Morning at Sturgeon Bay

I have to thank the Petoskey Regional Audubon Society for the discovery of this beautiful northern Michigan place. I hope you just clicked on that so you can see the floating gull. One of the things that pleases me most about the parks and woodlands here at the Tip of the Mitt is the way the plants arrange themselves, reaching for light and water, in such attractive ways without benefit of human gardening. This picture is a very good demonstration of that. There is a small lagoon formed by a small sandbar; there are rows of grasses and flowering plants arranged in groups and broad sweeps. It all seems just about perfect.
There are trails through the woods here and paths along the shore. On our birdwalk last weekend we didn't see that many birds--it's hard to time the autumn migrations in advance--but there were many late wildflowers I hadn't seen before. They had wonderful names like Nodding Ladies Tresses and Fringed Gentian. And I suppose I must mention my favorite name on this outing (and it was hard to choose!) the Grass of Parnassus, of which I had never heard. Was there ever any more beautiful blue than this??

Levering Cafe; home of the Big Chicken

Levering Cafe
Originally uploaded by jhhymas

We took an outing to the Post Office and decided to continue on to a nearby town for the locally famous special chicken they serve here. The restaurant was full of rooster effigies, to carry out the theme. Alas, someone had just placed a huge order to be picked up and taken out--the special chicken machine was tied up for half an hour. So we just got regular chicken, his grilled in a toasted sandwich and mine "smothered" in swiss cheese, mushrooms and bacon. We each brought half-a-portion home. It was fine, but we still don't know why the special chicken is so famous!
Walking into the place was like a trip back in time. Several people were smoking in the dim brown light. The walls were plain wood with various rooster items hung on them. We sat down at a dark-red-oilcloth-covered square table. Most of the other tables were full; there was one waitress and one sub-waitress who brought your drinks and cleaned off the tables. She also filled the pepper shaker, after I removed the lid and set both shaker and lid artfully on the edge of the table. A heavy woman helped a man with a damaged left side to a table. A teen with a funny haircut, like a cartoon baby with a curl on the top of his head, was eating dinner with his parents. He held his mouth about an inch above the plate. Lots of ordinary people, just like us, chewed and swallowed. I was quite comfortable. It made me think of the video I saw today about the Mad Magazine artist, Rick Tulka, who sketches every day in a cafe in Paris. He was comfortable in that cafe, even though it was famous, in Paris, and the former haunt of famous writers like Hemingway and Henry Miller, it was comfortable to him. He rode his bicycle there every day at the same time and often found that he had already drawn all the patrons of that hour. I wished I could sketch, invisibly. And then I drove home through the rain and looked at the clouds.

Across Round Lake

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Originally uploaded by jhhymas

Here's a picture for talking about color! It does have abstract qualities, but mostly it is a recognizable lake landscape. And depends for its impact upon autumn color.

Below is some of what Rebecca Purdom says about abstraction. It makes the most sense to me about the meaning of abstraction of anything I have ever read. Mostly people want pictures to be recognizable and if you try to explain to them about an arrangement of squares that you find very moving, they giggle. So this pleased me very much.

"We’re so good at judging, it comes so naturally, that it’s easy to see why looking at abstraction, which offers absolutely no clues whatsoever as to what to do next, can be such a challenge. But that challenge is, in fact, abstract paintings greatest gift. The kind of seeing it promotes is something we can all do; we just don’t get the opportunity to do it very often.
I’ll bet that every one of you has had the experience sometime in your life of looking at something so marvelous that, for just an instant, you’d forgotten yourself enough to not act. Fot just that instant you were not in charge; the experience itself somehow was. The pursuit of that kind of experience is what I think turns painters into abstract painters, and the awareness of it turns all of us into better audiences for abstraction in particular and for art in general."

Rebecca Purdum in the newest New England Review:Vol 28, no 4, 2007. p175-6

Sunrise

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Originally uploaded by jhhymas

They played more than an hour of Monteverdi's sacred music tonight. It sounds like what choirs of angels ought to sound like. It would be nice to hear it in the morning when the sun is coming up over the maple topped hills to the east like this and tinting the undersides of clouds peach. There is a lot of violet color in the sunrise here, too. And the pale color against the green is wisps of the morning fog we often have.
My daughter's sick mule ate a little tonight, after having her teeth filed down. I had never heard of this, but I hope the mule will live a little longer now; K is very attached to her. It seems like this might be a mild winter, which would help, I will have to check the Old Farmer's Almanac. I had forgotten about that, but saw some on a display rack at a feed store the other day.