Chicks and Inks

Whoops! Hit publish too soon, so here’s the corrected post. Sorry about that.

My house is too quiet. There are no sounds other than that of the furry girls snores and sounds of the fans, moving the air around. It’s hot outside, much hotter than I like. They say – those “they” that purport to know these things – that it will hit 97 today. I’ll stay inside, doors and windows closed, fans moving the air, pursuing quiet, non-physical activities. Because it’s too hot to be busy.

My house is too quiet because once again my chicks have flown the coop. Kat has returned to Bangkok, where she cuddles with her cats and prepares for her first day of work at her new school on August 1. Gep has returned to Ecuador to go back to the camp on the coast where they are housing and assisting victims of the spring earthquakes. I wander around, occasionally finding myself about to tell one of them something – and then realize their chairs are empty. This too shall pass.

While they were here, we moved some pieces of my furniture that I did not care about to the garage, and replaced those pieces with some of Gep’s furniture – some pieces from Tibet he bought while in China – pieces he prizes and would be better off inside a temperature controlled building for the winter. That process created a trailer-load of the cardboard wrapping that the shippers taped – quite securely taped, I must say – to protect the pieces. Here they are, sedate and stone-faced as they usually are, hauling it off to my burn pit.

What? Oh, you’d like to see the furniture pieces? Well, I’m here to accommodate and keep you all happy, so here they are.

My chicks are gone, but my inks remain. A few days ago Robin of Breezes at Dawn fame, posted a photo that drew me in, and made me want to see if I could create the scene with the inks. I made two attempts, the first of which came out like this:

but I wasn’t sure I was happy with it, so I redid it and came up with this, with a little artistic license of course.

And then, yesterday when I was avoiding putting all of the items I’d removed from my pieces of furniture into their new homes in Gep’s furniture, and not moving about too much because it was too warm to be busy, I played a bit more, and came up with this:

Quite similar to some others I’ve done, but yet a bit different. I have a inclination to do mountains – mountains and trees are what I did the most when I was painting with oils. I’ll be taking more classes, one of which will show me how to do water, because water is another of my favorites. I’m excited about that!