Naturalist Robert Bateman

Thought for Today:

"Back in 1967, when I prepared my first art show to mark the celebration of Canada's centennial year, I chose as subjects a series of human-made artifacts that had survived the previous hundred years. In Halton County just west of Toronto, where I then lived, such subjects were not difficult to find: old barns, Victorian farmhouses, wooden pumps and split-rail fences were there in abundance. Now, with the exception of an old chapel, everything I painted is gone."

Robert Bateman Natural Worlds, text by Rick Archbold, Wellfleet Press, 2005. Madison Press Ltd.

Robert Bateman, Canadian artist, naturalist (1930 - )

Photo: lwalker, Haldimand County

"Every Year the Snow Sets Me Dreaming..."

"Every year the snow sets me dreaming;......add logs to the stove and widen the draft. Sit in a chair looking south into blue twilight that arrives earlier every day -- as the sky flakes and densens [sic], as the first clear flakes float past the porch's wood to light on dirt of the driveway and on brown frozen grass or dry stalks of the flower border. They seem tentative and awkward at first, then in a hastening host a whole brief army falls, white militia paratrooping out of the close sky over various textures, making them one. Snow is white and gray, part and whole, infinitely various yet infinitely repetitious, soft and hard, frozen and melting, a creaking underfoot and a soundlessness. But first of all it is the reversion of many into one. It is substance, almost the idea of substance, that turns grass, driveway, hayfield, old garden, log pile...into the one white."

Donald Hall, Seasons At Eagle Pond, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987.

(To view larger image, please click on photo. Taken January 21, 2010.)

Note: The author appears to have invented some words; however, his imagery feels true ~ lw

"To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing, and in that profound sense everything he writes is autobiographical. He could not write it if he had not seen it and felt it deeply."

~ Robertson Davies (1913 - 1995) Canadian author, journalist, playwright, in a speech given at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. Nov. 26, 1989.

Robertson Davies The Merry Heart, Pendragon Ink [An enterprise set up by RD's wife and daughter to handle his work.] McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1996

Roads~ Less~ Travelled

Roads-Less-Travelled

Taken Friday, January 21 (To view larger image, dbl. click on photo.)

Smile for Today

"A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."*

This is not a rose, obviously. We just like it because it took years to blossom.It is what it is!

*Gertrude Stein, Sacred Emily, Geography and Plays, 1922.

For Our Robbie Burns fans:

A RED RED ROSE

O, my luv's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June,
O, my luve's like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I,
And I will luve thee still, my Dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun!
O I will luve thee still, my Dear,
While the sands o'life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve,
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!

Robert Burns (Jan. 25, 1759 - July 21, 1796)
Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, Collins, 1955.

Robbie Burns

Charismatic Robbie Burns, eighteenth century Scottish poet, retains his appeal.
Followers continue to celebrate his work every January with Robbie Burns Night.

Let Not Women E'r Complain
[Some things never change! ~lw]

Let not women e'er complain
Of inconstancy in love!
Let not women e'er complain
Fickle man is apt to rove!
Look abroad thro' Nature's range,
Nature's mighty law is change:
Ladies, would it not be strange
Man should then a monster prove?

Mark the winds, and mark the skies,
Ocean's ebb and ocean's flow.
Sun and Moon but set to rise.
Round and round the seasons go.
Why then, ask of silly man
To oppose great Nature's plan?
We'll be constant, while we can ~
You can be no more, you know!

Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, Collins, 1955.
(b. Jan. 25, 1759; d. July 21, 1796)