RMW Ramblings

  7 July 2021 RAINBOWS & SUCH   Rainbows area popular subject of photography and painting.  I have snapped a few rainbows over the years.  Here are some.   Does the rainbow end at the HdG marina?    Or at McDonald's. Sometimes we have rainbows and lightning  simultaneously. Or a rainbow arcs so far I need a fisheye lens to capture it , as in Iceland across a black lava cinder landscape.  But the rainbow may contain the pot of gold itself.

  4 July 2021 INDEPENDENCE DAY   Here's a Independence Day flag display on an earlier 4th of July at our cottage.  They are the so-called "Betsy Ross flag" and regimental standards from the Revolution. I found these skillfully handmade flags at an antique mall or a flea market some years back.  Four of the seven flags feature a pine tree, an early symbol of the emerging independence movement in the thirteen colonies.   In Havre de Grace there is a court of flags behind the statue of the Marquis de Lafayette as you enter ,the small downtown. Above is this morning, July Fourth. The array of flags change regularly, and for a few years a small glass window case posted a story behind a featured flag.  Here's the posting on one pine tree flag. .Summer is flag season. From Memorial Day ,through Flag Day, Indepen dence Day, up .to Labor Day flags fly and the stores feature red, white and blue decorations and picnic items  We'll be back to other vexillologic...

  28 June 2021 MARY'S MINIATURE BIRDHOUSES   Mary has been engaged in a fun craft project, decorating miniature bird houses which she is using as a fund raiser premium for the Delaware Art Museum.  She is doing two groups.  Above are a sample of little gabled birdhouses, each uniquely decorated in assorted themes. The second group are little Rockford Towers with stone textured paint. They could ornament a  flowerpot, a Christmas tree, a drinks and snacks tray, or whatever. They're available locally for a $10 or up donation to the Delaware Art Museum Council, just contact me or Mary.

  24 June 2021 PORTRAITS OF MARY Today is the sixtieth anniversary of my marriage to Mary.  Over those six decades Mary has supported and encouraged me in many ways, and  has also been quite literally my muse. Over the years I have made several portraits of her.  Here are a few favorites.  In the 1970s when I was exploring stained glass, I made  a Celtic cross necklace for Mary.  I took several photos of her wearing the necklace at the time, and years later used them as a reference for this painting, "Mary in Black."  The painting is acrylic on canvasboard, now framed and hanging over my stand-up desk in our library.  Another favorite is "Mary on Blue," also acrylic, this time on gallery-wrapped canvas.   I later did a smaller variation on this to fit a thriftstore found frame.  The frame shape and baroque style made me think of a cameo, inspiring both the style and coloring of the small painting and it's title, "Mary Cameo."  ...

  22 June 2021 CRABS & SUCH 3. NOT REALLY CRABS   "Horseshoe Crab" is a 8 x 10 inch acrylic on canvasboard depicting the so-called living fossil Limulus polyphemus, which we can see on the shores of the brackish reaches of the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, and elsewhere on the Atlantic Coast. Not a crab, and more closely related to spiders, it's a fascinating creature that's been around for millennia, swimming upside down, sporting seven eyes, and with blue blood rather than red. The oxygen transport in the horseshoe's blood is the copper metalloprotein  hemocyanin rather then the iron metalloprotein hemoglobin that most of the animal world depends on.  Think iron rust red, copper tarnish blue. Read up on him at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab#Harvest_for_blood. Then there are the seriously dead and extinct trilobites, one of which I painted in "Before Adam."  They are also not closely related to crabs, but have a similar shape. I dug up...

  19 June 2021 CRABS & SUCH 2  FANTASTIC CRABS + "Pale Crab" is a 10 x 8 in acrylic on canvasboard, continues as a whimsy with exaggerated eyes. In a Photoshop copy, I abstracted him from the background, flipped him, and produced this T-shirt for daughter Betsy.     Last Summer during the Covid isolation I did several paintings to fit thrift store frames,  "Guardian" is another fantasy crab, guarding a submerged treasure. There are some three dimensional elements here.     I filled another found frame with a fictional non-crab denizen, "Chessie, the Chesapeake Bay sea monster. Next time we will do some real, but not really crabs.

18 June 2021 CRABS & SUCH 1 Growing up trapping, shelling, and eating crabs at Fenwick Island, Delaware,  I quickly connected with the Maryland crab culture when we acquired a cottage on a branch of the Chesapeake Bay.  I have since painted several crabs and crablike creatures, ranging from realistic to fantasy.  "Chesapeake Blue Crab" is an unadorned representation that I painted along with a few native Chesapeake Bay fish for a gallery show. Buried in our cottage on Carpenters Point is a hidden crab on a hidden painting. "Mermaid" is painted on a panel on the inside of a transom door that accesses the upper reaches of a tall, shallow closet I built in our kitchen.   The all too human mermaid is plunging toward two crabs in the corner of this painting amidst an ecosystem of fantastical flora and fauna. When daughter Betsy and husband Brad acquired their own summer home, she requested a large painting on rough burlap to hang over their mantle.  He is more ...