Rocking A Slice of Pie

The Erie County Fair is a week away. Amy and I regularly enter the fine arts and craft competitions. Every year we paint rocks, and every year it seems I end up doing something food-related. I'm like the Weird Al of rock painting, I guess. Last year it was a baked potato with sour cream and chives. This year it's a lattice-crust cherry pie. And I'm writing this at lunch time, and now I'm hungry.

Extreme Closeup: Sunflower Farm

Better photo to come, but this was a cell phone closeup of "Sunflower Farm" immediately after finishing color #10.

 Sorry about the orientation: grampaw isn't so good with his technology. As I said, better pictures are forthcoming.

As you may know, I traditionally enter a print in the Fine Arts competition at the Erie County Fair. As I prepared to start this print, I found myself in the muck of procrastination. "You need to get going on a print," my wife chided. "You need to give yourself time to do it over."

The joke is, of course, that I have a tendency to do a print a few times before it's right. And while I nailed this baby right out of the gate, allow me to take you back almost exactly one year, to the summer of 2013, when I was working on a little something I called "Sunflower Farm..."

This attempt was donated to the Chaffee Landfill, if anyone wants to go digging for it.

Alert Cat Press

"Solstice" is a six-color reduction woodcut I completed just before the July 4 holiday. Ticey, as we call her, picked me when we visited the Ten Lives Club back in March 2007. We had lost our Kalie after almost 12 years, and we were feeling broken-hearted, and the house seemed far too empty. We decided to stop by the shelter, just to see what was there.

Of course, we fell in love with all of them (and wow, there were lots). But Ticey fell in love with me, and followed me around, and wouldn't leave me alone. She was a scrawny little stray from Kentucky with a remarkable case of gingivitis which robbed her of all but one very sharp tooth (she lisps when she meows...no, that's not true; however, I do a lispy Ticey voice when I speak for her. Because that's how pet people are.) After all these years (7 already?!) she's still my buddy.