Beautiful killers and garden blossoms

Killers. Seems incongruous, and it was not what I was thinking when I stopped to look closely at a tangle of ivy and Japanese honeysuckle that had completely covered the lower trunk of a large tree next to the trail down by the Susquehanna this morning. I was more entranced by the delicacy and beauty of these very small flowers in a profuse spray of innocent looking foliage. But to the trees, that's what they are. Killers that wrap themselves tightly around anything that allows them to climb towards the sunlight, growing at an extraordinary rate, engulfing and slowly choking their hosts. Like the sweetly laughing geisha with her long, graceful neck and demure expression, hiding a wicked blade beneath the folds of her brocaded kimono. Seductive, enchanting, and deadly.

ivy and japanese honeysuckle, graphite and watersoluble colored pencils

In the more tame environment of the shaded patio and side yard of our house, I watched a peony blossom spread its petals and open as the morning chill was overtaken by the warmth and brilliance of the sun as it climbed higher into the late morning sky. I wonder what, if anything, it subsumes as it bursts from that hard green globe into layers of vivid pink skirts of wide petals.

opening peony by the patio, 5 x 7 1/2, Derwent Inktense pencils

I can hardly believe that it's already 1:30 in the afternoon and I'm just starting the day's design work and preparation for the Premier Designer Meeting that begins on Tuesday, so I guess I'd best get cracking!

Cover girls

Well, this is way too many posts in too short a time, but one fills the cistern when it rains, and dry times are coming at some unpredictable time, whether I like it or not.

Some months ago, Chuck Stanion, the editor of the category leader quarterly journal, Pipes & Tobaccos, told me that he wanted to do a feature article about my pipe and tobacco related art and design, and after looking at the images that I sent him, asked me to design and hand draw the cover for the summer issue. I was thrilled. The last time I did a periodical cover was when I was an eighth grader at Fabius-Pompey Central School where I grew up in the farmland near Syracuse, New York, doing weekly mastheads for our English class newsletter, Now. This was at least that cool. I enthusiastically accepted, then fretted about it for the next two months while my Glasgow product development work intensified. Nonetheless, I got it done, Chuck is ecstatic with the result. So if you're a pipe smoker and haven't bought your subscription, and because it's a terrific magazine, I suggest that you head right on over to http://pipesandtobaccosmagazine.com/subscription_services/ and shell out that very modest $28 USD so you get it delivered and don't have to go out hunting to find a copy. The writing is terrific even if you could give a hoot about pipes or tobacco.

Because I'm partial to Rad Davis pipes http://raddavispipes.com/index.cfm (I have an embarrassing 17 in my collection), and because Marty Pulvers, the witty proprietor of the well known San Francisco based Pulvers Briar http://www.pulversbriar.com/, wrote a feature article on Rad and his work for the summer issue, I used three of my favorite Rads in the cover drawing, along with the Smokin' Holsters http://www.smokinholsters.com/ black bison hide bag that Neil Flancbaum sent me at Christmastime.

It was a fun little project, and I'm inexpressibly grateful to Chuck for his interest, enthusiasm, and support for my efforts as an artist. It was a fun way to participate more publicly than most of us smokers are allowed by law to engage in our rather outside the mainstream hobby. I hope you enjoy the result. And, no, this is not a paid advertisement. I just really like all these guys.

Mid morning pipe break

As a follow up to last night's post with the iris blossoms, this is that Rad Davis pipe whose bowl shape is sympathetic to the shape of an iris petal. The Bill Shalosky chubby bent author is lying behind it on my work table, so it also made it onto the page, although it does not resemble a flower. It is, however, an outstandingly good smoker, and a terrific example of its genre.

