Summer Rambling

"Summer Memories"

(12X16" - oil on mounted canvas)

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I've been waffling from the studio to the prairie to "on the road to nearby prairies", the past couple weeks.  I'm being tugged where ever I look.  I'm convinced I had an attention deficit way back in the 1950's and 60's before there was a name for it!  But I'm trying hard to keep up with it all...finally finished a "farm/summer" landscape.  I'm throwing the word "memories" in the piece title because it was not all painted from life and also because the more I worked on the piece the more I remembered the summer weeks my brother and I would spend together on my grand parent's (my mother's folks) farm in central Iowa way back in the 50's and early 60's.  I have to stop thinking so much about these things as I'm getting way too melancholy for my own good!

"Jack's Bales"
(2 1/2"X3 1/2"color pencil)

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I was also toying with just something fun...something to do with my idle hands when I had no "great" idea boiling in my brain :)  I did this small 2.5X3.5" color pencil rendering from a photograph I took across the road from us about 3 years back.  Just to have a little more fun with it I've put it onto a miniature easel for displaying...no great fodder for thought but ya gotta keep things less serious sometimes.

 

Out in our native pasture, the succession of forbs (wildflowers) is moving right along.  We've experienced quite a bit of rain in June here. 14.35" here at our Prairie Hill farm...I don't believe we even had 1 inch here last year during the same period...it was extremely dry then.  Feast or famine!  The mosquitoes have now arrived with all this standing water and a walk through the prairie brings other logistical problems...I've taken to wearing my bug hat and a cotton sweatshirt!  Like a mini sauna...great for a weight loss aid!

Showy tick trefoil

(Desmodium canadense)

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One forb I like collecting seed from is the Showy tick trefoil...I used to collect it's seed when I was a kid - but never knew it...well, I knew it but didn't know what it was and didn't appreciate it!  The seed, sometimes called "beggars tick", sticks to anything...kinda like a predecessor to velcro!  I love it now because you don't need a bag or sack to collect it...just walk through it and it sticks to your clothes!  Then pick it off when you get home...in front of the TV works for me  :)

Hope you can get out, avoid the skeeters, and enjoy the prairie!