Blue-sky day

Today turned out to be a  blue-sky day in Delaware County, but it started on the foggy side.  Foggy, but beautiful.  The bottom photo is almost devoid of color, but that is exactly the way the scene appeared - almost a study in grey.  A little while later, the color appeared.  If you look closely in the third picture from the bottom,  there are two horses out in that field.  We don't know who they belong to, actually, even though they are grazing on our land.  But that's OK.  We used to have Cecil's heifers over there until he sold all his cows. And then, for a time,  our pastures were empty. So the horses are welcome guests.  The picture second from the top  was taken inside my studio.   The light for painting today was wonky because, as shown in the top picture, the clouds swept across the sky and in front of the sun thereby changing the effect on the subjects of my paintings.  But I won't complain. Days like today are something of a gift.

hanging tough

OK, I have surrendered to facebook and started not one, but two pages - one personal and one for my work - but I am darned if I am going to give up this blog.  Not too many people read it, I know, but those who do (hello family) sometimes enjoy it.  So here are a few pictures from today's trip out to the area of Brooklyn around the Gowanus Canal.  I haven't taken pictures in a while because my camera broke, but now I have a snazzy new one and I must say it came in very handy. As you can see, there are all sorts of interesting things to shoot out there - strange sculptures, lovely old buildings, water towers, wheels and the most idiosyncratic of all, a funky little store selling "items", wedged into the side of a vast parking lot.  The picture at the top gives some idea of how pretty the canal actually is.  And how coincidental is it that the color of the bridge crossing it is exactly the same as the color of the bridges crossing the Canal St Martin in an equally edgy and eccentric quartier in Paris?

Auzay in the fog

The bunny in the top picture points the way down into the valley of the passerelle at Auzay. Not only was it foggy this morning, but frosty as well, making the countryside seem other-worldly. Even Bell-Vue the house on the hill in Argenton Chateau seemed to be craning out of its perch to catch the first rays of sun burning through the mist.

the ladies, the ladies, the chateau and the mules

We three ladies took a walk to the old chateau de l'Ebaupiney the other day - and who should we find? The white ladies - Charolais cows - and the mules who, we have learned thanks to my excellent new friend Julia, have 63 rather than 62 chromosomes.

back in AC

Those of you who regularly follow this blog (all three of you) know that I am back in France, painting. And this morning, I was also back in Auzay - one of my favorite endroits on this earth. It was early and I was running. But at the river I stopped and walked across the footbridge comme d'habitude. Two reasons for that. One - the bridge is a little rickety. Two - I wanted to linger and gaze at the lovely river, the little valley it is in, and the old pink house which seems to be under a much more graceful renovation than I feared the last time I was here (see blog posts some time in the fall of 2010). I was looking downstream when out from under the hanging tree branches came not one but two gloriously chubby swans. They swam right under where I stood on the footbridge but my camera was doing something peculiar so I couldn't get the shots I wanted, but above are those I managed to take. In general, it was really quite a red letter day in the fauna department. On the way down to the passerelle, I saw dozens of fat jack rabbits - so fat, in fact, that when they crossed the road in front of me, I thought they were small deer. Then, as I walked back home towards AC what should I see but three - count-em- three blue herons lifting off from a pond up on the hill! The only sad piece of news is that Fripon the donkey was not in his pasture. The last time he went missing it turned out that he was off seeing a lady donkey. So let's hope that is where he is right now!

No they can't take that away from me. . .or can they?

Despite it's lack of outward charm, I have always liked Tenth Avenue. I've liked it's empty sidewalks, it's tunnel entrances, car washes, and pockets of low brownstone tenements. I've liked knowing that in some of the warehouses on the side streets, painters like my friend Mary Beth McKenzie have lived and worked under the radar for years in vast, cheap, and sometimes heatless studios. But mostly what has always drawn me to choose 10th for my walk downtown as opposed to the more bustling streets to the east is that because of the low density of buildings, the vistas have been plentiful and interesting. I know that a lot of people love "the grid" of Manhattan, but I don't, particularly, and the thing about 10th and its ramshackle silhouette is that even though you are walking in a straight line, your eyes meander so you feel like you are in a city with a more idiosyncratic layout. But with the opening of the High Line and the coming of Hudson Yards, 10th is changing rapidly. All up and down the avenue the air reverberates with the sounds of construction and soon there will be high rise apartment buildings blocking the panoramic views. I am afraid that ultimately 10th Ave will become just another canyon.

I walked down 10th today from the UWS and when I got to 30th street, I climbed up on to the High Line which itself meanders wonderfully alongside of Chelsea. The High Line has the almost miraculous power of making the city look like a totally different place and along the way there are some things to see that I hope won't ever change: excellent water towers, the Empire State Building behind the rooftop of the curiously named London Towers, a wall that will always serve as canvas for great graffiti masters. But the vista that I love the most is the one out across the Hudson to the Erie Lakawanna Railroad station in Hoboken. The station with its beaux arts clock tower is landmarked, but alas the view of it from the High Line is not. See the construction site which was right at my feet? Soon there will be another building there and if I had to bet, I would bet on its being so tall that the view of the station will be gone. That, I think, is a pity.

photos from a strange winter

We have had an unusually warm winter in NYC and mostly people are pretty happy about it despite the fact that it portends something really scary about the state of the globe. But last week, we actually had snow. Not much and not really very pretty, but snow just the same. On a walk across the park, I took a few pictures - two of them weird, one just nice. The weird ones are the one of the Alice in Wonderland sculpture near the boat basin. If you look close, there is a splash of orange on the left of the statue. . .that was a buddhist or maybe a moonie - wearing an orange schmatta and not much else. Her bare arms looked very cold, but she was somehow understanding of the cold, Alice and the city around her. Then, there was the bagpipe. I heard it before I saw it - a girl, her bagpipes and the heart-breaking sound of Amazing Grace in the deep midwinter.

The umbrella ladies - not so strange, just picturesque.

Tonight - a very mild evening - I came out of the subway at 72nd and Broadway and honestly, my first thought was "they put spotlights on a few of the buildings uptown" . But you know what? It was the sun, coming in from the west in a spectacular beam. Quite lovely. Almost poetic.

wishful thinking

The question is, who is doing the wishful thinking? Is it the folks who put up the "thin ice" sign wishfully thinking that winter would actually arrive as usual and then thinking - wishfully - that people would pay attention and stay off the ice? Is it the hellebores and forsythia thinking, wishfully - or wistfully - that spring has already sprung when, in fact, it is only January. Or is it the guys in the trees thinking - as is their wont - that it is during the winter when trees need pruning so when spring arrives - months from now - the branches will be healed and ready to sprout at the proper time and not, as seems possible, right now. So is it wishful to think that our globe is not in big trouble? I think so. I wish I didn't.