Waiter, there's a fly in my ointment.

Vanna is wearing a turquoise chiffon gown with shirred empire halter bodice, front slit, train, and Aurora rhinestone trim around waist.  So am I.  No, wait. Not quite, but I am sort of dressed up by my standards.  I'm attired in a knit top with 3/4 sleeves, shirred shoulders, and a draped neckline that shows a bit of actual cleavage.  Shh!  Don't tell.  I have on slacks, too.  I'm headed to the theater.

Except not.  Dad, the Great Minimizer, is reporting pain in his leg.  His pain is not relieved by Tylenol. Dad never reports pain, so this is significant.  It minimizes the annoyance of the malfunctional t.v. in his new shared room.

The t.v. is on.  The t.v. is off.  The t.v. is possessed. Gremlins.  Yup.

The t.v. stays on through a marathon of Judge Judy and Nightly News with clips of Newt chittering like a chunky middle-school hamster after a dozen Pixie Stix.  [I have the sound down realllll low.] Then, inexplicably, right when I'm ready to solve the lip-reading puzzle on Wheel and win a trip to tropical paradise, the t.v. is off.

I'm blurting out "A PRIVATE EYE SEARCHING FOR FLIES", then all dark.  Ten minutes later the t.v. is back on in the middle of "A KETTLE OF SEAFOOD GUMBO".

CLUES.  Not FLIES.  Well, duh. PRIVATE EYES IN GUMBO???

Some of Dad's discomfort may come from enraged eczema.  Thus the ointment is needed in his stew.

fly in my soup  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C8nl8eBoq0


fly in the ointment

Fig. a small, unpleasant matter that spoils something; a drawback. We enjoyed the play, but the fly in the ointment was not being able to find my hat afterward. It sounds like a good idea, but there must be a fly in the ointment somewhere.

Yesterday I rescued a June bug from the lunch room and "returned it to the wild!" I've been hanging out in preschool so long I can't even stomp on a overturned June bug with creepy wiggling legs, or at least not in front of the kiddies.  Soon I won't be able to flush a cockroach in private.

Dad is out of pain on a narcotic.  The x-rays showed no fracture or dislocation.  The soup is in the crockpot. My life has too much drama and too little theater.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Pastels for $200, Alex.

Food coloring and vinegar alter this hard-boiled source of protein into a symbol of rebirth.

• What is an egg? Pastels for $400, Alex.

Combining a bright tempera color with this paint, or diluting a watercolor pigment creates a pastel.

• What is white?  Pastels for $600, Alex.

This popular food usually combines a dairy product with fruit, and might be packaged for disgusting slurping from a plastic tube.

• What is yogurt? Pastels for $800, Alex.

A pastel green frozen scoop minus the chocolate chips is just this chilling ice cream flavor.

• What is mint?  Pastels for $1000.

Creamy, rich, thick paint strokes depicting cafeteria dessert offerings make this artist a good luncheon choice at the Sheldon Museum of Art.

• Who is Wayne Thiebaud? 

Paging through The Art of Richard Diebenkorn  while listening to Herbie Hancock's River might be good stress relief for this former flower girl.

• Who is CollageMama?

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Creating space

Our first elementary art project of 2010 is finally finished. We made it into space!

When a project takes four class periods, it's a relief to have it be worth the effort. I wasn't too sure we'd get past the first morning doing a reprise of the the shaving cream printmaking the kids loved in December. The second time the kids loved wallowing in the mess even more, so I need some space and a few light years to recover before I try it in a large group again. We got great marbled effects on some old, faded construction paper, though.



The second morning we did a calm color-mixing experience while painting to the space music mix cd the Woolly Mammoth made for me years ago. A little Star Wars, some Star Trek, Holst, and a final frolic with the Purple People Eater were a treat while trying for a a wide range of tints and a soft, feathery brush stroke. Using some freebie overhead transparency sheets for palettes made for easy clean-up, plus we used the last of the paint on each palette for a couple of monoprints.

By the third week, each student had several interesting papers to use, tracing and cutting circles to make planets, asteroids, and other orbs of various sizes. At ages six to nine they feel competent at tracing and cutting, so that class had a relaxed mood. They could trade their leftovers with classmates to get different colors.



