The school year is over, and I'm spending the summer on Lopez Island in a tiny house barely big enough to hold me let alone the thousands of projects I tend to trail with me. I set up an ecoprinting station outside the kitchen, where I hope to learn how to do it. I took some boxes of fabric and supplies down from the laundry room attic and cracked my knuckles. I stared at the printouts of several novels that have yet to have their final edit. My son-in-law pointed to the tens of cords of wood that should be split into firewood to sell. What to do first? A whole summer stretched ahead of me.

The high-energy woman who does training and outreach at Lopez Solid Waste (aka The Dump) snagged me one day and said, "You'd be perfect for the July Artist in Residence." Which I would be, since I stand solidly behind the idea of reduce, reuse, recycle, upcycle. Especially now that recycling options have closed down, and transportation is more difficult, the dump is dealing with thousands of pounds of perfectly good things that they don't have storage space for. Books, clothes, furniture, kitchen supplies, and the like. Part of my job this July is to take as much stuff as possible out of the trash stream and into use again. 

I don't yet have a clear idea of what I want to do. I have several first-draft ecoprint strips of fabric. Use them somehow? But what does "somehow" mean?

I made a lined cloth bag from fabric scraps, based on a Japanese design. Took longer than I expected (which is the nature of such projects), but maybe make some of these.

I fished about twenty obsolete science reference books out of the Mixed Paper dumpster and made a Coptic stitch book out of a couple of them. Hmm. Takes a long time, and I'm not an expert, but still. It's a possibility.

The clock is ticking. By this time next week I should have some overarching idea and be well into it. Right?

I have been having vague thoughts for decades about the pointillist nature of reality, time, and perception, but until finding Oliver Sacks and Donna Haraway, have not heard of anyone with similar ideas. Now, I'm taking quotes they inspired or actually said, and writing them in amongst the shadow paintings that I like so much.

Why shadow paintings? Plato's cave, of course. The very hierarchical, nay, paternalistic ideas that I read into Plato's cave allegory have annoyed me because I don't think there is a library of ideal forms, in God's mind I suppose, that we only get a bastardized version of. Recently, after reading Oliver Sacks' On the Road and Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, I realized how I could agree with a version of Plato's vision. Suppose the forms are raw reality, and the shadows in the cave are reality filtered through our very particular, very idiosyncratic senses and preconceptions.

And why calligraphy? Because the Medieval world-view was so very cut and dried. The figures they paint tend to have clear outlines. The writing is a strange mixture of gnomic and pedantic, always pointing to a Great Truth. It appeals to my sense of irony to depict my sense of the ephemeral, ungraspable, ambiguous nature of the world using those Medieval forms.

My mother's parents were painters. They sold many of their works, and now, 50 years after their deaths, I have an attic/loft with 1/3 of 1/2 of the remainder (my aunt had half, my mother the other half, and then my sisters and I divided up Mom's portion). Many are student works, or started work, or things that, well, it's no surprise that they didn't sell. During quarantine, I thought, "Well, I should do something with their work," rather than throw it out, or pass it on to my children who don't want it. The first step is just making a copy of the ones I really like. This one showed in an exhibit in Berlin in 1921, but it doesn't have a title. I see a cathedral-like forest, executed in a style that was right for 1921, but with a theme that speaks to me 99 years later.

I have an upcoming show at Gray Sky Gallery in July/August. Or maybe I don't. Only COVID-19 knows for sure. Anyway, the galley owner said, "Make some big canvases, those sell well." I had no idea. All along I've been avoiding painting big because who has that kind of wall space? Aside from me, of course. 

At great expense, and with a somewhat sociopathic carpenter, I had an addition built onto my smallish house about 15 years ago. As I'm not a skilled architect, the room he built turned out to be larger than I had envisioned, with a 20' ceiling. It's actually perfect for me, now that I've gotten over the shock. The other large paintings I've done are on the walls, but there have been a few stored canvases under the stairs to the loft which languished there. 

Let the languishing come to an end! 

Long-time fans (and I hope there are a lot of you) will recognize this car. I make a point of visiting it whenever I'm on that side of the island. An old friend, by now.

The more I looked at this old car, the more faces appeared. So I painted it.

A friend of mine bought land nearby. It has a tangled plum and quince orchard, a wetlands, and a car that had been parked oh, maybe 50 years ago.

I was teaching a class on Zentangles to the two students in a remote island school. We went to the beach there to look for motifs and I was captivated by the Madrona tree which had been designated as a buoy collector. 

The entanglement of the human with the non-human world is a perennial theme with me. Who knew? I've tried to allow the choice of what to paint next be intuitive, coming from the subconscious. And this is what happens. Entanglements, either overt as in this painting, or implied.

I walk the same beach twice a month when I'm on the island, scanning for beached birds. My dog scans for otter scat. Just over the bleached logs in this image is an otter ... den? holt? stinky spot? ... anyway, it is often inhabited. What fascinates me more than the redolence is how dark the forest seems compared to the brilliant gray light of the beach (grey light? Yes! This is the Pacific Northwest, after all. The light is like the pearly nacre of an oyster shell, most of the time).

For an ad commissioned by a friend. The goddess is Avalokitesvara, who is male in some traditions and female in the tradition that Dharmagiri Sangha follows. In the final version, I made her skin color darker. I'm not sure what I think about that. Do we change longstanding traditions if they are ridiculously not inclusive? Or do we forge on into the future, resolving to be more sensitive, and leave the artifacts of the past as a lesson?

I felt similarly when I visited several sites where the Berlin Wall had been. All traces were gone (though there are some places where it has been preserved). Is it more or less likely that we will repeat old mistakes if we erase all evidence of them?

Don't even get me started about what appears in history textbooks.

Yggdrasil is the World Tree of Norse Mythology, containing the nine worlds. There is an eagle at the top, and a snake at the bottom. Two stags eat the leaves, a squirrel runs between the eagle and the snake carrying gossip. Many other features of the tree came to light as I learned more about it, but my version of it is designed to use the fabrics that Astri and I have both used, and reflect the color schemes in her house. I asked her friends to do a bit of work on it too, and then sign the back. I think there are about 40 signatures now, but we can add more over the years. The quilting is not nearly done.