Winter Imbolc Moon
B-12 deficiency. That’s the latest on Rigel. Fixable with either injections or oral tablets. What causes it? Don’t know yet. Might not be important. She’s looking better, her coat is more lustrous and she no longer has a starved appearance. Sounding like a manageable diagnosis at this point. Good prognosis.
Went down the hill yesterday to Aurora. Each year around this time the art teachers in the Aurora School District have a show of their own at DAVA, Downtown Aurora Visual Arts. Because the show happens right around the time of the National Western Stock Show, Kate and I have been to several of them. This was the best of the shows I’ve seen over a period of 10 years or so. Less cluttered and with higher quality objects, it was a good showcase of the talents that lead these folks into teaching art.
Jon’s work, six prints in his found metal series, were the most daring. He’s doing something new and having fun with it. This one, Beach, moves away from his more somber color schemes in the earlier works, but retains the underlying concept: prints made by inking flattened pieces of metal found along the roadside. I don’t recall what the metal piece was for Beach, but it has striations that allowed Jon to use color in a fun way.
Here’s another one, which he titled, Can’t. This is forward art, playing with the notion of found objects and the limits of traditional print making. As often happens with art, this work came out of the struggles he had during the long divorcing.
He began to use the time after his school day to work on prints of his own. He’s experimented with several methods, but hit on this one and has pursued it actively for a couple of years now.
He’s also working hard on his new house. He’s built a loft bed for Ruth with a long desk, art space underneath it, complete with pegboard for her tools. The steps up to the bed itself are kitchen cabinets, artfully reused. The kitchen needed extensive remodeling, so he removed the cabinets a while back.
Jon is a closet architect, regularly filling multiple sheets of graph paper with ideas for houses, for projects inside houses, for stadiums, which he loves to design. He’s a clever, craftsman level skilled guy.
Last night over ramen at Katsu Ramen, an authentic Japanese ramen shop, he laughed and smiled. Not so common in the past few years, especially the last two. It was good to see.
