Studio Still Life

Have not been out except for a morning walk. Spent the day in my studio (with lots of interruptions...) as I was inspired, as always, by the artist’s books I saw last night. Have several things in mind to do, but it seems life just gets in the way. It’s OK, I like that too, but at least I made a new list, and got a bit organized, and printed out a bunch of back photos for the albums I keep on the island, and started a drawing.

So what you get is an indoor studio blip - the table is fairly cleared off --no excuse not to get work done. :-) I brought this work from last year to the “show and tell” at the book Arts Guild last night with a bit of fear and trepidation, as there are some really fine artist’s there. But it was OK. I have only these 2 copies - started as a little painting to go with my dear friend’s Icelandic poem, then decided the poem needed to go over a painting too, then of course it needed some sort of presentation, so this is the result, on 2 boards with folded paper and a spine. And deli paper print (a la Musings) on the covers.

Really want to do a book about elephants next.

Here’s my friend’s poem that I’m sure you can’t read in the picture. I haven’t been to Iceland (yet) but it makes me want to go....and to read all those Icelandic sagas.

ODE TO GRYLA THE CREATRIX

with ancient thorny nails
you cut in jagged fjords
and scrape in towns
for naughty children you’ll stew
come Yule time;
with gnarled fingers
you rake high cliffs
with boisterous waterfalls,
slap brushes of snow
down mountainsides
as straggly as the beards
of your thirteen sons;
a sack on your monstrous shoulder,
you search for naughtiness,
digging out craters like moons
to uncover hiding places;
disappointed,
you stomp the earth for
fumerials of hot water
to bubble up in muddy pools,
stomp again to free geysers
spiking high in cool mists;
your gleeful shrieks agitate the huge volcano
its fiery sloshing lava burns your hooves;
howling, you invade the glacial lagoon
at the volcano’s foot,
cool off by hurling icebergs
that drop enormous diamonds
into the blueness;
you chomp spears of ice
that poke the warts
on your enormous nose;
ever spiteful, you charge on, stab your wooden crook
at earth-red rocks, turf houses, domino sheep, Viking horses;
snarl across old lava fields
hard as your horns, black as your bat-wing hair;
you won’t stop the mayhem
until the midnight sun sets
on the wild beauty of Iceland.

Nancy Hagen Patchen