored tall grass prairie that my pup, Buddy, and I jog through daily is teeming with life, scents, sounds, and color. Likewise, our own Karen Hoyt’s flowerbeds [...]
Fishing
April 8, 2009, 1:26 pm
Fishing, March 23, 7″ x 9″, Watercolor, Stan Fellows
“If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage of fishing poles.” ~Doug Larson
Fishing, March 20, 15″ x 20″ / Lures, 11″ x 14″ / Waiting for the Truck, March 25, 7″ x 9″ / Watercolor, Stan Fellows
The [...]
An advent calendar of Campbell Steele artists!
December 1, 2008, 6:52 pm
So, it’s happened to me. My postings on my blog have become erratic and infrequent. Somehow the fast train that is the momentum of time between now and Christmas had hijacked a more meditative self.
That same self was jerked to life this past Saturday. Seventeen years has taught me that there is much wisdom behind [...]
A source of great joy
September 15, 2008, 9:02 pm
It seems that most of the sea changes of my life have been marked by pilgrimages along the vast stretches of Route 80. A coupla weekends ago we drove our youngest daughter, Willa, with her earthly possessions to Providence, R.I., and stopped for a lightning quick birthday celebration in Brooklyn with Maggie, our oldest daughter. [...]
An instinctual teacher
September 10, 2008, 6:30 pm
I came upon the word “polymath” in a review by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times. It means: “a person of great learning in several fields”.
I know a lot of people who know a LOT about one thing, but the only true polymath in my personal experience has been David Goodwin. On the art [...]