No new birds this week because I’ve fallen into the craft fair vortex, and I’m happy to report all my bills are paid now. I’m waitlisted for this weekend although we are expecting snow. So I might get in and maybe not do any business. We’ll see. I opted for this artist life - the be broke and in debt until you sell something big and pay it all off only to be broke again life - when I decided not to take a tourist season job after the gallery where I worked for ten years closed last fall. Getting that grant in March was enough to cover the lost salary, however gallivanting back and forth to the UK several times this year, plus copays on three eye surgeries didn’t help. But I have no regrets, except for the being broke part, the rest feels like freedom. And a true sense of self.

In the meantime, my craft fair inventory has shrunk considerably, which was the plan, and I’ve been figuring out what to add to the line to fill it out. I’ve already packed some of the charcoal studies and smaller paintings on paper from my 2024 show at The Commons, but that doesn’t cover the lack of cards that used to be my bread and butter. So I’ll introduce a number of my collages since I have a dozen or so cards of Communion, the piece above, to add to the mix. I do however have linocut tools and plates on hand as well as appropriate paper and envelopes, so who knows, I may be printing birds, albeit little ones, sooner than I thought. Ah the dilemma of being an artist with too many balls in the air. PS - Santa says Hello. Onward.

Missed a week - I actually had a post ready which got quickly outdated, so I’m starting fresh today. First of all, there are three birds - #32, the new Cardinal above, and two of the charcoal studies from September that I’ve reworked - #20, the Rooster and #17, the Falcon with the wonky head from the Storks And Such post. There are a couple more early studies I intend to do rather drastic things to, think silver painted backgrounds or cutting the bird out and adhering it to something else. But that’s what studies are for, to experiment with, to play with, since that’s also important in making art. I am still going to go as large as the limitations of my little studio allow, but the printing press at Funk and Schuster, which I’ve mentioned before and where I first thought about creating prints, can accommodate much bigger paper and may be the way to go.

One of the reasons this post is late is I had a booth at The Canteen’s Holiday Craft Fair in Provincetown for the three days after Thanksgiving. It’s outdoors, in fact it’s on the beach, and although I was in a semi-contained booth, I was actually standing on sand. It was fun, although wicked cold and we had to close early Sunday because of rain. I swapped the last two of my mugs for a quart of local honey from the beekeeper in the booth next to mine, made a few interesting connections that are promising, and sold enough to pay off my outstanding bills including the eye doctor and still have a little pocket money. And then The Canteen treated the vendors to a delicious dinner so we could get to know each other better. I’m at the top of the waiting list for a booth this weekend - fingers crossed. Onward.

Thursday was the first anniversary of the first of my three eye surgeries. I’m learning to live with the results and have stopped complaining about them, but that and the ever escalating chaos coming out of DC occupied my attention last week and made me late with the post. But I have three new birds. I’m happy with the two small pieces, #30, the Magpie inspired by the ones in our garden in Newcastle, and #29, the Vulterine below, but it’s #31, the Condor above, which is much larger, that is what I’ve been striving for. Paul says it’s the most Maureen McCarron of all the Maureen McCarrons he’s witnessed me create. It may not be as dramatic or expressive as some of the others, but it has a maturity that made me judge the previous work and eliminate half a dozen or so from my website. It has also inspired me to rethink only numbering them and to add their species to their titles. I now see the ones that got cut as studies, the work I did as I sussed out how to use the charcoal and to make the marks I wanted to achieve. I plan to do new versions of a couple of them - definitely the rooster, and maybe the frigate, which was the first drawing in the series. Adding white paint and mummy colored pastel to the mix was part of my learning process, but the Condor has neither of these. It’s just the charcoal, buffed, blended and aggressively erased.

