Coins:

This is a somewhat odd JFK half I found. Note that JFK’s part is unusually wide, and he appears to have shaved the side of his head from his temple to above his ear.

This isn’t from normal wear; it’s on the deepest part of the design, which translates to the highest points on the die used to mint the coin. This makes me think that this results from over-polishing, or some other form of wear, on the die. The high points on the die wore off, leaving the low points on the coin with pronounced flatness. (“Pronounced flatness”—pardon the oxymoron.)

[I was unable to take a decent photo of it today. The pics came out sort of rotten.]

A gentleman in London whom I recently made contact with via a coin discussion forum recently mailed me a bunch of “extras” he had no use for in his collection. I have yet to go through them in any detail, but there is some fun stuff. It was very, very kind of him to mail them to me. If we send Christmas cards this year, he’ll have to be added to the list for sure.

Likewise a forum moderator on the same Web site. He ran a random drawing contest on his forum, and I won a 1963 Cyprus proof set of five coins. I received them in the mail yesterday. Very cool.




Not even December yet, and it already feels like Christmas!

Garden:

My glads are still pretty green, so I haven’t touched them. After the foliage turns brown, though, I think I’ll be digging them up and spreading them out a bit. I guess I’ll store them in the garage this winter, which may be a bit of a gamble. I don’t know the best way to store bulbs (or “corms,” really; glads don’t technically grow from bulbs), but I suspect that digging the bulbs from the ground with the intention of keeping them warm in the unheated garage all winter might only slightly lessen the risk of freezing them. It worked a couple of years ago, though. I left them in the ground last winter. I think, after I dig them up, clean them, and let them air out a little, they should be safe if I wrap them in something like newspaper and box them up.

The rosemary that I have growing in a pot is now at my office. Last week I brought it in and placed it by a consenting co-workers cubicle, next to a window. I hope it over-winters well, because a grand two-year-old rosemary plant should be nice to have next summer.

Movies:

I watched the critically acclaimed “Army of Shadows” last week on DVD.

It’s a French film from 1969, about the Resistance during WWII. It was not released in this country until early this year.
I was expecting greatness, but my reaction was tepid. There were some very good things about it, but overall I can’t really recommend it.

Thanksgiving night I went to the theater with my brother Kevin and saw “No Country for Old Men.” Really, really good. I’ve had it on my mind quite a bit since viewing it.

Art:

I still need to finish the Cherokee Park landscape that I started the weekend before last. I haven’t touched it in a week.

I bought some black sumi ink to augment my ink experimentation. I’m eager to break it out, but so far I’ve only smudged it around a little. I wonder what a drawing done with both sumi ink and walnut ink would look like.

Carrie has loaned me some lino cutting tools and a brayer, which drastically reduces the already fairly modest start-up costs for doing some relief prints. I’ve really wanted to do this for months now, but now that the real opportunity is here, I’m not sure what I want to do.

At first glance, linoleum block printing seems quite a bit different from the way I normally work. I think of lino prints as typically depicting a self-contained object, or small group of objects, graphically clean and somewhat simplified. But when painting or drawing, I tend to work very sketchily, with a large variety of marks, and somewhat improvised. This method of drawing doesn’t directly translate into block printing. Also, the subject matter I keep thinking of doesn’t seem to reflect my general subject interests (that is, landscapes, vegetation, and buildings.) However, it just occurred to me that there really isn’t any reason at all that I can’t do a landscape as a block print. And it had already been on my mind that interesting buildings would be great to work on (I keep thinking of churches for some reason.)

I want to launch into a multi-color block print, but it seems wiser to do at least one single-color print to sort of feel my way into the process. It’s been a long time—more than twenty years—since I’ve done it.