Back after a long hiatus

Thanks to everyone for keeping me on your "follow" list -- I got real busy in March finishing up the angel project and have not had time to keep new art flowing in the intervening months. But I've been working on some pieces for my own amusement and I have even just put one on Etsy. (Click image to visit listing).

I have some other pieces too that I don't have for sale yet since they were just done for my own entertainment but perhaps I will share or even list those, as I need to clear some stuff out of the way and these paintings are stacking up!

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.

Ghosts in the woods

I haven't had much time this week for anything so I am just going to post and run, to share some autumn ghosts while the leaves are still on the trees. It got so cold so fast that I can't even remember where the sweaters are this year. Hopefully the leaves won't all be blown away before I can go and look at them.

They say there are more ghost sightings in October than any other month. It certainly feels like ghost weather. I expect to see something in every window of every empty house, and behind every tree in the forest at dusk.

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.

New art, and a message in the woods

I am reading the ghost stories of AC Benson and RH Benson right now. I'm more of a fan of EF Benson but it's nice to be able to sit down and read them all in depth and get a better idea of the style of each. My favorites by AC Benson turn out to be the ones that were not originally even published, like "Basil Netherby" and "The Uttermost Farthing," which I'm reading right now. How amazing that three brothers should all become ghost story writers. At any rate, I dashed off a couple of almost-abstract, simple ghost paintings as a result and here is the first. The other needs a little more work as it is actually too dark...it's nice when I'm looking at it under a lamp but it needs some more highlights, before I scan and post it. This one is for sale on Etsy now, and I also listed another new painting. I'll write about that separately in the upcoming days.

When I'm walking through the woods I like to leave messages sometimes by arranging pinecones or leaves. I took this picture with my phone today after I was sitting under a tree reading my ghost stories. It's been a rough year but I am trying to stay optimistic. Hopefully someone will come across this message in the woods and be pleasantly surprised. If not, well, it did make me feel better to write it.

Painting on wood

I haven't put this lady up for sale yet because I'm working out how to photograph her (the fact that my camera stopped working the other day, except to take video, 'night' and 'action' shots doesn't help) -- but I thought I'd share the scanned image anyway.

I usually paint on canvas but this is on a piece of wood, from the craft store -- I always look at these plaques and am overwhelmed with ideas for what to put on them.  So overwhelmed that I almost never use them!  The possibilities are endless, for things to glue to them or adorn them with.  But really they just seem to cry out for an oval portrait. 

Since I'm well into the time of year where I just read endless volumes of ghost stories (most recently a collection of Marjorie Bowen; now I am reading AC Benson and RH Benson) I thought I would do a haunted portrait of a ghostly lady.  I'm not sure what her story is, yet -- she has a poppy-like flower at her throat.  Perhaps hers is a sad tale of opium dreams and tragic death at a young age.  Perhaps she hung above a fireplace in an abandoned manor, obscuring an inscription on the wall that holds the key to an ancestral secret and a lost inheritance.  Perhaps not.  But while I sort all that out, here is her pale ghostly portrait.

Ghastly ghost flowers

This summer, it has been unusually rainy in New Jersey -- it rained almost every day in June, and July was unseasonably cool and damp as well. One of the results of this downpour has been the proliferation of every type of mushroom in the woods. And among the strange collection of yellow and brown amanitas, jelly molds and fungus, death caps and destroying angels, a strange flower blooms.

I walk in the woods almost every day that the weather cooperates, even if only for a few minutes, but I have never before seen the elusive Indian Pipe in one of my favorite walking places, though I have looked for them in the darkest shadows among the mushrooms. Pale and waxy, they resemble mushrooms themselves - a tiny cluster of pale white stems bearing drooping bell-like blossoms. Flecked with the dark soil from which they erupt after a heavy rain, they seem to favor woods like the one I frequent, full of birch and beech, pine and poplar.

Among their other names are ghost flower, corpse plant, and fairy smoke -- quite a poetic plant! With that in mind I imagined that at its roots a wan fairy might lie in wait beneath the earth. I will probably do several paintings on this theme, but this is the first. I haven't decided whether to offer her up for Etsy or eBay yet, but I wanted to share her right away.