Birdhouse in Your Soul

I found these little pastel boards at the art store months ago and am just now giving them a try.  They're fun to play with, but I think I prefer my usual Colourfix paper for my long-term use.  In the meantime, I can't stop listening to this song by They Might be Giants.  It's pretty catchy. 

Let us turn our thoughts today to Martin Luther King

There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest
Oh, let us turn our thoughts today to Martin Luther King...

-"Shed a Little Light," by the incomparable James Taylor

It's a big week! Martin Luther King Day of Service tomorrow, inauguration on Tuesday, Lost season premiere on Wednesday, and I'm back on my blog today. (Yes, I recognize that there are strikingly different levels of bigness in that string of events. I'm just being thorough.)

p.s. This is a re-imagining (this one in pastel on paper) of an earlier piece (that one in paint on a canvas apron.)

p.p.s. Happy 2009!

Illustration Friday: VOICES

Merry Christmas Eve Eve! Here's a little sketch that I'll consider an homage to my brother, my sister, me, and Christmas Past. When I started this little sketch, I didn't intend it to be autobiographical, and it's not exactly (I don't recall us ever caroling in front of the tree like that, nor was my brother's head that round or big.) But I was just drawing, and then all of a sudden there were two older girls and a younger brother and similar haircuts to ours circa 1993 or so. And the older girl's holding the book (and therefore she's probably the bossy mastermind of this little photo op) while the middle one looks like she's singing the nicest and enjoying the attention and the little boy is probably stealing the show by hamming it up and knowing his audience. And that was pretty much us back in the day.

So happy Christmas Eve Eve to my family and yours. See you in 2009!

Illustration Friday: HORIZON

What a great prompt word! Wish I had time to do more than this playing-around-on-smooth-paper-I-found-in-my-desk sketch. Inspired by Simon & Garfunkel's "Old Friends," which came on right as I started drawing.

Old friends,
Old friends
Sat on their park bench
Like bookends.
A newspaper blown though the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes
Of the old friends.

Old friends,
Winter companions,
The old men
Lost in their overcoats,
Waiting for the sunset.
The sounds of the city,
Sifting through trees,
Settle like dust
On the shoulders
Of the old friends.

Can you imagine us
Years from today,
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy.
Old friends,
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears