Spring and such

Spring is here! One day at a time, so far. Today is gray and rainy, but we’ve had several sunny and warm stretches lately.

I love Ethan Currier’s stone sculptures. He’s been busy lately!

K. had a great Indian-themed birthday party. Store-bought carrot cake was a non-themed outlier, but we did have mangoes and ice cream and lentils and spinach and Gujerati green beans and chicken coconut korma and naan and basmati rice and now I’ve made myself hungry again.

And the next night for her birthday present, we took her to a Dar Williams show at the Triple Door. So lovely, funny, poignant, perfect.

I worked on a new beach blanket for 8 hours yesterday–it’s one of the few things we’re taking to New Zealand. Let’s see how many beaches these little owls can visit in a year!

Tree Envy and an Icarus Complex

Fiber artist Suzanne Tidwell created this whimsical public art installation called “Artificial Light”– you can see it at City Hall Park for another few days. Just be sure to pull on your coziest, stripiest, most colorful winter socks before you set out, or you just might be beset by treesock envy.

How does she do it? She uses a knitting machine for the most part, then clambers up lifts and ladders to hand-stitch them onto the trunks and limbs.

It’s easy to see why peoples and their stories have long imbued trees with human qualities: their tall, sturdy frames and skyward reaching limbs remind us of us.

Our Seattle outing yesterday included the Museum of Flight.

Il Cigno, or The Swan, is based on Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings.

My favorite part of the museum is the early aircraft display hanging in the front foyer. The luminous materials look like deconstructed and reconfigured Japanese lanterns that talented sailmakers got their hands on.

My next favorite part was sinking into the first-class seat of a modern airplane. With just a little suspension of disbelief, I was really taking a trip, flying over the Atlantic, going to visit London in particular. A little flutter of anticipation made me smile. Funny, because flying scares me sick in reality. Only in a museum would I feel happy to be flying in a jet. And only on paper did Icarus survive his flight from the isle of Crete.

Contemporary dance in Seattle

Yesterday evening I had a whim to see some modern dance, which led to our discovery of ARC Dance. ARC is a small non-profit dance company and they can use all the support Seattleites can give them. Their summer show, also playing tonight and tomorrow, is gorgeous and intimate. Sudden intakes of breath, nuanced facial expressions, achingly beautiful choreography, and a hugely talented company all make for quite an experience.

When the seven-year-old stood up as the lights came on (after 10:00pm), he stretched and said, “That was good!” Hallelujah.

Winter is for making art

Textiles.
Threads interwoven.
Texts.
Books replete with woven words.
The tactile pleasure of making food, tasting, enough for fullness in the belly.

My first homemade sushi: not bad. The rolls were too big (I’ll try just 2/3 of the nori covered with rice next time), but pretty enough to look at. Smoked salmon, avocado, cucumber, asparagus, black sesame seeds. Some just vegetable, some with no sesame seeds. I tried one inside-out roll and discovered that the bamboo rolling mat takes forever to wash the sticky grains out of.

What is the purpose of winter?

A long breath you take
and hold

and the slow release is art

What is the purpose of art? A question I’ve been asking for a long time. An answer I look for everywhere.

F. Scott Fitzgerald loved and lost, poured it into a great novel, and still it resounds.

Hamlet tells us it “was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the / mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, / scorn her own image, and the very age and body of / the time his form and pressure.”

Denis Dutton’s ideas of art as an extension and elaboration of our nature are mightily appealing, too.

Today’s third art project: seaglass and stitchery cards.

Made/Unmade

I went to the Calder exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum and I got a sense of the scale on which he worked–from minute jewelry creations to huge installations, his playfulness and genius is really palpable when you’re in close physical range.

But my favorite of all is the black and white photo gallery of Imogen Cunningham‘s work.

The Unmade Bed

And my made bed with my grandma-made quilt.

I’ve been thinking of Karen Maezen Miller’s great couplet: The state of your bed is the state of your head.

Also, I realized some time ago when I was reading A Midwife’s Tale that back in the 1700s when people got sick more often and stayed sick longer, a made bed was a sign that no one was sick in the household; a tidy expansive symbol that all was well.

Silk art quilt

Here’s the quilt top, begun in January:

Because it doesn’t have a lot of weight, it tends to ripple. I ameliorated that effect with some seaglass weights along the bottom.

Oh, and the clippy line is from Ikea.

Just for Valentines Day, here’s number four

The history of my wedding rings is long and storied, involving tales of dark sapphires, a gardener who often wears no gloves, a girl who didn’t want a ring from the beginning, a couple who loves beautiful metalwork, and a woman who has devastatingly changeable finger-width.

Precious Metalsmith in Olympia carries a line of Beverly K jewelry; they remind me of skeleton leaves or rings that wise old fairies would wear.

Silk and sugar

A glimpse of today’s doings—sewing on my silk quilt, making no-bake cookies with cocoa and peanut butter. The most mundane surfaces can have sublime qualities when you’re very close to them. Surface tension—the property of a liquid to be attracted to another liquid—of a sort draws us in.

Winter project: New silk quilt top

I began this new project yesterday, and I’m working on it today in my living room-cum-studio. Winter colors: brown, deep gray, silver, white, and pale gold, and pale blue.

I was looking for a Gustavian blue–I’ll avoid the bees for the most part. Maybe a wing here and there for interest’s sake.

Sunday morning hallelujah

Laid up in bed with the flu and flying around the world with my laptop.

Gurinder Osan Copyright 2009 AP

I was reading the print version (per our Sunday Luddite ritual of morning paper in bed, sections strewn across the duvet and ink blacking my fingers) of Pacific Northwest magazine and found this short travel article on Sikkim, India alluring, intriguing, inspiring. I think most of it is due to the photo, which was taken by AP photographer Gurinder Osan, who specializes in social documentary photography. His perspective reminds me of the best National Geographic photography, which I grew up poring over. A little web searching brought me to his 2005 photo of Kashmir earthquake survivors, with its breathtaking composition and beauty amidst such suffering.

Gurinder Osan Copyright 2005 AP

The Arts and Life section has a piece on Rufus Wainwright, who’s playing tonight at Benaroya Hall–and that brought us to listening to his cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Just beautiful.

And then the even more beautiful version by Jeff Buckley: I could listen to this a million times and still get my heart broken and uplifted all in the same song.

Here’s the link.

And finally, Imogen Heap’s version.