Jaci Dawn

The past two weeks of glorious sunshine were good for my spirit and soul as well as my body. Face it, I’m a reptile and I need heat to come alive. More than that, I need sunshine to activate the serotonin levels in my body (or whatever chemical imbalance I have).

But we went from 98 degrees (high) to 70-something. Today, we didn’t even reach 70 degrees. We went from blue skies and unchallenged Vitamin D & K and far-reaching solar flares to overcast and grey all miserable day long. My general attitude soared with the sunshine and plummeted with the grey.

It took me a couple days to figure out why my mood shifted so suddenly. No sun. DUH! I need more than two weeks of summer sun to recharge my emotional batteries before the onset of our annual nine months of rain and clouds.

In an effort to cheer myself up, I decided to put some things away in my new-to-me dresser. You know, things like old sketches & drawings that I’ve had in cardboard boxes where silverfish and spiders are the only visitors. (Sort of a silverfish art museum, I suppose. Sorry silverfish: museum moved!)

Unfortunately, that only spawned some nostalgic sighing. I have all my kids’ PTA drawings (the ones with blue and purple ribbons on them because ALL children win ribbons at a PTA art show) and some of Levi’s funnier ones boxed in with my old sketches. I’ll have to do a blog post on Levi’s funnier art work tomorrow (only because I didn’t think of it tonight).

But MY artwork. I have sketches from 7th grade in my boxes.

I remember this assignment. Mr. Little, 7th & 8th Grade art teacher, wanted us to just put color down on paper to see how it flowed. *I* had to make a drawing out of it and a statement. Black dog kills brown dog. Mr. Little actually liked it. That’s the only reason I think I’ve kept it all these years.

This was hanging inside my locker in high school. Four years it hung inside whichever locker I had. I didn’t even draw it: CW Anderson did. I merely copied it out of a Billy & Blaze story book and altered it to suit my taste. I loved Billy & Blaze, by the way. Blaze was every bit as smart as that dog, Lassie. Or that other horse, Fury.

And I loved CW Anderson’s artwork.

High school, still. But this is original. In high school, I liked the fanciful Arabian horse heads and often carried them to an extreme when I was drawing. So much for being influenced by CW Anderson who leaned heavily toward Quarterhorses.

I had two babies when I did this colored pencil drawing of a bridge. I was in my late twenties.

Much more recent: an oil sketch of the old mill at Austin, Oregon.

ball point ink on a scrap of typing paper. My little Appy mare curled up in the sun, with a little artistic license (she didn’t have a black mane or tail and she did have spots on her rump). But only I know that. Whisper shows the influence artists like CW Anderson had on my pen.  I actually really like this sketch which is why I’ve kept it all these years (I haven’t owned Whisper since 2001).

Just looking at those sketches is melancholy but looking at the one of Whisper…

Darn. I think I need sunshine.

Or I need to blog about Levi’s childhood memorabilia. Wait until you see some of his artwork. You’ll forgive me for the Black dog kills brown dog piece of artwork.

I promise.