Back to the 50's, Images and Verse, and a tiny avian.

This picture is bigger than the painting!  It's a 4 x 4  - Singing of Spring (I hope).

On to thrift shop adventuring!!

I am rarely able to pass up the chance to rummage about in the books at a thrift shop or yard sale.  There's just something magical to me about finding a best loved author or a new discovery amongst the tons of Reader's Digests and Harlequin Romance rubble.


Last week I happened to notice the word Poetry on the spine of a shabby book.  Since poetry books of any kind are rare hereabouts, I eagerly pulled it out for a look.  It was a 1954 Public School Library book called the first book of poetry published by Franklin Watts, Inc., with pictures (charming line drawings) by Kathleen Elgin and poems "selected by" Isabel J. Peterson.

I wasn't yet in school in 1954, but I found a few of my favorite childhood poems included along with many unfamiliar poems and authors.  And I found that the illustrator, Kathleen Elgin, was a gifted, versatile and prolific artist working throughout the 1950's and 1960's.


 Here are a few of her drawings:

One of my favorite childhood poems - with a perfect illustration,

 

 

 

March roars in...

Toto 2 (for Peter)

With your dangerous beauty you
are like unto a tornado,
touching down,
laying waste to trepidation...

I am drawn, into your world,
seeking an Oz of my own.
Let me trade silver
for your ruby set in gold.

I look for you in the yellow moon
while the wind and City take you,
and the lies unfold,
I'll have this twisted ache to hold.

- patrice lynne young 2006

My fascination with funnel clouds and wild weather can be traced back to my Midwestern childhood in Central Illinois. and I've been working on several storm paintings once again. Two new ones posted here may be finished - but I'll live with them for a little while and check them out in different light before I seal them and prepare the panels for hanging. These are each 24 x 24. I've several more of these panels and I'd like to do at least six - preferably twelve - more of these to exhibit together.

I'd been working on the next Black Bird/ Wind paintings and thought that's what I'd be doing all this week. Ah, but painting mood changes sometimes to reflect events in life. Most of the time I love my rural solitude, but sometimes I wish I had better neighbors. After a verbal altercation with one of a family of bullies, I went from a fowl mood to a foul mood. I sat down to paint under a cloud of piss-ed-ness - and this is what appeared on my panel... Sometimes I'm really easy to figure out.

I like the first painting above most. It's fluidity of brushwork is closer to the wild, uncontrollable feeling I wish to portray. But there is something I like about the contained ferocity of the second one, too.

There is a fierce beauty in a storm, just as there is in life.