Snapshots from July and August 2012

Jennifer, Joe, Patsy and I stopped by Maple Donuts outside of Harrisburg on the way to our family reunion in July.

Sailing with my dad in July.

Sailing Ca Ira with the asymmetric spinnaker.

Patsy having a really good time at the CTSA picnic.

Roger is happy in the recycling box.

 Anne Needham with Roger at my Kitchen Warming Party in August.

First Journal Entry

This is a polaroid photograph of the family cat when my sister and I were little.  Her name was Dusty.  She was a magnificent calico who introduced herself to my family by crawling into my father's lap as he worked on one of our boats in a friend's yard.  That was several years before I was born and she was a member of the family until she died when I was 14.  We used to be able to judge how severe approaching storms would be by how far down the basement stairs she would sit.  We'd have "one step alerts," "two step alerts," and so forth.  If she was on the basement floor, we could expect a hurricane and the power to go out for a while.  When it was cold, she'd curl up under the sheets on the beds so all we could see was a lump in the middle.  My sister and I used to dress her up in doll clothes and put her in Jennifer's pink baby carriage.  We also used to build mazes out of a set of cardboard bricks, throw an afghan over the top, shove Dusty in the maze, and try to get her to run through it.  She never did, though, she just knocked down the cardboard brick wall :)

I was clearing out my desk last weekend and came across this piece of yellow legal paper.  It appears to be my first attempt at keeping a journal and Dusty is the main topic.  I scanned it in, bumped up the contrast, and enlarged it to be more or less legible.

This is what the whole sheet of paper looked like, complete with illustration.

Omar #5

20" by 25" Pastel Nude.

This is, so far, the only pastel of a male nude that I think is successful.  The pink and white and skin tone shades that I've been using seem to lend themselves to more feminine images.  In this one, I tried to keep the red from getting to0 pink and worked in some brown to make the drawing more masculine.  I also like the viewer's angle to the model, I sat way in the corner of the room to look dead-on his back and got a really good triangular composition formed by his body and the stools.

I've got less than 100 pages left of "Six Weeks in Saratoga."  I'm going to try to finish it tonight.

Nicola

Figure drawing.  Pastel.  18" by 24"  July 26,2012

I'm thinking of making my blog more like a journal.  So today, what of note happened?  After work I was running errands when I saw a young African-American kid get arrested outside of Eastport Liquors!  The gossip in the store was that he got picked up because there was a warrant out for his arrest.  I don't know what he supposedly did, I hope it was nothing too bad because he looked really young, about 16, I think.

I'm reading a book that my mom gave me a while back called "Six Weeks in Saratoga: How Three-Year-Old Filly Rachel Alexandra Beat the Boys and Became Horse of the Year."  It's more about Charlie Hayward, the New York Racing Association president, and the history of Saratoga racecourse than it is about the filly, and it was hard to get into the book at first.  I'm about halfway through now and it's growing on me and is starting to rekindle my old interest in horse racing.

The rest of the day was pretty normal, here's a pastel that I drew in July.  I'm happy with the way it turned out, especially the colors.  It's time for dinner and Roger says "Meow!"

Sarah #4

Graphite figure drawing.  20" by 25"