Carrasco Studio

The Crow's Complaint

When I walked down 4oth today with my deposit for the bank and some letters to mail, I heard several crows cawing loudly in a mountain ash on the corner.
The tree had been carefully trimmed, so there was lots of space between the limbs and leaves.  The composition was so beautiful...the complements of blue and orange, the sheen of blue on the crow's black feathers, and the flicker of sun along the bark and in the leaves.  I stopped for a moment to "memorize" the vision.

What really struck me after I stood there and looked for a while was the intensity of this August 1, 2009 sky.  It reminded me of October skies, but with a heat and glow of summer.  This blue was so hard and flat, and yet so luminous that I felt if I threw a rock at the scolding crow and missed, I would shatter the sky and it would fall all around me in shards of blue.

The Bloom of Sunlight on Dark Water

I am gearing up to do some sepia drawings for The Lost Resort website,and I wanted to acquaint myself with some watercolor renderings first.

Hoko River in Summer

Sunlight falling
onto and into
the river.

Slow moving water
through a tunnel
of trees.

A stain of light,
 a slow bloom,
a yellow green lamp
on the floor
of the leaf shadowed cave.

A Time of Trees

Last night, after the bright glare of sunset and the ensuing pop and crackle of fireworks subsided, I put on a CD of Sharon Robinson's," Everybody Knows" that has a song I love. It's not the Porgy and Bess Summertime, but one Sharon wrote. Her Summertime is about how "I want to put my light things on.....and wants "peaches on the table", and you know she is singing about something else as well.

I carry summer in my heart against life's grey days of rain. Instead of "thy rod and thy staff" of the Bible, poetry and art will sustain me.

On my walk to the grocery store, I usually pass under some catalpa trees that have been so brutally trimmed that they are like giant green toadstools...a mat of overarching tiny twigs and leaves.  This time when I passed by, it was full of children, and their father was trimming the tree to give a platform for a treehouse.  The sweet fresh faces glowing in the dark leaves, the brilliant sky and an occasional pink foot or hand poking out.  They called to me and I stopped to talk with their father.

And Ann Sexton's poem.  It is enough.

Half awake in my Sunday nap
I see three green windows
in three different lights---
one west, one south, one east.
I have forgotten that old friends are dying,
I have forgotten that I grow middle aged,
at each window such rustlings!
The trees persist, yeasty and sensuous,,
 as thick as saints
I see three wet gargoyles covered with birds.
Their skins shine in the sun like leather.

I'm on my bed as light as a sponge
soon it will be summer.
She is my mother.
She will tell me a story and keep me asleep
against her plump and fuity skin.
I see leaves,
leaves that are washed and innocent......

I know what I know.
I am the child that was,
living the life that was mine.
I am young and half asleep.
It is a time of water, a time of trees.

stanzas from "Three Green Windows" by Ann Sexton