Update on Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 8:22PM by Scott A. Stultz

It's been an evening for sitting out on the patio with a pipe, sketchbook and a box of pencils, listening to the birds under the noise of cars on Market Street taking their owners home from work, people talking as they take their after dinner strolls, and watching the day recede towards night. The yard could stand a mowing, but that can wait until tomorrow. Taking down the storm windows and putting up screens can wait until the weekend. The design project I need to finish will keep overnight and still get done. The house needs to be vacuum cleaned for the arrival of guests. But the fading daylight doesn't wait for me or anyone else, so before dusk fell on us, I had to fill another page with colored marks. It's as essential to me lately as food and water.

Sinister flowers

It was raining hard this morning, and I had a very early appointment, so my morning walk didn't happen. However, just after Gabe and I got home from grocery shopping and had our supper, I ran up to the studio, lit one pipe, jammed another into my bag along with sketchbook and pencils, and hurried back downstairs. I went out the side doors onto the brick patio that arcs from the kitchen, bows gently into our narrow yard then curves back to Tina's composing studio. I thought I might do a pipe drawing while the gnats flew around my head, but a single deep purple iris jutting out of a flower bed next to the knee wall captivated me. I had to hurry, because within moments of my sitting down on the damp brick ledge, the sky rapidly darkened and thunder rumbled ominously. I was about to get soaked.

I've done a few forgettable sketches of irises, and their sinister beauty has always attracted me while their form has been intimidating and elusive to draw. The delicate translucent fringe of those three cloaklike petals, deepening into velvety tongues of color, swirling down like flamenco skirts. Three more rising up around the hidden pistil and stamen. So dramatic. As the thundershower approached pushing electricity and urgency through the air, I had no time at all to stress out over whether or not I could satisfy that nasty little critic in my head that makes it so difficult to even draw the first contour - I just slashed this out as quickly as I could. And it was fun, knowing that I had to go fast before the first huge raindrops could turn my paper and pencils into oatmeal and puddles of pigment. I had brought down a Rad Davis long shank hickory nut pipe that never made it into the drawing, probably for the best - it would have looked and been silly and contrived. But curiously and perhaps not by accident, that pipe bears a striking similarity to the flower that diverted my intention then became the subject that stole my focus as the weather bore down. So if you're here to see a pipe drawing, look under the "drawings" tab, where there's a gallery with 42 of them, or come back soon and you'll probably see that now much more fascinating Rad Davis pipe, looking perhaps uncannily like a purple iris.

 iris, 11 1/4 x 8, Derwent Inktense pencils

Finding nourishment

Early in the spring this year, I started a new morning ritual. Instead of sitting down between the computer and my worktable in the studio before even getting out of my pajamas or having breakfast, I began walking down to the river right after Gabe's school bus picks him up at 6:45AM. I don't know what I expected, but I knew that I had become detached from the living world. I was working all the time, except when I was too tired and dispirited and then instead of finding nourishment, I distracted myself and felt worried and guilty because I wasn't working. A terrible business decision and subsequent devastating financial loss just before the recession hit shattered my optimism and joy, and I embarked, as many have done, on a gray survival journey. Painful upheaval in my family, mostly having little to do with the fiscal issues, began to overtake me. I was poisoned with the shame of failure. It seemed all too often that my only reason for not closing my eyes and pulling a dirt blanket over myself was my duty, however poorly I felt I was doing it, as a father and husband. But I was wrong.

The little walks helped me find the strands that connect me to a world that never went away. A childhood sense of wonder I thought I'd lost, the capacity to be awed by tiny, delicate green shoots unfurling on the woodland floor and surviving unpredictable swings between frigid nights and unseasonably hot days to become robustly, riotously alive. After a while I stopped searching for meaning and just began to pay attention to what was there in front of me. That's what the drawings are about. These small moments. I'm responding to the world the way a plant does to sunlight and water, the way an infant does to mother's milk and love. I continue to experience passages of despondency, but they are not sustainable for long. When my eyes are open to this world, my heart begins to open as well, and healing comes as I am able to let go of the bitterness, disappointment, and self recrimination that blacken my vision when that's all that I choose to see.

burdock leaves and the ubiquitous Rad Davis pipe, 8" x 5", Derwent Inktense pencils