100º in the shade

We're home from the lake and it's still beastly hot.  The cat was asleep for a day and a half in the culvert under the woodshed. We discovered a burr oak leaf skeletonized by unknowns, insects, we suspect. I have a brand new library card because I found a book I wanted to read for the title alone,  What There Is to Say We Have Said,  letters of Eudora Welty and her editor, William Maxwell.  The librarian issued me my new plastic card, that can be punched and added to my key ring, saying, with a radiant smile, Welcome Back! as if a lamb had returned to the fold. Eudora Welty, love, always.

Spoons for sale in the store,  purchased from a little old lady (as she calls herself) who carves them in Ely, MN.  Lilac, Maple, Lilac.

What was I thinking?

No, seriously. What was I thinking about before we left to visit our family out west just 5 days ago? This book and these yarns were on the table. I was thinking about something new. But what?  The show catalog Tradition Transformed, Brown/Grotta, No. 22,  is a favorite of mine. Japanese ideas and  9 contemporary weavers, are represented in a collection originally curated by Sheila Hicks, in 1995, at Brown/Grotta gallery, and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, in  NewYork,  and to coincide,  Brown/Grotta gallery, 1998.

Chiaki Maki and her sister, Kaori Maki, weavers, are part of this group.  Their work and words are so clear to my mind's eye, and help me to think better about what I try to do, every time I come back to weave in my own studio.  Their elegance alone would be hard to match, but their textiles incite memory, or something less tangible, something not quite remembered.  Can a textile do that?  What a painting or a poem can?  Obviously, it can.  Here are the proofs.

When I was weaving as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, I experienced a moment in which I disappeared, and only the weaving remained. The piece that was born of that moment was fascinating, beyond any description. Such a moment is the very heart of my creation.   Chiaki Maki



                                                                

Lilacs

I picked them along the driveway, and put them in an amber jar that holds the crooked branches without tipping.  There used to be a little path through the bushes, that the kids made.  Happy Mothers Day to all of you mothers, young and... not so young.