divided attention

my foray into wire wall sculptures has me creatively distracted at the moment. as a result, STILL is spending some rare time playing second fiddle. i am hoping, and i foresee, the two endeavors feeding each other, but for the moment i am consumed.  i am using the pliable branches of this seeded eucalyptus tree for my wire constructions. i can bend them into circles, and elegant curves. if i were at home, i would be using willow. which has me just now realizing the resemblance of these slender eucalyptus leaves to our arrow-shaped weeping willows at home.

seeded eucalyptus tips

entering the zone

each time we have come to france, at some point during our stay, i have entered a fairly intense period of creative flourishing. one year it was adapting a newly launched still blog to the landscape of the mediterranean garrigue. one year it was experimenting with painting. one year with drawing. one year with collage. just today again, i felt that deep flow of energy for the first time this trip, after a number of distractions and a lot of travel since our arrival. several weeks ago, i bought some very fine gauge wire, and have started to play with my nature scraps, mostly twigs at the moment. i am slowly turning them into simple wall sculptures. this afternoon the sun shone through the south patio doors, it was over seventy degrees, and like a cold blooded creature on a sun warmed rock, i was suddenly energized, even a little buzzy. it does no good to force it, but i do hope this is the beginning of one of those delicious stretches of timeless creative play.

eucalyptus trigs

george clooney trees

while googling mediterranean cypress, i came across a map showing the natural and naturalized habitat of this favorite tree of mine. the map looks very similar to the map of olive country. so, it’s no surprise to me that cypress is as associated with the mediterranean basin as olives are.  after nine years of biannual visits here, i still get a thrill every time i see a perfect cypress, or even better, a row of perfect cypress, or best of all, an allée of perfect cypress leading up to a country house where an aperitif waits.

by the way, in our family we call these george clooney trees. because when my mom came to visit us last time we were here, she had just watched a television show about george and amal’s estate in italy, and all that she remembered about it was that it was surrounded with these skinny cypress trees. so for the rest of the trip, and now for the rest of our lives, she points out every single george clooney tree we drive by.

mediterranean cypress (Cupressus sempervirens)

specimen table companions

these dried bits found themselves crowded together on my specimen table. they must have realized they made a striking group, because they made sure i noticed them by catching the light and winking at me.

on a marginally related topic, we are listening to the book Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.  we are halfway into the 15-hour book and we are all enthralled. if i have taken away one lesson so far it is that da vinci was, among all his other gifts, an almost superhuman noticer of the natural world. i could die happy if i attained even a shadow of his skill in just that one area. i’ll never paint the virgin of the rocks. but i could start noticing not just what species my local birds are and what color their feathers, but whether their wings beat faster on the downstroke or the upstroke. that’s just one of the things he noticed with the naked eye on the way to discovering how a bird’s wing created lift centuries before bernoulli put his name to the principle. it’s maybe the most refined case of simply noticing something that i’ve ever heard of.

bits and pieces from my specimen table

a walk home from the american consulate in milano

i gathered these leaves during the walk back to our hotel from the u.s. consulate in milan where we had gone to apply for new passports. i gathered them from the sidewalks in the urban center during a persistent drizzling rain. we had just survived a fairly major setback. it’s not every day that you get your passports stolen in a foreign c0untry by a street thief, and as a result can’t really return to your second home (in france) in order to arrive eventually in your primary home (in the u.s.) until you move through a heavy gauntlet of bureaucracy. and yet, the artistic habit had me looking not at the sky to lament my fate, but at the ground to sort through some pretty interesting fallen leaves. still blog is not just a daily habit, but a distraction from some of the ways that the world tries to redirect your gaze from the important, by presenting you with the urgent.

autumn leaves from one walk in milano