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At long last I have a new finished piece of art to post:

I suppose I'm reasonably satisfied with this piece. It seemed like it went a little smoother than usual and I managed to keep the paint fairly thin on the background which helps to cut down on time spent on the piece. What bothers me a bit is this isolated pool of red-orange that is the squirrel/boat. The warm yellow of the dragonflies was intended to balance out the orange of the squirrel, but I think they are too small to be as effective as I'd like. I did push some orange-ish color around in the background, but maybe not enough... All the same I think it came out okay.
Prints are in my Shop.

Not only have I finally gotten back to painting, but we've also gotten back to our frequent weekend hiking. We had a good long walk at nearby Bull Creek this past weekend. This trail was about three miles one way meandering back and forth across the wide creek. Where in LA we could clearly see the extremely parched condition of the land in the form of dry creek-beds and trickling waterfalls, here we could see the opposite - an abundance of water. We've heard the reason for this is that the soil's quite thin and underneath lies a layer of rock, so the water can't really soak into the ground and therefore channels into the many waterways that wind around the hills here. You can see how rocky the land is around the water in these pictures:

The trail came to an end in a small dog park. I have never seen so many happy dogs together in one place at the same time. It was fun to watch them splashing around in the water so exuberantly. I think they had the right idea too - it was surprisingly warm that day and the water looked so inviting!

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So it's official - we're moving to Texas. My husband accepted a job in Austin and just put in his two weeks this past Monday. It's such a strange feeling. We had a few weeks of anticipation and mild uncertainty and now, suddenly we're in the thick of preparations. We're out of LA in exactly two weeks, so it's going to be quite a whirlwind. I'm really excited to be moving - trying out a new city in a different part of the country, but the moving itself can be such a dreaded experience. We had a pretty horrid experience six years ago when we relocated from NY to LA and I'm not at all eager to repeat it. Fortunately, I have a bit more time to do better research on moving companies and the like this time around, so hopefully it will be a somewhat better situation. We shall see...

I've never been to Austin myself, but every one we've spoken to seems to really like it, so I have high hopes that we will too. The cost of living is very attractive and I hear it's quite green and boasts spectacular thunderstorms. I so miss thunderstorms...

Here's a sketch a did last week:
I've had a thumbnail of this idea waiting around in my sketchbook for years, so I'm glad to finally have a chance to tackle it. I'm not sure where the idea for it came from - instruments as boats just seems like a neat idea to me. I've got a color study finished for it, but I have a feeling I'm not going to get to touch it again for a while, since my current job is now 'moving coordinator.'

So as we're preparing to move, going through our possessions and trying to figure out what we can do without, we managed to gather up a few stacks of books that we were willing to part with - a lot of them duplicates that we both had before we got married. I remembered a small used bookstore right around the corner from us, that I'd walked past many times, but never really ventured into before. So I headed over there, arms full of books. It's one of these places I wish I'd discovered sooner - a really nice store with good selection and the owner's just nice as can be. They even had a copy of Castles by Alan Lee - quite a find! I love the big bookstores, Borders, B&N as much as anybody, but there's something to be said for the charm of the smaller independent bookstore. So, if you happen to be passing through Canoga Park, stop in and see what you can find - address is on their website: www.nextchapterbooks.com.

Also, I mentioned sculptor Vicki Banks' beautiful animal sculptures in a previous post - seems she does indeed have a website: http://www.vulturesculpture.com/

It's time for me to dive back into the madness of moving - many phone calls to make. Anybody know a good pet-friendly hotel in Austin by chance?

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So, I was going to post this yesterday, on Friday. But I was sick, so it didn't happen, as I spent all yesterday afternoon sleeping...

So, first, a history lesson:

In 1644, the Ming Dynasty fell to the conquesting Manchu Dynasty. Ming means bright, and the character is made up of the characters for the sun and the moon. The new dynasty took the name Qing, which means clear and has the water radical, thereby dousing the Ming. (The Qing would last until the Nationalist Revolution of 1911.) The final decades of the Ming and the first of the Qing were a time of changing social mores. During this time, there were many female poets who started gaining slight fame, even if many were anonymous. One place such poems were found were written on walls. More information and more poems can be found The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China (which is a great anthology, btw).



Now, a poem, written on a wall in the late Ming in Xinjia by someone only known as the "girl from Guji":

My silvery-red singlet is partly covered by dust,
Only a single dying lamp to keep my company.
I am just like the pear blossom after a rain storm:
Strewn all about and never making it to spring.

Now, more history:

Some of the greatest Chinese operas were written during the Ming dynasty. One such opera is The Peony Pavilion. In this opera, Du Liniang is a young maiden who dreams of the lover she hasn't yet met. She paints her portrait and then wastes away. Meanwhile, Liu Mengmei comes to the garden where Du Liniang has hidden her portrait. He falls in love with her ghost and his love brings her back to life. There's a lot more to the opera than just that, but that's the relevant part for the point I'm meandering towards.

So, the opera had a great effect on the upper class women on China. Many women responded Du's character and, like Du, wasted away and died.

In 1694, a poet named Wu Ren published The Three Wives Commentary, an edition of The Peony Pavilion with literary commentary written by his three wives.

Now, a book review:

In Peony in Love by Lisa See, See takes this commentary and imagines the lives of these three wives and how the commentary came to be written.

Peony lives a proper life and has never left her family compound on Hangzhou's West Lake. She is to be married to her father's friend's son. But on her birthday, her father stages a production of The Peony Pavilion and, when taking a break, she accidentally meets a man and falls in love. Unable to marry the man she loves, and faced with marrying a man she has never met, she becomes so wrapped up in writing her thoughts on The Peony Pavilion that she forgets to eat. Days before her wedding, she dies.

Through a series of misunderstandings, her ancestor tablet remains undotted, and she becomes a hungry ghost. She haunts her husband's family and influences his subsequent wives to continue working on her project...

This is a story that needs background information--you might want to read the ending Author's Notes before you read the book. See's imagining is tender and well-written and pays close attention to historical detail. Her portrait of Hangzhou in the years following the Cataclysm (the name given to the overthrow of the Ming) and the changing role of women during this time of extreme political upheaval. I was excited to see a tale narrated by a hungry ghost, and a sympathetic one at that.

I loved it. I know a lot of people have said that it's not as good as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but I haven't read it yet, so I can't compare. Also, I want to thank Lotus Reads for the recommendation!

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