Now for the tricky part--how to introduce composition to get the best space, the best illusion of depth, so the circles wouldn't be glued on like polka dots or domino spots. Our eyes and brains play such wonderful tricks on us. The small circle seems more distant than the big circle. The circle that interrupts the picture frame seems closer still. The overlapped circle is automatically more distant than the overlapping one. A small shape interrupting the edge of a large circle seems to be moving in front of it!

The kids were delighted with their results. Their planets and moons weren't just in space. Some seemed to be rotating and revolving thanks to the patterned papers. We even had a few eclipses, and we got safely back to Earth.



© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Galleries for gray, spring days

This is a painter's time of year with the hopeful green of new leaves nearly neon against our silvery-gray rain-heavy sky. The wet tree trunks and branches are dark inside their cotton candy fluffs of white, pink, mauve, and rose blossoms.

My attention span is short these early spring days, and galleries are more enticing than museums. A visit to the Valley House Gallery refueled my inner artist. That poor girl must have been running on fumes!

Valley House has increased its exhibit space without altering its building. Henry Finkelstein's brushy oil landscapes always speak my language. This year his show also includes two still lifes and a lovely interior.

Also on view at Valley House are Gail Norfleet's hand-colored monotypes of people at gallery openings. "Looking at Art" is the Dallas arts scene version of a play within a play. Wish my schedule allowed me to attend her gallery talk tomorrow:

Artist Talk: Saturday, March 14, 2009, 11:00 a.m.
Where: Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden
Address: 6616 Spring Valley Road, Dallas, TX 75254
Phone: 972-239-2441
Hours: Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Admission: Free

The cover of T H E, an oddly named periodical of arts in the Metroplex, caught my eye on the Valley House entry table. I'd been teaching bird identification much of the afternoon, and here was Charley Harper's distinctive cardinal. There's an exhibit of original paintings and vintage serigraphs by Charley Harper at The Public Trust gallery in Deep Ellum through April. I've got to get there, as my inner artist needs new spark plugs, too.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Check out next time through Kansas

I'll be going to Lindsborg the next time I drive. I need to visit the Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery in Little Sweden USA. Birger Sandzen painted gorgeous, exuberant landscapes and created block prints of great vitality.

This Swedish painter came to the campus of Bethany College in Lindsborg in 1894 at the age of twenty-three to teach art, art history, French, and to sing tenor while assisting the vocal music classes. Although he exhibited extensively and was offered other positions, he loved Lindsborg and lived there until 1954.

I've had many years to enjoy two of Sandzen's large, vibrant oil paintings, "At the Timberline", and "Mountain Lakes" at the Highland Park Library here in the Dallas area. Ten of his lithographs are also on display in the upstairs Reference Room. Several of the lithographs remind me of my hikes, campsites, and attempts to draw in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The works urge me to put on hiking boots and a backpack and breathe in! The brush strokes suggest the power of geologic forces, while the colors bring the tension of ice melting on a mountain pond. It's partly the cobalt violet, of course.

Sandzen's landscapes are probably from Estes Park and Colorado Springs, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, not South Dakota. He taught summer classes at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado. In mid-1930s, as part of the Federal W.P.A. program, Sandzen painted post office murals for Lindsborg, Halstead and Belleville, Kansas. I'll try to visit the post offices too, next time.

The Sandzen art was presented to the Highland Park Society of Arts in 1926 by Mr. and Mrs. E. T. Moore. The Society had a gallery in the Highland Park Town Hall. After the Society disbanded, its art collection became part of the Highland Park Library.

On school photo day, several of the students dressed up in their Sunday best. "I like your bow tie," one five year old told another. "It's not a bow time," he responded, "it's a next time."
© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Sprinksfiration OR Surfing for divas

It is Easter, and an appropriate time to celebrate the miracle of spring arriving on the prairie. I can think of few experiences so astounding as to demand a Divine Artist than spring in Oklahoma. That vibrant, transparent washes of cobalt violet, cadmium yellow medium, permanent green light, Alizarin Crimson and New Gamboge burst forth from the thick, opaque, almost oily Burnt Sienna is a painter's ultimate creation mystery.



Heading north after the glorious Chihuly experience in Oklahoma City, I visit one of my favorite places in Edmond. The little Fink Park sits across the street south from the University of Central Oklahoma campus. When we lived in Edmond, the college was still named Central State, which is why the university radio station is KCSC fm., 90.1.

