Purple Finches and the Great Backyard Bird Count

I mentioned in my anniversary post how much blogging has not only been a place to create, but an inspiration. And that inspiration is often provided by my fellow bloggers.

Round Robin caught my eye this week with Hugh's post on the Great Backyard Bird Count. Then I noticed how many other bloggers were participating. So I read about it and decided to count too. My first day, I felt hesitation, mainly about busy birds that won't keep still while you try to count them. But this nervousness quickly fades. You just do the best you can and go! And even if you are a beginner like me, there's a primer on ebird that will jump start your understanding of how this thing we call "counting" really works.

Nancy at the Zen Birdfeeder posted her bird count yesterday with some nice information about pine siskins. She also posted two convenient links to the Cornell site with helpful information. I visited the links and explored the "Top Ten" and guess what! At the time I'm writing this post, Knoxville, TN ranks #5 in "Localities Submitting the Most Checklists". Do you think that makes me glad I decided to participate? What a fun surprise!

Today I also took a few minutes to sketch and paint the male and female purple finches in my sketch book (the ones that aren't showing up for the count). The female was a joy to draw. I sketched her several days ago. But the male has been a different experience!
Actually, my first try looks like a pretty close sketch as I post it here. But remember in my last post I referred to "finch shapes" and how the eye integrates shapes with practice? Well, I grew up on a farm and we had roosters. Every time I walked away from this sketch and came back to look at it again, that finch face turned into a rooster! And that just wouldn't do.

I realized there were two shapes battling for my attention, the shape of his head and the shape of those fluffed up feathers. So I erased the top lines and concentrated on the shape of his face without the fluffed up feathers.
And then I added the shading for the fluffed feathers and adjusted some lines in his bill.


Still not perfect, but I stopped seeing a rooster. By this time my sketch paper is getting pretty worn and my doubting voice is starting to taunt me, "how do you think you're going to sketch in the field with all this erasing?" And since I have to have the last word, I answered. "Practice...and patience. Besides, I'll start with a plant."

Sketching Practice

When I go to visit my favorite art instructor in New York, Ann K. Lindsay, I am reminded of how actively my "critical mind" comments on my painting efforts. It makes me sigh sometimes, wondering if this will ever lessen. Ann says its always with us. And then I am reminded to "be kind," to step back and allow those critical thoughts and especially fears to subside. No effort is wasted. Our minds are learning, integrating, even when we think we're doing nothing.

For many of us, being kind to others is second nature. But thinking kindly about our own efforts, our practice before we get it right, doesn't come so easily. On a practical level, this critical thinking helps us fit in and strengthens our ability to cooperate in our families and community.But we also have our own perspective, an inner voice that allows for individual differences, our own uniqueness. And eventually we come to respect both the uniqueness in ourselves and in others. It is one of the joys of art classes. After a work session, we post our efforts on the wall and talk about what was hard and what we enjoyed, what we did and did not like about the effort. And when I look at everyone's work, it is wonderful, fresh and alive with discovery and uniqueness. When I am too busy with other things to practice drawing and painting, I come back to it with timidity. And that means my critical mind (which also seeks to protect me) is in high gear and shouting, "don't risk showing that to anyone." And so it was when I posted my first kinglet sketch.

I also stepped away from it leaving the sketch visible on my table until my opinions softened. I have since had time to create a few more sketches. And I learned that drawing a robin is much easier for me than a kinglet. The reason? I think its because angular shapes give my eye something to grab and work from. Angles break up the shapes. I sketched this robin in only a few minutes and was pleased with the first effort even though the legs are a bit short. The ease of this sketch could be from having seen many robins, even though this is my first attempt to draw one. But it also could be that sketching the kinglet warmed me up and quieted my doubt. Probably all of the above!
Critical thinking and seeing work together as we draw, paint, live life. Sprinkle in a little kindness as you practice and watch what happens.

Coming up: My Thanksgiving visitor and the painting

Watercolor Practice—Trees

A friend of mine asked me, "what do you have after a week-long painting workshop? Did you come back with paintings?" I laughed. "No, no new paintings, just lots of fundamentals and practice."

Getting familiar with the paints, the combining of colors to create rich neutrals, how much water and how much pigment, how the water and pigment move together on the paper, which brushes give what effect—these are the fundamentals of painting.

And since I had not painted for over a year, it is these fundamentals that I revisited. They weren’t in my back pocket anymore. I had to reconnect with them. It was a happy reunion.

Painting is much the same as playing basketball or learning photography or writing practice. You follow your passion and you practice. Through practice you develop skill, familiarity, confidence. You load your brain with the fundamentals.

Then when you want to paint, these fundamentals are right there in your brain’s library. You focus on your subject and the rest flows. This is the essence of talent—a loaded library.

