Summer snails

It has rained pretty much every day for the past two months in Houston as far as I can remember. Maybe my dates are slightly off. But every day, whether it's a brief shower at 3 a.m., a downpour in the evening, or a drizzle in the morning, it has managed to rain for as long as I can remember. This is quite wonderful. It means that the turtles in the turtle ponds have enough water. It means that the tiny toad population just outside, is burgeoning. And it means everything is green, lush and lovely. Also, there are quite a few mosquitoes. But they have their purpose too.

It seems like a good time to celebrate with some cooling images like these -- dark, watery colors, the gentle silent presence of a snail at night, and a patter of rain. The contrast might recall black velvet art, but I can't lay claim to that artistic medium quite yet. Oh wait, but I do have a small collection of unpainted black velvet paint-by-number kits....well, perhaps another time.

"Blue Dandelions"

5 x 7 acrylic painting on flat canvas board

"Violet Rain"

5 x 7 acrylic painting on flat canvas board

And while they were not present in my garden at the time of these paintings, we do get some awfully cute and awesome big snail friends here, looking to eat my herbs.

 

But really, if you can't spare a sage leaf for these little guys, you're not living life to its fullest!

another shortcut to more mushrooms

Nothing quite compares to the summer two years ago, but it's been raining so much in the Mushroom Woods (which is what I call a particular county park, because I see so many varieties there) that I knew they had to be popping up this year, maybe even a little ahead of schedule.

My posts back in 2009, like the original Shortcut to Mushrooms post, show an interesting array of groovy fungus that grew up in the damp earth that year. I even took a variety of photos of them that I offer prints of, like this one.

This year they haven't gone completely wild yet but I will take a break from shawls for a moment to show a few things that I saw today on a rainy woods walk.

I love these red-capped fellows. This one is just peeking up, looking around to see if anyone is there.

These wee yellow ones were much brighter in person but I do what I can when the light is dim to try to capture it.

Just some regular ol' brown mushrooms but still cute enough for a hobbit!

Oh and as a side note, I love tulip trees but they are so tall that you can almost never actually see the "tulips" until they fall to the ground and are squashed. So I was happy to find a low-hanging branch with some of the flowers intact on it. So strange and waxy and almost tropical looking!

For the sake of posting...

Just when I was thinking that it has been awhile since I posted here, because I am trying to stay away from computers these days, I sat down to try to post something and the computer froze up, kind of making my own point for me.

My little internet art shops are still active -- I am just in a non-horn-tooting mood and have been so for awhile. I am mainly interested in reading, and making things for friends/charity/myself, and being outdoors since spring started (which was in late February for me this year!).

Oh and that photo up at the top? It's from a pattern book I got called Ocean Breezes, which are all -- well, ocean themed scarves and shawls. I really love how it looks, and the ribbon kind of makes it. While I wait for some tie-dyed silk ribbon to arrive I used some cheap stuff from the craft store which actually...might look better than the expensive stuff, now that I think about it.

And I even dusted off the sewing machine (literally -- it was very dusty) to try to make a couple of dresses while at my mom's recently. I cut out this space dress on the right a long time ago and finally made it. Then I found some amazing jellyfish fabric and made the same dress with that. My love of jellyfish is also represented in things like this painting here.

Anyway, here are the dresses.



And here I am at an arboretum outside Houston.

My love of palm trees is well documented, but I still never stop being thrilled by them. If it doesn't grow in New Jersey, it is exciting to me.

A yellow-crested night heron. Pretty groovy!

Some kinda lizard!
Aren't my captions just incredibly informative and helpful?


And, um, that's a butterfly.

So there, consider yourselves up to date -- I'm making baby hats for a hospital all week so I will get back to that now, and whenever the computer lets me post something again I'll be back!

still hanging on...

This is the kind of picture that I assume people take when they want to create a peaceful fall feeling. Or maybe it just looks lonely, I'm not sure! At any rate, the leaves are extremely vivid and colorful despite being mid-November -- usually they have all blown off the trees by now. I would normally be posting new art here but I have been knitting/crocheting instead for the past week and I can't share my work since it is mostly gifts, and I don't want to post photos until I have given them!
It was in the 60's today which is unusual for this time of year, and a few dragonflies were buzzing around, well past the time of year I think I usually see them.


The frogs were still awake too! Curses on the leaf that cuts the picture in half though, argh!


A popular question has always been -- what colour leaves are your favourites? I think the bright yellow-orange ones are mine but I pretty much like all of them, let's face it.

