of colors & moons
flipping flapping through days & pages of moths & butterflies of collage & happenstance of colors & moons
Mary Gartside
White Yellow Orange Scarlet Green Blue Crimson Violet
Arranging found color today and thinking of the newly published, ‘Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) Abstract Visions of Colour’ invaluable scholarship by Dr. Alexandra Loske. 
Mary Gartside’s eight colors illustrated “Colour Circle, from the Borrow Copy of Mary Gartside, An Essay on Light and Shade 1805, engraving with hand-colouring.” 
Not only did Gartside write about colour theory, but she brought in abstraction with her ‘colour blots.’ The ‘white blot’ captures the tints of our grey skies as of late. 
2 Images from Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) Abstract Visions of Colour published by Thomas Heneage Art Books.
Find more information on Alexandra Loske and her colour research, here. Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) Abstract Visions of Colour published by Thomas Heneage Art Books
grey
morning collage/watercolor responding to the objects on my table Geoff Young chap book paste paper folder tangled threads or the grey outside
greyed: palest grey to white violet grey pink cosmos grey violets dropped in milk grey a drop of cobalt blue grey orangesicle ice cream grey sunpoked through yellow grey old yellowed newspaper grey grey green sky portends rain
butterflies & moths
one of my teachers used to say
make one, make fifty
and so here a kaleidoscope*
made sixty five or more
and still no wiser
as to the whys
and wherefores
* a group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope
.
.
and a Mary Oliver poem
.
.
One or Two Things
Don’t bother me.
I’ve just
been born.
The butterfly’s loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes
for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,
which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.
One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightning—some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.
But to lift the hoof!
For that you need
an idea.