I practiced trees, lots of trees.

Practice wets the appetite. It made me eager to paint more trees.

The Silence

Clearly the most profound experience of my stay at Rose Mountain was our teachers, what they taught us about writing (and about living). Both Natalie Goldberg and Sean Murphy are talented and powerful mentors. I am fortunate to have experienced their wisdom and that it lives on in my mind, my practice and in their books. But I have wondered what aspect of this experience made it so difficult to re-engage when I returned home, so much so, that it took a full two weeks before I could feel my feet firmly replanted in everyday life again. I have concluded it was the silence. The silence of the mountain, the silence we observed just after meeting each other--thirteen of us inclusive of teachers, the silence of meditation, of walking, of writing and of listening. There was nothing superficial, shallow or pretentious to occupy our minds. Everything around us was real and pure, the air we breathed through our nose, the earth squarely solid beneath our feet, the whisper of the wind in the pines. There was nothing in the way of our opening up.
Without everyday distractions and demands to hold you to the surface, as your pen moves across the paper, what bubbles up is what matters. And what matters comes from a deeper place. And when you go deep you heal and become open to who you are.
As we read what we had written aloud to each other, this bubbling up was honored with silence, reverent, affirming silence. No reassurances bombarded you. There were no attempts to repair your composure or make your voice go away. No criticism or ‘fix it’ responses, no rushing in to make you feel better. There was only listening and silence. And how does this feel? Uncertain at first. It’s unfamiliar. But what follows is a very settling and strengthened certainty that you have honored who you are. You have listened deeply and heard what you had to say and in the midst of that profound silence, you know that is all that really matters.

The challenge then becomes, how do you hold on to that when you return? How do you incorporate that into your everyday life despite all the surface clamoring? The answer is, you practice.

Witch Hobble and Practice

“Don’t be afraid to answer the questions. You will find endless resources inside yourself....Even if you are not sure of something, express it as though you know yourself. With this practice you eventually will.”
--Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones Witch Hobble is a common name for this variety of viburnum, a native shrub that grows mostly in the northeast but extends as far south as east Tennessee. Each intriguing blossom is like a factory producing a whole village of tiny flowerettes, all of which, are encircled by graceful, snowy white petals. Witch Hobble? Don't you just wonder about the story behind this name?

Practice Finding Your Voice

Natalie Goldberg’s, Writing Down the Bones, is one of my favorite books. I keep it on my bedside table so I can open it whenever I want and read a few pages. Not only is it full of two-page gems about writing practice, each lesson also speaks volumes about living life.

Last night I opened the book to the section entitled, “Make statements and Answer Questions.” In this section she brings to light a study that shows that women and minorities often use qualifiers in their statements, words that ask for reinforcement and encouragement, rather than using a clear and affirming voice. She writes: “After I read the article, I went home and looked at a poem I had just written. I made myself take out all vague, indefinite words and phrases. It felt as though I were pulling towels off my body, and I was left standing naked after a shower, exposing who I really was and how I felt. It was scary the first time, but it felt good. It made the poem much better.”

We all know what this nakedness feels like. We know it best in the form of early encounters that caused fear or humiliation and these experiences often shut down our voice at an early age. But truth is, there are no constants and opinions are as varied as the autumn leaves. We each have our own unique way of seeing the world and of creating and expressing ourselves. No one expression is any more valid or valuable than another.

Drawing and writing practice can help overcome the fear of exposure. To expose your thoughts and feelings on paper can be unnerving at first. To present them to others, even more so. But with practice, you will find your voice. You can’t help it.

The Practice of Seeing

Have you ever written something and proofed it carefully, only to see that you’ve been overlooking a typo, reading it as though it were correct a dozen times? We sometimes read what we know is supposed to be there, the same as we have preconceived ideas about images that we try to draw or, for that matter, about the things we encounter in our daily lives.

Upside down practice makes us look more carefully at what's really there. And the more we practice, the more the lines and spaces are loaded into our brain. The sketch above started upside down and got worked over right side up--several times. There was something about the shapes and the angle of the calf's head that I couldn't quite get so I continued to change it until I was ready to try another one.

I liked the angle of the baby's head better in the next upside-down drawing, below. (To see the reference photo, click and scroll to the bottom photo: "upside down--on purpose") So I added a little watercolor and ink. Now that I look at the image, I see that I focused on the Mom's face more with the watercolor and barely dabbled on the baby's face. A little bit of gratitude to Mom for being easier to draw? I think so. Actually, I think Mom's face is more interesting.

Fortunately, our unconscious jumps in there and does some of the work--in art, in writing and in our daily lives. I wasn't paying any attention to the composition, just working on the shapes, especially the calf. But Mom is actually the focus of the interaction in this image. And she gave me the greatest satisfaction. Somehow it shows!