Arts & Maths, With Pictures

Hiking Boots ` graphite c.1977

The beginning, after all, was the middle school English Award, producing the annual Lantern issue with captioned pictorials of what went on with who was there. 

But, before that was seeing the wonderful captioned picture sequences (with maps) which described our summer camp boy adventures (produced by the bookkeeper, thumbtacked to a dining hall wall).

One day, on the window shelf by the favorite chair, in the high school library, there was Bird, illustrated non-fiction c.1962 by Lois and Louis Darling. 

Cornell had rowing on the crew team, reading history, re-reading Robert Frost’s essays about writing (the latter brought to light by a high school teacher whose teacher at Amherst had been Robert Frost), and love; being where E.B. White first read The Elements of Style, appreciating the natural world as well the art and planning of architecture building a thing into which you can go and be at home. 

Well, school for my own children was important. I created content for them which hinged on their play,  doodling about; children know when they do their best, and we get countless opportunities to rejoice in that. 

Maths and sciences are words put into numbers.

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme." Mark Twain

The Big Idea

Work In Life

I felt the ABC, as illustrated non-fiction, can be developed a bit, out of care.

It was meaningful to explore forest paths; to talk about what’s there and who we are, return from that, and make picture stories of the adventure, and be relaxed.

'Abc Dadb' elements first gathered together, in the context of a verse writing class (Robert Morgan), drawing class (Zevi Blum), and oil painting class (Gillian Pederson-Krag), at Cornell, working at The Temple of Zeus Cafe, in Goldwin-Smith Hall. The start of it was coupling talk about summer with drawings of life in Ithaca, using watercolors and colored pencils too.

This was made in summer 1976, following graduation from Cornell.

"Art is just another word for feeling." John Constable

Growing Up

I continued teaching, designed and built homes and interiors, reworking pictures and writing into the form of what they apparently were, to be, cooking. My own father loved tennis, cooking, and a useful book. The important part of life, has been staying at home with the kids, helping them with their projects, out of care, the kindness of that being the gift of time. 
Art and writing were always around for that.

"To the land vaguely realizing westward,

But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

Such as she was, such as she would become."

Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., renewed 1951, by Robert Frost.