I have fond associations with Central State, which was primarily a teachers college in the late 1980s. My mother and I viewed a Crayola Dream-Makers exhibit of outstanding elementary student art there that fueled my first teaching ideas. A retired CSU professor of educational measurements re-evaluated my oldest son for the Edmond gifted and talent program after a dreadful assessment by a school counselor.


Fink Park at Spring Break

Now I can add a fondness for the all-classical radio station. Glad to find KSCS while station surfing for the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on two Saturdays. The Edmond station brought me parts of "Peter Grimes" and "Tristan und Isolde," and two presto rounds of the Met intermission quizzes. I could listen from Oklahoma City to Perry one week, and for brief flashes at the tiptop of the Arbuckle Mountains north of Ardmore the next.



A painting I made almost twenty years ago is still one of my favorites. It is based on sketches and photos from Fink Park at Halloween, but the sense of energy in the soil, the trees, and the sky is still very satisfying to me.



© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Feels like painting in oils

This stitching project feels the most like painting yet. I'm playing with layers of opacity and translucency, with line and shapes. My goal is a backlit view of a gourd vine on a fence with a majestic orb spider and web among the browning leaves.

The colors are the earth pigments Richard Trickey listed for our Oil Painting 201 palette in the drafty Richards Hall classroom: raw umber, burnt umber, raw sienna, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and ultramarine blue. Colors of rich compost, primordial stew, and fossil fuel meet mixtures of turp and linseed oil...

The design uses positive and negative collage concepts from Gail Butt's Drawing, Composition, and Watercolor classes. How many times do I contemplate his definition of drawing as "linear, monochromatic, or incomplete"? Whether I cook, write, or stitch, I think of his color lecture about "delicate, rich, or bold".

The process of stitching is my on-going internal discussion with James Eisentrager about saving and discarding parts of a painting. Eisentrager particularly warned about avoiding "the precious save" of the favorite section when it impairs the development of the whole form. In my mind he sits at that gray university desk in his smoky office patiently opening my mind to large decisive areas of creamy cake frosting or clear broth, instead of a picture full of anxious narrow strokes (or stitches).



© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Fabulous Fans

Feeling warm? Take a little mental break and fan your imagination with the current exhibit of Eighteenth century painted fans on display at the Dallas Museum of Art. The twenty-five elaborate fans are part of a collection given the museum by Wendy Reves.

Painted by primarily female artisans looking at an example in front of them, the watercolor and gouache* images include political, biblical, bucolic, wedding, mythological, and travel scenes of great beauty and detail. Fan leaves are of silk, vellum, or parchment. Fan sticks of carved ivory were either imported from India and China, or made by the guild of comb makers and inlayers in Europe. The fan sticks are inlaid with mother-of-pearl, brass, glass or rock crystal, paste gems, tortoiseshell and silver foil. Clearly, these aren't the fans of simple folk. The pamphlet that accompanies the exhibit says a fan like this cost five to ten times the amount of a linen shirt.

A Painting in the Palm of Your Hand: 18th-Century Painted Fans from the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection
June 17–October 14, 2007 Focus Gallery II

My own fan collection consists of one given me by my Nebraska great aunt, and probably about ninety years old. Its sticks are painted wood. I can't tell what kind of paper the leaf is made of, but it has an opalescent sheen. The design is painted or printed with watercolors and metallic paints.



*Gouache is similar to watercolor, but with chalk or gum added to the mixture of ground pigment and water, making it more opaque. Allegedly easier to control than watercolor, it has a livelier look than tempera. Tempera is also basically ground pigment and water with an egg or egg yolk addition to bind it together. Poster paint is tempera with a binding of gum Arabic or glue instead of egg. Casein, a milk protein, can also be used as a binding. The definitions and boundaries between these paint types are variable.


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Arbor Lodge from a distance

It is easy to look back at a marriage through a distorted lens. How could I, moi, have been so totally wrong about choosing a mate? Thinking about trees and Arbor Day eventually led me to search out the photo album of courtship and newlyweddiness (take that, Stephen Colbert!). The color photos taken with my Kodak Brownie Starmite have browned and faded in the "magnetic" album pages. Still, they show a happy, creative young woman enjoying hiking trips and outings with her intended. I can tell you about the cucumber and cheese on whole wheat sandwiches, the dried cherries from the food co-op, and the "plain label" beer on these roadtrip picnics. My painting professor could tell you about the saving and wiping out, the letting go of the "precious", the uniting and defining, the underpainting and glazing. A marriage that created our three amazing sons could not have been entirely wrong. It might be time to alter my mental self-portrait, maybe fade it a bit, but tinge it with some ochre sunshine.

