Hiding in plain site

Look at all that color! I picked all of these budding stems today on a one-hour walk along Grass Lake with my best friend Kristin. If you weren’t paying attention, you could think it’s still all gray and brown here in Minnesota. But not at all! I love that I can still be astonished walking my same trails every year :-)

collection of early spring buds: cottonwood, dogwood, red maple, pussywillow, unidentified, red elderberry, forsythia, dogwood, cottonwood

frozen in time, temporarily

I dried this stem last fall. We were still in the apartment then. I didn’t have a basement or a garage to stash drying botanicals. So I used a corner of my closet. It was one of the perks of losing everything in a house fire–empty closets!

dried pink coneflower

When in doubt, make a circle

After years of making simple assemblages with found nature bits, I have literally circled in on the circle as my favorite composition. This should not have been a surprising realization– there is nothing more harmonious than the circle. The symbolism of a circle is well known: unity, wholeness, oneness, eternity, infinity, cyclicality, the divine, and on and on. I wasn’t thinking of any of that when I was making my earlier works. I was just pushing my subjects around until I saw something that pleased me. And what pleased me, more often than not, were circles–wreathes, crescents, oculi, mandalas, concentric circles, tangent circles, overlapping circles, spirals, rings, halos, ensos. Circles made me calm. They made me happy. By centering the eye, they seemed to somehow center my nervous system too. All hail the cirlce!

A Tribute to Bette

My neighbor, Bette, used to cross-country ski up to her mailbox every winter morning to get the paper. She did this well into her 80s. She passed away recently and the funeral was last week. Her daughter, who is moving into Bette’s house and will now be my new neighbor, offered me a Peace Lily plant she received at the memorial because the plant apparently is toxic to her cats. By the time it came into my possession, the leaves were a little droopy due to lack of water. I thought they made a fitting tribute to the memory of Bette. Rest in Peace, Bette.

peace lily leaf

Make a Frame. Break a Frame.

“Make a frame. Break a frame.” is one of my favorite compositions tips I share during my workshops. So this is me, heeding my own advice.

broken box of assorted dried green botanicals