I also plan to do a much larger white cockatoo with its crown feathers fully unfurled, but I’m not sure the paper I have is big enough for what I envision. Because that’s my goal. Much bigger birds, enormous birds, birds that truly grasp their godlike quality - but for that I need a lot more space than I currently have in Provincetown. Not to mention a place to store them and how to transport them once I move to the UK. This would require another grant or winning the lottery. So it remains a dream for the time being. Which reminds me of the dream Paul had when we first hooked up. In it, he was helping me hang a show because the work was huge and in ornate gilded frames, and way too heavy for me to handle. Back then, the birds were on tiny wood panels and I was adamant about not framing them. But I am always open to suggestions and within a couple months, I had switched to paper, which demands to be framed, and the work had doubled in size. Soon enough, it tripled. When I returned to wood panels, my minis were a thing of the past as I began the paintings that made up the show I had this summer. All of which were framed. Now I’m back to paper. Arches, my preferred brand, makes wide rolls, but maybe I should consider canvas although I don’t care for a surface with that much texture. Either way, gilded frames or not, I still need that big fat grant or to win the lottery. Best get cracking on that then, onward.

I haven’t had time to get any artwork done since I arrived home in Provincetown late Monday night, but I did do an owl, #28 above, on Saturday before I left. However, I took a lot of snapshots out the airplane windows I sat next to on the flights back. One is of the remnants from Hurricane Melissa as we flew through it on the way to Dublin from Newcastle, as well as the rain-lashed window of the Dublin to Boston plane as it was waiting to take off. Again, like the flights to the UK, I sat in window seats but this time I was next to emergency exits on both planes so I had lots of legroom and nobody smashing into me with the back of their seat. I shared the space with a young man named Trace who bore a startling resemblance to an old college friend of mine named Barry when he was young, and who had died while I was in the UK. Same long black curly hair, same glasses, and boho hippie clothes. When I showed Trace pictures of Barry from 50 years ago, it freaked him out, but it made me happy. It was as if Barry was sitting with me, not his young doppelganger.

Anyway, I’m back and have been very busy plowing through the bills and paperwork I had dreaded coming home to. I got a little refund from Expedia because I prepaid more for my tickets than what the trip finally cost, and a check arrived for my cut of the sale of the collage I did this summer for the PAAM 12x12 Benefit Auction, so that plus the Substack subscription I mentioned last week were enough to pay everything except the balance of what I owe my eye surgeon. So, if I eat frugally this month, I’ll be ok until December. Especially if I do well at the Holiday Craft Fair at the Canteen Thanksgiving weekend. I heard about another craft fair in town next month that I’ve applied to since the one I did last year has been cancelled.

Have I told you my favorite Buddhist parable about the woman and the tigers? Being chased by tigers, she climbs over the side of a cliff and is hanging from a vine only to see there are tigers down below her too. She also sees that a rat is chewing on her vine and that she will eventually fall. Then she notices a cluster of berries growing out of the cliff next to her. She plucks the berries and eats them. They are delicious. End of story - in other words, stay in the moment. Eat the berries. Onward.

Yesterday, one of the pair of beautiful magpies who visit our back garden sat on the window ledge and peered inside as I watched. Generally they announce themselves before patrolling the garden, which is an English jungle of sorts full of enormous ferns and spiky palms that catch on your clothes as you pass. Once they arrive, the magpies inspect the plants, the various things jutting out from the brick wall of the building next door, and Paul’s bike. We dare not feed them so as not to attract rats from the back lane, but one morning there was a tidy pile of mysterious droppings on the step outside the glass doors where I work as if, a magpie perhaps, had been sitting there peering in. Or admiring its reflection - years ago, in Provincetown, a goldfinch visited me several times a day and did the same thing. She got so used to me I was able to take photos without her flitting away. That’s a goal, my goal, to take pictures of our magpies before I leave on Monday.

