John Fiore, an old
high school friend of mine, died yesterday morning after a long battle with leukemia. My sister Sue, who lives close to John's family in California, called to tell me the news. I had just been reading John's powerfully moving poems at breakfast. You can read them
here.I pulled off the highway yesterday afternoon to take this picture. See the square shaped opening between the two clouds? It looked to me like a window. There was a small rainbow sparkling on the left side of that opening, and I thought of John passing through that space. The cloud on the right looks like a white cat, and the cloud on the left, a hedgehog, perhaps. Two feathery white angels, nose to nose, paw to paw, forming a portal...
Godspeed, John.
This is the start of a new series of drawings of and about my daughter Lisbeth. I've wanted to do this series for a very long time, and I finally feel emotionally ready. Ever since I took this photo of Lisbeth in the ER last fall I have felt compelled to draw it. I've also been wanting to try working with acrylics and pastels on primed canvas instead of paper, so this week I bought some raw canvas and tacked it to the new homosote panels lining one wall of my studio, and gessoed it. I drew the image in first with charcoal, then worked into the drawing with acrylics and pastels, back and forth, back and forth. It's a new surface, with new challenges: I'm just getting used to it, and I'm enjoying it so far. I plan to work the hummingbirds into the piece this afternoon, either on this drawing of Lisbeth, or on smaller separate canvases that will circle this piece, like little angels...
