Button the dog......

Button is our ten year old poodle. He was given to us from a friend and he seemed so small then about the size of a hamster. The person who gave him to us was concerned that we wouldn't like him because he had brown ears. What a deal, brown ears and a button nose.
Button use to be an only child dog wise but we did have a yellow cat that sort of ignored him, but now he has adjusted to the newer Border Collie and the Manx kitten. He was really frightened of this wild collie dog as he never sat still and he was 4 times bigger than him. It took him a while to get use to him so we had to carry Button everywhere all over the house as he didn't want to be on the floor. The same is true when he is around the kitten now as she rushes at him and tries to push him over bodily. Button is our great traveler as he has put in many a mile with us when we did our Minnesota painting trips. We have pictures of him sitting in the van front seat while we loaded the van, waiting so we would be sure not to leave him behind.
He is need of a haircut right now. He gets this non poodle look like a scruffy mongrel and when we do get him cut, he looks like this femie little dog. You can't see his pointed nose right now but someday we will free him from lots of fur. Thanks for reading.

Farm boy a long time ago....

I was born on a farm south of Murray and close to a very small town called Hopeville. My dad was just out of the service and rented a small amount of acres from a man name Ray Woods. My dad had sheep and cattle and I think that is how he kept us fed. He raised corn on shares and that was picked by hand so he couldn't have had a lot of corn. In 1953 my folks got an FHA loan and bought a farm of 240 acres near our rented farm. I believe only 180 of the acres were farmable and the rest was timber. I remember the day we moved and I couldn't have been three and a half, as I was told that I had the measles and that my Aunt Mary took the day to take care of me. She kept me wrapped in a large quilt and I couldn't see out most of the time. We had to ride in a wagon to get to the farm house as it was on a dirt road and it was slick.
Life on the farm will always be a strong memory of mine. The working with livestock, making hay, farm pets, and the solitude of living on a farm. It was good times and bad. We were just as poor as anyone else, and dad had to go borrow money many times to get through the lean times to feed the family. His tractor was always a Farmall, a red tractor. He had worked as a mechanic for awhile for his brother in Murray, helping repair tractors and that was an International Harvester dealership. It was eventually moved to Osceola, Iowa. The type of tractor that you had seemed to be important to some people as there still today the argument of which is better Farmall or John Deere. John Deere seems to have reign supreme now as Farmall was sold to the Case company.
The tractors you see above are from a tractor ride that took place a few years ago near here. I took my father-in-law to see hundreds of tractors driving down highways on a seven day journey through Iowa. The red tractor is the Farmall. My dad had an F and and A and later bought a used one that I never knew it's number. He had it for only a few years and sold the farm in 1973. I was on the farm through my senior year in high school then returned one summer in 69. After that I went to summer school and worked in Ames year round.
Now today, there are so few farmers that it is hard for kids to know that anyone alive could be related to a farmer or have their roots on the farm. There are probably a couple students per grade that do have dads that are farming but that is all. So when I mention to the students at school that I have farm roots, they think it funny that an old man, an art teacher, had every come from a southern Iowan farm. Thanks for reading.....

The final showing.....

I'm done posting about this one, except when I finally have birds nesting in the dwelling. If you have followed me, this has been a long process. Design as you go is sometime the worse way to go, but it makes it more of an adventure. From the various photos you can see it took a lot of coffee and a hammer to get it all done. My crippled hand says stop hammering, but I couldn't put it all together with screws only as I just couldn't get small enough and long enough screws to make it work. So I had to use smaller nails to hold on the roof parts.
I am really happy with the final product. I had over-painted decoration on it and went back and cleaned up the design. I made the base to slip over the top of the pole and I hadn't remembered that the basketball pole had holes in it for the basket apparatus, so I was glad to be able to bolt the thing preparing it for tornado winds. After the base was up, I then removed as many parts off the top of the house that I could, like the roof of each house and stuff on top of them,to make it lighter in weight. I then put the lower section of the houses onto the base. I had pre-screwed small screws on the underside of the base so that I could just sit the main house on to the base and finish screwing then in to the house base. Then one piece at a time I put the rest back on to finish the assembly. I had a bad cold and shouldn't have been out there but when I took one piece out at a time it seemed like I was doing no harm to myself. I am sure glad it is all done.
I had a women pick up a framing job yesterday, and she said she wanted to buy one. I really wanted to do that at first but the time it takes to do all of the parts and assembly and painting, I am betting people won't want to pay me the labor bill to do it.
Change of plans today as the cold is worse or not better, we are going for a couple hours to a bookstore and mellow out for a while. May not have coffee today as hot chocolate sounds better. One more project off my list. Thanks for reading.

A start on a painting....

I started a painting last week. I cropped a section out for you in order to see what it sort of looks like. I have so many distractions that I haven't painted for four or five days. I have other projects that interrupted it and today I have to teach my adult teacher mentor class. Maybe tomorrow or Friday I will get to it. Tomorrow we are going to hit the Des Moines Art Center, for lunch and to see the painting "American Gothic" by Grant Wood. The painting is actually owned by the Chicago Art Institute and is on loan for now. As you can see my painting is an abstract collage of things going on which describes my retirement life right now. Thanks for reading.

A flock of sheep.......

