How amazing to come from such a smart, artistic, gifted family...
Topic for April: Spider Web
2, April 2007
14, May 2007
Grandma
Spider Web My house is full of spider webs. I like spiders. They are spending their time and energy getting bugs for me. I admire their weaving. I should remove the old webs which have collected dirt and are no longer as useful for fooling the bugs into trapping themselves and being eaten. I used to have a spider who waited in the bathroom for ants. When I visited the bathroom I always tried to catch ants for him and give them to him. It was fun watching him go after the ants I got for him from his hiding place.
The spiders are especially good at lurking where they can’t be seen. I only insist that they do not drop in on me, and when outdoors, I dislike walking into a large web and having to get it off of my face. Some of those outdoor webs are amazing. Once I saw one which extended on two powerful strings from one tree to another six feet or more away. I have a photo of that production. It is beautiful and the spider was very large. Not only do I have spiders active in my house but also out in the atrium. These webs festoon all over up in high corners. I now have two different kinds of birds who take snippets from those webs to build their nests in the spring. The hummingbird never fails to visit the webs every day more than once and now that he has apparently finished his work there is another bird taking snippets for hours in a day. I have often wondered if cloth could be made from these webs, like silk from silkworms. Certainly one could not wish for a better bed to lie in that one constructed from spider webs.
How nice to be in such comfort suspended in the air being fed non stop foraging parents. Other birds do not do as well. A wind blew hard one day and two scraggly, ungainly, unsafe nests fell off the roof onto one of my roses. A birdling in one of those risks his life and regrets his parents. Luckily the parent had not yet deposited any eggs in those contraptions. What were they doing? Practicing? They needed to take lessons from the hummingbirds, the spiders. But perhaps they are too dumb to learn. 29, April 2007 JAA SPIDER WEBI was going to write something intellectual regarding the labyrinth of mymind, the world, and the universe but then I said to myself, "Self. That'sa load of crap. Write about what you know."
So - here's what I ended upwith:There is a small spider web in my house. It's under a cabinet near a wall.My cat can see it every time she takes a drink of water. She is apparentlynot at all interested in the spider.The spider drops down from his hiding place under the cabinet each eveningand hangs in the middle of the web. It's like seeing an old friend and I'vebegun to consider him a pet. He is smart enough to hide during the day sothe cleaning people haven't found him yet.The only slightly unnerving thing is that he is managing to find plenty toeat in the house. Hmmmmmmmmm.
28, April 2007
Aunt S
SPIDERWEB
Once upon a time, there was a house with more spiderwebs in it than anyother house anywhere in the world. This was the house of JLA.The spiders appreciated her care and concern for them and thrived in herenvironment, which was quiet and still, with no annoying dusting or sweepingto make them change location or rebuild their webs.
They all lived happily ever after.
In another time and place, a little blond boy went to his first day ofkindergarten. When he arrived home, his mother asked him how he liked hisfirst day of school. He said it was lovely. He told her it had been "awebby day," as he had played a game of spiders and spiderwebs at recess withan older kid who lived up the street.
They all lived happily ever after also.
27, April 2007
Cousin G
Spider Web
A very talented but supercilious artist named Michael J. Wolfe once boasted to his friends that he could paint spider webs so well that, if he left his paintings out over night, in the morning there would be a spider resting in the middle of the illustrated web. He was most likely joking, but the evening after he made the boast, he pondered the thought and soon became taken with it. “I’ll be famous around the world!” he exclaimed to his T.V. dinner. Then I can quit my job at Seven Eleven, he thought to himself. The next morning he began making paintings of spider webs. He painted the most beautiful looking spider webs hanging from all sorts of different types of trees or shrubs. He put all his spider webs in very gorgeous natural environments and always threw in some bugs to entice spiders to his paintings. However, after he had spent an entire month making ten of these such paintings without any interest from a single spider, he gave up painting spider webs. He, of course, did not mention the operation to any of his friends.
