February Sunrise with Avian Surprise

February sunrises paint the sky in layers of lovely soft lavenders and mauves. Our steady wobbling and tilting towards the sun gives us a few more minutes of light each day. We are happy for it. 

The Mount Holyoke range reclines beneath purple pastel washes, shadows and fuzzy lines.

A delightful surprise perching within one of our strong oaks. A pair of Red-tailed Hawks. I see these stately raptors, sometimes daily, resting high in the upper limbs but never before two at a time. Looking out the barn studio windows at just the right moment often brings such joyous sightings.

The five year mark just flew by for my Flower Hill Farm blog, and as it turns five years old there are changes going on behind the scenes. Our new website will hopefully be launched soon. Working with my builder is a lot of work and a great distraction, which is why there are not as many postings here of late. It is exciting too, and I look forward to sharing it soon. 

Meanwhile, best wishes for an inspiring February. 

Winter Blues ~ Eastern-tailed Blue, Summer Azure and Silvery Blue

Dreaming of Blues fluttering around the garden can shake off the mantle-of-melancholy winter sometimes weaves about our spirits. Today, I gather some delightful, inspiring and tender butterfly encounters, from this past sizzling summer, and toss them on this page of white, that they may bring a ray of light, to warm the inner gardeners folded inside our longing souls. 

Eastern Tailed-Blue Butterflies of 2013

The progeny of these gossamer-wings are now chrysalises, or caterpillars in the Eastern Tailed-Blue's case, tucked away in crevices within mossy mounds, pods of vetches and clover, or along the frozen winter ground. Little fragile beings within their sleepy pupa or larva state, without realizing their fate, without questioning, without knowing, without hoping to survive the onslaught of freeze and thaw, human flaws and sharp bird beaks, simply, sweetly sleep, waiting for transformation. 

Summer Azure Butterflies of 2013

Holding on throughout the bleak winter months, many new Blues will emerge, along with our gladdened hearts, into the warm breath of spring. I hope and imagine hundreds of butterflies surviving the numerous perils that come between them and their completed metamorphosis. Such gossamery treasures tickle emotions and call the caring mind to action in thoughtful ways towards their wellbeing. An added appreciation for subtleties in shades of blues and grays awakens this slothful painter, when gazing upon the pastel Blues.

Silvery Blue Butterflies of 2013

Without snow cover, butterfly chrysalises and caterpillars are more vulnerable. Just beneath the old apple tree, gray birch and blueberry bushes, precious life is quietly in hiding.

I love birds too and they enjoy all the stages of butterflies equally, especially at this lean time of year.  No snow coverage is good news for this little Carolina Wren, who has decided to move in and live year round.

Wren and other bird beaks are perfect for lifting up the leaves and digging for larva nuggets below. Too bad for the butterflies being of the lower food chain, but then, butterflies fasten hundreds and hundreds of eggs to various host plants assuring there will always be trembling gossamer-wings to pollinate and touch our hearts. I say, always, but heedless humans do have a hand in the decline of butterflies of all kinds.

Foggy, frosty, winter morning sunrises are wondrous to behold just outside the windows and doors. I feel blessed to start the day in this inspiring way. A branch of the Mill River runs between the hill where Flower Hill Farm is situated and Carey Hill just due east, making for a great show of mist most every dawn. I am less excited about the sheet of wood smoke that is always more gray.

Millions of unique snowflakes fall, thickening a fleecy snow-blanket, sheltering tiny life. It is heart-warming to know of all the diverse, quiescent wildlife sleeping beneath the surface of snow in layers of detritus deeper below. In the dance of life, all is in limbo, uncertainties abound upon a blanketed earth.

Winter can be beautiful in its frozen snow-blossom way. Creating an ever changing wonderland with a great deal to explore, to ponder and exclaim about. It can soften the mind and loosen binding thoughts of gloom. If its beauty fails to lift our spirits, it may help to remember that the little Blues are placidly waiting too. 

A Winter Focus ~ Cedar Waxwing Ornaments and Long Nights Moon

The nakedness of winter's landscape can sometimes seem cold and lonely, when suddenly, whoosh, all together in flight, a flash of fluttering life lifts the spirit high towards outermost tips of a beloved Black Cherry tree. Offering light and enchantment to the lucky viewer, a flock, an 'ear-full', a 'museum' of over sixty Cedar Waxwings alight, sprinkled along the top of the skeletal cherry canopy, resembling delicate ornaments bedecking leafless limbs. 

