My black and white linocut the Chinese folktale of The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, shows the Cowherd at the bottom right, reaching up towards the weeping Weaver Girl at the top left. Each stands on a stylized raining cloud. There are 6 magpies in flight, flying over raining waves of the river between them. As you look from the bottom left of the river up towards the top right the waves transform into the simple dots of the stars in the Milky Way.

Day 3 of #FolktaleWeek25 prompt is rain. My hand-carved, hand-printed lino block print of the well-known, ancient Chinese folktale of the magpie bridge linking the lovers, The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, separated by a great river, which is the Milky Way, is printed on lovely Japanese paper. 🧵

🙌The Very large Array🙌

(of course I fucking LOVE Plur1bus)

the post office is a public service. it doesn’t need to make money. public transit doesn’t need to make money. the library doesn’t need to make money. some things exist for the public good and we desperately need lawmakers to stop thinking about them in terms of capitalism. these are not businesses.

A regal-looking coyote sits up on a mossy bed atop a layered limestone cliff. A thick forest is only just starting to feel the warmth of the rising sun.

The watcher.
One of a pack of coyotes I met the other morning while out on the kayak. This one kept a close eye on me from it perch on the cliffs. #mammals 🌿

Canada Post “lost” 1 billion dollars last year?

How about, “it cost Canadians 1 billion dollars to have a national postal service” which works out to costing about $25 a year per person (population of Canada in 2024 = 40 million). Seems like a pretty reasonable cost to me.

Cartoon Crest for Newberry Library in a medievalizing style. Art by Lucy Bellwood.

New Medieval MiniComics Prize Just Dropped!

www.newberry.org/calendar/new...

I AM surprised I exist...

Yesterday we visited Green Mountain Falls, CO to visit the kinetic sculpture Off the Beaten Path by Patrick Shearn. I wasn’t ready for just how dynamic it was even in the slightest breeze. Reminds me of a murmuration of starlings. Incredible artwork. It’ll only be up through October 19th.

#photography

Sunday colors.

Display case in pollinator garden with my 16” x 20” linocut print with a ring of bees plus one in the middle with collaged text in bronze. Clockwise from top: two leaf cutter bees (Megachile relativa and M. brevis), blue orchard mason bee (Osmia lignaria), the rusty patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis), a sweat bee (Agapostemon sericeus), eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica), the common eastern bumblebee (B. impatiens), a long-horned bee (Melissodes sp.) and centre: eastern snail-shell nesting bee (O. conjuncta). The text reads “Our Fate is Tied to that of the Insects” in a ring around the assorted bees. Some small typed signs with captions are included.

A little #scicomm in the garden: you might remember I repurposed one of the prints I was working on for #ManufacturedEcosystems for a local pollinator garden. It’s now up, with its hand-printed collection of native bees and message in amongst the pollinators in the garden. 🧪🐡🧵

#linocut #printmaking

People stigmatize the unhoused most unhoused people are survivors—of eviction, domestic violence, medical debt, systemic racism, or broken safety nets. Many work, many are disabled, many are veterans. The problem isn’t moral failure—it’s policy failure, economic cruelty, and social abandonment.

#15MoviesToGetToKnowme

One Flew Over a Cuckoos Nest
The Black Stallion
The Fifth Element
Time Bandits
Howl's Moving Castle
The Fall
The Fantastic Mr Fox
Twelve Monkeys
Moon
Flow
The Secret of NIMH
The Dark Crystal
Logan
The Big Lebowski
Everything Everywhere All at Once

Federal agencies hiding out in a bunker

extremely good fish website

Alexander Skarsgård Breaks Down the "Messy and Complicated" 'Murderbot' Finale: "I Quite Enjoyed That Murderbot Didn't End Up Having Answers" Skarsgård also discusses Murderbot's biggest relationships, why he likes the finale's open ending, and more.

For Murderbot Day, a great interview with Alexander Skarsgård! collider.com/murderbot-fi...

last year a mother raccoon came by with her three tiny children and ate every single red current off the bush in one night... and after we foiled the chipmunks with netting round the blueberry bush, they made a tunnel and hole at the exact base of the plant last fall - Fantastic Mr. Fox style!

Enjoy this lucky mink and elegant swan in the Humber for #CanadianRiversDay

Wonderful pics! That little white spot on the chin! (I saw my first wild mink in TO a couple years ago, nice to see these wild populations returning :)

The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy but I still like seeing them fight

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

Jorge Luis Borges

My linocut print on Arches paper with a deckle edge shows a common milkweed plant on collaged washi papers in green and plum overprinted with magenta sans serif text “WE’RE NOT WEEDS” with the Robobee pollination drone in black on an angle inside the O. The little drone is a vertical shaft with a dot and two wings at the top and a tripod at the bottom.

A piece for Manufactured Ecosystems about the future of pollination about who decides what gets pollinated if humans and our devices are the only pollinators. 🐡🧪

The definition of “weed” is usually pretty arbitrary and usually all sorts of native plants get caught up in our human biases. 🧵

North American river otter swims in pond. You can see its long body along the surface.

Two North American river otters checking us out from the water. One faces left and is giving us the side eye. The other has its head way out of the water and looks straight at us. There's some long grass in front of the camera, but it doesn't obstruct the otters.

Otter with his head out of the water looking right at the camera

Otter with most of his head out of the water swimming towards shore

Yesterday was lovely & we went to Tommy Thompson Park on the Leslie spit and we saw river otters!

We sat down for a snack and to watch the birds and these two otters swam by and circled back to get a good look & got quite close to us. Apparently they are shortsighted.

Never seen them so close!

As described, this is my 16” x 20” print with a ring of bees plus one in the middle with collaged text in bronze. Clockwise from top: two leaf cutter bees (Megachile relativa and M. brevis), blue orchard mason bee (Osmia lignaria), the rusty patched bumblebee* (Bombus affinis), a sweat bee (Agapostemon sericeus), eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica), the common eastern bumblebee (B. impatiens), a long-horned bee (Melissodes sp.) and centre: eastern snail-shell nesting bee (O. conjuncta). The text reads “Our Fate is Tied to that of the Insects” in a ring around the assorted bees.

Sometimes things don’t go as planned but, you make a new plan. Working on my (bee propaganda) next print about the future of pollination for Manufactured Ecosystems, I dropped my inked plate with the text & slipped - after printing 9 bees. 😔 I was pretty frustrated, but I started again. 🧪🐡🦋🧵

end of a typical monsoon day.

#severance is renewed for Season 3.

#PraiseKier and Tim Cook.

film still #67

Choreography & Merriment

"I am a crooner, a screamer, a rapper a chanter, a beatboxer and a growler. I sing English, Spanish, German and Portuguese. People ask me why I can't just stick with one. My answer is, I sing from my heart and my heart isn't a one-way system. Fuck Genre."

Mike Patton, Faith No More

was talking with a friend last night about the sharp divide between people whose trauma tells them "it can happen anywhere" and the people whose trauma/denial tells them "we made it, we're safe now, it won't happen here no matter what". And the people with no trauma who just don't believe it's real.

Breaking Bad Creator Calls For "Less Grimdark And More Hopepunk". "We need more wholesome and cozy media," said Gilligan. "Perhaps about a witch trying to find her lost cat in a ghibli-esque world"

I realized something recently. There are so few older women in illustration & comics to look up to, to see how they did things, to inspire us & even more so for LGBTQA women. Then I realized at 37 that’s me & my peers. It’s hard because we are trailblazing. It feels both saddening & empowering #art