greenheron

greenheron
Birthday
June 29
Bio
Since the sixties, I have drawn and painted pictures of stones, trees, birds, and other assorted relics of nature. I still do that, and have the privilege of teaching the next crop of young artists how to do the same.

MY RECENT POSTS

Greenheron's Links

Salon.com

Update 5/15: first noisy little he/she is here!!  When mom or dad stands up, and they will....look underneath.  So cute!  New pip on second egg, and a possible third.  We have herons to watch, people.

 Update 5/14:  Confirmed pip. First chick due to appear tomorrow (5/1… Read full post »

MARCH 29, 2013 2:07PM

Oh No

   CBBG

 Look. It's Alan Rickman. Some young people I don't recognize. Playing the roles of Joey Ramone, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Blondie, Patti Smith (Sting's daughter, Mickey Sumner), and apparently, the role of CBGB's bathroom is playing itself, out of museum retirement.

Release d… Read full post »

FEBRUARY 24, 2013 11:53AM

Virgin in a Sheared Beaver Coat

 

sheared beaver coat 

 

I don’t have any spicy barf stories of my own, but my late great momma had one that my sister and I would beg her to tell us over and over again–as teenagers, as adults, and once her mind could not longer hold it, I… Read full post »

MAY 29, 2012 8:20AM

Herons X Heron

 readerspick1337991723

 

Since early April, I've been sticking my beak daily into a great blue heron nest camera set up and monitored by the Cornell Ornithology Lab in Ithaca, New York.  For several cold weeks in April, I watched as a pair of great blue herons lay five eggs and… Read full post »

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Editor’s Pick
DECEMBER 19, 2011 7:27PM

Fail

 
images
 
 

My first painting teacher gave me an F. How could my attempts to learn to paint warrant failure? My attendance was perfect. I completed each assignment on time, according to directions. Forty years later,

Read full post »
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DECEMBER 12, 2011 8:29AM

Shimmy, Shimmy

Rocky3

 

Once I was a resident in a monastery, a real one, with men in brown robes and shaved heads. It often felt a little like prison, and if you’d been allowed to visit on those days, which you couldn’t, because it was not permitted, I might have begged… Read full post »

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OCTOBER 6, 2011 12:53PM

Cancer Bitch

 

pink1


It is October. Again. Pink ribbons. Heart wrenching stories of the stricken. Images of courageous smiling bald headed women in pink T shirts. Companies that donate a percentage of product proceeds to research if you buy this or that shampoo, yogurt, deodorant, or spaghetti sauce. Ever… Read full post »

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Editor’s Pick
SEPTEMBER 1, 2011 2:44PM

Obituary

 
branch illo
 
Not major news, the tree casualties of hurricanes. We excise them around our power lines, alter their natural symmetry and render them mutant, wounded, and in high winds, weak.

Along my walk route this morning, a few old friends wore sashes of yellow plastic police tape and… Read full post »
Comments are now closed for this post.
 
 
roots2

When I was thirteen, I waited. Waited for almost everything, it seemed. For breasts. For periods. For boys to look at me. For adults to take me seriously.

In the meantime, I read. I drew pictures. I danced and sang and played air guitar alone in/… Read full post »

Editor’s Pick
MARCH 24, 2011 11:07AM

Sparrow Concerto

birdsing

The season is beginning. It’s been a long quiet winter.

In pewter light, I take my seat, an old worn zafu cupped in the shape of me, and wait. Earlier, when it was still dark, I sprinkled bird seed along the fence outside my window, what it costs for a… Read full post »

MARCH 13, 2011 12:29PM

Ici

  feet2

It is a rare opportunity to understand you are standing at a crossroad, at the exact moment when you are standing at a crossroad.

My mother receives a dropper of morphine by mouth twice a day, and sleeps. I hold her hand, but she has let go. We’ve been/… Read full post »

MARCH 4, 2011 11:03AM

Three Herons

DSCN0967_2

Sometime in the late nineties: Big Heron, properly and pinkly dressed by Talbots, bracketed by her two leftie bohemian braless chicks. As documented here, and in almost every image of us, I am watching her.  She appears small, yet she is the largest woman I have known. While there… Read full post »

Editor’s Pick
JANUARY 21, 2011 11:50AM

crossing

 

leaning in

In a still photograph, the movement of leaning in and pulling apart appear the same. Drawing the letter O, there is a moment before beginning and end are joined and cease to exist.

