By now you know I'm out in my gardens much of the year, especially this time of year. From sun up to sun down, there's watering, weeding, and harvesting of lavender, fruits, vegetables, and lots of other duties. I have plenty of ideas for new pieces to make in clay, but truthfully I wasn't allowing myself to make anything new till I got around to firing a test firing in my kiln. This was my pact with myself so I would finally just get around to firing it. Now that the firing is behind me I'm now 'allowed' to make new work in clay.
I have plenty of inspiration in the garden surrounding me every day. Flowers, trees, shrubs, insects, butterflies, birds, lizards, wonderful mountain views and on and on. I've had several pieces forming in my mind for the last month or so, but I'm not quite ready to start on those. One of them is a triptych of a blue heron. This will be a large piece and I want to start on something smaller first. Sometimes I have a feeling there's an idea just around the corner waiting for me to discover it.
We get a lot of bird traffic here since the river is at the rear of our property. Every day I see hawks, blue heron, robins, mockingbirds, bluebirds, blackbirds, sparrows, egrets, and I even see owls at night. For some reason, this year there have been a lot of ravens flying overhead. As you probably figured out, I love ravens. Remember the raven I received from Cindy Shake?
The other day a pair of raven were flying by and they started doing acrobatics in the air directly above me. I also happened to have my camera, so, of course I started taking photos. The ravens looked like they were doing a ballet in the sky just for me. It was if the ravens were saying, "Hey Linda, look up here, here's what you need to work on now". Wouldn't you know it, right when you least expect it, inspiration flies by. I knew I wanted to do a series of pieces with ravens.
I love the ends of the raven wing feathers and the shape of their outline against the sky. I was mesmerized by the ravens flying together as if one, and then they flew off in unison. Thanks ravens for the great air show and for the inspiration. I'm working on a couple of raven pieces right now and I'll post them in a day or so.
