What Are YOU Looking At?

What Are YOU Looking At? / Nuthatch / Oil on black canvas, 6x12, $135 including shipping

sold

THERE IS SOMETHING to be said for the little birds, brown and gray. Not flashy. Not vivid. Not iridescent. Nothing that invites you to look twice.

There is something to be said for the small, quiet way they go about their business, blending in, flitting, chirping. Thriving. At the feeder, there will be dozens of the little birds to one of the brighter one. Numbers of them feeding on the ground while the bright blue jays and queen-red cardinals push the food aside, tossing down clouds of seeds, to find the one bit that pleases them. And then the little birds on the ground pick up the leavings, happy to have them. 

I love the little birds the way I love gray skies, color-drained winter fields, the smart and shy and quiet people in my life. 

As I pack Peter's clothes to be donated, or given to my family and my friends, what I find is mostly colors that aren't bright, that don't draw attention. Browns and grays, the colors of the small birds that we both watched and fed and loved. 

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Winter Field / Oil on black canvas, 16x16 (?) / Please contact me for price, size, availability

I WILL BE IN ARIZONA during the Tubac show, Feb. 5-9, and will be exhibiting, but not in my regular spot. Instead, I will be on the patio of my gallery there, Sweet Poppy,  19 Tubac Road, near Shelby's restaurant. 

This is a gamble for me, not exhibiting at the show, in the space where I have always shown and sold my work. But it is a simpler set-up and offers me some freedom and flexibility. This is the year for me to try different things, and so I am giving it a go. 

If you are in Tubac during the show, please come to Sweet Poppy and see my new paintings. 

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For Today

Sonnet 97

William Shakespeare

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness every where!
And yet this time removed was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute;
   Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer
   That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.