March 10, 2023

This morning, I awoke to another snowy day in Uelzen, Germany. Kids are throwing snow balls, people are scrapping sidewalks. It is quite slippery for the folks still riding their bicycles.

  With the snow on the roofs, my night time view from my window, looks much different with snowy roofs and so I continued working for a couple of hours on the large still life, I started yesterday.

 

When I got tired of working on it, I looked closely at the tulips that I bought yesterday. When they open, (if they open before we head off to Holland next Wednesday) I am hoping to do a large very loose tulips painting.  In the meantime, I did a tiny sketch of the tulips that I bought yesterday. 

I am reading a most fascinating book in my time off, Glenn Gould, Music and Mind, by Geoffrey Payment.  It is a bit of a tough read but I am enjoying reading about the idiosyncrasies of a creative person.  Lots of them I identify with. I pulled this book off Emily’s book shelf in our apartment not knowing that it was a recent gift to Emily from her father, Phil, just prior to his death.  Emily is doing a big music adjudication this June in preparation for studying for a degree in Music Education.  I can see why her Dad gave her this book.  The start of the book upto about page twenty-five is really about the importance of playing with the heart, in addition to playing with the music.   When I was forty, I took fiddle classes every Friday night with an excellent music teacher Peter Dunn. For many of the folks who played by ear in the class, Peter would tell them “Pay attention to the music”.  For me, who easily could read music, Peter would always remind me to play with heart and stop focusing on the music! 

Since we arrived in Uelzen, I have had a relationship with a pigeon, sitting on the top of a roof in my view out the window.  “Aren’t you cold, aren’t you lonely?” I would ask him.

Then yesterday, Jim noticed two smaller pigeons on the roof and I realized that my pigeon friend is not a pigeon at all but the top of a chimney that appears over the ridge-line of the house.