As work in the studio moves in new directions not yet ready to surface, I offer you, in lieu of new paintings, my morning’s meditation on the season.

I hear this month half-melted in dirty snow belongs to a Saint dressed in velvet. Amid the scrolling bonfires of vitriol, romance still flutters “below the fold” as they used to say, back in the day when you could iron the news in half.

Forgive me if I had misplaced February. At Trader Joe’s, on a mission to find King County’s last carton of eggs, I pushed my cart past the bulbs dangling jaundiced roots and the sticks that hold up orchids and arrived at a startling array of succulents in pink ceramic hearts. I paused. Such an unexpected sweetness they offered, tiptoeing into the swirling turmoil of my thoughts. I looked at the scalloped edges of the planters and the cascades of pearls and hens and chicks and said to myself, I am not the kind of person who buys such a thing. [Read more…]