New Drawing and New Year's Eve

I went to Diana's yesterday to draw and produced this picture. At one point in the myth of Demeter and Persephone, Demeter turns into a mare in order to avoid the amorous attention of Poseidon. She hides in a herd of other horses, hoping he won't recognize her. Since I love to draw horses, it seemed like the perfect project for me. I had a great time doing it, but time ran out before I was able to finish. I still want to fill the rest of the background with more horses and work a little more on the lighting and modeling of the forms.

After we spent the afternoon at her house with the woodstove for heat, Diana and I moved over to David's. I spent the evening there in their company before coming home to bed with the dogs. Diana left for home this morning and her departure signals the end of the holiday season. Things are now back to the usual routine. I felt like a transplant from outer space when I returned home after seeing Alice for the first time in two weeks. It was strange to step back into normal life so abruptly, and my unlit Christmas tree still standing in front of the window looked like an ancient relic from a time I barely remembered. The snow we had disappeared during the night, so even the earth seemed to have recovered the face it had before the holiday, adding to the feeling that the whole thing had been a dream.

I don't think I mentioned New Year's Eve, which was a less spontaneous version of last year's celebration. We had the same party at the gallery and watched the giant sardine edge down the side of the Tides Insitute building as the projected clock counted down toward midnight. Last year's rather modest, pinata-style sardine had been replaced by a much larger, more permanent and cultured fish whose picture had been in many newspapers. Even the Boston Globe had somehow unearthed quiet little Eastport's secret celebration and exposed it on its front page. It lost something in the translation, I thought. The idea had changed from the quite hilarious novelty it was last year to a spruced up version of itself that couldn't quite measure up. It was too soon to make the sardine a tradition. It's infancy was too short for the town to bond with it. It left home before we really made it ours.