Art lessons from a four-year-old

My four-year-old granddaughter Wren is not only an amateur entomologist, she’s also an artist. She was doing a painting of an ocean a few weeks ago with acrylic paints. She mixed peachy pink and lavender and exclaimed, “This is the perfect color for the ocean.”
My sister, also an artist, looked at Wren’s concoction and agreed. It was the perfect ocean color.
How a four-year-old could not only know the color of the ocean, but mix that color from two different colors, is amazing to me.
This past weekend, my sister and I went to Grand Marais, Minn. on a camping trip. My sister was taking a pottery class at the Grand Marais Art Colony, and I was taking a three-day class in pastel painting.
It seemed the water theme followed us.
Grand Marais is along Lake Superior, where stunning water meets black rock and green landscapes. We parked our camper in the municipal campground. Getting into town from the campground was a few blocks walk along the lakeshore, then two blocks up the hill to the Art Colony. The walk was beautiful, whether it was in the fog of early morning, the bright sun of afternoon or the calm at dusk.
I had brought along several photographs to work from in my pastel class and chose a picture of five women sitting on Bay View Beach in Washburn. I wanted to explore painting people and the instructor was a former figure and portrait artist.
We began our paintings and my sky turned out quite nice. Next came the deep section of Lake Superior, again not too hard. The middle section was the shallows, with small waves not quite breaking over the sand bottom, which was visible through the water. Getting just the right color for this section proved to be difficult.
In class the next morning, my instructor informed us we were going to learn how to make our own pastel sticks. Pastel sticks are made of pure pigment with a binder. Our task was to crush parts of our pastel sticks, mix with water, then add either white or black pigment with the binder to create new colors. The new pastel was rolled into neat sticks and set in the sun to dry.
When taking a class at the Art Colony, you have access to the studio 24 hours a day. After class was over that afternoon, my sister and I went back to the camper for supper. When I told her about my experience with mixing pastels, she reminded me of Wren’s recipe for the ocean, peachy pink and lavender.
We walked back to the Art Colony, and while my sister threw pots in the clay studio, I went upstairs to work on a new pastel color for my painting. I found a stick of peachy pink and a stick of lavender then wondered what proportions Wren had used in her mixing.
When exercising my adult brain proved unhelpful, I decided to think like a four-year-old. I split each stick in random halves, crushed them, added water and stirred. Comparing the resulting color to the photograph of Lake Superior, I was surprised to find it was the exact color I needed.
I left the stick to dry over night.
Our morning was spent with a plein aire demonstration by the instructor on Artist’s Point. The instructor perched her easel on the rocky shoreline and painted a multi-layered rendition of the outcropping rocks and lake while we sat in the sun watching the changing colors and listening to the tourists watching us.
After lunch, we again gathered in the studio and I was able to try out my new, ocean colored pastel stick on my painting. When I was finished, the instructor said, “I wasn’t sure how you were going to do on that water section, but it looks very good.”
Thank you, Wren, for saving my painting.

Abundance

I am learning that when you buy a foreclosed, abandoned property, you never really know what you are going to get. We officially moved into our new home last Saturday and I am beginning to discover what we got.
Abundance.
We made our offer on the land in February when snow covered the ground and the earth held its treasures in stillness. We waited and watched. First to be revealed was the abundance of things no one else wanted. Rusted metals, trash, and the remains of old buildings began to surface as the snow melted.
We began to clean up and waited more.
With spring came the abundance of things planted in the past. Peonies, bleeding hearts, lilies and other flowers showed their faces and burst open in radiant color through the season.
Summer grasses began to grow in abundance, warranting a search for a new lawn mower.
Underneath a section of those grasses was a garden plot, long abandoned. A weekend’s worth of tilling brought the garden back to life. With a large garden space, we planted seeds to our hearts content and now we are experiencing another kind of abundance. We have an abundant supply of deer who love to nibble at the contents of our garden. Our fence isn’t high enough yet; the mother and her Bamby are not detered. While the mother savors the bean plants, her youngster is content to ravage my newly planted hostas.
While rummaging through the remains of an out building, I found an abundance of honey bees who have apparently made a hive in a stack of old window screens. Maybe we will have an abundance of honey?
Behind the ramshackle buildings that serve as a garage, we found an arbor of grapes. In the winter, it looked like a tangle of brown vines clinging to old posts. Now, summer has brought us a lush green arbor with an abundance of maturing grape clusters. They are green right now, but when ripe will be a deep purple delight.
The back pasture brought forth delicious wild strawberries and along the hillside behind the grape arbor, raspberries give us a fun evening treat.
To my amazement, four trees in the back yard along the creek bed have brought forth ripe, bright red cherries. The trees are tall and I picked as much as I could from the ground, then resorted to a ladder. To reach the majority of the harvest, I’m going to have to put the ladder in the back of the pick-up truck.
Last night, I was contemplating the abundance of our new home while enjoying the tranquility of dusk in our back yard. I heard a rustling sound in the cherry trees and saw several crows flying away. The rustling continued and I approached with caution. I have heard bears like to climb cherry trees and bend the branches down. I know we have a bear in the area because we found a den dug into the earth in the back of the pasture.
The branches weren’t shaking enough to warrant a bear, unless it was a cub. I sneaked closer and listened. I heard a rustling on the ground near the creek and stopped. Was it the mother bear? Nothing attacked, so I continued.
I was almost under the tree when I spotted the culprit. Clinging to a high branch, hiding behind leaves, was the masked face of a small raccoon. The raccoon held still and I heard the gentle trill of the its mother coming from behind the old out building.
There are enough cherries in our trees to share with the raccoons, who can climb to the highest branches better than I can. I assured the raccoon I was not there to harm it and gave it my blessing before going into the house for the night.
Abundance. It comes in many forms and is all around us when we take time to be still and feel it.