--"We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked."-------- Ruddy duck textile with Balzac quote from "Le Pere Goriot"

Birds drawn on old cotton sheets for the New Year

(click for larger view)

"Between you and me, I am not deep, but very wide..."- Honore de Balzac ................. + hanging (out with) Paul and Laura

  
















 "...and it takes time to walk around me."-- Honore de Balzac in a letter he wrote to Countess Clara Maffei 

......remarking on the "impertinence"  of people who said he was "deep" (profond), and then tried "to get to know him in five minutes."  I don't know exactly when the Rooster became Balzac-- I guess it was an association I made with the overall massing of the form and the gaze of the bird. One day I looked over and thought "Balzac".

I like the use of the word "wide" (epais) in reference to the expansiveness of oneself.

   

Here's the back, finished.  It looks like fireworks are exploding all around him-- maybe it's Bastille Day.

I used two layers of an old cotton blanket for the backing. 

When viewed from the back, the stitching of the writing looks like its own cuneiform system. 

Paul and Laura

Otherwise this week, I decided Paul and Laura belonged together, so I  suspended them from a wooden dowel with butcher's twine...

used old freezer tape as a stop on the dowel end, and hung them over my bed.  Primitive at best, but fast, light, and it works-- so far.


I was thinking of Piero della Francesca's Duke and Duchess of Urbino

except Paul and Laura are not focused on one another but rather,

 are gazing out of the windows of my room.