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custom painting for collin 11x14 acrylic on canvas ©the enchanted easel 2016

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turner's initial pantings ©the enchanted easel 2015

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©the enchanted easel 2015

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I consider myself a war buff. I love reading historic accounts of combat. I don’t discriminate between time period or conflict. Because of the volume of material, I have probably spent more time delving into World War 2 than any other. When I was in the Army, I drove a beat up WW 2 era Deuce-and-a-half and always wondered about its history.

Historians argue about which battle is the greatest – Waterloo, Stalingrad, Hastings, Yorktown, Thermopylae, Guadalcanal, The Battle of the Bulge, the list goes on. Like everything else in life, no one can seem to agree. When compiling such a list, the qualifiers become important. Things such as lives lost, duration, strategies, and conditions all come into play when deciding which is supreme.

It’s not that I don’t have an opinion, I’ve got plenty of those. I just don’t like to argue in general. I get distracted or flustered and lose my place like when I drop my book and reread the same pages over and over again before I figure out where I left off. Only an argument is live, verbal combat. When I lose my place, I sit there open-mouthed wondering if I look as stupid as I feel. So like everyone else on the losing side, I hone in on one point and try to drive it home even if I am totally wrong and know it.

The Baltic Sea is in New Mexico. It isn’t? I will repeat that thirty-seven times, forcing you to get out your phone and Google it, which allows me time to escape the fracas unscathed. I’m gone, therefore I win.

This leads to my opinion of the greatest battle which I believe is a conflict going on today – right now! RIGHT NOW!

You might think I am waxing philosophically about a moral or ethical conflict for the hearts and minds of people. Think again, I’m nowhere near deep enough for that. No, I am talking about the Battle of the Christmas Tree going on in my den as I type.

This battle has two combatants: The cats vs. the presents. The cats investigated the tree the minute it arrived. They united their forces and conquered it quickly. It is now their territory and they are very protective of it. The two of them alternate on watch and have made a formidable occupation force. Their confidence never waned… until the presents arrived.

As presents do, they marched in slowly but steadily. They landed through the front door and also surprised the occupiers from the garage entrance. Strange men in brown uniforms delivered them, but some were brought in by the woman-thing who seems to be working for both sides. She pets and feeds the cats, yet adds to the stack of presents assaulting from every flank. She is a crafty sort. Worse yet, she puts little ribbons on top to lull the cats from their strategic high ground. They can’t avoid the ribbons, which are almost as alluring as the ornaments with bells.

I have no idea who will win this battle. Epic is too small a word for it. The cats seem to rule the night while the presents hold the day (sounds like a Billy Joel song). It is a seesaw affair likely only resolved by the Take the Tree to the Chipper Treaty.

That landmark agreement is coming soon. Until then, may peace reign in your home unlike mine – where it appears to be an elusive dream.

Filed under: It Made Me Laugh

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…and then, as if by magic, Bruce Sprucington Treeworthy wobbled impossibly into a stately bow.

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Looks like we have a few masochists joining HoHoDooDa this year. Below are the names and links of said participants (at least any who have left their name and link to where they are posting their doodles, in the comments here.) If I’ve missed anyone or your link is not working or any other proof of my heinous lack of organizational skills, please let me know and I’ll do my best to fix it.

Let’s get doodling!

For more HoHoDooDa info please go here.

HoHoDooDa 2014 Participants:

Heahter Soodak

Roberta Baird

Pam Tanzey

Bobbie Dacus

Heather LittleBearies

June Goulding

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By Philip Durkin

The obvious answer to ‘when is a book a tree?’ is ‘before it’s been made into a book’ – it doesn’t take a scientist to know that (most) paper comes from trees – but things get more complex when we turn our attention to etymology.

The word book itself has changed very little over the centuries. In Old English it had the form bōc, and it is of Germanic origin, related to for example Dutch boek, German Buch, or Gothic bōka. The meaning has remained fairly steady too: in Old English a bōc was a volume consisting of a series of written and/or illustrated pages bound together for ease of reading, or the text that was written in such a volume, or a blank notebook, or sometimes another sort of written document, such as a charter.

The argument for…

The pages of books in Anglo-Saxon times were made out of parchment (i.e. animal skin), not paper. But nonetheless a long-standing and still widely accepted etymology assumes that the Germanic base of book is related ultimately to the name of the beech tree. Explanations of the semantic connection have varied considerably. At one point, scholars generally focused on the practice of scratching runes (the early Germanic writing system) onto strips of wood, but more recent accounts have placed emphasis instead on the use of wooden writing tablets.

Words in other languages have followed this semantic development from ‘material for writing on’ to ‘writing, book’. One example is classical Latin liber meaning ‘book’ (which is the root of library). This is believed to have originally been a use of liber meaning ‘bark’, the bark of trees having, according to Roman tradition, been used in early times as a writing material. Compare also Sanskrit bhūrjá- (as masculine noun) ‘birch tree’, and (as feminine noun) ‘birch bark used for writing’.

