Broom Straw

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The weather had started the day before as a long warm rain, but sometime after I turned in that evening, it changed over snow   By daybreak the wind was gone, leaving the morning still and clear Bitterly cold air, coming in behind the storm, had fallen into the valley like a rock thrown off a cliff. The air glistened orange and white in the low sharp light. The fields are littered with patches of bright brown straw grass sticking up out of the new snow.   Rain on the grass & trees had been snared by the fast moving cold in the night and the sparkling ice on everything washes the fields & wooded hillsides with a warm colored light. A lone apple tree is glazed over with a translucent glow; every limb leaning and creaking towards the ground. . . . No wind - no sound . . . Only the muffled land, muted by the ice & snow . . . and this orange crystalline light . . . that seem to blanket the air itself.

This scale drawing is a skeletal beginning. My idea is to carve straw grass onto the door panels.   Clumps of long spinely strans stretching through the panels. The panels would be butternut - the color of straw grass; with perhaps a layer of cherry beneath the butternut to help depict the red & orange glow of the morning The scale drawing gives me some idea about how much room I have to work.

       

These sketches are thoughts on the carvings - line direction, grain matching, etc.

It was while doing these I started to play with the idea of the carving

breaking out of the door panels - the straw grass reaching up into the drawer panel.





To Be Continued When There Is More Progress

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