Free Gift: an American Avocet Art Print

http://etsymn.blogspot.com/2013/03/handmademn-giveaway-epiphanies-afield.html

Above is the link to a free giveaway, which is an 11 x 8" watercolor print of a shorebird in a cattail marsh. The title of the print and original work is 'Adult Avocet in the Secrecy of Rain'.

The team of Minnesota-based artisans on Etsy, Handmade in MN, has free giveaways of two weeks' length, each giveaway featuring some work by a different member. Viewers are invited to enter a request for the free item by clicking on the link (above) to the team blog.

The original 12 x 9" painting that this print is made from was created in 2001, mainly in the suburban area north of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area and in Lac Qui Parle County over in Minnesota's southwestern corner. When I started the work I was remembering my first-ever avocet, a wading bird with an upward-curving bill, which I had seen along a creek bank in North Dakota in late May when my child was about seven years old and hiking the prairie with me. In coloration and markings the avocet was a book picture come to life, instantly knowable by name. In its behavior, as it chased geese and ducks off a sand bar, the avocet--or blue shanks if you enjoy using old-folks' names based on a bird's quirky looks and mannerisms--seemed militant and self-important, like a thin eccentric clearing much bulkier strangers from a public space, everybody dressed in their seasonal finery.

In  the painting however I was invested in a predominant theme of my own and much other natural-history art, the sense of 'Ohh' that comes to a person who is crossing land or water and sees something that is alive and true to that place, especially if it is seldom seen or never-before-met but has a wondrous mystique to it. Yes, the soul notes, this is a piece of Creation that I have missed out on before today, but can now verify through my own senses which are not to be mistaken. And if I could transform, only for a minute, into an avocet...

Sat Down a While in Spring's Lengthening Rays

Since our region just below the Canadian border has dipped closer to the sun with March, the afternoons now signal almost-spring, with the sun pulled higher off the horizon. It's been a winter closer to the traditional with an enduring, layered snow pack. This winter may have been making up for the one we skipped last year, which was like a freezing autumn hosting an eerie, dry spring. Lately a more direct daylight, reminiscent of other places and earlier times, reaches through trees both bare and needle-thick. 

I daydream of fishing for lake salmon, an investment of chilly, empty-minded hours with strangers full of secrets on either side of me, and forgo the opportunity to get back to artwork that is about delicate membranes taking full advantage of light. The subject I plan on will be a drunken hummingbird, so far just sketched in, but the current focus is an assortment of flowers, surreal, formed like pouches and bottles. A local greenhouse offered plenty of tropical and sub-tropical examples when I was allowed the privilege of a mid-week visit.

The work picks up again in fits and little frenzies in between all the other things there are to do, with new and opposing flower structures to add in though they're all on a theme of choice and satiation. This might be  a metaphor for a lot of us who reflect on all the foods there are to try, especially if we get around to all the places we mean to visit, or other luxuries, and our worldly lives will be the fullest by the greatest possible indulgence in these things, we can afford them after all--even if, in the end, we've fooled ourselves and by a chosen course had reached a point of peril to mind, body or soul. We are of course time and again fooling ourselves in all kinds of ways, all kinds of days, yet most of us in a cyclical manner follow a scheme that seems to have been laid out for us and we dignify it all the ways we can, for our own repletion and for everyone we hope to nurture.