Especially flame-red and orange against a darker pine green background. Goodness gracious!

The standard "I am a deer and I am looking at you from the path right before I bolt away" pose.

Ahh la lune! In the blue sky! That means one week until the full moon which means...hmm, the perfume web sites I have traditionally bought perfume from, will be posting their monthly updates. Yes, this is how I tell time.

Autumn leaves

I didn't miss all of the leaves this year...

You know, I'm no photographer (though my dad was an excellent one and my mom is handy with a camera as well) but I find that if you use the 16:9 setting your pictures suddenly look really classy and important! These looked pretty drab in the regular view, but the ol' widescreen makes it look rather impressive I think, even on my cheap camera.





Ah! How pretty! This is at one of my favorite little parks.

You can also see my other great photographic trick in the second to last one: "hold the camera at a slight angle" - ooh ahh, instant art!

Angels and snowdrops

The angel book illustrations are virtually finished - I only have one more to complete. That's 10 canvases, two sides so there are a total of 20 images, plus some extra stuff for the front, back etc -- whew! Here's one illustrating a moonlight/star/night time theme.

And the accompanying angel.

And just because, here are some snowdrops. The first flowers of spring. They're a little late, because we had so much snow, but as long as we're talking about angels...these have a bit of a hopeful message I think.

The last mushrooms of fall

I took pictures of the last mushrooms of the year, on Thanksgiving, but I did not get a chance to post until just now!

It was unusually warm on that day, probably around 60 degrees which is very warm for late November here. I didn't expect there to still be mushrooms growing in the woods, but there they were...not the vivid shades of July, no bright reds or sulfurous yellow, no garish blues and purple or strange mossy greens.

Though a few still spring strange and corpsy, smooth waxy curves of flesh protruding from the cold bark of trees.

There's a flourish of strange orange-yellow color among the rotting leaves though.

And the flaky purple fungi creeping up this log, looks rather like oyster shells.

See how big they are in comparison to my green glittery nails!

Can't get me out of the woods

It was unusually warm today, around 70, which means that once everything else was under control there was time to check out the woods department. Most of the trees are bare except for some yellow maple leaves. The 'timer' on my camera isnt' really working anymore, can you tell?

After a summer of nonstop mushroom photography (I say that as someone who is not a professional photographer, mind you, just a random weirdo with a barely-functional cheap digital camera) I was happy to still be able to find a few of the little guys, peeping out from beneath rotting leaves. Lots of critters came out today -- lots of bright green leaf bugs and spidery friends.

Bright green moss is so beautiful! It was the only spot of green in the forest (other than those bugs) but it's so lovely.

Spider ahead!...
This guy was actually huge, for New Jersey -- we're not known for our enormous spiders, but he was as big as I've seen them. This was the only picture that came out clear though! After some research I think he's a pretty normal garden spider, but I've never seen a bright neon orange one before. Looking up spiders online, it looks like he might be an orange marbled orb spider (or some combination of words thereof) but I say that as a wild guess. The Clueness Naturalist strikes again.

Bought some more canvases on sale today, so it's back to my indoor activities now!

Obligatory autumn foliage, plus new art

There haven't been a lot of opportunities for autumn leaf viewing yet this year because as soon as they started to turn, the temperatures plummeted. Today though was the most perfect weather imaginable! It's horrifyingly nice! And it might be the one and only perfect autumn day we get...


The bright daylight kind of makes my hair look about five shades lighter than it actually is, so don't let this fool you. What am I looking so intently at? The timer on my camera, since I'm not sure if it's about to go off or not. There is no squirrel crashing the photo, unfortunately! Also, I normally don't wear pants. I mean, I wear skirts. Pants are an anomaly, but I got used to wearing them in the woods to keep the ticks off this spring and summer. I still was constantly picking ticks off of me though!!


Completely unrelated, my recent viewing of Dark Shadows on DVD led me to think about some of my favorite obsessions -- hallways full of doors, candelabras, you know the routine. I watched Dark Shadows when I was a kid, of course, in reruns in the 80s, and one of the enduring images for me was Angelique's dream curse, where each dreamer is presented with a hallway of doors. Behind each door is a rather unconvincing horror. But it still made an impression on me! I don't quite know what the story is behind these mysterious figures but I like the ambiguity they suggest. What is behind these doors? What power does that jewel hold?

