First Frost

Yesterday, my garden was ripe with exploding blooms and, at dusk, I clipped orange and lemon marigolds, fire red pineapple sage flowers, violet angelonia, rose and lemon geranium stalks and lemon balm. They're sitting in bowls all around the kitchen, waiting for arrangement.

I woke this morning to a heavy frost on everything from blades of grass to rooftops. By afternoon, my garden had melted. So it should be, now that it's December!

My photographs of the flowers last day did not do them justice so you'll have to see this evening's painting to get the feel of it.

Fantastic!

This fall, my posts are rare because most of my time and creativity is devoted to a Great Big Project (but more about that later). It's Friday and I seem to remember that I've had an on-again, off-again video Friday tradition on this blog.

I hope that all you US readers enjoyed a lovely Thanksgiving. I did. Before getting ready for dinner, I took myself out to the first matinee of Fantastic Mr. Fox. The theater was filled with squirmy children but, once the film started, you could hear a pin drop. I smiled all the way through. I can't wait to see it again.

If you are going to see one movie between now and the end of the year, make it Fantastic Mr. Fox.

To learn more about how the film was made, watch the Making Fantastic Mr. Fox, A Cutting Edge Fox, and listen to Terri Gross's interview with Wes Anderson last week.

Tout-Rien

I watched The Man Who Planted Trees the other night and an interview with Jean Giono,
the Provençal author upon whose book the animation is based. I ordered all of the english translations of his books I could find at the local library and look forward to snuggling up with them as autumn progresses.

Then I looked into Frédéric Back,
the Canadian animator who's colored pencil work won two Oscars and four nominations. I learned that, when he received his first Oscar for Crac!, he confided to his producer that he would have preferred that his previous piece, All Nothing had won instead because its message was far more important to him.

Small and out of date non-American films are hard to come by but fortunately, All Nothing (Tout-Rien) was posted in its entirety on youtube. Thanks mariobq!

Want more? If you're interested in hand-drawn animation, there's a good interview with Back by William Moritz. You can also watch Back's Illusion Part One and Illusion Part Two

Farewell to La Ronda

La Ronda
1030 Mount Pleasant Rd
Bryn Mawr, PA

My mother worked for an architect in Philadelphia before she married my father. I was born in Bryn Mawr Hospital and grew up along the Main Line where we would often spend Sunday afternoons driving around looking at houses — not because my parents were interested in real estate — but because my mother loved looking at houses.

I inherited that love from her and wanted to be an architect when I grew up. The etch-a-sketch was my favorite toy and I'd twist those knobs to make floor plans and elevations. I subscribed to Architectural Digest when I was 13 years old. My architectural thinking developed but career plans were altered early by guitars and songs and the stream of life.

In 1984, as I was finishing a year at Ringling School of Art & Design and preparing to transfer to New College, I made a sketch for my mother of the Mediterranean Revival house where I lived on Acacia Drive in the Sapphire Shores neighborhood of Sarasota, Florida where Mediterranean Revival style houses with barrel tile roofs and maid's quarters were de rigeur. That sketch blossomed into a much larger project on the history of Sarasota through its residential architecture that you can read about in an article called Styles of the Century.

Today, I am embroiled as Executive Director of Drawing America and, although I've been at work on the initiative since last December, in six months I have created Big Draw models for two museums, a private school and am single-handedly producing the first neighborhood Big Draw in the United States, Big Draw 12 South: This Is Where I Live! The neighborhood and school models I've designed both involve engaging community in drawing houses and buildings in local neighborhoods.

So there I was last Thursday, just finishing up my last mad sketch of a neighborhood building for the Big Draw promotional exhibit when I heard the news of La Ronda, the 1929 final commission of Addison Mizner.

I was listening to a Ray Bradbury story called "The Smile" while working on my drawings last week. It was about a not too distant future in which all cultural beauty is reviled and destroyed as community entertainment. The entertainment in the story was the Mona Lisa. 

Along the Main Line, however, the community was desperate to save La Ronda.  Grown men cried.  Because of one man's money, ignorance and selfish willfulness, an exquisite realization of an architectural dream met the wrecking ball. Only eighty years old, the value of La Ronda, and it's loss, cannot be estimated in terms of money.  Apparently, the current owner of the property hasn't yet learned that you can't take it with you.

Some buildings I drew in the Nashville 12 South neighborhood will go the way of all things in a matter of just a few years. The value of these buildings are not at all close to the value of La Ronda but they do have inherent value to their particular neighborhood and its history.

This was La Ronda:







This was La Ronda last Thursday:



Become a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and visit The National Register of Historic Places.

Postscript — Found this. Worth watching.

Take Five

As I have been on a mad drawing tear to prepare promo drawings for the first Big Draw Nashville preview exhibit (which I installed last night), I've been listening to Ray Bradbury read stories on tape and, all yesterday, to the Dave Brubeck Quartet Time Out. It really helped power me through to the very last second. The preview exhibit is up and I have taken five all morning.

Seeing as it's Friday, and once upon a time I had a regular Video Friday, I found this 1961 clip of the Quartet performing Take Five.

When I was just about 5 years old, Columbia Record Company placed a promotional slip of a vinyl sample with a taste of Take Five into an issue of Time Magazine. My father had already taught me how to place the diamond stylus into the groove of an LP. I played that little vinyl sample until it went the way of my ragged blue stuffed puppy dog. I didn't know their names, but Joe Morello and Paul Desmond gave me a thing for percussionists and alto sax players and Brubeck helped to ruin me for anything less than excellence.

To Autumn

Although the summer was rainy and cool, each day felt like summer. After many rainy days, all in a row, today that feeling changed and autumn is upon us. It was a perfect day.

To Autumn

1.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees.
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more.
  And still more, later flowers for the bees,
  Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

        —John Keats

Kissing Summer Goodbye

Just now, as we mark the last day of summer, my garden enters its most glorious phase. Busy bees of many varieties, butterflies and birds all scamper through exploding marigolds, overgrown grass and plastered walnut leaves to reap intoxicating nectar that I whiz by and miss entirely. Finches pull at sunflowers, mockingbirds nibble at pokeweed and jays grab hackberries. The squirrels always seem to find something. It's a feast!