Homage

I finished her this morning.  Actually, I was close, so close late last night, painting with the windows open to the dark.  I brought her downstairs and hung her on the bedroom wall, facing the end of the bed, because when a painting is this close, I like to sleep with it close by.

When thunder shook the house in the wee hours and lightning blazed right through my eyelids, I awoke to the sound of a torrential downpour.  In the hazy black of night the owl glowed softly, just enough for me to sit up and make out her outline.  I felt safe.  Held.  Communal.

I'm still working on the official words for this painting, this Homage (for a great many of my paintings I like to write story-titles, a bit of poetic prose that serves as companion for the paint, as another doorway in which to enter a the painting), but I want to tell you some of the raw, perhaps unraveling, untidied thoughts behind it.  

It starts with this: we're moving, again.  Back north by the end of August.  We've known the move was eminent for months, and while it is deeply bitter-sweet, I can not deny that I know this chapter of life is drawing to a close.  So for months now I've been soaking up the land, willing my cerebral cortex to perfectly imprint the shape of every hillside, the bend of these redwoods in the wind, the scent of this dirt, the sound of this particular mix of flyers, the color of my river at sunset.  I've been promising to never forget, and offering thanks after thanks for all this land has gifted me.  It has been my place of healing, a place of quiet, of deep breath, of salt and tears and emotional stretch-marks.  It has been a refuge.  

But still.  I know in my bones, the time has come to leave the nest.  

So this painting, like so much of the work I've been creating through of late, is my small offering of gratitude to the land which has cradled me so well.

Tonight I know I'll sleep deeply under her guardian gaze.

Homage
(acrylic on canvas, 3' x 5')
(please please click on the image above - it will take you to my flickr page wherein you will be able to see this image MUCH larger!)

While We're On The Subject

Of Barn Owls that is.

It occurs to me that I've yet to tell you a tale of where my owlish love began: in the second story of a elderly farm house on a street called Louie.  I was still in single digits of age.  My sisters and I grew up in a house partly made of science, partly made of magic, and full of encouragement to question and explore.  My father was the town science teacher, known by each and every child still in school.

I realize this is sounding like the opening to a Mary Shelley novel and while we did have a great many questionable objects floating in formaldehyde, and what I'm about to reveal may lie akin to grave robbing, we were a somewhat respectable family living in California's central valley in the 1980's.

My first experience with barn owls was not so much with the birds themselves, but rather with their digestion.  On special Saturdays my father would deliver a few choice nuggets coughed up by local barn owls, filled with the remains of their prey.  Delighted, I would spread out my tools:

Probes.

Picks.

Scalpel.

Needle.

Forcepts.

And ever so carefully, while other children watched The Flintstones and Small Wonder, I would dissect owl pellets, carefully identifying rat femurs and mouse vertebrae.  Consulting creased pages with drawing of bones, spreading digested fur out to see if any treasures lingered behind.

What kind of wonderful creature was the owl!

They could swivel their heads 280 degrees, soar soundlessly through the night, scare the pants off of you if you happened to be wandering in the dark, AND their stomachs did all the work of forks and knives and cutting boards and garbage compressors.  And if that wasn't enough, they delivered all the information of who they found in swaying grasses and lonely country roads in a tidy little pellet for my scrutiny.

Amazing.

And so the love affair was born.

While it's been a great many years since I had the pleasure of a pellet, it's easy to recall the first mysteries the owls presented to me.  I've been chasing them ever since.

~ Both the Barn Owl and Barn Owl Feathered Stones will be in the shop lickity split ~

~ I'm off to take the Pup to the dog park before he loses him mind ~

~ CHEERS ~

PS: LADIES, YOU ARE UNBELIEVABLE!

An Owlish Sort of Day

In the name of silent flight, winged messengers, moonlit feathers, hearing without sound and viewing without sight, I offer the third cuff in the Totem Cameo series: The Barn Owl.  Cut, tooled, painted in a slow rhythm, like the flap of an owl over midnight fields, knowing that the woman who wears this piece will know exactly what it means.

(for the original post on the Totem Cameo Cuffs, please click here)

In the shoperoo momentarily...
screech screech croak! (since barn owls do not hoot)
- Umber