last night i said to steve,”ok there it is. i just put everything i have left into today’s image.  have no more ideas. no more collections. no more specimens. no more b-squad images just good enough to be still-blog-worthy on a bad still-blog day. and it’s still only january. i’ve still (no pun intended) gotta fill two whole months of winter. i’m tapped out,” i said. and i meant it. then, this morning, i took a single leaf from a single stem from a single square of yesterday’s color swatch image, and i’ll be damned if i didn’t come up with this! someday, when i’m finally worthy of her, i will internalize the fact that nature contains boundless inspiration. in the meantime, i’ll just say a humble thanks.

a single leaf from a blade of prairie grass, probably quack grass

grass lake regional trail, saint paul, minnesota

as an artist you can go in two possible directions to find new material. you can roam the surface of the earth, always looking for your next inspiration just over the horizon. or you can stay in one place, looking for your next inspiration one layer deeper, rather than one step farther. i’ve made my choice. which does not mean it was an easy one.

collections of winter specimens arranged by color

minnesota

this photo feels like the first harvest after the root cellar has been emptied, or the first soaking rain after a drought. as of this morning, i was quite out of old images and new ideas for STILL. our recent polar vortex had prevented any walking with a puggle, so I hadn’t done any gathering for a week or more, and the target pitch i’ve been working on has been an all-consuming, all-hands-on-deck cramming-for-finals kind of effort. so, when i saw forecasts in the 30s today , i grabbed my gathering basket and headed out for an emergency forage. if the volume of stems on my kitchen floor tonight are any indication,  i may have overdone it a bit in my anxious enthusiasm. i guess we’ll know more when i’ve started to triage by color palette. meanwhile one of the items too big to fit in my basket was a six foot tall stem i had never seen before. when i got home, i set about deconstructing it, as you see above, while my hubby (@sjrhoffman) worked some Google magic to identify it as Japanese Knotweed, which is, of course, an invasive species in MN. i’ve been doing this long enough. i should have guessed. at this point, any striking stands of meter high wetland weeds that i haven’t noticed before are almost certainly going to turn out to be invasive species. the one advantage of spending twenty minutes carefully deconstructing this plant is that i will forevermore be able to identify japanese knotweed. now i just hope the rest of the stems in my basket are familiar.

decontructed japanese knotweed in winter

grass lake, saint paul, minnesota

this eighteen-inch-tall front-yard white pine will be completely buried in snow for most of the winter. then, in spring, like a dog emerging from a lake, it will sort of shake itself off, and let the sun do its work.

white pine with snow

saint paul, minnesota

when i first took the the time to look closely at a paper wasp nest, what popped into my head was “it looks like geological strata.” i don’t know why it has taken me until now to experiment with geological forms. just kinda, i don’t know, slow i guess.

wasp paper nest collage

paper wasp nest from island lake trail, saint paul, minnsaota