RMW Ramblings

  O'Lanterns Hallowe'en Pumpkins Past   As our family was growing up I annually painted, carved, or decorated pumpkins for the Hallowe'en season. I photographed just a few of them. Here's Dracula...         Laurel and Hardy... i    And a Samurai...     We'll be back to Rockford Horrors soon.

  A Pyrographic Frame Paintings to Fit Interesting found frames are both a challenge and an inspiration for my paintings.  A thrift store find of a pyrographic decorated frame (detail above.) was a reecent starting point  Pyrography or wood-burning is a decorative process, charring patterns and images on wood or other substrates with a heated tool.  Typically pyrography is a handcraft technique, but this acorn and oak leaf design was probably hot stamped commercially. The frame came with a print which I discarded and an oval glass cover. My first experiments with a painting to fit the frame were two watercolor sketches followed the frame's oak motif.  An oriole decending a tree branch, and then, a single oak leaf in autumnal crimson.    I found these to be boring and trite  The frame called for more color so I switched to painting in acrylic on a panel cut to fit the oval opening, "AJ in Blue," a little portrait of our great grandson on an ultrama...

    Mount Salem Lane   A New Homemade Book As a gift to our neighbors, I recently put together this little story about Mount Salem Lane and Mount Salem Church where it terminates. I composed it from some of the photos, maps, and other items that we have gathered over our decades here along with my memory of tales from earlier neighbors.   There are many gaps in the story and I may have gotten some dates and details wrong but I hope errors are minimal. Here's a peek inside...  About ten copies were printed, but you can view it in pdf form at  https://drive.google.com/file/d/16LC50ysk1CnftCTy7Tj7p33_ZGhGb6VU/view?usp=sharing

  A Homemade Pop-Up Book   Pop-up books are a Christmas tradition.  We have pop-up versions of  The Night Before Christmas,  Dickens'  A Christmas Carol,  and  The 12 Days of Christmas.  To add to our collection I made our own Christmas pop-up,  A Christmas Visit.   We'll page through it. The front cover ...  Front endpapers...     Title Page...     "The Walsh's house is very near," with Rockford Tower and Mount Salem Church popped up beyond our house...   "And through the transom we can peer," looking through a stained glass bordered transom window you can see the globe ceiling lamp in our library...         And now inside the library, "Peace, Joy, and Love are present here"...     "We must come back again next year"...   Back endpapers...   And back cover...   A detailed presentation of  "The Making of A Christmas Visit" is posted in my Google Drive at...

Obida A Homemade Memoir         For Christmas 2011, I wrote and printed a homemade book for my brothers and our family, "Obida." The book is a memoir intertwined with reminiscences of Obida, my grandmother and step-grandfather's isolated ocean front cottage in the 1940s & 50s. No plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, one room with a kitchen and sleeping porch. I illustrated it with sketches and a few old photographs. I made about ten copies in screw-post hard cover bindings. You can browse this book and some of my other homemade books on my Google Drive at https://drive.google.com/.../11rj35wgFYPpZvRrT4...  

  The Brothers Walsh A Short Homemade Book    In 2012 I read George Howe Colt's Brothers: On His Brothers and Brothers in History,  a memoir of his family of four brothers with alternating chapters about well known brothers. the Kelloggs, the Van Goughs, the Booths, the Marx brothers. I loved the book and bought copies as Christmas presents for my brothers and supplemented it with a little homemade book, "The Brothers Walsh," my memoir of our family of six brothers. It was mostly text, illustrated by a few brother photographs.          

 Alaina's Book of Animals Another Handmade Book The books I have made as gifts, one-off or just a few copies range from mostly pictures to all text.  A mostly pictures one-off is a book I printed on Tyvek for Alaina's second birthday,   Alaina's Book of GrGrandad's Animals  is simply an assortment of some of my animal themed paintings with identifying labels. .