I've just finished an altered book.  This one started as a British book about important events in the 20th century, published in the 1970s.  Only a little of the book's content survives now, though.  I chose the book in a thrift shop in Santa Fe (NM) because I liked the quality of the paper, and it has a sewn binding.  It's a nice big book - about 12 inches tall when closed.

I had a couple of compositional themes with this book.  First, there are large, mostly original drawings that often float off the left or right edge of a page spread.  Second, I used portions of printmaking plates, cut up and glued in as collage elements.  The plates are from monotypes, and I worked them on vellum.  The original printing medium was water based.  I liked how the translucency of the vellum allowed the plate portions to nestle down into the matrix of the gouache mixtures I had already applied to the paper.

The imagery is - various.  Plants and animals, sometimes in microscopic views, my clay vessels and sculpture, landscape photos - and a few other things.  Snakes are notable - I used my stash of photos of snakes from a teapot project I did several years ago for the Year of the Snake.  As usual in my two-dimensional work, objects are presented in kind of a primordial soup of contexts.  

I love the way the base of a bald cypress tree will widen out when it grows in a very damp area.  This one is standing in Butler Creek at the Phinizy Swamp.  The drawing is mostly about my enjoyment of the dark and light interlocking patterns of the cypress tree base and the lush growth around it.

The water is tea-colored because of the presence of tannin compounds from decomposing plants - it's not pollution.  

​I was looking at a bright green plant with large leaves that was growing directly out of the forest floor near the Butler Creek trail.  The light was beautiful, and the leaves were especially 3-dimensional.  I added dots to the background - it's part of of my interest in patterns and the idea of a network that everything in nature is part of.
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These fascinating green balls are the cones of the bald cypress tree.  The surface structure is very subtle - I had to do a lot of image enhancement to even get it to show in this photo.

​In the background of the drawing I added a pattern used in lacemaking.

​I was looking at a lovely wildflower (weed?) out at the swamp, and was amazed by its delicate structure.

I used some color in this drawing to try to show the structure of the flower.

I've started a new drawing project with the Phinizy Center for Water Sciences - the Phinizy Swamp Nature Park.  It's pretty simple:  I take a walk out there, notice something, draw it.  Then the Phinizy Center posts the drawing and a photo on their Facebook page.  These entries have been appearing for a couple of months now.  I thought I would also show them here.

I saw a puffball mushroom on the entrance to the Butler Creek Trail.  At first glance it looked like a round white puff with a slightly cracked surface.  Looking closer, I saw that the surface was covered with what looked like little mountains with beaked peaks.

​This is the drawing that I made:

I've just finished another altered book/sketchbook.  I use these to experiment and think about ideas.  This one is really a souped-up sketchbook.  To make it, I started with a commercially available cork-bound sketchbook that had acid free pages and a sewn binding.  I used watercolor to make colored patterns on the pages, and then I tipped in charcoal drawings I had made of various things - mostly plant parts.

The Year of the Monkey begins on February 8.  Here are six small teapots that I made to celebrate the new year.  Each teapot is 4 to 5 inches tall, made individually and by hand of porcelain, hand drawn and painted.  Each teapot has two monkey faces, one on each side.

I've been working some more on the Swamp Drawings that I completed several months ago.  I have mounted each drawing on a painting panel and added paint to the backgrounds.  Each finished painting is now ready to hang, and measures 12 inches high by 9 inches wide by 3/4 of an inch deep.

I think so often when people come out to the Phinizy Swamp, they are hoping to see animals.  I know I am.  Plants are fascinating, and I enjoy looking at them very much.  But where are the animals?

As you know, animals are mobile, and often survival for them depends on not being seen more often than necessary.  Therefore, we people who want to look at them sometimes have to gain satisfaction from interpreting the signs that the animal leaves behind.  In this case, you can tell that beavers are active because of the canal they’ve recently dug on one side of the main stream channel.  And there is a pile of sticks on the stream bank that was made by beavers – it might be part of a lodge.  Since my Swamp Drawing Project is about things that I actually see at the Phinizy Swamp, I’ve indicated a beaver in my drawing only through a dotted outline.

Beavers are found throughout most of North America.  There is just one species in the New World, Castor canadensis.  There is also a species that is native to Europe and Asia, Castor fiber.  The two beaver species cannot mate because they don’t have the same number of chromosomes.

Castor canadensis is the largest rodent in North America.  Their upper incisors continue to grow throughout their lives, and are continually ground down by chewing on wood.    Beavers close their nostrils and ears as well as their eyes while they dive underwater.  They can even close their mouths behind their front teeth, so that they can dive while carrying a stick in their mouths without ingesting water.  Their back feet are webbed for swimming. 

The beaver is a wetland animal – it lives its life by maintaining wetlands through damming streams.  Many landowners have been irritated when beavers move in and dam up streams, flooding the land.   But it turns out that the wetland creation behaviors of beavers have significant ecological benefits.  Beaver activity tends to increase streambank vegetation and general biodiversity  in dry areas over time; it also creates more open water area even in drought years.

Beavers fell trees to build dams and lodges.  The inner bark and leaves of the tree are a major food source for them.  The lodges are made of sticks, grass, and mud.  They tend to be built so that there is an underwater entrance.  A major function of a dam from a beaver point of view is to ensure water depth around the lodge.

Beavers are active at night.  They tend to stay in or near the water.  They can submerge for up to 15 minutes.  There is research that indicates they build lodges or repair them in response to the sound of running water. 

Another way you might encounter a beaver is by hearing it.  Beavers have a broad, flat tail that they slap against the surface of the water as a warning to potential predators.  To me, the tail slap can sound like a cement block being dropped into water – it’s startling. 

Beavers are monogamous, but if their partner dies, they will look for someone new.  They live for 10 to 20 years in the wild.  Their main predators in our area are people and probably coyotes.  People kill beavers for sport or for their fur or when they feel that beavers are harming land by building dams.  People also kill beavers by destroying wetlands and through pollution.  


For more information on visiting the Phinizy Swamp: http://phinizycenter.org/