title : blue rabbit dream
medium : watercolour, pencil & ink on paper
dimensions : 4 3/4″ wide x 5 3/8″ high

Did I dream up the blue rabbit or is the rabbit dreaming of me? This was the first time I’d caught sight of him again after a couple of years gone. A series of paintings emerged called blue rabbit goes to war and I let them but too soon I let a shadow beat the rabbit out of the picture, nowhere.

Welcome back, blue rabbit.

title : blue rabbit march
medium : watercolour, pencil & ink on paper
dimensions : 4 3/4″ wide x 5 3/8″ high

I don’t know what season you encounter in March but here in southern Canada(da) we watch the daylight stretch itself out and winter’s back is broken. A momentum builds in the cells that breathe and sip and grow. The frozen and the dead, thaw out, reanimate.

Blue rabbit, march.

title : modernisms
medium : watercolour, pencil & ink on paper
dimensions : 4 3/4″ wide x 5 3/8″ high

This is the mind’s eye. It may seem a little cold but it is doing the necessary service of searching for the patterns at hand. Making things fit. Seeing, understanding and applying structures, implications exploding outward every which way. The mind has a tendancy to wander. Only the heart knows what to do with what the mind collects in it’s considerable travels.

The mind is clay, moulded and marked.

title : cookie cutter
medium : watercolour, pencil and ink on paper
dimensions : 4 3/4″ wide x 5 3/8″ high

I found this cookie cutter in a retail hovel of used things. Three feet above the street and five feet below, very used books piled in slippery threatening stacks, adhoc shelving lined the grim walls. Oddments, home-crocheted rooster tea-cozy, bright orange, ugly toys, and this cookie cutter were hung on nails pounded anywhere. No lost scrap or plastic thing had been spared the pecuniary eye of the crazed man who beached up all his rapidly aging effort in this array of flotsam for sale.

He asked if I would mind if he smoked, lit one and told me in a voice full of clenched teeth how the law would come down if they knew he was smoking.

By then I’d scanned the drifts of remnants and found next to nothing and noted that next to nothing was not cheap. There were clumsy hand-lettered notes pinned everywhere. Some of them said strange things like; “Make a noise when you first come in so I’ll know you’re there – if you don’t understand this you don’t belong here.”

I really wanted to draw that cookie cutter and I figured he could use a few bucks. He wanted two for it and explained that it was his opening day.

Oh. I also bought a small greenish paperback of the curious title : The book of Job as a Greek Tragedy.

What can I say about this?  It is a drawing of an interior state.  The figures are symbolic.

One is rooted, the other walks away.  We are like this with one another.  We dispose of one or another so easily.  We curse them and cut them down like weeds.  Have you ever been thrown away?  Have you ever had someone’s hands around your throat, deadly with intent?

This world will teach your brave little heart to stand still and root.  Be careful.