The Vaticinating Moon

The Vaticinating Moon

Moon!

Oh you vaticinating moon!

You boast of your prophesying powers,

You impostor!

You wretched fake seer!

You were wrong,

So wrong!

But I shall not curse you

For your moonbeam

Illuminated my way

When I so much needed

Light during my darkest moments

And taught me

To be a true and loyal friend

Before I could find one.

The Vaticinating Moon is one in a series. Each oil painting is on a 30"x40" gallery stretched canvas.

Holy Week

I am on call tomorrow. I always find that very stressful. I hope it will be a quiet call. I have so many things to do at work. It is very stressful but I learn to cope. Today I was painting. I am almost done with the painting. I am using brushes instead of palette knives. When I was painting, I became very dizzy. I had to call my daughter to help me to the sofa. I was afraid I might fall. The room was spinning. I thought I might have been hungry but I have eaten. I know I ate something. I rested for a while and then the dizziness went away. I think it was due to exposure to chemicals. The painting requires delicate brush work that my face is almost on top of the canvas. I am using very fine tip rounds, brights and flourish brushes. So perhaps I may have inhaled the chemicals.

My painting partner (she sleeps at my feet when I am painting):

Weekend Edition: Painting, a Birthday and an Award!

Update:
Today is Sunday.
March 28, 2010
Today, she would have been 54.
My angel of a sisterfriend, Renee.
I will always love her and honor her, and what better way to do it than what she did best. - Spread the love.
This is the Renee Award. Please read about its origin here. It will make you understand its significance and why I am giving it to you.
Bella Sinclair and I designed this award together for an incredible woman.
I would like to share this award with new friends who are wonderful, fascinating, creative and prolific women and three men. Some of you may have already received it but I will give it to you anyway.

Lahksmita
Lisa Holtzman
Andrew Finnie
Susan
Janice
Amalia
Anne
Audrey
Shirley
Glen
Elisabeth
Helen Wheeler-Shaw
Jenea

I have chocolate cake in the refrigerator. I shall celebrate Renee's birthday today!!!
Happy Birthday Dearest Sisterfriend Renee!

Saturday
Today
Laundry
Chicken Broccoli Divan
Wrote
Kept in touch
Painted
Needed white and black oil paints
The art store
Five 200 ml. tubes
Ivory Black, Lamp Black, Flake White, Titanium White, Soft Mixing White
Thirty three paint brushes, a bucket of gesso, mineral spirits, turpentine
Liquid nettoyant pour pinceaux et diluant pour peinture a L'huile
Home
Painted
Now it's dark
The day
Not the painting
Time to eat
Fold the laundry.

We Have Bananas Today!

Permanent Pigment Ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board
RESCUE ME!!!

Lepidoptera was just flying one day when she heard a cry near Musa. Poor Arachnida was crying. "What's wrong?" She said to Arachnida. Arachnida replied, "I am stuck, please rescue me from this web." Lepidoptera continued, "Are you hurt?" Arachnida cried louder. "Please , please, help me." "Okay hang on..."

Now that should be interesting. I updated this drawing for Illustration Friday. RESCUE is this week's theme. I have many stories along this line but I am so stressed. So I shall recuse myself from this task, wait... recuse... rescue...

Musa. Mu"sa\, n.; pl. Mus[ae]. [NL., fr. Ar. mauz, mauza, banana.] (Bot.) A genus of perennial, herbaceous, endogenous plants of great size, including the banana (Musa sapientum), the plantain (M. paradisiaca of Linn[ae]us, but probably not a distinct species), the Abyssinian (M. Ensete), the Philippine Island (M. textilis, which yields Manila hemp), and about eighteen other species. Reference: (http://Dictionary.com) Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.


I love bananas! Yes I do, but not the perfect yellow unblemished bananas that are sold in US supermarkets. Those bananas have been subjected to torture. They are mass produced, harvested prematurely and then exposed to gas to ripen them perfectly. If you you want to read more about gassing bananas, read this post. I took the opportunity to re-post my colored pencil drawing of bananas. They were difficult to draw because I kept eating them and I was getting full. My favorite banana is the plantain. I use it for cooking.


