Asclepias

The Asclepias are coming, the Asclepias are coming. Well, I guess they are here. There were four species of Asclepias in bloom last week.


Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)




Poke Milkweed (Asclepias exaltata)




Showy Milkweed (Asclepias speciosa)




Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa)

Mostly Shadows

Given that we had about 10 minutes each for thirteen exercises, if we chose to do them all, we had very little time to gather our thoughts and materials to do our tasks for the Manitoulin art experience. That being the case, many of my projects were small ones. Here is another mini-sculpture. This one was made of a twig, a feather and a bit of grass all held together by friction after making small holes in the twig with my pocketknife. I then held up the structure and photographed it against the sky to make it a bit more dramatic.



On this particular day, I also collected some tree seeds from a poplar tree and made some shadow pictures. Here is one of them.



And here is one more shadow picture. This time, I changed the light reading on the camera to make a bluer cast and used a root on my sketch pad in full sun to create another shadow.

Manitoulin Vistas

I took this photo, looking west from our B&B, just a few minutes after sunrise. Someone had been up early to get this far out on the channel so early.



As we left the B&B to go to our art location, Églantine yelled, "Stop." We had been told the night before that we might see Sandhill Cranes in the meadow and sure enough, there one was walking through the daisies.



At the end of our day we found a young native boy and the B&B dog out enjoying the cold water and the sunset.

Paraphrase Art

For one of my art projects I made a mobile sculpture using all natural objects. The parts were twigs and bark that I found on the ground tied together with blades of grass.



After photographing the mobile, I turned the image on its side and duplicated a reverse image and put the images together.




Next I duplicated the new image, flipped a copy, and put the images together again.



Our art course was called "Paraphrase" which, we were told, is a jazz music term for playing with a theme. My last paraphrase consisted of going back to the original photo, taking the colour away, and using Photoshop to make a few more changes to get this last image.



I do enjoy playing with images!

M'Chigeeng

More by accident than by design, I celebrated the end of my first year as a blogger away from the internet. Églantine and I are just back from a five-day art experience on Manitoulin Island which is the home of seven different aboriginal reserves on islands in Lake Huron. Last Sunday we spent our morning in M'Chigeeng, one of the villages on Ojibwe land. We were treated to a demonstration of drumming and dancing by some of the Medicine Star Drummers. The so-called "calendar boy" in the following photos demonstrated several dances that he uses in Pow Wow competitions. He has on the special regalia which he uses for the dances.





Here is one of my "artistic" shots of him in action. (More art from our course will follow in the next few days.)