Friday, January 20, 2012

On making things and memories...

Making stained glass mosaics has taught me something interesting about how my brain works:  I often work on mosaics in my study with the door open in the evenings while David and Griff watch TV or a movie.  I can hear what they're watching, and sometimes I even follow the narrative, but I can't see the screen. Often, I don't really pay attention and the voices just wash over and around me as I work.  I have discovered that days later when I set about grouting the piece I had been working on in the evenings, the story or plot of the TV show comes back in detail, as if I had been sitting in the room with the guys while it was on.  So curious!  I should have known that I was so impressionable.


And, speaking of remembering while making mosaics....
I made this window (inspired by California poppies and lupines) for my friend Lissa, whom I have been lucky to have in my life for the last 40 years.  We met in the fourth grade and spent much of our free time horse-back riding and roaming in the beautiful fields and forests of Northern California.   As I worked on this design, I kept flashing on detailed memories of acacia blooming in february, of the cement ship at Seascape, of poppies and lupine blooming in the spring, of La Selva beach and the Santa Margarita trestle, of riding bareback in the fields above the Bayview hotel, and so much more.  Ah, what a beautiful place to grow up!

3 comments:

  1. Lovely post, Marlowe. Such images from your childhood. And perhaps the memories were especially inspiring, or I haven't looked so closely at your flowers, cause I am just noticing that you got some subtle and lovely depth to the petals here. The one on the far right, lower where a petal is just peeking from behing the stem, and the one to the right of that with a suggestion of petals coming outward. Wow, quite an accomplishment with glass. Hope this comment is not too long!!

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  2. Oh, thank you for the close look Margot! I wanted to capture the two-tone petal of the lupine flowers -- but couldn't quite get that. I had to try to be "suggestive" of it, instead. So nice to be seen this way!!!

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  3. Am just plain old jealous of that childhood. True, I was a beach rat and have my own So. cal. memories, but riding horses in pristine No. Cal with you would have been a precious souvenir!!! Lucky Lissa! Window is wonderful.

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