Okay. So! My dearest friend told me she likes my banana plant drawings. She said she likes the shiny leaves. So I asked her if she wanted me to draw a banana plant. She said yes. I planned on drawing trees behind the banana plants but my daughter told me to stop. She said to make it simple. You know how I draw spiders and lizards on my trees. Well the banana is not a tree. In real life, spiders love to make their nests and cobwebs on bananas leaves. The dried ones are perfect nests for spiders. Alas! My friend does not like spiders and I completely forgot to remember that when I was meticulously drawing the spider web. I am so sorry. It's just a drawing.

By the way, you can eat the banana fruit, heart and the core of the stalk. The leaves are used for cooking and wrapping foods.

Colored Pencil on 9"x12" Bristol Board

Spring Break

My friend Caroline, wants to see photographs of my vacation. I told her she may get bored. She may think they look the same, even though to me a few inches away from the focus, it is a different view. What can I say? If I am not photographing trees and leaves, I photograph the skies. We could have stayed in the same city and say we were in all these places. No big deal really, they are just clouds and the sky. My name could be Ces Skye. Does it really matter? I did share with her the requisite fishing snapshot of my beloved young fisherman whom The Viking trained and continue to teach sportsmanship - Catch the big ones but release the really big ones, like the one on the right from Lake Hartwell. Let it spawn for the future, the next catch will be even bigger.

Birmingham, Alabama

Asheville, North Carolina

Sulphur, Louisiana


Sulphur, Louisiana

Rain in Rayne, Loiusiana

Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina

Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Between Atlanta, Georgia and Anderson, South Carolina

Oh, and here is our luggage. 8 of 12 bags were mine (Well, I had to have bags for my drawing materials and cameras :)); with the kids before we left and after driving past crayfish farms in Louisiana, my son asked to have a crayfish boil when we got home, so we did!

Eyes Fishing

I have forgotten why I was in Michigan but I happened to look down and saw this beautiful view of Lake Erie.

There!
We're all happy. Really! :)

A Mother's Love Has No Expiration Date

There are a lot of things I do not know in this world but, I do know these and I am sure, that my Mother loved me when she walked on this earth and I love her and I love my children.

The Bamboo Grove. Pigment ink on 12"x9" Bristol Board. Click on image to enlarge.

The following is a re-publication of a previous post dated April 10, 2009. If you have been following my blog for a while, you may see a correlation of some incidents mentioned below with a comment my eldest sister posted on Moleskinerie.com on November 2009. Last week, I went to Facebook to delete my account since I seldom use it. I also do not understand the rationale for strangers asking me to accept them as friends from a mere invitation just because we have common friends. So I set about to discontinue some "friendships" but before doing so, I chatted up someone who asked to be my friend and who I accepted because we had the same surnames. She turned out to be the granddaughter of my Father's cousin, the one I mentioned in the following story. Needless to say, I still have my Facebook account.

A Summer Afternoon

"I am 10 years old now. I will continue attending E.T.C.S. I am graduating this year, and then I will have to go to Sum-ag. My younger sister will transfer and she will be the only one in our family who will not graduate from E.T.C.S. Inday Ched is going to U.P."

They are my father’s cousins and he is called “Bata Taguy” meaning “Child Taguy” but his wife is “Nanay Maring” meaning “Mother Maring”. They have datiles trees and I am free to climb them any time. Their house is about a 1000 feet from ours.

We moved here on my ninth summer. There was nothing around us except flat empty lots and rice fields in the horizon that blanket the foot of the mountain and the volcano, and giant bamboo groves. My bedroom window directly faces the cone. It’s dusty because the roads are not paved. I am too sophisticated for this place I think, but Mother easily brings my reality down to earth with a curt reminder of who I am.

In the summer afternoons after all the chores are done, we walk with her to visit Nanay Maring where they talk about their ancestors and their past and dreams, hopes and plans. I climb the trees pretending not to listen but I am eavesdropping. They say nice things about me and my younger sister and then they compare us. She is well behaved and I am full of mischief but Mother always tells them we are both good. We walk back home before dusk so we can tend to the garden and the ducks and chickens.