Arbor Lodge is a Nebraska State Historical Park at the Nebraska City home of J. Sterling Morton, the founder of Arbor Day. Fontenelle Forest is a natural gem in Bellevue, Nebraska.

And in the nicest way, take a hike.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

My trail of bread crumbs

Last evening I got to hear the Dallas Symphony Orchestra perform "Pictures At an Exhibition" conducted by the Russian guest Andrey Boreyko. The music was clear and light, rich, dark and frightening, bold and triumphant. I liked Andrey Boreyko's interpretation very much. Felt like I had been wandering in the woods of a Grimm fairy tale without my bread crumbs. I sat above the stage level, which was good for seeing the harps and bells and other unusual featured instruments. It makes me happy when the tuba player gets such rousing applause!

My college watercolor professor, Gail H. Butt, Jr., would have been eighty-two this weekend. In my drawing, painting, and composition classes with Professor Butt, I heard his lecture about "rich, delicate, and bold" many times, usually reinforced with recordings of classical and jazz music, and the smell of his cigar.

Scott Cantrell's review in the Dallas Morning News comes straight from my UNL watercolor class:

Rounding out the concert was a vividly characterized Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition, with great care over gradations of volume and color. At big moments, Mr. Boreyko was even sensitive enough to factor in the generous reverberation of the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.

The Lincoln Symphony Orchestra performed "Pictures At an Exhibition" for an assembly at Millard Lefler Junior High in 1970. Made quite an impression on me! Then in 1972, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer had a rock version of Mussorgsky's composition. I have to admit that my favorite album in 1972 was "Fragile" by Yes. If I had to listen to much of the ELP or of "Roundabout" today I would get a needle-sharp sinus headache! We won't even consider Procul Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale", or the Moody Blues' "Knights in White Satin".



Mussorgsky was Russian, so his folktale inspirations are Slavic, not Germanic like them good old Grimm Boys of the consulting firm Hansel and Gretel, LLP. The wise and powerful Baba Yaga, crone/witch/earth goddess, is a fascinating archetype. Plus, she has architectural implications. Baba Yaga is sometimes cruel, and other times kind, but she always lives in a house that walks about on chicken legs. I wish my condo could go wandering around the neighborhood on skinny legs in fluffy slippers when I have insomnia.

So nice to learn there's a reason for the chicken legs:

A "cabin on chicken legs with no windows and no doors" in which Baba Yaga dwells sounds like pure fantasy. In fact, this is an ordinary construction popular among hunter-nomadic peoples of Siberia of Uralic (Finno-Ugric) and Tungusic families. This was an ingenious invention to preserve supplies against animals during long absence. A doorless and windowless log cabin is built upon supports made from the stumps of 2-3 closely grown trees cut at the height of 8-10 feet. The stumps, with their spreading roots, give a perfect impression of "chicken legs". The only access into the cabin is via the trapdoor in the middle of the floor. Bears are strong, smart and stubborn enough to break into any door, but they cannot use a ladder or climb a rope to reach the trapdoor. A similar, but smaller construction was used by Siberian pagans to hold figurines of pagan gods.

I'm going up in my treehouse now, and pulling up the ladder to keep out bears. It's time to start preparing for the June 17th DSO concert featuring
Stravinsky: Firebird Ballet Suite (1919)
Mozart: Divertimento in D major
Vivaldi: Violin Concerto in C minor "Il Suspetto"
Tchaikovsky: Sérénade mélancolique
Debussy: Prélude à l'Après-midi d'une faune

Taming the busy

This is the finished "Venn Berrygram" painting. It may look frenetic to you, but it is very much calmed and tamed from its wild origins. Peer down to the early layers and you will sense the State Fair bumper car ride meets The Gnat energy. The hair on my head stands up for dread!



How do we pick the blueberries? How do we make choices in our art? Can we make things clearer? Can we let go of some parts to make the picture better? Simplifying without losing meaning, you think. You are right, and it is a life's work.

Palmolive Princesses and Mysterious Measures

A fortnight ago I wrote about mixing dishwashing detergent with liquid watercolors to make monoprints on top of oil pastel face drawings. This is a fun example of those nice, clean-smelling preschool pictures.

