Drawing's from Moose Lake

It’s funny how things come about.  The other night I went upstairs to find my little cat Hazel rummaging amongst some book piles in our spare bedroom and when she turned around she had a mouse in her mouth!  She was very excited about it!  I however was not.  I’m not afraid of mice, I actually think they are very cute, but I didn’t want Hazel to kill it.  I called to Tim to get upstairs because Hazel had a mouse.  I grabbed Hazel (mouse still in mouth) who was now in the office, and I kind of gave her a little shake… I don’t know why I did that, I guess thinking I could shake the mouse out of her mouth… The mouse did get out of her mouth and ran into the corner behind the desk and Hazel freaked and squirmed out of my arms.  Then Tim came upstairs and we shut the cats out of the office in hopes of catching the mouse.  But there were so many things for it to hide behind or under that it took us a really long time to find it again.  When we did find it cowering under the cedar chest and we tried to coerce the little guy into our tupperware container it just ran under something else, and then another piece of furniture and then another and another and finally we lost it.  We even brought the cats back into the room hoping that they would draw it back out into the open, but they had lost interest.  So, we decided that this would be a good opportunity to clean the office since we had basically tore it apart anyway.  Yes, this was our Friday night!  Yippee!  Cleaning of  course meant going through old piles of paper and bags of things we had forgotten we had.  So many bags and piles.  Tim came across a bag of mine with a journal in it from 2005 when I had been at the Moose Lake Artist Residency provided by the photographer Craig Blacklock.  I got to stay in a cabin up North for 2 weeks and make art.  Going through the journal I found that I wrote a lot about my fears of death and of being alone and my need to be medicated, (I’ve always been a very depressive and sappy journal writer) but I had also made these quirky drawings.  I never draw, but while I was at the residency something compelled me to try something different.  At the time I felt I was really struggling to be creative, when, there I was, naturally doing something creative, but not what I thought I was supposed to be doing.  I had been reading about the fires in the area in 1918 that destroyed everything, and I had also found the book “The Wind In The Door” by Madeleine L’Engle.  These two things were what inspired my drawings.  At first looking back on them I thought they were pretty silly, but Tim really liked them.  And then they kind of grew on me so I thought I would share them here.

Oh, and later that night I spotted  the mouse climbing in our book shelf and Tim caught it and brought it outside to our compost.  Lucky fella!