I haven’t posted any poetry for awhile, so here are two that I rather like. They are from “Modern Mongolian Poetry”, which was published by The State Publishing House in 1986. This was before the “changeover” from socialism, which started in 1990. So there will be 20th anniversary celebrations in Mongolia next year. Both photos were taken by me on my July trip to Mongolia.

AUTUMN ON THE STEPPE

The boundless and spacious wasteland

Spreads yellow; and full-grown grasses sway

Grasshoppers, the world is completely silent,

Only the cranes soar the sky.

From the brown-yellow surface of the golden world

A scent rises, pleasant but strange,

And on the stone-mans’ forehead

Hoar-frost melts like beads of sweat.

B. Rinchen

IT’S AN HONOUR TO BE HUMAN

“I am a human being.” These simple words

Have a ring of dignity and pride.

That’s why

I think that it is the highest honour

To be a human being

In body and soul.

I do not like it, I hate

To be flame in the heat,

Ice in the cold.

But to warm the one freezing to death,

To cool the one gasping in the heat-wave,

Not to flatter the powerful,

Not to insult the weak,

To lend a helping hand to those who stumble,

To encourage those who suffer-

That is how to be a human being.

If you’ve carried dignity and worth

As a banner of struggle,

If you’ve never compromised with cunning and baseness,

If you haven’t feared death.

In the cause of truth and freedom,

Be proud of yourself and say:

“I’ve been a human being!”

L. Khuushaan

]]> http://foxstudio.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/mongolia-monday-two-poems/feed/ 0 foxstudio Steppe Three http://foxstudio.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/memories-of-germany-a-year-after-the-wall-came-down/ http://foxstudio.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/memories-of-germany-a-year-after-the-wall-came-down/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:02:09 +0000 foxstudio http://foxstudio.wordpress.com/?p=3249 ]]>

A few people are posting on Facebook about the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened twenty years ago, so I wrote the following at a Note to post there, but also thought I’d share my memories here of that amazing point in history and our trip to Germany the following year.
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I and my husband, who arrived in Berlin (courtesy of the Air Force) six months after The Wall went up, watched it come down on TV 20 years ago. It was something we never thought we’d see in our lifetime. I’ll always regret that I didn’t hop on a plane and get over there to join the party.

We did visit Germany in December of 2000, three months after unification. We flew into Frankfurt, picked up a rental car and headed towards Berlin. I remember crossing the old border between West and East on a country road and coming to an autobahn Kreutz (intersection “cross”) with abandoned guard towers looming over the road in the half-light of a late winter afternoon. It was snowing and very quiet. We took an exit, drove into a village as night was coming on and suddenly found ourselves in the 17th century. Old, old houses and muddy dirt roads. I half-expected to see a horse-drawn cart amble by. The only gasthouse was closed and had obviously been so for many, many years. So we had to scoot back across “the border” to a “west” German town to find a place to stay.

The next morning we crossed the old border again. There were fence posts, but the wire was gone. Tacked to one of the posts was a campaign poster for Helmut Kohl, who had rammed through reunification, knowing it was the right thing to do. I thought the symbolism was very powerful and neatly summed up the dramatic change which had happened the previous year.

We drove on to Berlin through Erfurt. I have ancestors who came from around there and I wanted to see the medieval Cathedral, which has some statues (of Count Erhard and Countess Uta) that I had been struck by when I had seen them in a costume book. As we walked around the city, we drew some stony-faced looks, especially when people saw my camera. We were probably the first western “tourists” they had seen in a long time, if ever. I remember walking past a building that was completely collapsed on the inside and realized that it had probably been bombed during WWII and had never been repaired or replaced.

We found the Kristkindlemarkt in the main square and bought Nuremburger bratwurst and glugwein for lunch. Someone was doing a brisk business selling small, unassuming Christmas trees. There were no merchant booths like we saw in the west German cities. People seemed cautiously happy.

When we got to Berlin, we went down to the Brandenburger Tor or Brandenburg Gate. It was blocked off, but on either side were rows of tables and blankets laid on the ground. Covering both was the flotsam of the end of a country. For sale were East German military coats and hats, ID books, medals, various other documents, East German currency and pieces of the Wall. We bought one big chunk for ourselves and some smaller ones for gifts. I remember that the sellers weren’t speaking German, but a variety of other Eastern European languages.

