autumn in my tiny yard

late autumn all of a sudden

What happened this year was that the leaves didn't change color until the very end of October.  I thought they would just drop and we'd call it a day -end of fall hello winter.  But they all suddenly turned glorious colors.

But the autumn colors coated the entire area.  for a week.  they it rained like mad and many trees lost all their leaves.  The wind blew hard from the west and then from the east.

 There are still beautiful colors out there just not as many as you wanna see.

But nature has her whims and one of them is to show how glorious she is but for only a brief moment.

And now we will all exist in the sweet windy rainy days with all the perfection it brings as we move toward that Thanksgiving Norman Rockwell imagined taking place accross the country. 

amusement

The stamping out of the artist is one of the blind goals of every civilization.  When a civilization becomes so standardized that the individual can no longer make an imprint on it, then that civilization is dying.  The mass mind has taken over and another set of national glories is heading for history's scrap heap. - Elie Faure

God is a child who amuses himself, going from laughing to crying for no reason, each day reinventing the world to the chagrin of hair-spilters. -Elie Faure

all these were just done for amusement. I've been working all day on the photos of my work and in the next day or two I should have 2011 loaded….

good by sweet October

October is always a good month for painting though I don't know exactly why I think that…it must be the changing weather…the cold the leaves changing colors and falling from the trees…the strange promise of a cold winter of coming ice and curious writings in the ice and snow...

…certainly the autumn is the most glorious time…it always seems pressured and stingingly full…I am surprised not to see strange miniature creatures everywhere I look…elves and dwarves...

What will be already is here and during the winter its roots grow and grow…until the spring when it jumps out in glorious pink and says I am here and this I am…

…hello wet cold rain and thousands of slimy leaves coating the walkways and grass…hostas a burnished yellow and paperbark maples a sublime rust...

pumpkins give up their insides for warm sweet pie and apples crushed for all the wonderful cider...

peragration

ahh, now I'm wandering around in a new program, trying to learn it…well that's not true...trying to use it to set up and move photos to different programs, see how it works, etc. etc.

These last two months of the year are in a way the most depressing to me as they note the end of the year.  As my youngest said to me on the morning of november 1st, halloween seems so done.

…you see 2013 is almost done…and when it is done it is done forever…it is gone into the past a year in some ancient history book about even more ancient history…no day ever returns...

That may be why I'm doing these sort of recursive paintings here…I have been working on getting an ocean of paintings through this program…some very old things…some I like…some not so much...

…and since they were really accidents in the first place the rule behind them remains elusive and difficult to repeat...

…it's fun to try though…it gives me a sense of the struggle I went through when making them…and knowing that lends me some relief in the here and now.