Sermons in Stones

Day one in Boston was a Sunday. We let ourselves have a slow start, since we were on Pacific Time and had checked in around midnight local time the night before, and started the day with lunch at the Trident Cafe and Bookstore. It was my first time ordering via QR code and online menu in-house, for the record. Then we met friends of Joy’s at the MFA and saw the Ekua Holmes exhibit, which was gorgeous.

I took a photo of one piece I loved (“Pride”), a profile portrait of a young man with a 3-D gold earring in his ear, but respecting her copyright, I won’t share it. However, you can see lots of her other work at her website, here. She often incorporates elements like that into her collages–a bow tie on a portrait of her son and a flower on a woman’s hat were two others–in a way that brings the whole piece more vividly to life.

I love children’s book illustrations, I love collage, and neither they nor African-American artists get their due from our art museums. African-American artists who are also female and contemporary are even more sparsely shown. I hope exhibits like this show curators and funders everywhere what treasures they have overlooked.

Another work of art that captured my attention was this drawing in the B&B, which, by the way, is called Abigayle’s; you can see lots more photos of the rooms here, and if you’re going to Boston, look it up via AirBNB–the innkeeper used a booking agent until recently, but now prefers to handle reservations directly. (And a good idea. We used the agent and she reported the wrong dates to the innkeeper! Fortunately, no one had booked the room immediately after us, so her assumption that we were leaving earlier than we’d planned didn’t leave us without a place to stay–just scared us for a minute.) The drawing is quite large–I’m guessing 18″x36″–and done in charcoal on paper. The signature looks like “John R. Key,” and the innkeeper said something about the artist’s brother having work in the Museum of Fine Arts, but a little research indicates to me that the artist is probably John Ross Key, who is quite well-known in his own right. The house was built during his lifetime, in 1896; it’s very possible that the art changed hands along with the house, going to her husband’s parents, who were only the second owners. I’m going to drop her a line.

I love the variety of textures: mist, tree bark, lichen-covered stones, water, needles. I have long been confounded by the question of how to draw moving water, and seeing this inspired me to stop being confounded and just try it–not as Key must have done, from life, but from photographs.

An opportunity came on our second day, when we had lunch in Chinatown and then walked to the Boston Common and the Public Garden. On Indigo’s short list for Boston activities was “see the ducklings”–these ducklings, of course. The sculptor, Nancy Schön, had a tough bill to fill (no pun intended), as Robert McCloskey’s drawings are so expressive and his style is unmistakably his own. She really captures them in such a different medium. I could never get Indigo to love his other stories the way I do, but I brought Homer Price and Centerburg Tales into the house in the attempt, and that led me to stories I hadn’t read, so it was not for naught.

Then we went on and sat for a while in communion with the living ducks. The one to Indigo’s left here napped peacefully the whole time, while others swam up to her hopefully and went away disappointed by her lack of snacks.

It’s been a rainy July in Massachusetts, and the lushness of the green here is so lovely. Even after the winter rains, it never gets this intensely green in the Bay Area.

The next chapter of our adventures mostly concerns Indigo, so it is at Mookie’s Mama.

I tried to take photos of duck tails out of the water, but only got blurry shots that did not capture the charm of this particular activity. But one made a good reference photo for me to use later to try a sketch. I always want to draw water, and am frustrated by the way it keeps moving–which motion, of course, is also what makes it such a compelling subject. But how do I draw something that won’t sit still? I began to get an idea as I drew this from my photo, and noticed the repeating patterns, the way the light sections are shot through with dark and vice versa. I’m going to keep at this approach, and see if I can get familiar enough with the patterns without stylizing them too much.