Forest Rogers

Silvershod and the Cat, underway

I'm further embellishing his forest base...

Silvershod continued...

More of him soon, with his friends.

To do the deed at hand.

“To cast aside regret and fear. To do the deed at hand.”
                            ~ J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, Gandalf 

    Regret and fear: these two I have wrestled with throughout this last year. One’s world being shaken sufficiently, basilisks rise from the crevasse of memory to fix the mind in a glare of paralyzing hindsight. Up rear blunders of omission, blind unkindnesses, losses through ignorance. A terrible falling short. It is one’s own errors that are hardest to forgive, in the end, and hindsight produces the most weary breed of sorrow, surely.
    What then of doing the deed at hand? I think that therein lies one of the uses of humility, if I understand that virtue at all: to relinquish the desire, or the torment of the failed desire, to have done and been right, in the interest of doing right now and in future. Or as much ‘right’ as one is capable of perceiving. Releasing the tendrils of regret to follow, as best one may, the thread of fresh insight.

Hell and High Water

    It is my observation that it is rarely Hell or High Water; these two have a penchant for arriving simultaneously. I say this fresh from an emergency root-canal. Now fitted out with a bottle of Vicodin & a massive jar of Ibuprofen, I return to a great and incredibly belated mailing of NIADA Souvenir dolls.       
    Musing on the dark yet somehow charming sense of the absurd frequently demonstrated by the Universe, I’m reminded of my languishing Memoirs. This magnificent opus consists largely of chapter headings at present. But oh, such fine ones:

FRUIT SCENTED SQUID: Who Can Resist Posterity?
NEVER HIRE A TIPSY SCAFFOLD BUILDER
GRANNY’S AX: Remember, You Need the Ice Pick and the Hammer
HE HAD A DREAM: Full Basement, with Urinals
HOW MY PARROT SAVED MY HONOR
FIRST, AN OOGLY MASH: Meditations on the Creative Process

More anon, sweet Friends.

Another Dino...

Another critter coming for the Carnegie Museum's line! Anybody guess who this is? The prototype is Kato Polyclay. I mix it to an opaque tan color to make it easier to see and create fine detail.

Hope

There are times, kind Friends, when it is more dangerous not to hope than to hope, and when cynicism and pessimism, however justifiable, risk an unhappy self-fulfillment.  Pondering our current perch in history, I believe this is such a time. Thus I've added a Voter Registration link at left, top of the sidebar, for any who might want it. Let us dare to hope.

Twilight Faery, out and about

This little creature is flitting about on eBay, with my blessings. Terry, the sweet woman who bought her a number of years ago, is having a rough year and parting with some of her fairies, in a good cause. If you'd like to take a gander, here's a link:
Click on the Image to visit Terry's Auction. I'm a bit belated; the auction ends tomorrow evening, Friday July 11)

Sculpture of Mother Pauline von Mallinckrodt

Friends, I'm posting this image (already in the "Liturgical Work" gallery at left) for a certain visitor this morning.  This sculpture -- about four feet tall and 300 pounds of plasticine -- was created while working with the Rohn liturgical arts company of Pittsburgh, more than twenty years ago. It represents the Blessed Mother Pauline.  She's standing with a blind child, one of those for whom this German nun was advocate and protector. I was fortunate not only to create this piece but to travel to Rome with some hundred and eighty Sisters for the beatification ceremonies. Truly a rare adventure; many a tale connected there, to be sure.

I must run about headless chicken-wise now, but I will share a rather charming coincidence later, perhaps this evening. 

Hobbits, by Lou Rogers

My Mother's take on Frodo and Samwise. Oil on canvas.

Aniversary...

A year today, astonishingly, since my mother's departure from this world. A curious day perhaps to work on paper doll sketches, but also somehow suitable, given our world. Anon, Friends.

It's Fun to make Fungi.

Our Victorian Garden Faery's Mushroom, on its own. It's Kato Polyclay, over an Aves Fixit Sculpt, wire  and aluminum armature.

In the Garden

A Victorian Garden Faery (on eBay again, at long last)

(Click on the Image to visit the Auction)
More anon...

An Herb Gatherer

This one's gone to live in London.

A Tale of Three Artists, told Mother's Day 2008

Long ago...

My mother, Lou Ponder Rogers, Artist, and me.

I will tell you a tale, the one that stands at my beginning.
     My mother was the only child of a woman called Granny. Granny had virtues, but like many witches in tales she was not easy to live with, and tended to eat people right up, if they let her. Especially little children, especially the only one who was hers.  Granny had perhaps already eaten her husband. No one is sure.
     So rather than be eaten up, my mother as a young girl took to dwelling in the wild wood within. She painted what she saw there:

     She had not the eyes for the world as most know it, and little understood what most learn early, and was wise in ways most never see. She thought she would dwell alone within forever. But then one day a bright thing happened. In a gallery of her paintings she saw someone looking who understood. He was a painter, he loved Van Gogh. Sometimes he painted portraits of himself:

     He was warm, and reached into her world, and held her heart in his hands. He asked her to come live with him in a house he had built in the woods by a river, and be his bride. And she did. It was a new thing, entirely.
     Yet there were things she did not know (as in every true tale).  She did not know that he was drawn down, sometimes, into sorrow. Down into the Underworld where no one could follow.

     But he did not stay long there, and it happened only once in a while, and no one told her anything about it. So she thought all was well, and that her life had blossomed, and that the story would stay the same story to the end. 
     She and he painted together, and did other things, and soon she was round and full and there were to be three of them. She did strange, small real things she had not anticipated, like cook and change diapers. She was not sure she was good at it, but she wanted it. One day in January, she and he went out and took pictures of themselves with their baby, handing the camera back and forth between them. 

     Happiness was present, in that moment, there.
     But, the dark below began to call him. Things began to crawl up. The things that beset painters, that whisper at three in the morning asking how you are going to live, with your new wife and your new baby, on paintings. Things also from darker places that we can but guess at.
     She found him crying.
     They had an old shotgun, though they never used it. Now she had to wrestle it away from him. She made him lie down to rest. She did not know what to do. She did her best. At last, he fell asleep.
     Because she needed to think, and because the forest was her own world, she went to walk there. When she came back, he was gone. Her baby lay in its crib, staring silent at the ceiling. No one knows what it was thinking. Or whether he whispered anything to his child before he went.
     She looked everywhere, and did not find him. Everyone looked everywhere. At last the police were called. They came with bloodhounds. The bloodhounds led down to the edge of the river.
     For two weeks she searched in the woods where he had painted. She hoped  and thought what she might do to make things well, and how she had failed, how she might understand him better, how she should not have gone for that walk that night, how if there were yet time she could fix it. She could not throw away the clippings of his hair, swept up. At the end of two weeks, a fisherman found his body on the water. It was a day in May. 
     So we were set on a rough sea in a lifeboat two alone, she and I. Through all the years of my life she was there, unfailing, though often the stars were covered over, and there was little to steer by. 
     She found a safe and wild harbor a year ago in June, when I closed her eyes with my hand.

     Amidst the broken edges of the world that slice the heart, may we find solace, dear friends. Our work is love.

Silvershod, again

Silvershod

Harpy, wing view

Dark Harpy roosting