A closer focus reveals hints of waxwing antics, patterns and forms. A group that may rest and then be off together, a burst of beaks, trebles and feathers, winging through the crisp air down to our crabapple orchard.

Surrounded by colors of autumn and captured through glass, so as not to frighten the timorous Cedar Waxwing, I cannot quite focus the bright yellow tip of its tail or the yellow wash covering its downy belly. Tiny apples are hanging temptations, little-bitty baubles, winter apples waiting to be plucked. Only these are nourishing . . . vital winter food for the waxwings, robins and wild turkeys too.

Every inch of branch, twig and dried stalk, wearing icy snow-coats all across the fields, groan of winter's beauty. 

During a storm . . .

After a partly sunny day . . . snowy mantles melt away.

Into wonder of long black nights, native cherry, charcoal raven touching crumbling cerulean sky, tickling the 'Full Cold Moon'. A joyous interlude between dark and light.

Rising up from swirling surf of clouds, following the setting sun, the 'Long Nights Moon' sails across the painted pastel sky.

Night folds us into our dreams until daybreak, shattering the dark, while scattering light and soft puffs of rosy pink, awakens a new day. An old, softened mountain slumbers still beneath a mantle of lavender smog, as days, nights and solstices dissolve one into the other.

Dreamy underwater illusions, a world of sediments worn down over millenniums, torrents of lava flows from time and crust torn apart. A deep plentiful supply filling an ancient tectonic rift . . . pressure forced up molding forms Native American-like silhouette looking up longingly, for millions of year, towards the sky. A segment of the Metacomet Ridge, of the Mount Holyoke Range dreaming since days of dinosaurs, within my view.

Presently, with placid anticipation, life moves through a calendar of months making what it can of each. Filling the hours minute by minute, spilling seconds by the spoonfuls. It is all over in a wink.

Winter Solstice 2013 is marked on our calendars for tomorrow December 21st, for those of us in the northern hemisphere, the exact moment is never certain, when the shortest day will give birth to the longest night of the year. After a few days, we will note the lengthening of light, as a rebirth, a celebration of our sun, leads us deeper into winter. Peace and Goodwill and Good Day to All.

Flower Hill Farm Butterflies of 2012 ~ American Copper

The teeny tiny American Copper (Lycaena phlaeas) packs a sizable palette for one so small.   I was happy to find this little butterfly sunning in the south field back in May of 2012. Its wingspan is only 7/8 x 1 1/8 . . . a delicate, miniature, ephemeral painting belonging to the Gossamer-wings family . . . offering distinctive marks and textures that one can identify but never own. However, photos and happy memories are filed, of a late may day, walking in the south field along side a fragile, yet plentiful living jewel. 

We might pause before pulling out all of the invasive Sheep Sorrels or Curly Dock of the Rumex family growing in our gardens and meadows. I am sure to examine plants carefully before composting them in hopes of finding eggs or caterpillars of this lively and vibrant butterfly. Stands of sorrel are left to grow along the south field paths . . .  in honor of American Coppers.

The American Copper butterflies are on the wing or in varying stages of metamorphosis from mid May through the middle of September. They overwinter here in their chrysalis stage or as the Massachusetts Butterfly Club's great website mentions ~ in half grown Larva state.

It stimulates the imagination, to consider life waiting beneath heavy blankets of snow now filling our Western Massachusetts gardens, fields and forest . . . and as far as the eye can see, lightly coating every twig and tree. Hemerocallis sleep within a deep frost . . . waiting to feel alive again.
Color will run riot in just a couple of months, but for now, just outside our windows and doors the dawning sun paints the sky, clouds and mist ethereal hues of lavender and pink.

March continues to hold fast to winter's quiet and cold beauty. 

Bluebirds are patiently guarding their house, while the Mount Holyoke Range sits shrouded in pink mist. 

Spring seems content to stay away for now . . . I shall have to visit 'early spring' at the Lyman Conservatory on the Smith College campus just fifteen minutes away down in the neighboring town of Northampton, where visitors can inhale an elixir of hyacinths and other flowering bulbs of their Spring Bulb Show.