A "fortnight" does not refer to a night spent in a fort, I'm sorry to say. Hearing that word as a child had such fabulous possibilities... Alas, it has nothing to do with the French Foreign Legion. .. There's no such word as oasisnight, but, ah, what would Maria Muldaur have to say about that? Just to give you a little earworm action!



(David Nichtern)
Midnight at the oasis
Send your camel to bed
Shadows paintin' our faces
Traces of romance in our heads

Heaven's holdin' a half-moon
Shinin' just for us
Let's slip off to a sand dune, real soon
And kick up a little dust

Shave and a haircut:
two bits
"quarter," 1730, in ref. to the Mexican real, a large coin that was divided into eight bits (cf. piece of eight; see piece); hence two-bit (adj.) "cheap, tawdry," first recorded 1929.
bit (1)
related O.E. words bite "act of biting," and bita "piece bitten off," are probably the source of the modern words meaning "boring-piece of a drill" (1594), "mouthpiece of a horse's bridle" (c.1340), and "a piece bitten off, morsel" (c.1000). All from P.Gmc. *biton, from PIE base *bheid- "to split" (see fissure). Meaning "small piece, fragment" is from 1606. Theatrical bit part is from 1926. Money sense in two bits, six bits, etc. is originally from Southern U.S. and West Indies, in ref. to silver wedges cut or stamped from Sp. dollars (later Mexican reals); transferred to "eighth of a dollar."

Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar. All for dictionaries, stand up and holler!

I love you a bushel and peck
A bushel and peck and a hug around the neck
A hug around the neck and a barrel and a heap
A barrel and a heap and I'm talking in my sleep
About you, about you

from "Guys and Dolls"

US bushel plus (1 US peck) = 44.04884 liters

bushel
c.1330, measure of capacity containing four pecks or eight gallons, from O.Fr. boissel, probably from boisse, a grain measure based on Gallo-Romance *bostia "handful," from Gaulish *bosta "palm of the hand" (cf. Ir. bass, Bret. boz "the hollow of the hand"). The exact measure varied from place to place and according to commodity, and since c.1374 it has been used loosely to mean "a large quantity or number."
peck (n.)
c.1280, "dry measure of one-quarter bushel," of unknown origin; perhaps connected with O.Fr. pek, picot (13c.), also of unknown origin. Chiefly of oats for horses; original sense may be "allowance" rather than a fixed measure, thus perhaps from peck (v.).

"Butter the size of a walnut"
(from several of my grandma's recipes)

No paved paradise, no big yellow taxi

Joan Mitchell is one of my favorite painters. I got to see a wonderful display of her huge canvases at the Philips Collection in D.C., probably in 1996, but maybe earlier. Her paintings have all the ferocious energy of Pollack's, but with a sense of poetry and calligraphy, and fade-out compositions that allow a hint of space, landscape, and oxygen.

Not to be confused with Joni Mitchell:

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot SPOT
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don't know what you’ve got
‘Til it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to seem 'em
Don't it always seem to go,
That you don't know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Hey farmer, farmer
Put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But LEAVE me the birds and the bees
Please!
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you’ve got
‘Til its gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
I said
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Add Lee Krasner to the list of women artists, too.

Holmes Lake Regatta

Put on your life jacket and sunscreen! This blog is going sailing in Lincoln, the capitol of Nebraska. True, Nebraska is landlocked, but memory is not. Memory has to bail sometimes, and may even have to stand on the daggerboard to right the boat when it turns turtle*, but it is free to sail all the way to the edge of this Administration's flat Earth and beyond.





Put on your oldest Keds. They may still squau-ucksh and squirrish from your last day sailing. No need to shower and shampoo before this outing.



My sailing experience is limited to a few golden summers and autumns on Holmes Lake, a Corp of Engineers project completed in 1962, in Sunfish, Dolphin, and Dolphin Junior boats in the years just before I learned to drive. We had fabulous fun learning the sailor lingo of "hard alee", "prepare to jibe", "come about", "high-siding", "tacking", and "running before the wind". Sometimes even the "doldrums" can be exciting.



Captain Small's little dog, Tinker, is more active than Blue Dog. My sons loved Lois Lenski's Big Book of Mr. Small, and my students love each story.