I have a ton of new matte 5 x7 prints of new and old paintings to list on Etsy in the upcoming days. My older scans, which were smaller files than the ones I save now, look absolutely great in the 5 x 7 size if I do say so myself! I'll be listing them over on http://sarada.etsy.com daily.

Absurdly nice October day

First, a very big thank you to http://www.jewelrybytarabiz.blogspot.com/ for featuring me on her blog today! She has a wonderful blog with regular features on artists and crafters, and her etsy shop is full of positively amazing stuff!!

It was almost comically pleasant outside today -- the kind of day where you pretty much have to just cancel everything and spend the entire day outside. The leaves aren't really in their autumn colors yet, though some that turned early were already blown off. But the rest are still mostly summer green, though starting to brown around the edges. In the woods there is already a thick carpet of gold beech and birch leaves.

Mushroom hunting is a little more difficult because of the thickening layer of leaves on the forest floor. The Psychedelic Slug painting in this post has been marked down temporarily to mark the end of the forest mushroom season. (and again, I note, I never pick mushrooms, I only photograph them...do not disturb your fungi friends!)

Above, you see some growing on a log at Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve last week. Below, from Clayton Park this week. Just out of frame there was a fuzzy white and black caterpillar inching along. Some internet research suggests they were destined to become Hickory Tussock Moths. I saw several in the forest in the same vicinity. They kept wanting to crawl onto the path that is often traveled by bikes so I moved them back off the trail. Reading up on them I see that some people can have bad allergic reactions to handling them. I did not have a reaction, but I just let them crawl onto a finger and quickly moved them out of the line of the path...but I should try to remember that bright white and black marked things with spines jutting out of them, might just be trying to send a "do not touch" message.


It's funny, because I had just been reading the horror story "Couching at the Door" by D.K. Broster, which deals with someone who is haunted by something long and furry that resembles a feather boa or caterpillar. So seeing furry caterpillars everywhere was in keeping with my mindset -- rather like the time I read "The Willows" while traipsing through a swampy area with willows growing everywhere. Ahhhh, atmosphere!

Forest of eyes

Walking through the early autumn woods near twilight, the colors of the sky and trees strike me with their beauty. In the fall the world seems full of rainbows. The colors in the trees bleed from crimson to tangerine, gold, lime green and soft olive. The shadows stretch purple across the cooling earth. This year many of the trees were blown bare by brisk October winds before they even changed into their autumn outfits.

Although the eyes in these trees may appear sinister I don't think of them as being baleful beings -- trees are alive, even in the colder months, and whatever earthy intelligence they possess continues to watch over the woods even in the winter. Dark guardians of silent secrets.

More artist features coming soon, I just wanted to post a little something about this while it was on my mind.

Redheads

I am working on a post about a favorite artist who is also a best friend, but while I am doing that here is a painting I began quite some time ago but only recently got around to scanning. She's on Etsy now. Since I'm a redhead I have an affinity for woodpeckers, but this isn't a self portrait. Though I DID make a corset kind of like that once.

This spring I saw so many amazing birds in my woods walks (before mushrooms took center stage) -- everything from hummingbirds to bald eagles. The most breathtaking of all, though, was an enormous pileated woodpecker. If only I could have taken a picture! The woodpecker you see above is not a pileated though -- I decided to paint an ivory-billed woodpecker, which is thought to be extinct. They look very similar to the pileated (which has a black bill). I hold out some hope that the ivory-billed will be found to still exist -- I've read some encouraging things but it still seems unlikely. Then again there was a time last year where I was convinced I was seeing passenger pigeons everywhere I went, even though I know they are long gone. On a positive note though I did really see bald eagles this year, just in regular old central New Jersey. In Princeton and further south, where I live, I know there are nesting pairs but had never seen them before here.

real and illusory mushrooms

It's getting cooler out, but the summer of endless mushrooms continues. The mud is getting darker and thicker, the trees downed by lightning strikes in the summer are now covered with heavy fungus growth.


This strange procession of mushrooms up the trunk of a downed tree, were particularly striking. Again, I'm limited by the fact that photography is not my main pursuit in life so it's just dumb luck when I can get a picture in focus.


Then of course there are the illusory mushrooms. I was looking at my Indian bedspread with my glasses off, and I would have sworn that the patterns formed these strange spotted mushrooms. I liked that idea so I jotting it down before I lost the image. The owl and the hedgehog are purely gratuitous! But walking around with my glasses off might be a good way to come up with ideas for things to paint, now that I think about it.