Possumblog

Enough!

I'm not sure what triggered it, but in a fit of redecoration, this morning I removed the old site plan of the Thomas neighborhood I've had hanging on the wall beside my desk since June 14, 1996 and rolled it up and put it in the drawing bin. And then, with all that huge swath of corkboard opened up for settlement, I removed all of the kids' artwork they've done for me over the years and relocated it to the new place. Before it had been behind me, so people who came in could see it, but I didn't get to enjoy it as much. Now I can.

And best of all? The old hunk of corkboard on the wall behind me is gone. Well, reduced, really. In some past renovation, some bright person thought it would be a good idea to stick corkboard on all the office walls to give us something to pin drawings on, but the execution of said installation left much to be desired. Also left much of the corkboard with only the thinnest of layers of stickum, meaning that over time, with changes in heat and humidity, the cork waved and buckled and began peeling off the wall. It was kinda funny ten years ago when I first laid eyes on it, but it has increasingly curled over and fallen down, so that it has become something like a big ugly cloud hanging over the back of my head. Or like the wall was sticking its tongue out at me behind my back.

Well, no more, doggone it. After I moved all my precious little pictures, out came the pocket knife and with two swift slices, the offending pieces of cork were removed and thrown into the ashcan. Mostly. There is still one small divot in the middle of the area that has clung with a bitter attraction to the wall, and I left the lower right quadrant on the wall, mainly because it seems to be actually stuck down sufficiently. But the rest of it? Gone! No more dark cloud, no more brown bumpy wall tongue!

AND, in honor of this great change in the whole feng shui of the place, NEW ARTWORK!

When we were cleaning up the den Saturday to put up the Christmas tree, I found two drawings sitting under a pile of video games and DVDs on the drum table. I pulled them out and was quite frankly shocked at how good they were. This is not one of those 'proud papa' things I so often engage in, but once again one of my kids has impressed me with her innate talent.

Seems Catherine had done some pictures in art, brought them home, put them on the table, and never told us about them. I guess to her they were just class assignments, but they really are quite something.

SO, bear with me for a bit of art appreciation.

First up, a simple apple, done in pastels on Strathmore paper--

I guess what struck me about this one is the gradation in shade--she did a quite passable job highlighting the dark and light sides of the fruit, even if the leaf is rendered a bit more formulaically. Also interesting was the composition in the frame that creates some sense of weight to the apple--the center of the apple is below the horizon created by the table. This is a shift from her earlier work, when objects would be drawn hovering above the edges of the surface plane. In this instance, the point of view is shown correctly from the artist's vantage, looking down onto the table top and apple.

Next up, the one that really got my eye. A cityscape, rendered in watercolor wash on cold press watercolor paper--

I was shocked--obviously, she spends most of her time in the suburbs, and she's not really downtown with me much at all. And no matter if she were, Birmingham is really not the most vibrantly colored city in the world. But here is a place she carefully modelled and colored in a way that is both realistic and a flight of fancy. The buildings have both fronts and backs, street fronts and alleys, with obvious differences in purpose between the ground floors and upper floors. They have rooftops with penthouses and antennas, and each building is unique, with changes in scale, shape, color, and type, all things you would expect in an urban scene. But the buildings that face us have faces themselves--the people--of which there are many--are too small to be seen and are drawn in almost in a perfunctory manner. The buildings, though, especially the two end ones, have great personality in their faces, and seem to be amused by the ants ticking their feet.

I tell you what, those kids are something.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at November 29, 2005 10:17 AM