The argument against…

This explanation has troubled some scholars. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, the words for ‘book’ and ‘beech’ in the earliest recorded stages of various Germanic languages belong to different stem classes (which determine how they form their endings for grammatical case and number), and the word for ‘book’ shows a stem class that is often assumed to be more archaic than that shown by the word for ‘beech’.

Secondly, in Gothic (the language of the ancient Goths, preserved in important early manuscripts) bōka in the singular (usually) means ‘letter (of the alphabet)’. In the plural, Gothic bōkōs does also mean ‘(legal) document, book’, but some have argued that this reflects a later development, modelled on ancient Greek γράμμα (gramma) ‘letter, written mark’, also in the plural γράμματα (grammata) ‘letters, literature’ (this word ultimately gives modern English grammar), and also on classical Latin littera ‘letter of the alphabet, short piece of writing’, also in the plural litterae ‘document, text, book’ (this word ultimately gives modern English literature).

In light of these factors, some have suggested that book and its Germanic relatives may show a different origin, from the same Indo-European base as Sanskrit bhāga- ‘portion, lot, possession’ and Avestan baga ‘portion, lot, luck’. The hypothesis is that a word of this origin came to be used in Germanic for a piece of wood with runes (or a single rune) inscribed on it, used to cast lots (a practice described by the ancient historian Tacitus), then for the runic characters themselves, and hence for Greek and Latin letters, and eventually for texts and books containing these.

However, many scholars remain convinced that book and beech are ultimately related, and argue that the forms and meanings shown in the earliest written documents in the various Germanic languages already reflect the results of a long process of development in word form and meaning, which has obscured the original relationship between the word book and the name of the tree. For some more detail on this, and for references to some of the main discussions of the etymology of book, see the etymology section of the entry for book in OED Online.

This article first appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Philip Durkin is Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the author of Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English.

Language matters. At Oxford Dictionaries, we are committed to bringing you the benefit of our language expertise to help you connect with your world.

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The post When is a book a tree? appeared first on OUPblog.

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The latest image from The Triumph of Pupik. Sometimes a cicada is just a cicada.
Watercolour and gouache 30 x 49cm. Click to enlarge.

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Four more new pages from my forthcoming Memoirs.
Paper53 on iPad. Click to enlarge.

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Thumbnails.

Color Studies.

Final Illustration.

 That's it! Thanks for reading.

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Two more pages from the forthcoming Memoir.
paper53 on iPad. Click to enlarge.

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A slight re-working of an old illustration. I dropped the temperature on the thermometer and added his breath-cloud. Or whatever that’s called.

Don’t go out, little squirrel!

 

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If you recall, I'd completed and study for my summer tree/woman and was well on my way into a "final" version.  I thought it would go quickly - and the initial drawing did - but, I really got stuck on some things.

First of all, I did the study on a different paper than the one I'm using for this series.  It was a very smooth texture while the final has a bit more tooth.  It's always a bit of an adjustment, getting used to the different result.  But, the hardest part was that it was more difficult to get extreme darks that came so easily in the study because of the texture - the white of the paper shows through, lightening whatever value I put down.

I also struggled with the palm fronds, for some reason.  They came together so easily in the study - not so for the drawing that followed.  And then, I realized that I had really confined myself to almost only B-range pencils.  I really didn't use the the lighter values that I like to use in my drawings.  I flashed back to a college drawing class - I'd spent weeks on a poster-sized detailed still life and the professor commented that it appeared to consist mostly one value.  When I realized that, I started erasing to see if I could fix it, and this resulted in dirty, smudgy-looking work (not consistant with the other drawing in this series and rather sloppy for the subject matter).

So, much to my chagrin, I knew that this second drawing was not a final but another study.  There were elements in both drawings that I've taken and put into what will hopefully be the final drawing.  This time, I've started by laying down my light values - 4H, 2H, and HB - on the palm fronds.  I'll insert more dark shadows where needed, but I'm in the building of values stage.  This will take some time, depending on how much time I can carve out in the next few days.

In the meantime, I will continue to chip away at the mess of toys, shoes, and family stuff that always seems to pile up too quickly.  I'm teaching our writing co-op tomorrow - it's my turn and it's research paper time.

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Hi everybody! This is one of the images I used on my Christmas card this year. It was the outworking of an image I did for Illustration Friday. I can't tell you how many changes this went through to become this, but it was a lot!

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas! Thanks for visiting our IFK site and blog!

Paula's website
Paula's blog

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This is the final iteration of a piece I did for Illustration Friday a few weeks back, using the word-prompt “tree”. It went from a boy and dog in a tree, kids in a tree, SNOWmen in a tree, and now back to the first idea. And when I thought THAT was done, I added the boxes, bulbs, and ribbons. I think it’s finished. I have not had the urge to fix or change anything. A good sign! And now I’m using it for one of my Christmas cards this year. Merry Christmas!

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