In a thoughtful and enlightening afterword to her little book, About the Sleeping Beauty, P. L. Travers (best known as the creator of the immortal Mary Poppins), offers this explanation of why she chose to write her own version of that fairy tale: “It was written not at all to improve the story….but…
Everybody doodles. Artists doodle. When you get an idea, the first thing you might do is just scribble something on a piece of paper — just to get it down. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Many masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture started out on a piece of scrap paper. If you’re working out…
“I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the…
Here’s Merriam Webster’s first definition 1. of “spontaneous “: done or said in a natural and often sudden way and without a lot of thought or planning. Spontaneity is a quality much praised both by artists who wish to paint or draw in a way that appears to have been done without effort. But experienced…
It always irks me when I hear someone say , “Life is not a fairy tale.“ They are referring, of course, to the standard ‘“happy ending” of so many fairy tales. I’m fairly certain that the people most likely to belittle fairy tales are those who have never read any. Or maybe they are…
When I decided (after much deliberation) to go ahead and have a blog, I intended to open with a piece called “So Life is Not a Fairy Tale?” (That one will follow at some point). Then I made an intriguing discovery which I felt should be my first post . Here is a perfect example…