There was a bit of a panic when we realized on Tuesday that I’m leaving this coming Monday and not the next. Suddenly our list of things to do got more urgent. After repeated but failed calls to an immigration lawyer’s helpline, which is only available on Wednesdays for two hours, we decided I should email my list of questions from home. Although Newcastle feels like home too, now that I have a great work station, some new-to-me clothes from local charity shops and we’re entertaining guests like a settled couple. However, I can’t help being anxious about flying and what’s happening in the US, or the hurricane which appears to be headed right for Ireland on the day of my flight even if it will probably only be a bad storm by then. Anyway, I managed to get a good shot of #25 above, the owl from last week that refused to be photographed properly, and there are two new birds this week, #26, the eagle in the middle and #27, the finch below. I’ve been confirmed for the Canteen Craft Fair in Provincetown for Thanksgiving weekend, and even though I don’t push readers to be paid subscribers because I’m more interested in building my audience than the money, one of you has switched to a paid subscription after last week’s post. Thanks so much Susan, I really appreciate it. Every little bit helps. Onward.

I tend to keep politics off Substack but Wednesday night, I had the first bout of my usual insomnia since I left for the UK a little over two weeks ago. I sleep great here, which I rarely do at home. I’m also online a lot less when I’m here but I do keep informed, and the East Wing demolition was the proverbial last straw in a series of escalating last straws, so I am now officially afraid to go home. My Buddhist practice teaches me to stay in the moment and I will until it is time to go back in November, but what waits for me there besides the DC chaos are things I don’t want to deal with. Most of them are financial - a stack of medical bills, a rent increase, a significant drop in sales and opportunities. I didn’t fill a prescription right before I left because it went from $8 to $95 last month. I won’t die without it, but I’ll definitely be uncomfortable soon enough. That said, I know everybody is going through the same thing and some have it much worse. I don’t have kids or ailing parents and I don’t have student loan debt or credit cards. So yeah, stay in the moment and enjoy this UK reprieve. Last weekend, we went to Cullercoats again and I photographed the cliffs and caves along the beach. I also set up a workstation with the new drawing board and an easel next to the glass doors that lead to the back garden and get the morning light. I finished #24, the small piece above and then #25, a much larger one which is proving to be impossible to get a good shot of. Perhaps I can get a better one for next week. We hung the three little pieces of other people’s art that I brought in my suitcase and my sitting room now looks like I live here. We saw some work in Sunderland and an exhibition by Uta Kögelsberger in the Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University. That’s a picture of me below, a very rare thing, taken by my fiancé Paul Brewster, as I contemplate a photo in the show which is primarily video presentations. I love my life here. It’s the simple things. Onward.

I made it to Newcastle in one piece. The trip over was smooth except for a screaming baby and the woman in front of me who had too much white wine and threw up on herself. The wait at Logan and the layover at Dublin were long and exhausting, but I had window seats in rows by myself on both flights. I arrived on Wednesday afternoon and promptly went to bed after devouring a delicious steak pie from the Grainger’s Market’s Hunter’s Deli, and it has been non-stop ever since I got up the next morning. Saturday was all about a big teatime meal with friends that included quizzes which I held my own in. Friday we installed a washing machine and that was a bit stressful. Yesterday we explored the riverside across the Tyne in Gateshead and on Thursday we went to the local lumber yard to price wood for a work table Paul, my fiancé, wants to build and something suitable for a large drawing board for me. We wound up in the back looking at off cuts that were destined to be destroyed. One of the men back there offered to saw down a piece to 30”x36” for me at no charge. Paul joked later that it was because I was a right flirt, while I thought I was just being nice. Either way, I now have a huge, free, drawing board on an extra easel in the studio. Then on Friday we went to the Details art supply store after installing the washing machine and got several big sheets of paper for me to play with. In the meantime, I finished #23, above, but it is on the 12x12” watercolor block I brought with me. It has a new element I have been thinking about using - white acrylic paint. It was only a matter of time before I picked up a brush again although the charcoal and drawing are still the predominant components. The paint added a different texture and blending ability as well as a great base for more charcoal once it had dried. I’ll do a few more 12x12” pieces before going bigger but the white paint will come in handy whatever size I choose. I’ve also got a rich gold paint for backgrounds, could that be next? Stay tuned.