Mendocino Herons

Anchored to the Annex wall are two blue herons.  One flies with legs back and the other stands amid water grasses. In order to fire the ceramic pieces, they were cut into kiln-fitting, smaller pieces using a jagged line to vaguely simulate feather layers.  The airborne bird shares the heavens with a blazing sun and a somber moon.

Wiser than seven...

Chameleon

Wiser than seven,
Warier than adolescent fawn,
This transient child
Is hawking her life for whims
Of perhaps-parents.
Swift cuddlings
And insistent demands;
Already reluctant
To show the pictures
Of lipsticks and eyeshadow
Which are not prized 
In this household.
Hiding her small self
Behind the social worker's
Hard sell.
She has clear, blue eyes
Which cannot
Conceal
Pain. 

July 27, 1980

First Bronze

The first bronze I ever made was this female torso, whose back is made of desert cholla skeleton, and interestingly enough, lacks a right breast.  Eda rented a foundry for this pour.  The group took turns cranking up the temperature in the gas heated brick kiln we had built.  I had the midnight shift, an eerie time to be by oneself in industrial San Jose with the roar of gas jets ones only company.  Our pieces were in large plaster investments which took long hours to burn out.  But the bronze pour the next morning was an exciting event and I was hooked. That pour predicted many fruitful hours I would spend in future years, working with lost wax process.  But perhaps "Sitting Female" also predicted the loss of my own right breast to cancer some twenty years later.

Domestic coinage....

The Buttons of My Life

Handful after handful of buttons
Run through my fingers --
The domestic coinage
Of my life.

Pristine upon their cards,
Or released from garments
With thread snippets trailing,
Their paleness of metallic roundness
Recalls a negligee's chiffon
Or blue blazer's crispness.

Two holed,
Four holed,
Rear looped;
Bright red,
Mottled grey,
Cloth covered by a rayon fabric --
Half a century of rounded styles --
They represent a treasure mintage
Sequestered in a sewing basket.

Circle upon circle,
Disk upon disk --
Trickling from a handful mound,
Each button flashes
With a memory of brilliance
Through time's sky.

I sort their curves
And look for matches,
Duplicates and triplicates
To fit the buttonholes
Of my life today,
To pay for joys and sorrows.

August 11, 2004

Cultivating our gardens

 Flowers for Granddaughter Carly, no date

 "Of the pleasures incidentally connected with the garden, the power of making presents of the fruits of one's own labors is certainly one of the highest.  A rare bouquet to one who can appreciate its loveliness, a dish of blushing fruit, or a basket of choice vegetables, contributed on some special occasion to a friend's bill of fare--or a rich cluster of grapes to bless the fading sight of some poor consumptive, to whose parched lips they seem almost a foretaste of heaven,--affords a degree of satisfaction to the giver from being the results of his own skillful labor, which can be but faintly realized by him whose gifts involve only a demand upon his purse."

H.W.S. Cleveland,  Landscape Gardening,  1855.     Cleveland influenced "western" urban planning and landscape design and was also a collaborator with Olmsted on Brooklyn's Prospect Park, a codesigner of the renowned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, etc  Quoted in Cornell historian Aaron Sach's wonderful Arcadian America (2013).

Porch Garden, Saratoga Retirement Community

Tulip Bed, Mendocino                                                                                          Yellow Harvest, SRC

 Wisteria

Like early, airfilled grapes
The clusters bobble on their austere
Stiff stick branches.
Soap-film translucent
Lavenders
Curve and blend
With opaque whites
And purple blues.
The blossoms burst this morning
As Japanese paper flowers do
In water.
A magic color explosion
Before the green
Workaday leaves
Take over.

 March 19, 1978

 "Of the pleasures incidentally connected with the garden, the power of making presents of the fruits of one's own labors is certainly one of the highest.  A rare bouquet to one who can appreciate its loveliness, a dish of blushing fruit, or a basket of choice vegetables, contributed on some special occasion to a friend's bill of fare--or a rich cluster of grapes to bless the fading sight of some poor consumptive, to whose parched lips they seem almost a foretaste of heaven,--affords a degree of satisfaction to the giver from being the results of his own skillful labor, which can be but faintly realized by him whose gifts involve only a demand upon his purse."

H.W.S. Cleveland,  Landscape Gardening,  1855. 
Quoted in Cornell historian Aaron Sach's wonderful Arcadian America (2013). 


Cleveland influenced "western" landscape design and was a collaborator with Olmsted on Brooklyn's Prospect Park, a codesigner of the renowned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, etc

Filling depressions in the earth...

Personal Puddles

The rain has swirled away

But left a chain of puddles

On the Headlands trail.

They reflect the pewter

Of the scudding clouds;

Their weed-laced edges mimic

Portuguese Beach’s weaving of tossed logs,

A few deep treaded boots leave

Imprints on their border mud.

We call them “The Great Lakes”.

Pulling memory from our slanted,

Wooden, inkwelled desks

We name them:

The biggest, Superior,

Then Michigan, and . . .

And . . .

Mnemonic from Geography – h o m e s!

We christen Huron, Ontario,

And Erie.

Some smaller watery patches

We call the Finger Lakes:

Cayuga’s ponded waters, burnished blue.

There is a pristine string of lakes—

Five Lakes—in the Sierra.

We name another puddle Claire.

These pools all fill depressions

In the earth.

Each one exists in a particular,

A certain scale of size and time.

Those in Mid-America

Are a reminder

Of the glacial ice and geologic time.

The mountain lakes

Recall our younger selves.

The muddy puddles

Are our now,

Our evanescent, vaporizing future.

February 6, 2003

À la recherche du temps perdu

Two little skunks by the roadside sat
As an automobile whizzed by.
It left an odor far from good
And the tears stood in one's eye.
'Oh why do you weep,' asked the other one,
'Why do you sit and quake?'
'Because,' replied the lonely one,
'It smells like  Mother used to make.'

Quoted by Granddad Daus from ~1910

Eucalyptus Tango

Wind, fire and tears were involved in the making of this sculpture.  

A winter wind whipped bark and leaves from the stand of eucalyptus across the road from us onto our porch.  In the spirit of "if you receive a lemon, make lemonade," I constructed two Giacometti-like dancers, dipped them in wax and proceeded with the usual lost wax procedure.  The figures were cut into pieces and mounted on appropriate wax cups. The multiple dips to form a ceramic shell were performed. One dancer had actually been poured and the other was waiting to be burned out. That's the fire.  Wood is harder to burn out than wax, but works just as well in the end.  

The tears came next when a friend, by mistake, began hammering on my unburned piece, thinking it was her poured one.  Mistakes happen.  But her tears were more deeply felt than as a wrong craft step: she had learned that day that her husband had terminal cancer!  The dancer's shell could be fixed, and was.  Her husband died a few months later./ 

The tango is an emotional dance.  The piece is in the way of an emotion-filled memorial to Hans.

Swinging colors around the sun

July 25, 1981