We then walked all the way around the nearby Reichstag. The walls on all sides had obviously patched bullet holes from the final battle for Berlin.

It’s no longer there, but we also visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and saw all the desperately creative ways that people used to try to get from the East to the West, including a small convertible car whose doors had been filled with concrete to stop bullets. It was a convertible because the plan (which worked) was to duck down with the doors for cover and drive right past the guards and under the horizontal gate bars at the border.

Outside we found that Checkpoint Charlie itself, the gates and guard booths, were already gone. As we drove past where it had been, there, on the right hand corner of the first block, was a United Colors of Benneton store. I’ve always wondered how in the world they were able to negotiate a lease and get a store up and running in three months. It was the only western store we saw on that side. I’ve joked over the years that, yes, we got to the old East Germany ahead of McDonald’s. But not Benneton.

We drove around for awhile and then back to the west side of the city past enormous apartment buildings that were the personification of East “bloc” housing.

We went to Templehof airfield (where my husband worked for part of his tour), the sole remaining example of Nazi meglomaniacal architecture, courtesy Albert Speer. The scale of it, even though it was never finished, is almost obscene. But outside is the Berlin Airlift Memorial, which commemorates one of our country’s finest hours and that of the Allies who also participated.

My husband also did part of his tour at a location south of the city. We drove out that way one afternoon and he saw the Berlin skyline from the south for the first time, looking back across what had been no-man’s-land. The farmer’s fields were covered with sparkling frost and a few burned out lime-green Trabant cars lined the road. These quintessential communist-era cars were the subject of many jokes back then, such as “How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill it with gas.”

Our stay in Berlin at an end, we drove back to Frankfurt via the east-west autobahn that was one of the only ways in and out of Berlin during the Cold War. The East Germans timed travelers. They knew how long it took to get to Berlin and you were asking for serious trouble if you stopped along the way. For us, it was a beautiful drive through the green forests of a Germany that was whole again.

Cheetah 9x12" oil on canvasboard

I photographed this cheetah on an art workshop/safari to Kenya in 2004. Click to purchase here

First Light 12x16" oil on canvasboard

This handsome lion was laying in the grass as we drove up in time to see the first light of day hit his golden mane. Click to purchase here

I just got back last night from a two-day trip to New York. One day was taken up with the Society of Animal Artists board meeting (of which, more later) and the second day with wandering around Greenwich Village sketching and then hitting some jazz clubs in the evening with fellow artist Guy Combes, who lives across the river in New Jersey as the artist-in-residence at the Hiram Blauvelt Museum of Art.

I hadn’t done any “urban” sketching for quite a long time, but the area of New York that I was in could keep an artist busy for a lifetime. As it was I did the four following sketches in a  5.5×8.5″ Strathmore Series 400 recycled paper sketchbook with a Pentel “Energel” .5 pen.

Nothing fancy here. These are about the process and just having fun.

Notice that I didn’t get into rendering a bunch of leaves on the big shrub. It’s just a shape.

All the little dark marks are what is left of old pier pilings.

I stood on the opposite corner to draw this festive restaurant exterior with the piggy sign.

None of these took more than about twenty minutes.

I’ve decided to do something new besides offering only small works at auction. In addition to those, I will be offering more substantive works for a set price, also on eBay. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you want more information or have any questions.

Thompson's Gazelle 16x12" oil on canvasboard;

This painting was juried into the Bennington Center for the Arts  “Art and the Animal Kingdom” exhibition in 2008. Click for listing here

Ground Hornbill 15x24" oil on canvasboard

I photographed this impressive ground hornbill when I was in Kenya in 2004 as a participant in Simon Combes’ art workshop safari.Click for listing here

Pretty In Pink 16x20" oil on canvasboard

I was also in Berlin in 2004 and was able to spend three days at the zoo sketching and taking pictures. I knew when I saw them that these Peruvian pink-backed pelicans would make great subjects. Click for listing here

Buuz is one of the most popular foods in Mongolia. They are a small, round steamed “dumpling” with a mutton or beef filling. Mongols make (and eat) zillions of them for their holidays. Just for fun we had a “buuz party” a couple of weeks ago. One of the guests, and the chief buuz maker, was a young Mongol woman, Ganaa, who I met when I advertised for a Mongolian language tutor before my 2006 trip. Her husband is an American who she met when he was teaching English over there in the Peace Corps a few years ago.