My younger sister and I follow our Mother or we walk along side with her. Sometimes I run ahead of them and pick up stones and throw them in the air and into the bamboo groves. "TOK!" I like the sound of the rock hitting the bamboo and the bamboo responds with "CREEEAAAHK", CREEEEEAAAHK" as they sway like old women with their backs bent. "CRACK" "SWISSH". There goes a broken dried up branch we called "kagingking". Mother used them as trellis for the climbing vines in her garden. We can hear the giant bamboos creaking as we walk. It's a beautiful melody with the wind blowing the upper leafy branches and the trunks creaking rhythmically filling the hot summer afternoon with what I called the bamboo grove orchestra.

The roads were lined with giant bamboo groves soaring up to a hundred feet or more up into the sky. They sway and bend and Mother mentions the bamboo’s ability to sway and not break and she uses it as a metaphor for an extemporaneous lecture on virtues. I sometimes just listen but most often say something irreverent or construct something illogical for argument's sake. Yet deep down I listened to every word she said and took them to heart. My younger sister who is the smarter and wiser of the two of us just looks at me and says my name “Ay Inday Ces” she would say, meaning that I sound too foolish and impertinent but being that she is younger she cannot admonish an elder since I am two years older than her! So she keeps quiet. Mother gazes at me and I see her smile. She has the gentlest of smiles and she stiffens her upper lip and narrows her eyes and raises her right eyebrow. She has not said anything at all and I keep quiet and smile with embarrassment. That gaze of hers, so strict and firm yet gentle and full of love, always kept me in check.

I can’t recall Mother ever screaming at me, I can only recall her laughter, her smile and her gentle voice. Many years later as she lay dying on her hospital bed, I sat beside her and rested my head on her lap. She gently ran her fingers through my hair and she murmured, “Why are you here?” I replied “Because I want to take care of you.” She smiled and asked “Who is taking care of your children and husband?” I told her they were okay and my husband was taking care of the children. “You flew here all the way from Texas?” “Yes” I said, and she smiled. “You and your sister came all the way from the US?” “Yes, I said” and added that all eight of us sisters and brothers did. She smiled. “You must really love me. I feel so loved.” So I told her that every one of us loved her from the moment we laid eyes on her when we were children until forever. She did not cry, neither did I. We were just talking.

My Mother had the ability to talk about deep emotions without the maudlin sentimentality. As philosophical as she was she believed a lot of time was wasted on words, she believed in deeds. So that evening was not yet her last, she ended the conversation with a command and advice. “Go home to your husband and your children. You belong to your family.” I opened my mouth to say something and she cut me short with a gentle shake of her head, and added “You have a different family now, still part of mine but for you to take care.” Mother asked for the date then she said, “It will be your sister’s birthday in four days, you must celebrate it”.

Two days after she died my sisters, brothers and I were mourning as we went to the dining room of the house where I spent my youth. My sister blew her candles and cut her cake. We celebrated my sister’s birthday just as Mother would have wanted it.

3/21/2010. 8:55 AM: Thank you for reading this very long post. I know your time is valuable and if you read this, I take it only to mean that you like me or love me, either way, I appreciate you very much. Now, did you find the five lizards, one spider, two butterflies and one bird? Just asking.

One Day, The Colors Expired From The Sky

One day the oil painter and black pigment ink illustrator went to the mountains. She took out her camera and aimed it at the sky. It sounded like an Uzi as she captured the gift she was given that day. God Almighty was magnificent and put on a vaporizing show. The sky was ablaze with colors:

Flake White

Zinc white

Ivory White

Paynes Grey

French Ultramarine

Cerulean and Compose Blue

Cobalt Blue... to name a few.

Later in the afternoon

there were

Vermilion and Cadmium Orange

Magenta and Yellow Ochre

and

Chinese Vermilion

Naples Yellow Italian

French Ultramarine

and Oriental Blue

But she is mortal and so curious and for a moment she wondered. What if she had the power to erase the colors from everything? What if everything was black and white? The answer was stark but she was weak and could not even stick to black and white. She had to use Viridian and Yellow Ochre.

If I Shall Let The Sky Speak For Myself...

Three Galloping Seahorses

Sunset At The Blue Ridge Mountains

Click on image to enlarge...

3.18.2010

If I shall let the sky speak for myself:

There will be

Dramatic

Fickle

Constant

Somersaulting

Still

Calm

Thunderous

Overlapping

Enveloping

Breaking

Masking

Stubborn

Dissipating

Unpredictable

Clouds.

More Skywatch Friday