A Foggy Day, Harbinger of Spring

This cruel winter is winding down. Last week there were 7 or 8 inches of snow on the ground. The first warmish day, a dense fog hung about for most of the time. I love fog. I like the mystery of how it can transform familiar spaces and change one's orientation to reality. I like how it makes haloes around street lights at night. I like how it creates a feeling of isolation, so that my house seems to be far from any other houses, as if I'm on an island far away from land.
In the last few days, all that snow is gone. The ground is brown, with a gray-green cast. For those living in low areas or near creeks and rivers, there's water everywhere. There's still a chill in the air, but we have had a few days of sweater weather. Some people here in northeast Ohio have crocuses and snowdrops blooming already. The ice is mostly gone, although John found the trail in one of the MtroParks ice covered yesterday when he went for a hike.
Saturday night, when Sally and I were returning from a concert, we found a crowd of students along University Drive, out on the muddy lawns of fraternity houses, enjoying their beer and music as if it were late April and 70 degrees instead of 40.
It's been a loooong winter.

Online Art Class

I am having fun with the Lucky Drawing Class. (Lucky is Susan Shie's nickname.) we have to draw something every day by setting a timer  for 10 minutes and drawing whatever comes to mind. I believe this is one of those concepts left over from the hippie era, when a little mind altering substance helped the process along. No matter, it results in making me put down this IPad and doing something real and tangible. If you like what comes up, you can spend  more time and make a finished drawing.
Besides this, we have a more direct and complicated assignment each week. The one due tomorrow is to draw one's closet with a surprise in it. Could be a clothes closet, a supply closet, etc., and draw what's in it, plus something unexpected. I haven't finished mine yet, but I think it will be  all right if I don't screw it up.
For some reason, Sixto is interested, suddenly, in my drawing table, my drawing pencils, erasers, anything loose, which he likes to pat and push around. I kept thinking that he had never done this before. Then I realized that the last time I was in there, there was no Sixto around. It has been around 2 and 1/2 years since I was working on those Amish scenes. I've also been using a painting app to illustrate this blog, mainly because my scanner broke and I couldn't scan drawings any more as I had done before.
For the drawing class, we are working in a very large size skettchbook, so we photograph our drawings and download them to a personal album on a FB site, which is basically our virtual classroom. There we can get feedback from Lucky and other members of the class. Way cool, I think.
Above is one of my drawings from one of those  timed exercises. I made these window figures from this plasticky stuff I got in Germany, called Fenster Farben. They are transparent and cheerful little things especially in the winter.

 

Roaring In

March began very traditionally, with a snowstorm. The snow started Saturday, but our first day of the month when Spring starts was arctic. The outlook is not good. I have missed quite a few of my water aerobics classes this winter, mainly to avoid losing my footing as I skid down the walk to my friend's car. Ice seems to form even though John keeps shoveling every flake almost as soon as it falls. He lent me his YakTraks, and I have my walking sticks, but it is treacherous for an aged person such as I am to risk breaking my body into little pieces.
Two good things during March are the Sunday pancake breakfasts in maple syrup country, and the Lenten fish-fries down at the town of St. Joseph. Even though I broke my hip at the latter some years back, I still enjoy the food and community spirit in that little German Catholic village.
I am also starting an online drawing class offered by Susan Shie, a gifted artist and fun person I got to know when we both participated in Artsweek down at  a school in Sugarcreek. I taught a week of storytelling for middle-school students,  and Susan, or Lucky taught kids to paint story chairs. She's a fantastic and nationally known art quilter and painter, and also very funny. Until I had  to give up driving, I had taken some kind of art class every year for  a long time, just to keep my hand in and to learn new skills. This should be fun. This is Lucky's second online class, but she's been teaching for years. She'll give us assignments, we'll take photos of each one, download them into our own album and post them on a special Facebook page. We'll be working in a large format, which I find intimidating, but I think it will be much fun and challenging.One exercise will be to spend 10 minutes evry morning to draw something, whatever comes to mind. This morning, after aerobics class, I started by making watery colors, like the pool I exercise in, and Sixto joined me, right on my drawing table, rubbing my face and covetring part of the paper with his tail and one of his paws. So that's what I drew.