Daily Doodle # 8: Daffo-doodles

It’s daffodil season!

Daffo-doodles

Watercolor painting of daffodils

Robin with daffodils

Daffodils

Daffodils, 52 Wreaths Project

 

 

Daily Doodle # 3: Pine Tree in Lithia Park

Looking up; Pine tree in Lithia Park, Ashland, OR

Daily doodle, Pine tree in Lithia Park

Trees Need Not Walk the Earth
by David Rosenthal

Trees need not walk the earth
For beauty or for bread;
Beauty will come to them
Where they stand.
Here among the children of the sap
Is no pride of ancestry:
A birch may wear no less the morning
Than an oak.
Here are no heirlooms
Save those of loveliness,
In which each tree
Is kingly in its heritage of grace.
Here is but beauty’s wisdom
In which all trees are wise.
Trees need not walk the earth
For beauty or for bread;
Beauty will come to them
In the rainbow—
The sunlight—
And the lilac-haunted rain;
And bread will come to them
As beauty came:
In the rainbow—
In the sunlight—
In the rain.

Daily Doodle # 2: Camellia

I woke up early this morning and spent an hour with this line drawing of a camellia from the bush outside our front door.  I kept thinking of the Paul Klee quote:  “Drawing is taking a line for a walk.”

Daily doodle # 2, Camellia

 

Daily Doodles, My New Practice

Daily doodles # 1

I was entranced when I watched John Franzen drawing lines in this YouTube video: Each Line, One Breath.  What an imaginative leap to do line drawings so contemplatively that the strokes become a meditation.  I was inspired to use line drawing as my own meditative practice, one that I will call “Daily Doodles.”  I don’t know whether I will be able to sustain a daily doodles practice, but it’s a new month, and on day one I am motivated to at least attempt it.

For my first daily doodle, I drew on a page I ripped out of a New York Times Magazine.

I could draw and paint trees for years and years and never get to the bottom of their mystery and allure.

“Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?”
— Walt Whitman, from “Song of the Open Road”

John Grade, ‘Middle Fork’ on display at the Seattle Art Museum

Here is another artist’s impression of tree art:  John Grade’s suspended sculpture of a tree currently on display in the atrium of the Seattle Art Museum.  It’s a cast of a 140-year-old Western Hemlock from the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River.

And this week I fell in love with another “tree artist,” Donna Leavitt, who draws with graphite pencil the intricate shadings and textures of the bark of immense trees.  Her large works are collages of smaller sheets of paper. I saw these on display at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s “Revering Nature” exhibit:

Donna Leavitt, ‘Majesty,’ 2016

Donna Leavitt, ‘Thrust,’ 2012

Donna Leavitt, ‘The Sentinel,’ 2010

I’m falling in love with images of trees.  Imagine how captivated I can become with the real, live trees around me.

 

 

Cherry Blossoms in the Springing of the Year

Yoshiko cherry trees in bloom, University of Washington campus

A Prayer in Spring
by Robert Frost

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees. . . .

Finally!  The cherry blossoms are in full bloom at the University of Washington.  I took these photos on the Quad this morning:

The floating world; upside down reflections in a rain puddle

Some people travel all the way to Japan to view cherry blossoms, but we in Seattle are fortunate to be able to experience hanami in our own city.  Another way to see them is via books.  I saw this book of Japanese prints with cherry blossoms at the library:

Cherry Blossoms by Freer/Sackler Smithsonian Museums

 

“Viewing Cherry Blossoms,” attributed to Katsushika Hokusai

 

“Snow, Moon, and Flowers,” by Takahashi Shotei

 

“Avenue of Cherry Trees,” by Yoshida Hiroshi

 

“Spring in Mount Atago,” by Kawase Hasui

 

“Spring at Kintai Bridge,” by Kawase Hasui

 

“A Courtesan Under a Cherry Tree,” by Katsushika Hokusai

 

“Crow Perched on a Flowering Cherry Branch and Full Moon,” by Ohara Kosan

“What a strange thing!
To be alive
Beneath cherry blossoms.”
— Kobayashi Issa

My watercolor sketch of cherry blossoms

 

 

Time to Break Out

Magnolia buds

Magnolia buds, just about to break out into blossom

“Jailbreak”
by Maya Spector

It’s time to break out —
Jailbreak time.
Time to punch our way out of
the dark winter prison.
Lilacs are doing it
in sudden explosions of soft purple,
And the jasmine vines, and ranunculus, too.
There is no jailer powerful enough
to hold Spring contained.
Let that be a lesson.
Stop holding back the blossoming!
Quit shutting eyes and gritting teeth,
curling fingers into fists, hunching shoulders.
Lose your determination to remain unchanged.
All the forces of nature
want you to open,
Their gentle nudge carries behind it
the force of a flash flood.
Why make a cell your home
when the door is unlocked
and the garden is waiting for you?

Cherry tree, about to blossom soon

Here in Seattle, it’s too soon for lilacs.  But with our lat spring, we await the blossoming of the cherry and plum trees.  Any day now!

 

A Host of Golden Daffodils

Watercolor sketch of daffodils

Daffodil Wreath (52 Wreaths Project)

You can listen to actress Noma Dumezeni read Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” poem on the BBC at this link.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Daffodil: King Trumpeter

Spring bouquet

“King Trumpeter to Flora Queen,
Hey, ho, daffodil!
Blow, and the golden jousts begin.”
— from “Daffodil,” The Wind in the Trees: A Book of Country Verse, by Katharine Tynan

Watercolor sketch of daffodil

 

The Grace of the Crocus Blossom

“A single crocus blossom ought to be enough to convince our heart that springtime, no matter how predictable, is somehow a gift, gratuitous, gratis, a grace.”
— David Steindl-Rast

Crocus Chrysanthus by George Maw, from The Art of Botanical Illustration by Wilfrid Blunt and William T. Stearn

“Beside the porch step
the crocus prepares an exaltation
of purple, but for the moment
holds its tongue. . . .”
— Jane Kenyon, from “Mud Season”

An exaltation of purple

Crocuses

Crow with crocuses

 

Is Art Justified?

Pot of yellow primroses

“There is not a significant artist in the world who is not asking himself whether his art is justified — not on account of the quality of his talent, but on account of the relevance of art to the demands of the time in which he is living.”
— John Berger, from “Revolutionary Undoing,” Landscapes: John Berger on Art

“There is vitality, a life force, energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.  And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.  The world will not have it.  It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable or how it compares with other expressions.  It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.  You do to even have to believe in yourself or your work.  You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you.  Keep the channel open.”
— Martha Graham, from Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham by Agnes de Mille

Quotes like these help me to feel better about making art.  I sometimes feel my paintings are frivolous when each morning the news is full of serious and worrisome threats to a peaceful world.