A few months after he had been fired from Seven Eleven, Michael decided he needed to go to college. He was 27 years old and he still barely had any money at all. He lived in a run-down apartment with cockroaches, he ate the lowest quality foods, he didn’t have much of anything but his little T.V. and his couch upon which he slept. He figured he didn’t have a girlfriend anymore either seeing as how she hadn’t called him or answered her phone since he told her he had gotten fired. To top it all off, his art career, which wasn’t really much of anything, was at an all time low due to his lack of inspiration after giving up the spider web paintings. Thus began Michael’s entrance into the local junior college. The years quickly passed by for Michael as he developed a passion for nature and, before he knew it, he was a tour guide at a national park, and it had been ten years since he’d made a serious effort to paint anything or do anything artistic at all. As the years continued to roll on, Michael developed a boredom from even the beauty of the park in which he worked. He had saved up quite a bit and he decided to take some time off. On one of his days off, he found himself with nothing to do so he decided to tidy up his new apartment. He soon came upon his old art supplies, and without really putting a lot of thought into it, he brought them out from a closet and began to draw. He made a few amateur-looking sketches, when suddenly the memory of painting spider webs flashed back to him. He figured it wouldn’t hurt to paint another just for old time’s sake. After spending a few days working on the painting, he decided he was done. He was pleased with how it came out, considering that it had been so long since he done art. However, he quickly realized that it did not impress him the way his own art had so easily done in the past. Although he couldn’t put a finger on why, he decided that he would try again and this time he would not put a limit on what his imagination would create. He wound up with another picture of a spider web, but there was hardly anything realistic about it at all. Instead of the normal grey, wispy spider webs that he normally drew, this one was composed of all the different colors he could make with his paints. The backdrop for this spider web was just as bizarre as well. There were trees and shrubs but they were strange shapes and colors and they were distorted in proportion to the spider web itself. Though the ideology behind the painting looked like it could have come from a young preschool kid, Michael was much more impressed with this painting than anything he’d ever done before. It must be the fact that I’ve just gotten a little too much of being out in the same natural environment these last few years, Michael thought to himself. He took his painting out to his back balcony to air dry, but he forgot to bring it inside in the evening. In the morning, there was an stunningly beautiful, multi-colored spider sitting comfortably in the middle of the web in his newest painting.
25, April 2007
Aunt-E
Spider Web
Growing up, we never heard the phrase "cleanliness is next to godliness." Instead, we heard things like "be careful if you sweep the bathroom not to touch that spider web." I'd hear my mother occasionally saying "hi baby" (to the spider we called a daddy long legs), "here's an ant for you."
7, February
Mom
Topic for February: Randomness
From her mother Lucy Autrey Wilson on the subject of RANDOMNESS Quality randomness is hard to accomplish, like the work of the best abstract painters, although there may be little that’s truly random about their art – it just looks that way. My Letter A alphabet illustration may be truly random and, perhaps, it shows. “Why are there various disparate elements in this scene? One might ask. “What’s the point?”
There is nothing random about the 26 letters of the alphabet or my obsession to create alphabet posters (see more at Art.com) But when it comes to illustrations of the individual letters, the composite of things that simply start with a common letter may be too random to make sense. So, the net result could be a situation in which the whole is less than the sum of its parts. You be the judge and while you’re at it see if you can find the following elements:
1. The Letter A (created digitally in Illustrator CS)
2. Arroyo Burro Beach (watercolor painted in Santa Barbara by Jean L. Autrey)
3. Apple (Illustration by Matt Taylor)
4. Amber (Digital painting over an old photograph with a digital bird fabric dress added)
5. Airplane (Painting from a wooden model built by Paul Getchell)
6. Avocet (Pen & Ink & Marker illustration done originally for my bird alphabet)
7. Arum Lily Frog (Pen & Ink & Marker illustration done originally for my Amphibian, Fish and Reptile poster)
8. Anchovy (see 7 above only listed under E for European Anchovy in the poster)
9. Anemone Fish – duplicated 3x (see 7 above only listed under C for Clown Anemone in the poster)
10. Angel Fish (Pen & Ink & Marker illustration done originally for my Fish poster)
11. Ants – duplicated 4x (Pen & Ink & Marker illustration done for my insect alphabet (and also incorporated into my original insect font) 12. Acanthus (Pen & Ink & Marker done originally for my Cancer Zodiac poster)
26, February 2007
Cousin G
Randomness
“Hey, you grotesque kids! What are you doing there?”
“Oh, nothing really. Just a pillow fight.”