The lake has been dredged and restored in the last two years, and reopened this month. I hope a new generation of kids with slip on their squauuuuckshy tennis shoes and go sailing.

*turn turtle To capsize or turn upside-down: Our sailboat turned turtle during the squall.




My students are looking at images by Van Gogh, Turner, Homer, Whistler, Seurat, and others this week. We're using curves and overlapped triangles to create space and movement. We're off to sail the Seven Landlocked Seas!

Training Wheels

Spent time recently teaching an art project about bandannas. The kids became a bandanna, lining up on the edges, sharing the corners, and filling the middle. In a moment of inspiration I had them sit facing out from the middle of the rug, shoulder to shoulder, and do some goofy positions of the legs and wiggles of their feet, ala the June Taylor dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show.



My dearly demented friend brought up the subject of bicycles recently. Remember how grown-up and powerful you felt when you first got to ride your bike around the neighborhood, as long as you didn't cross any major streets? Have you ever felt that free and in control of your own destiny since? That might have been the pinnacle! Riding my bike to the swimming pool for an afternoon of swimming, diving off the board, and lying on the hot concrete was about as splendid as it gets!



Now we are considering Franz Marc and the Blue Rider painters. My used Schwinn bike was blue, but it had book baskets on either side of the rear wheel. Convinced some of my students that those gymnastic stunts are called "Car Twheels," because they are intended to be performed in their mothers' cars, not in my art class where other kids could be kicked.



I taut I taw a twaining wheel!

Look! It's Blue Dog vs. Blue Rider

"Prussian Blue" was the name of a Crayola crayon in my sixty-four crayon set as a young artist. I never did get a real clear understanding of "Prussian", and I was not alone. Binney and Smith changed the crayon name to "Midnight Blue".

But I'm not gonna let 'em catch me, no
Not gonna let them catch the midnight rider.

Learning to read in Mrs. Erickson's first grade class was a joy back in the fall of '61. We learned to read and write the name of a new color every few days. Red was first. We also learned to read "Look". When we learned to write "Look" we turned the o's into eyes, complete with eyelashes. Being able to read the labels on my crayons was a big thrill, and I'm delighted to report my young students still get just as excited when they reach that milestone.

But I'm not gonna let 'em catch me, no
Not gonna let them catch the midnight rider.

Franz Marc is one of my dad's favorite artists. I grew up with reproductions of Marc's horses and deer. Marc was one of the "Blue Rider" group of artists that included Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, Paul Klee, and a few others. Both Marc and Macke were killed in WWI, bringing the Blue Rider group to a premature end.

But I'm not gonna let 'em catch me, no
Not gonna let them catch the midnight rider.

I wanted the students to consider movement or action in a painting. Marc's paintings have wonderful curves and overlapped shapes that move the viewer's eye around the painting. His bold, symbolic use of color sings.

The bad news is kids are totally intimidated at the thought of drawing a horse. So are adults and some art teachers! After the first day on this lesson, I had to change it. First we compared George Rodrigue's "Blue Dog" paintings to Franz Marc's "Blue Horses". We all pretty much agreed that Blue Dog has tension and interest, but no movement. A few kids want to know how Blue Dog moves between the pages of my book, Blue Dog Man. They have figured out that I'm not showing them nearly all the pages in the book, and they suspect Blue Dog goes crazy chasing cats and cars on the omitted pages. I suspect Blue Dog just goes by taxi downtown to stare at the ceiling from his psychoanalyst's couch.



Kids like the crazy colors in Franz Marc's paintings--red horses with blue manes, yellow horses with green manes, red deer and yellow dogs in white snow, a parade of blue monkeys. We look at "Cows: Yellow, Red, and Green," and I tell them that I believed that picture was the cow jumping over the moon when I was their age. It's easier for them to accept jumping yellow cows than me ever having been their age!


A perfect union of Blue Dog and Blue Rider!


The hills are alive with the sound of music.


I love the eye in the underwater cave, the scorpion, the happy turtle,

...the smiling swamp monster, and the pirate ship. The next one reminds me so much of watching the bats fly out from under Austin's Congress Avenue bridge last April! The one below pleases me greatly as a teacher, because it is the painting of a first grade boy on his own after we had completed the directed assignment. He was obviously applying everything we had learned:



How sweet it is!

Now it's time to pop the Allman Brothers in the cd player.