- LEAF: Llano Earth Art Fest

We went to the inaugural Llano Earth Art Fest and National Rock Stacking Competition. The two artistic/freestyle competitors in this Facebook video provide an insight into what was it was like. That being said, I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story ...

- Closing the book on Close Your Eyes 2

The second edition of Close Your Eyes is complete ...

Since I created links to the previous posts on Close Your Eyes and Close Your Eyes Too, I decided to just show the final two page spreads in this post, A-sides and B-sides ...

I did do some design mending (Jude Hill's very apt term) on the front page. First I removed the metal snaps (which were too large and too strong), then I removed the double-strand, multi-colored split backstitch lettering and replaced it with a simple single-strand backstitch which is more my style and balanced better on the B-side ...

Of course, the part I agonized over the most ended up being the part I liked best: the canvas photograph of Meg and Griffin hiding behind a window of rust-dyed muslin, bordered with a frame of asemic orange stitch ...

which is revealed on the B-side as the opening lyrics of  Carole King's You've Got a Friend (the first cut on James Taylor's album Mud Slide Slim). It was only as I wrote out the words that the phrase "close your eyes" jumped out at me ... a serendipitous echo ...

So, Close Your Eyes 2 is now signed, sealed ...

and delivered at last ...

- It's springtime in Texas, so of course the leaves are falling

Here in the Texas Hill Country we get "fall" in the spring.  The live oaks are currently in the process of shedding the leaves they held on to all winter. It's a great system: the new leaves push the old leaves off and grow in their place. So these trees will bare their branches over the next couple of weeks and then be covered in completely new foliage shortly thereafter ...

Consequently, leaves are everywhere, blown off by the March wind and rain that roared through earlier this week ...

Likewise, much of the ash from the deadwood and brush that we burned last weekend has blown and/or washed away, leaving the burn pit empty, awaiting the next installment ...

Fortunately, before the rain fell I was able to shovel some of the ash onto the inner wall of the burn pit ...

where it now serves as a kind of mortar for another layer of stone ...

And this is the windfall lichen that was spared from the flame, a patch about 6' wide and 12' feet long ...

bound for the lichen farm along the west trail ...

Last, but not least, here's a shot of Don using my wheelbarrow alternative, a 2' x 3' cement mixing tub with rope attached so it can be pulled over rocky ground and wood chip trails alike ...

and an odd bit of wood found along the way ...

Who knows what Don will find to do with it ...

- Getting closer: Close Your Eyes 2 nears completion

Two more page spreads have been completed on Close Your a Eyes 2, A-sides and B-sides ...

I'm particularly happy with the moon rising through the trees, which was started by loosely sketching some live oak branches off the Internet (with thanks to Mo for her recent advice), then roughly cutting the shape out with kitchen shears (which explains the fine job I did ) ...

The branches were then traced onto the B-side and filled in with some of the lyrics from James Taylor's Carolina in My Mind ... 

back stitched with a single strand of floss ...

then filled in on the A-side with needle weaving, seen here with the top two branches complete and the bottom two branches still showing traces of the lyrics from the B-side ...

Don has been busy, too. Initially he was working on a new tile ...

       

and came up with a neat twist on the sun center ...

But somewhere along the way, the sun migrated onto another piece of wood ...

So he now has two pieces in process, I guess.

Then there's this coffee table Georgia O'Keeffe In the West (Knopf 1989) that I found for a song at a used book store, now airing out page-by-page under our laundry room fan ...

Which is to say, we've been keeping busy. 

Last, but not least, here's another Mondegreen moment, Griffin-style this time ...

Meg sent us a text this morning (gently edited to protect the innocent):

I just asked Griffin if he did something and he said "No."
So I asked if he was lying. He roared and said "I'm a lion."

- Hill Country hugelkultur: Likin' lichen

I've become a lichen farmer. Which is to say, I'm deliberately saving lichen-laced deadwood from the burn pile and relocating it to areas that were scoured by heavy rainfall. Hopefully the branches will slow the flow of water and cause soil to drop out of suspension into the spaces between the rocks ... while simultaneously supporting continued lichen growth.

In this photo the newly laid wood chip path runs from upper left to lower right. The windfall branches covered with lichen are spread into the washed out area at the lower left corner ...

The idea had its genesis in Grace's suggestion that we use our brush cuttings for hugelkultur, but we have too many critters that would eat anything we might plant unless we build fences ... which isn't in our current plan. 

But lichen ... now that's something worth nurturing! And where better than along our trails?

Of course, we already hauled a large quantity of deadwood and brush to the burn pile ...

But I've started to pick through it to rescue the lichen-bearing branches. It's not something I'll ask Don to help with ... which goes back to my supervisory days when I used to tell student workers "If I ever ask you to do something and then decide I want it done differently, then I promise I will be the one to re-do the job." It was a good technique which made me think twice about how I wanted things done and made for a good lesson learned if I miscalculated.

