By dipping a paintbrush in the water pound, and mixing it with soil, you can create beautiful earthy shades, pretty much the same principle as watercolour.

By breaking grass and smudge it on paper you can make a shade of green, and by using a burned wood stick you can create some chalky black. Using only these natural pigmentations from nature you can create 100% organic art on recycled paper.

I have made two organic sketches, one that I prepared at home in my back garden and another one I used for a quick demonstration how it works for the kids.

Here are some of the results:

Age 9

Age9

Age9

Age 10

For more school art lessons check out my blog at Life of a Mother Artist
More to come…

Actual destruction, I only experienced in utero as my hometown was bombed. Unlike the messy warfare in Iraq, Afganistan or Gaza, there was clean, industrial-like destruction. As bombers came from England, usually at night, the citizenry, notified by sirens, ran to ubiquitous, hefty air raid shelters. The next morning, perhaps sleepy but not otherwise hurt, it could view the new damage to the submarine harbor and facilities where famous battle ships had been built or apartment buildings, in the vicinity to the beach.

Would you settle in a place like California, Louisiana, Florida where nature forces could be unleashed resulting in similar mass destruction? Or would you settle near the Great Lakes where destruction, historically, was limited to a few incidences, effects of tribal warfare and the sinking of ships?

My first experience of the Sleeping Bear Dunes in northern Michigan gave me a sense of awe. Its sandy shore had not been violated by modern warfare, bombings! I found a small wilderness, protected by the DNR as National Lakeshore, largely devoid of signs of human habitation. After photographing the dunes, I finally found the courage to attempt to paint them.

Some of us research their roots, asking where did our ancestors come from? What part of world, Europe, Asia, Africa? Why not instead reinvent your own childhood? Imagine growing up in a place like a fairy tale (without the Orcs) and play.

You may bring your friend to this place of innocence.

This horse is the earliest painting by Karl that I treasure. The cheap acid paper has darkened with time. The purple/maroon colors have faded. Time to archive the horse as a digital print. Taking the frame apart for the removal of the glass, I noticed that the paints were absorbed on the foam board backing so that I now the original painting plus a print of it.

Was the hand of the small child directed by something bigger than himself to paint the lines of the horse’s head given his tender age? The lines makes me think of Zen.

Update: Here is the full horse:

How can I prepare for such a change in direction while avoiding mishaps? Friends of mine, relocating to new jobs, suffered minor strokes and a bout of pancreatitis. This is the advice offered in the current Yoga journal:

“Once you find your center, you can move in new directions”.

I am getting ready for my new adventure by slowly tidying up. In my personal life, inspecting the contents of closets, I found a picture of Barras that I took half a century ago with my Voigtlander (Vitomatic IIa, Color-SKorpa 2.8/50), a gift from Ossi. In my childhood, Barras accompanied me in on my solitary rambles along the North Sea.

In my professional life, I am passing on my experience and hybridoma cell lines.

Last not least, I am getting in touch with my body at Mindful Movement/Physical therapy without suffering the minor injuries contracted at previous Yoga centers, mega operations, where I was just another piece of cattle. Having taught how to properly do head stand, Sue is now explaining to me how to loosen my back and psoas muscles in preparation for camel pose.

My sense is that, supported by friends, I am slowly pulling in my tentacles without tearing anything.

My last statement reminds me of playing with an octopus in Hawaiian waters. Have you ever played with an octopus?

On Memorial day, a loop on the Sleeping Bear Plateau is a popular family trail.

Sometimes, I think of Georgia O’Keefe, when I look at the shapes such as the elevation shown here, dubbed ‘silicon’ by Masaaki Vada , a friend of Troels.

The dunes, of course, abut on water, as here, where Otter Creeks spouts into the Big Lake. Like David , I am interested in aerial views. A Google map excerpt to the right shows the area photographed here with Otter Creek at the bottom and Empire bluff at the top, 2 miles away. I am fascinated by my necklace on the slope of the Empire Bluff. The naked half ring, reddish with clay, has been slowly moving down over the 10 years that I have been watching it – dynamic dunes.

We are happy for overcast days. The light reflecting off the lake can be very strong.

Here, poplars but not the Big Lake are touched by wind.

What is my Sense of the Place? I enjoy exploring its many faces – wandering dunes, scrubby junipers, lush maple and beech forest. While Troels is planting berry bushes and trees, I am on my artistic quest. I cannot import Karl here to paint the dunes.

There may be a niche for art combining humans with dunes such as the above children and my sister, dreaming on a ‘perching’ dune. While Sunil is fascinated by faces, I am intrigued by whole body expression.

I am now playing with different materials to find the one for which I have the most affinity.

Happy faces from all windows of a skyscraper merging with the blue sky as painted by a little girl visiting her grandparents in Manhattan in the 1970s.

The grandparents, living in an apartment complex of the garment district, introduced Nina to the culture of this big city.

The Jewish grandparents led a complicated life, balancing jobs with their struggle for social justice in this country, and to their granddaughter, they offered the unsullied joys of Manhattan.

Disasters happen, skyscrapers may topple. This painting celebrates the possibility of joy and innocence.

It was only in the 1970′s that the sensory homunculus

used to describe the distorted human figure drawn to reflect the relative space of our body parts on the somatosensory cortex

acquired reproductive organs in US textbooks.

Nevertheless in 2003 modesty prevailed in a paper read at the inauguration of a University president, again showing the homunculus as gender-free.

Kandel and Mack, Figure 6

Also in 1970′s, an issue of the The National Inquirer stated that a NY state scientist claims she needs x$ to study the sex life of leeches. In reality, NSF funded her to study a novel synapse that just happens to connect leech penile evertor motor neurons. The article was prompted by William Proxmire planning to give her his ‘Golden Fleece Award’. It was with glee that her boss, James D. Watson, received the news, welcoming the opportunity to fight this American senator, who, however, wisely dropped the case.

These are vignettes of adult modesty. What goes on in the mind of pre-schoolers? A little girl, Nina, created the above piece of reductionist art. What does it represent?