I told everyone at the party the Mongol joke that I posted here last week as we scarfed down many buuz and some delicious salads. Ganaa then told us a story about how a family is all sitting around a table eating buuz. There is only one left on the platter when, suddenly, the lights go out. After a short time, the lights come back on and the solitary buuz is gone. Everyone looks at everyone else. Who took the last buuz?

This has apparently been a running joke in Mongolia for many years.

Here’s a photo of the first buuz I ever saw.

I was in western Mongolia, on my way back from the Khomiin Tal tahki reintroduction site. We stopped in a soum center (county seat equivalent) for lunch at this little buuz stand. The ladies made them to order and they were delicious! They were also somewhat bemused by my desire to take a picture of something so utterly ordinary (to them, of course). This was the first real Mongolian food I had ever had.

It took a little while to get there after it opened, but we finally visited the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park this past Sunday. I, like many people, was sorry to see the old building go, but the new one is fantastic. The living roof is worth the price of admission. The Planetarium now is now state of the art with three digital projectors. The original African Hall was preserved, along with this long-time resident….

The albino alligator

Here’s some of my favorite images from the day-

The entrance

Looking past the "swamp" to the enclosed food court

Looking down to the west end of the building

The living roof, covered with California native plants

How the roof started; cocoa fiber planting trays laid out side-by-side

The downstairs is a large and very well-done aquarium.

California coast kelp forest fish tank

I’m a mammal person and don’t really know my fish that well. I’ve identified the ones I know. You’ll have to use teh googles for the others.

The big salt water tank

Butterfly fish species

Triggerfish species

Lagoon triggerfish

Upside down jellyfish (no, really, that's their common name)

Small saltwater tank

Moray eel and fairy shrimp; symbiosis in action

There’s an old Dean Martin song that someone wrote some new words for. It goes like this: “When the eel in the reef has your heel in its teeth, that’s a moray.”

And finally, we walked through the botanical garden across the street before we went to the Academy and “met” this guy:

Become a fan by visiting my public page on Facebook!

Grasmere Path, The Lake District, England 8x6" oil on canvasboard

We walked this path around Grasmere, one of the lovely small lakes in Cumbria, some years ago and I loved the soft dappled sun coming through the trees on a late summer afternoon.

Click to bid here

One of the many things I enjoy about traveling to other countries is learning what is considered humorous and to what extent it overlaps with what Americans find funny. This last July in Mongolia, I finally got a chance to explore this with my guide, who spoke very good English. I asked him about Mongol humor and he told me this joke (paraphrased to read smoothly):

An old man was sitting in his ger on a cold evening. The door opened (Mongols don’t knock. They just go in.) and a young man entered. The elder offered the young man milk tea and aruul. They sat and chatted. It grew late. The old man pointed to a mattress on the floor and asked the young man if he wanted a blanket. No, no, the young man said, he would be fine. “Are you sure?” said the old man, “It’s going to be cold tonight.” “No”, replied the young man, very firmly, “I will be fine.” “I can give you a blanket.” “No, I don’t need a blanket.” “Very well then.”

Morning came, the old man woke up, looked over and saw that the young man was lying under the mattress.

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Further contributions to what I hope will become a collection of Mongol jokes and humor would be greatly appreciated. Please send them to sfox at foxstudio dot biz.

Spent pretty much all of my easel time on the argali painting this week. I think I’ve got it on track now. I need to do some detail drawings of the horns of all three to make sure I understand their structure and perspective before I begin the final stage on them.

I tried painting the big ram light all over, like my reference of him, yesterday, along with defining his neck and shoulder muscles. Came in this morning and realized that I needed to go back to the original color rough because I’d lost the value contrast I needed and the interesting color variation that the younger rams have on their heads and bodies. So I ended up going in dark over light, which worked just fine.

end of day 10-21-09

I also added a couple more layers of color to the sky- a light warm and a light cool,  knocked back the right side background with a pale glaze and the left shadow side with an ultramarine blue glaze to cool it down.

This morning I started on the young ram on the left and pretty much have him where I want him. Then I went back to the main ram and repainted him from head to tail.

end of day 10-22-09

I’m starting to get the light quality I’m after. Next, I believe, will be the left side and foreground rocks to “catch them up” with the rest.