I always find myself awestruck by fine architecture, the minds that design it and the hands that create it. This may be partly due, I guess, to early observation of my Grandfather, a carpenter, and noticing the respect he gave to accurate woodcuts and joinery.  
He sharpened his tools each night after returning home from work to prepare for the next day.  And his work each day was performed in concert with a number of other builders, a choir if you will, of craftsmen (masons, plumbers, electricians) whose individual  talents merged to create a harmonic structural presence.  
So, I think of these things while trying to sketch on a piece of paper a semblance of 'sheet music', from which this choir of Moravian craftsmen harmonized during the early 1700s in Bethlehem.   

Christmas eve and Easter morning the Moravian Church has a tradition of serenading the community with a "brass choir".  This orchestral announcement of the birth of our Lord and also of His resurrection is carried out from the belfry of the Central Moravian Church in Bethlehem.

It occurred  to me that I should share this tradition, although  I began the drawing late this afternoon. I'll share elements of this drawing as I progress over the coming days. I'll add silhouettes of the trombone choir as I approach a finish.  

Merry Christmas to All.  

We made a trip to Boston to celebrate Thanksgiving with Sara's family. Anyone who watches this year's weather map knows the N.E. is being slammed with one "nor'easter" after another, a term unfamiliar to most of us living below the Mason-Dixon line.  So, no surprise my computer froze-up with 11 degree weather Thanksgiving morn. Also, no surprise my blood is now thinned to that of a "southerner".  

So I guess my computer and I both hibernated while in New England, then New York, then Pennsylvania and Ohio before returning to the sunny south.  

I did carry my sketchbook, however, and here is the view from the office/bedroom of my brother-in-law looking out at his frozen landscape.  Now after numerous trips to the Apple store and successfully awakening from early hibernation, I'll start posting a few new blogs to tell you how our year is ending.