Gazing Into A Wintry Landscape of Wonder

Though the wintry landscape palette is not as colorful as other seasons,

 the raw sky does spread out a bright cloth with vivid rose and lavender hues 

each early morning and just before night.

Winter's beauty can be mesmerizing, though wind chills of -13 F do challenge the spirit.

Somehow we all adapt.

We are all creatures of habit. 

Late afternoons and early mornings, I often find our resident Red-tailed Hawk perching 

on the same branch, in more or less exactly the same location, within a stately Oak, 

which solidly stands in a clearing dotted with native blueberries not far from the forest's edge.

The Red-tailed Hawk stands out in a striking way within a foggy, snowy landscape.
Its underwing white mirroring that of the powdered coating etched upon the Oak's limbs
and shrouding a forest of Hemlocks and White Pines.

Winter's white and light can be beautiful and we acclimate to its frigid ways sometimes longing for warmer days.

Colors ~ Sunrise Sky 'Intuitive Palette' ~ Painting Workshop ~ Provincetown Art Association and Museum

"The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art." 

Hans Hofmann

"My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature." 

Hans Hofmann

"Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel." Hans Hofmann

"Color is a plastic means of creating intervals . . . color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony."    Hans Hofmann

"Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind." Hans Hofmann

Beginning . . .  First day~ Color Workshop with Robert Henry Provincetown Art Association and Museum 

It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form." Hans Hofmann

Still only a beginning ~ Second Day ~ Color Workshop with Robert Henry Provincetown Art Association and Museum

"An idea can only be materialized with the help of a medium of expression, the inherent qualities of which must be surely sensed and understood in order to become the carrier of an idea." Hans Hofmann

Beginning . . . Third day ~ Color Workshop with Robert Henry Provincetown Art Association and Museum

"When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium." 

Hans Hofmann

"In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light." Hans Hofmann

Pieces of the sunrise sky ~ Left photo below

In March I had the great privilege of attending a painting workshop at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum taught by a former student of Hans Hofmann.
Robert Henry is a fabulous artist/painter/teacher whose relaxed and generous teaching style made the three day color workshop so rewarding.
I begin each day by stepping out of our cottage and standing on the dunes of North Truro bathed by the light and colors of the sunrise and ocean. Later, after lunch, I enter the museum painting studio and apply paint to canvas, while Bob shares his vast knowledge and interpretations of color. Three hours or so later I am feeling, thinking, seeing, sensing and cleaning color off my brushes . . . then back in nature with J. walking, exploring, dining and once again bathing in the vibrant colors of the sun as it vanishes beyond the ocean.
It had not occurred to me, until I began assembling this piece together, that the colors of the sunrise were intuitively chosen by me for the palette of my small paintings.
I have such a long journey to "master the medium". . .  though it is often a struggle, the process is ever enriching. 

Pieces of the sunrise sky ~ right photo above 

I published a post on the amazing Right whales off of Race Point Lighthouse over at Focusing On Wildlife. It was truly a spectacular event!

Meanwhile out in the gardens and sky here at Flower Hill Farm . . .

In keeping with our color theme . . . here is a glimpse of BLUE ~ a peek at a future posting.
The male and female bluebirds are busy guarding and building their nest.
The middle photo is the female and the far right is of the male. The female bluebird's head is not quite the intensity of blue found in the male bluebird. The greens and grays in the background enhance the colors intensity.
What would you call this blue? Cobalt, Ultramarine or Cerulean?
It does not come out of a tube for sure.
If you click on this photograph you can see the colors more vividly.

Hanging in a blue sky April's full moon is known as the Full Pink Moon (grass pink or ground phlox) or 'sprouting grass moon' . . . Native Americans along the coast call it Full Fish Moon, in honor of shad returning to streams to spawn. The first full moon of spring is also known as the Paschal Full Moon.
Passover or Easter . . . whichever you celebrate (or perhaps another ritual) . . . I hope it was a good time with family and friends.
May light fall through your prisms . . . may color inspire and warm your heart . . . may there be double rainbows after soaking storms.
I gladly dance beneath the moon for rain.
Peace.