A blue moon (second full moon this month), a red moon (caused by lunar eclipse) should greet early risers on Wednesday morning (or so they say).

Not to be outdone, here's my graphite sketch of "The Light of the Silvery Moon".

I can still dream, can't I.   Getting older I huff and puff with more frequency when climbing and lifting.  With all the new-fangled mechanical parts holding my body together, I can't run or jump without thinking twice about how I'll land.  And, living in the south, it seems like my blood has thinned and I get colder, despite wearing my time-tested 50 year old "Nehru sweater" which Sara detests.  So now I draw scenes that I can remember doing, or wish I did, in my youth.

A tribute to the good old days, find this sketch (taken from a Coors advertisement, therefore not for sale.. shhh,  wink, wink).   Winter is still a wonderful time of year!   A time to rest and prepare for the blossoms and promise of new things to come.

Cleaning up after a recent construction project, the odor of saw-dust and wood shavings brought back childhood memories of my Grandfather.  

A quiet man, he allowed me to hang out as a child while he built our frame home after the war.  From an early age I was fascinated to see how a plan and numbers sketched upon a wood plank resulted in the precise removal of wood by a hand saw or plane, then two pieces of wood were purposefully joined.  Grandpa must have seen my fascination. He gave me my first handsaw when I was 8 years old without any explanation or expectation.  He was a quiet man.
I built my first boat when I was 12.  It floated, but required as much time bailing water as time paddling.  (That ratio changed with gobs of roof cement applied to the hull.)  There comes a quiet satisfaction for a kid to sit in a boat of his own creation, moved by a meandering stream under a midwestern sky. Many wood-working projects followed in years to come.
50 years later I visited an art museum. Not really my first visit, but for some reason this was the first time I really admired art. I saw and studied and found myself intrigued by the planning and careful crafting required by a solitary artist to build an appealing picture or a sculpture.  Was that an echo I heard?

or so I thought while driving through Marietta Square on a crisp January morning.   Below freezing weather, water in the fountain starting to stiffen .  But a dedicated group of water color artists were gathered around local instructor Shane McDonald, a frosty mist around their easels, armed with ear-muffs and Bean-boots, paint brush in one gloved-hand and hot coffee in the other, ungloved.   I had not heard of plein air painting before. But here they were, calling my eye to some of those attractive scenes on the Square. 

So I returned (but on a much warmer winter morn) to sketch what I had previously passed by. Here are a few of those winter scenes with more to follow in the Spring.