“In the middle of the night on the bridge? You’re bound to step on a snail!”
“They don’t much come by here nowadays.”
“I’ll be speaking to my parents about this.”
“How old are they?”
“They’d be in their nineties by now. But they’ve both passed away.”
Seven or eight kids left the bridge with their pillows and walked over to the train station.
“I can see the sun tomorrow from right here already,” said XXMYRBP.
“I know what you mean,” said Claire.
“It’s really going to be something.”
“Sine waves all over the fields and all through the forests.”
The conductor came by.
“Excuse me,” yelled Dent. “May we have additional pillows? We’ll be riding all night.”
“A dollar a piece,” said the conductor.
“Would you believe I had a dream about you last night?” said a person in the next row over from Amethyst.
“It happens.”
“I believed you were God.”
“It wasn’t so bad was it?”
“Do I know you?”
“In a past life.”
Some one spilled a milkshake on that person at that very moment. It was one of those great new milkshakes developed by Mike Michael Mike. They were all so ridiculously delicious and that’s why they came in enormous cartons. It made an enormous mess, but the person was quite comfortable with spilled milkshake all over. The little kid who spilled it burst into tears.
“It’s all right,” said Mike (no relation to Mike Michael Mike). “I have one I’m never going to finish. It’s a few weeks old but it’s been in a gaseous state for the entire time. You’ll just have to cool it down if you want to drink it.”
“Thanks, you’re a sweet fellow,” said the kid.
“I really can’t wait for tomorrow,” said Dent. “I can just see it now. I can hear all those dreamy noises and smell all those dreamy smells.”
“But we will all die tomorrow.”
“Well, yes, but tomorrow will never end.”
23, February 2007
Aunt L
Last week was busy. We went to the opera for Norma, the ballet for Ballet Trocadero de Monte Carlo, and the Symphony for a variety of pieces. The music for Norma was gorgeous and we really liked the singers. The plot was so stupid people in the audience laughed at some of the English translations up on the screen. The Symphony was great although I didn’t much care for the Weil thing that involved a soprano singing in German and a baritone in drag singing the part of the ingénue's mother.The Trocks were the best. I’ve been wanting to see them for years. Every dancer is male and except for the smallest two they all wear women’s costumes and dance the females’ parts. Even en pointe. I was amazed at how well they did. The hairy chested guy in the white swan costume is funny but after awhile you almost forget that it’s a guy. They did throw in some funny stage business every now and then just as a reminder. There was one thing that tied all these performances together. Two women musicians who played in all of the three orchestras were killed the prior week in a traffic accident caused by a wrong-way driver. Random. A third musician in the car survived. Random. I’ve never understood how anyone can find any meaning or purpose or explanation for such random events.
Live wellLove muchLaugh often
12, February 2007
JLA
Randomness
My brain is not accustomed to randomness.I plan, I execute, each hour its job,but old age has forced a change.Oh, the familiar exhausted feeling when faced with dishes remainsbut strange waves of wearinesstoo often sweep all plans aside.I find myself sitting for hours looking at the TV, pushing buttons,unable to get upAt times what I see is interestingbut my viewing is pure randomnessThere is something about the chairThat secures me with a seat belt nowPowerful, unseen, unfelt, untilthe day wasted, gone, I propel myself to bed and dream random dreamsI won't remember.
11, February 2007
JAA
RANDOMNESS
“Life is really filled with randomness, isn’t it?” she mused while looking out the window at the construction going on across the street.
“Randomness? That’s a little pretentious, don’t you think? Why not just say ‘stuff happens’.” He was reading the Sunday paper and was in a randomly foul mood.
“’Stuff happens’ sounds illiterate” she responded snappily.
“You’re fat” he replied.
“Your mother…”
She was rudely interrupted by a wrecking ball crashing through the window and taking out the big screen TV.
“Whoa” they cried in unison, “Random!”
9, February 2007
Anonymous Auntie
On the subject of randomness there was a time when I loved adventure -- hitchhiking when there was a known serial killer in town who was killing other teenagers for example -- but now I've turned into a suburban matron with Grey hair and a serious sort of librarian look. I'm mystified by how stupid I was, and am guessing that I'm still equally foolish, but in a different way at present.
