Drawing by Rick Beerhorst (left) drawing by Grace Beerhorst (right)

I stumbled across this picture above as a favorite among my daughter Rose's Flickr favorites.  It reminds me of how magical and righteous it is to have children regularly sprinkled into your day.  It really is a good thing and I need to remind my self because they are fun and creative and sparkly and cute but they also wreck your favorite shit on a pretty regular basis which is just part of the whole frikken ball of wax.

Since we brought home a used upright piano via Criags List a couple of weeks ago, Rain (age 9 yrs) and I are trying to learn how to play.  A very crude version of Beethoven's Ode to Joy can be heard several times a day at completely random times coming from the foyer of our home which has recently been designated the Music Room. I am working up my own primitive version of Professor Longhairs's Mardi Gras. Some portion of us must remain a child forever and having children around are a great reminder of this simple truth. 

I began using ladders in my drawings and collages in full force last summer when we created our ArtPrize installation for MadCap Coffee Co. called Perspective Lifters.  I made up several wooden ladders of differing sizes out of scrap wood.  I also carried the image into woodblock prints and drawings. I would like to keep playing with this image and see where it takes me.

So what does it mean??? Well art will invariably mean different things to different people.  For me the image of the ladder speaks to our desire for transcendence.  It is connected to our deep need to be in touch with the unseen world. The ladder also may refer to our ability to go beyond what we can ordinarily do, with the help of some person, tool or special curcumstance.  finding a teacher to take piano lessons with may be your ladder to reach a whole new area of your personality.

We have a few different conch shells that drift around between the house and the Carriage House Studio.  I no longer remember where they came from.  It seems that they just arrived at some point and stayed.  I love them for how solid they feel when you pick them up.  I like the reference to the sea, mermaids, the natural world and what could be thought of as sort of portable home.  The conch shell internal structure is  of course the spiral and this is also carries important meaning as described below;

In terms of spirituality, the spiral symbol can represent the path leading from outer consciousness (materialism, external awareness, ego, outward perception) to the inner soul (enlightenment, unseen essence, nirvana, cosmic awareness). Movements between the inner (intuitive, intangible) world and the outer (matter, manifested) world are mapped by the spiraling of archetypal rings; marking the evolution of humankind on both an individual and collective scale.

Moreover, in terms of rebirth or growth, the spiral symbol can represent the consciousness of nature beginning from the core or center and thus expanding outwardly. This is the way of all things, as recognized by most mystics.

I have used the conch shell in several paintings and prints. This idea of passing from the outer world into the inner world is very compelling.  I think that both making art and living with art is a way for us as people to become more adapt at making the journey from the surface down into the depths of meaning and our own consciousness.

Photo Rick Beerhorst

The Master Of Saint Veronica

Behind The Veil

First sip of a cold beer

What I saw in the corner of my eye

A whiff of dinner through the kitchen window

A fragment of a heated conversation

Bumped from behind at a party

Something in my shoe

A cup with a broken off handle

Dust on the painting

The sound of the brush going through her hair

The first stars to come out

Lilly of the valley in a tea cup

The freckles over the bridge of his nose

Smell of a horse saddle

Red lipstick

A robin searching for worms after the rain

Pill bugs under a rock

The view through her veil

Nina Leen, Young Teen, 1944

Lasar Segall, Youngster with Long Hair, 1942

Anita Malfatti, Montartre Song, 1926

Thuva-Lisa Steen, Self Portrait (photo)

Tongue out painting green dress, Rick Beerhorst, 2012

I spent an hour or so trolling through Flickr collecting favorites last night. I have shared a few of them here.  Before I began this post I was clicking through someone's tumbler that I found totally captivating.  I just kept coming to the end of the page and then I would hit next page and begin again.  Oops! a half hour of my life just slipped away. Next page.

Julia Cameron calls it restocking the pond.  As artists we are constantly drawing images and ideas out of our inner workings.  It becomes necessary for us to find the playful ways that we can drop new images and ideas inside of us and then give them time and space to swim around and combine into new and mysterious possibilities.  Wasting time?  I prefer to think of it as restocking the pond.

Sabriel, Pearl Beerhorst, drawing available here

The Bridge, Ann Wood

I began reading to Rain and Grace from a new fairytale book last night at bedtime.  The book has come from Pearl's Room.  I asked Pearl for suggestions because we just finished up Little House On The Prairie and we needed a new book. She wisely recommended The Violet Fairy Book first published in 1901 by Longmans, Green and Co., London. In the preface it includes this;

The stories in this book, as in all the others of the series, have been translated out to the popular traditional tales in a number of different languages.  These stories are as old as anything man has invented.  They are narrated by naked savage women to naked savage children.  They have been inherited by our earliest civilised ancestors, who really believed that beasts and trees and stones can talk if they choose, and behave kindly or unkindly.  The stories are full of the oldest ideas of ages when science did not exist, and magic took the place of science.

Can there be anything better than sending children off into their dreams through the pages of an ancient fairy tale?

I had a truck load of top soil and another load of wood chips dropped off a couple weeks ago and I have been slowly putting it all into the garden.  We had a soil test done and found that our soil had some degree of lead so this input should  help bring that down.  We use the manure from the rabbits and the used straw and manure from the chicken coop to also spread through the garden.  It is nice to have the animals as part of our micro urban farm for the way they bring supplements to the soil.  It is also nice to have a good place to go with kitchen scrapes. 

This morning I was shoveling the soil into the raised beds while the chickens where quietly talking to each and rutting through the old straw of their run.  Overcast and cool, everything moist from two days of spring time drizzle, the moss on the barn next door glowing green.  I love this place of backyard food growing for the connection it gives me into the natural world and the diligent pecking of the red headed woodpecker.

Sassafras Trees etching, Rick Beerhorst, 5x7 inches

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to get a way for a few days and stay with a friend who lives in the country.  I took a walk into the woods each early morning and finding a place to sit down I would scratch a little copper plate doing my best to take in what I was seeing and feeling.  I have always enjoyed a walk in the woods, but sitting down and making a picture takes the experience to a whole different level. 

To sit quiet and listen, to be still and notice the patterns and shapes that happen between the trees and how they overlap is a powerful experience.  This being in the woods helps me to get centered.  This being in the woods helps me reconnect with myself.  This being in the woods makes me wild again.

a world of our own making

a world of our own making

half a robins egg in the grass next to the side walk

a cup of tea forgotten now cold

early morning sun hits the roof tops

upside down conversation sits down

flower on the floor were she made biscuits

wiping the pallet clean to a polish

tire patch kit and an air pump

looking through cheese cloth to the dinning room

the flower print tea cup missing a handle

she keeps trying to plunk out Ode to Joy

no bath room towel

the Bible goes un read another week

a telephone call inside my ear

putting paint on the pallet one more time

landscape, Wayne Thiebaud

Landscape Highway, Wayne Thiebaud

landsape, Wayne Thiebaud

I have always felt a great admiration for the work of Wayne Thiebaud. Though his subject mater is rich and varied I have only included a few of his landscape paintings here because I am personally investigating contemporary landscape painting these days.

Wayne Thidbaud is currently 93 years old and still actively painting.  I love the way he talks about his painting and his life in this video.  This is a man who has given his whole life over to the pursuit of painting and drawing and has captured so much life in his work in the process.