Paint-Out at Eagle Saturday Market

We walked through the Saturday Market this morning. Quite a few people 

were painting over an area of a few blocks. This painter was the first one we met, 

sort of an outlier before one actually reached the market square. 

He was painting the old bank across the street that now is a restaurant. 

I took a couple of cameras to test and the 

Canon Elph 100HS came out the clear winner. Pictures were sharp, 

the screen was much easier to see in the bright sunlight. It has a shorter zoom, 

which was plenty for compositions at these close quarters. The painter here

stepped away and I am surprised at how much I like this picture;

the shadow! I took other pictures of him painting.

I had two big surprises: one was what small brushes the artists were using.

There was a limited time to paint and it was a competition.

But I saw no one who chose to use a big flat brush and a big canvas,

every painter I saw was painting with a teensy brush on a small canvas.

It gave me a cramped feeling. But I am very glad I went,

perhaps because of one bright painting (on an even smaller canvas!) 

in the judging tent amidst all the cautious, muted, more natural tones of the others.

Also, there was fresh yellow-and-white corn on the cob

picked at five this morning in Emmett, Idaho!

Hand Shadows

My father put his hands in the white light
of the lantern, and his palms became a horse
that flicked its ears and bucked; an alligator
feigning sleep along the canvas wall leapt up
and snapped its jaws in silhouette, or else
a swan would turn its perfect neck and drop
a fingered beak toward that shadowed head
to lightly preen my father's feathered hair.
Outside our tent, skunks shuffled in the woods
beneath a star that died a little every day,
and from a nebula of light diffused
inside Orion's sword, new stars were born.
My father's hands became two birds, linked
by a thumb, they flew one following the other.
Mary Cornish

 
from Red Studio, Oberlin College Press, 2007

This is not the shadow poem I imagined, but it is the one I found. I did take my little notebook to the Marker, but I didn't write any poems. . . .