So tomorrow is burn day (unless the wind picks up again) and I'll alternate fire tending with lichen hauling. With a little wildflower gazing thrown in ...

                          

And this is for Grace: one of our breezeway anoles admiring the lantana ...

- Oklahoma impression: First in a series of tile assemblages

Don is working on a series of tile pieces, which began with a first attempt at "painting outside the lines" shown at the end of the February 7th post and ultimately resulted in this assemblage ...

Spiritless?

It's been a longer-than-usual journey, resulting from much discussion between the two of us, although in the end it is truly Don's piece, his vision. 

Here's a picture of the assemblage taken mid-way through the process which shows the rusted hoe and hinge that he bound together to form a "body," the strips torn from cotton-linen cloth used in my first bleach discharge experiment (seen here as a setting sun in one of the lullaby books) ... a bit of plywood painted with primary colors inspired by Robert Rivera ... a small feather "earring" on the side of the "face" (held on by a screw which remains there in spite of my initial, unspoken hope that it might be removed) ... and a string of beads he culled from button boxes and antique store finds, then threaded onto copper wire ...

A similar hoe with fork and blade

G's growth chart, made from the
same plywood as the blue sky panel

"What triggered this?" I asked at one point.

Don said our drive through Oklahoma last October was at the heart of it. From the western end of I-44 at the Texas border to the eastern end where I-44 enters Missouri, he was deeply affected by the signs for the Indian Nations, one after another. No longer reservations, but still, not land chosen by the Native Americans who live there. Land chosen instead by a government that had its view of landownership rooted in the English system of metes and bounds ... land largely defined by latitudes and longitudes, although the rivers sometimes had their way, as the Red River does between Oklahoma and Texas.

As I watched the assemblage develop, I saw more and more symbols of the bounds imposed on Native Americans by a Euro-centric culture and began to think how titling the assemblage might reflect that ...

               

So, on the day Don declared the assemblage done, I asked him what he was going to name it. And then, when he said "Spiritless" I promptly tried to talk him out of it. Which is typical for me because I always look to dictionary definitions and if you look at the meaning of spiritless in m-w.com, it sounds like the antithesis of Native American spirituality.

But then I reconsidered ... how would I feel if I were forcibly moved off of my land? How drained of spirit? How bound by someone else's definition of what was to be my home?

Wouldn't I too be empty?

Spiritless?

Postscript: After writing this post, I asked Don to read it over and add something if he wanted to. Here's what he had to say ... 

The truth of the matter is that I feel rather odd commenting on something I've done that is a step away from my comfort level of folk art fish assemblages. Liz is correct, this piece was inspired by our travels across Oklahoma, yet I do not want to convey that Native Americans are without spirit. Hardly. The spiritless symbolism such as the missing face is rather straightforward, but the piece also speaks to me about strength and possibilities ... the strength of the metal itself, the movement from the darker center to the sunlight in the corner, the river of life running through the middle. Of course, most of this is unintentional ... I think?

- Working both sides: Sunset to sunrise

I alluded to a middle-of-the-night brainstorm at the end of this post that ended up on the sunset page of Close Your Eyes 2  ...

The back story (pun intended) relates to the James Taylor album Mud Slide Slim, on which You Can Close Your Eyes originally appeared. Released in 1970, that album became the soundtrack of my high school years. 

So it wasn't surprising as I stitched Close Your Eyes that music and lyrics from other songs came drifting back (especially Soldiers, which was mentioned in this post-Christmas reverie). Soldiers came back to me once again the other night, but this time it was the opening lyrics that stuck in my head. They seemed like a perfect story-starter ...

It was just after sunrise and down by the sea
Down in the sand flats where nothing will grow
Come drumming and footsteps like out of a dream
Where the golden green waters come in ... (what comes next?)

Then it hit me. One of the hardest things for me to do is stitch irregularly; I get into a rhythm and the stitches just fall into regular patterns. Not so my handwriting, which is about as irregular as my stitches are even. So what if I took advantage of my wonky handwriting for once?

That's how I came to write the sunrise lyrics from Soldiers onto the back of the sunset page. Thoroughly enjoying the freedom of writing less-than-perfectly, I then backstitched to my heart's content ...

Which resulted in perfectly irregular layers of sunset-lit clouds underlain by a grassy meadow composed of the closing lyrics ...

I remember quite clearly when I got out of bed
I said "Oh good morning, what a beautiful day."

I asked Don what he thought about the basting stitches ... leave them in or take them out? His first thought was that the vertical lines above the sun looked like buildings, so ... Perfect! The whole idea of the B-sides is to prompt new stories. Who knows where this one might go?

The second of six two-page spreads is now complete, A-sides ...

and B-sides ...

I'm pleased enough with the end result that I'll be going back to the James Taylor catalog for the B-side of the rising moon page.

Any guesses?  (Hint: this time I'm not using Mud Slide Slim)