She is immersed in the primordial consciousness of her limbic system. I witness and wait, as she… Read full post »

Editor’s Pick
DECEMBER 31, 2010 8:59AM

Burning It

 

  DSCN0960_2

 

Many years ago, a friend from Georgia taught me two of her Southern New Year’s traditions: a supper of black eyed peas, and the Fear Bundle. Many Southerners whom I’ve told about the Fear Bundle were unfamiliar with it, and my friend, an artist, may have… Read full post »

Editor’s Pick
NOVEMBER 17, 2010 7:23AM

Mus musculus

 

mouse


Sometime around early September, I discovered a new roommate. He was tidier and more polite than some, a quiet fellow who kept to himself. He didn’t call his girlfriend in California to gab for hours, then move and skip out on an eight hundred dollar telephone bill.… Read full post »

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010 9:09AM

Ghosts

 

nutskullOS

Come September, like a cloud of bats that take off into the summer sky at sunset, they seem aloft everywhere, ghosts. Forty years of life in the same big city offer more sanctuaries than I knew I’d visited. Ghosts of people alive or deceased. Ghosts of memory. Ghosts of… Read full post »

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Editor’s Pick
AUGUST 31, 2010 7:12AM

Pulp Romance

 

deckles

 

The Ferrari of paper fiber is Belgian flax: tough, long fibers, strong as leather, beautiful color and surface that will last for centuries. When spun and woven into fabric, flax becomes linen. Flax paper is to drawing what linen is to painting, the ultimate surface.

Wearing ugl… Read full post »

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Editor’s Pick
AUGUST 19, 2010 12:37PM

Incident at the Pick Your Own Lobster Restaurant in Philly

lobster2

We drove from Pittsburgh to Cape Cod in the family station wagon that summer in 1970.  For too many road hours, we’d listened to my dad proselytize about Bookbinder’s Restaurant in Philadelphia, a stop on our itinerary. I was sixteen, lived in a landlocked state, had a moth… Read full post »

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JULY 29, 2010 9:28AM

Flown By So Fast

For the next few weeks, I’ll be offline and out of cell phone reception, without newspapers, radio, or tv. The daily sound effects will be waves lapping against granite rocks outside a studio built on stilts and connected by boardwalks to other studios. I’ll get up at five o’clock,… Read full post »

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JULY 25, 2010 12:13PM

As the Crow Flies

 

ravenf3

 

Every morning around six, in rain, snow, sleet, summer heat, eight degrees or ninety, I walk the same dear four miles. I’ve seen things, met people, found treasure you would not believe. This morning, I found a long dark feather, the color of licorice, and almost as… Read full post »

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You have to pray for her, my sister told me. I could not respond as she desired. I do not believe in a universe small enough to consider individual petition. I believe I was born, then sent spinning away, to explore, to love, to lose, to serve, to suffer, to savor,… Read full post »

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Editor’s Pick
JUNE 28, 2010 1:01PM

O

pheasant
 
This image hangs above the primary work table in my studio. I drew it in 1965, when I was eleven years old. It was a Christmas gift to my grandfather, and hung in his library until he died in 1972, when it was returned to me. The… Read full post »
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Editor’s Pick
MAY 19, 2010 7:25AM

Conversation with Corot, One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago

 
CorotBeech
 
 “The muse is in the woods”
--Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot


The summer of 2007, I tramped through seventy-seven galleries of painting in the Louvre. Late afternoon in the cafe, hepped up on espresso, I made a short list of galleries I could visit in/… Read full post »

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MAY 12, 2010 8:51PM

The Tao of Glasses

Inspired by Ann Nichol's post on the important clothes of her life


In second grade, after it was discovered that I could not see the blackboard, glasses were prescribed, and a life of wearing plastic on my face commenced.  My mother took me to Doig’s Optical Shop, where she and Mr.… Read full post »

MAY 5, 2010 11:58AM

Commencement Pay Day

 
 
Nikon070163_2
 


This year will mark my 25th commencement ceremony. I’ll put on my black wool and velvet robe, my outrageous hat dangling with a veil of student business cards, and will boogie down the aisle with my colleagues to “When the Saints Go Marching In”,/… Read full post »