One of my students last year struggled through my painting class and was having a hard time to create any work at first. She had not taken any art during her high school years until then her final semester. She was a challenge because she claimed she had no talent, she had no ideas and she thought if she would stall all day everyday that maybe she would never have to paint.
She didn't understand that I wasn't going to make fun of her. She didn't realize that there were a few students in the class that had less skills than she, and she also didn't realize that I was going to encourage her all the way through. Everyone spends way to much time comparing themselves to others. No one person is actually getting it all right even if you think they are looking good. I found that once this student quit evaluating herself in relationship to others and just started to work, that she could succeed in the visual arts.
She had painted this one sheep one day, and I laughed inside, smiled and praised her for such a fun interpretation of a sheep. It was a little kindergarten-like but it was her honest expression. Once she found my approval, away she went. She went to find one of our larger canvases and as you can see we have a whole flock of sheep.
When she was to graduate, she brought to me, on the last day, a smaller version of her sheep and gave it to me, and I will keep it forever. In many ways the painting contradicts her opinion of herself. She thought she had to be just like all the other sheep who were good painters, when all along she was different but still capable to work and stay around with the flock. Thanks for reading.

Photoshop and Dad.....

I took an extensive class on how to use Photoshop, a computer program that allows you to create better photos, designs, web pages, and special effects to pictures. It is far more complicated than that description but I hope you get the idea. At the same time I was taking the class, I had inherited a large box of photos that my Dad had sent home to Mom during WW 2. Men over there had polaroids and regular cameras. A large group of these photos are polaroids but some are regular developed prints. My Dad had said that one of his friends brought chemicals and would develop at night out in the field. Anyway, the pictures that you see here are ones that took place before my dad went to the front line of the Battle of the Bulge. He was first shipped into Belgium before assignment to the front, all the pictures remind you of farm boys visiting Europe on vacation. They really didn't know what was yet to come in their lives.
The neat thing about photoshop is that you can take a scanned picture that looks like nothing and adjust it's brightness and contrast and turn it into a good photo. The one of Notre Dame was a very dark picture and by the time I had work on it you could even see the lion sculpture in the front of the plaza in front of the building. I have many photographs that are in bad condition that I have found are really good photos once I play with them on the photoshop program. The train photo as well as the boat one are pictures of things that were damaged by the bombing in the area before he arrived there. I have a lot of pictures of broken bridges and German tanks in the pile. Many times when my Dad sent these home, he would have written a description on the back using a fountain pen. Ball point pens hadn't been invented yet. I don't see how he had fountain pens but the barracks they were in, which was like a Belgium hotel, probably had them.
The design I made was one of my final projects that I was required to make. I later turned it into a book cover. Time to go to bed now. I will post different war photos along the way that I think might be interesting to you. Thanks for reading....

Ready for spring....

I am getting tired of the cold, patches of ice, melted water mud puddles in the day, melting snow piles and no color of green foliage in sight. We are going on daylight savings time next Saturday and you would think the weather should be a part of their making that decision. I know Washington DC is more southern and I know they will have flowers sprouting up by then but the rest of us are still having winter.
One of my unusual collections is the growing of cemetery iris. When you visit the gravesites in Iowa, the old original classic iris are still very much alive. I have had a fascination with since I was young and watched relatives place them on graves during Memorial Day. They use to put peonies and iris together in canning jars with water and put them on their graves. I remember seeing them as a kid growing on graves of an old cemetery called Moon Cemetery near Macksburg, Iowa. My Grandmother is buried there with all of her Wheeler family. My Uncle Marvin is also there also.
I have found four different ones and they are tough plants. They are a lot smaller that the normal iris seen in gardens today. Being that is appears to be orchid-like it is still a very beautiful flower. I lose hybrids all the time because of a rain filled summer and it causes them to rot. I lose hybrids because of the grass that I didn't cleaned out that also held moisture and caused rotting. But my old iris never die.
As you can see I have four species that have come from the Murray Cemetery, in Murray, Iowa. Ok, I hear all of you people saying he steals from family grave sites. That may be true, but I take a very small slip from the edge of huge growth area, where the riding mowers are smashing into them and cutting back the leaves. The plants are so tough and they are very crowded and have spread into very large areas. One site on the hill of the cemetery has the brown and yellow iris and it is being grossly cut back each spring as it is growing into the front of the stones and into their cutting paths and also is heading down the hill into other graves of different families. My small slip that I take usually takes two to three years to actually grow and bloom as I start it in a pot then move it to the garden a year later.
When my mother was alive I would take her to the cemetery to visit Dad's grave and we would walk the place so I was very tempted. She had memory problems so every month we would go and she would claim we hadn't been there for years, so we walked it over and over. This spring I plan to move clumps of my Grandmother's red peony out to the grave sites of my family. I know they won't bloom until next year but it will be nice to have them there. I also have a hybrid iris that is almost black in color that I am going to move from my Mom's garden.
As you can see the colors of old iris vary, but from research, I have read that all hybrid iris come from one common mother plant and that is the brown and yellow plant as seen above. They have cross bred that plant and all of its offspring into all of the hybrids that you are able to purchase today. They also worked on that plant and now have a larger version called Bumble Bee that one can purchase. The whitish iris is actually a very white with subtle cream falls. The one lavender with purple falls has been duplicated into a larger version also.
Well, if there are any other colors out there of the old iris, I will be looking and scouting and will be very happy if I find it. I think there is an all yellow one out there, but I may be thinking of flag iris. We will have to see. Thanks for reading.