As I write this, they, the nefarious “they”, are breaking ground in the lot behind my building. I mostly spend the days of summer working in studio, insulated from heat waves and humidity, and avoiding the putrescent swirl of vapors oozing out of every nook in the city. I still love New York, I promise, and I am grateful that my studio has been blissfully (relatively) quiet and blessed with open, South views and astonishingly good light. These are things you only luck into or pay for exorbitantly in Manhattan. That open lot has been a beacon of hope, a fount of stifled dread, and a dream of wishful denial since the day I moved in. I only would have loved it more if it had been unpaved and I could have peered in for birds, bugs, and weeds. Oh well, so it goes (singsong voice, skipping off into an unknown future). Here is a toast – with tea, this time around, since I have just been awakened by the rending of concrete and earth – to change, and to riparian and boreal forests that exist someplace firmly where I am not.
Ovenbird Studies, ink and watercolor on paper, 2010
Lovely!
that’s some yummy color. so glad you are back doing color!!
Catherine, I wish you would post more often – your paintings capture a bird’s essence and variety, and your writing is beautiful and descriptive. I felt like I was looking down on your empty lot with the light flowing in from the window.
Last summer at the birders who blog, etc., in CT, you shared some of your experience with cameras, giving me one more push over the top and into good equipment. It has transformed my birding, tho increasingly it seems I have to bird alone in order to have the time and exercise the patience to wait for birds to come in range of the lens. In the process, I am seeing so much more than I did before, and hopefully, seeing with something of an artist’s eye.
Yeah, my post frequency has been hampered by other obligations BUT the exciting news here is that as the summer literally melts into fall, I will be segueing into a new project that will, at last, involve the blog full time! I am posting information and updates on Facebook as Birdspot. Please find me there, and another post will be going up here next week! Thank you everyone for staying with me!
Your ovenbird colors are delicious. You amaze me in that you live buried in the city and yet capture the true essence of your birds. You must get out of all that cement once in awhile. Lovely work! Inspirational.
When we first moved into our current home, the particular development where we bought contained lots of open spaces. Behind our house, we could see fields of yellow coreopsis in bloom. We could see scads of crickets and hear coyotes at night. Now our subdivision is filled in, but we stil have lovely birds and more rabbits than a coyote could count.
These things are the ways of cities and towns, and of people in general.
The sole consoliation is that they make parklands and countryside that much more lovable. I can drive 20 minutes and find myself amid fields of bird and butterfly.
A toast, indeed, for all things boreal, tundra and prairie, to plains and
marshes, and to deserts which are anything *but* bleak.
17 August 2010. In case this reaches you…….I Saw some small pictures of your nature studies in the Providence Journal a few month back. In the article there were drawings of the “Squirrel II” 2009 and the” Rabbit” close up 2009. By the time I could make it to the gallery the show was gone. I looked on your site but could not find the information, I was wondering what size and how much your prints were ?
Thank you for your reply. Caterine
You do amazing bird art.
We lived in New York City for years.
And we all share your yearning for boreal forests, tundra, wind-swept beaches and more Nature.
Which is why my son and i took a trip this July to the White Mountains in New Hampshire….
http://thankfulfornature.blogspot.com/
Nature is alive and well in these places.
Just inhale in these forests and you feel integrated into them.
Try to get up there. It recharged our batteries.
Tom