yummy art books

Some delightful finds...

The other day my husband and I cleared our schedules and had a date afternoon. We headed off to the town of Carleton Place, just outside of Ottawa. Our destination was Wool Growers, a fabulous livestock supply store. Okay, so we had an errand we wanted to run but the date part was two other stops - Ballygiblins for a very late lunch (highly recommended if you live in the Ottawa area and can make it there) and The Book Gallery. The book store is located in a very old Victorian brick house and the attached renovated storage buildings and it houses over 100,000 titles of used books.

Of course I spent my time in the art section and I came away with some books that reflect my artistic passions - illustration, botanicals, nature art and books on art that flat out makes me swoon. My loot consists of: Janet Marsh's Nature Diary, Glen Loates A Brush With Life, Arthur Rackman A Life With Illustration by James Hamilton, The Art of Andrew Wyeth, and The Complete Writings of Emily Carr. If you are not familiar with the illustration of Arthur Rackman, the art of the Wyeths (a very talented family) nor the art of Emily Carr (one of my personal inspirations with regards to her life journey as well as her art) then I encourage you to check these folks out. (all highlighted text in the post has hyperlinks to other sites).

I don't know how independent book sellers stay in business. Who would want to have to compete with Amazon and other discount sellers? It felt very good to support a local business and to give some lovely art books a new home. I am looking forward to my next visit as I didn't have time to look through the gardening and cooking books.

When we returned home at around 5:30, the goats were all up on their play structure staring out into the field. The fox was back! The chickens were blissfully ignorant, eating all over the property in front of the house. Mark scared the fox away again...it ran off rather reluctantly as it was hunting mice. It continued to be a feral evening. Our dog managed to catch a meadow vole while out on his evening walk and he chomped it down, we sat out in the meadow with the goats until dark and two deer came out into the field and watched us, the resident owl started hooting at dusk and later coyotes howled. Wildlife abounds here and we love it.

Now for a few pics I took the other evening whilst heading out to the barn for evening chores. My new hobbies, cloud watching and now cloud photography...Did you know there was a Cloud Appreciation Society? I didn't but thanks to fellow blogger Ann Nemcosky, I know now. Thank you Ann. Their website has inspired me to start a new photo file of cloud photography.

Yesterday the clouds were so beautiful I found it hard to stay focused on my work! :-)  Perhaps I need to explain that for two decades I lived in houses that were surrounded by forest. Lovely, most definitely yes, but it sure was difficult to grow veggies without much sun and I never saw the sky. Ah, but now that we have moved here, I see sky and I am very smitten - storm clouds, snow clouds, big fat summer clouds, it is all so beautiful. Why not add some beauty to your life and make time for a bit of cloud watching?

The fox was back yesterday afternoon. He/she was once again hunting mice in the field, was stared down by goats and ran away when it heard my voice. The chickens were once again oblivious. Right now a cull of the flock doesn't seem such a bad thing - two hens have started laying eggs in an outdoor manger (which has a lid, the goats eat from between slats on the side) and somebody is pooping in the nesting boxes. My husband has re-engineered the manger to thwart the chickens and there is much annoyed clucking going on. Of course, Mr./Ms. Fox would no doubt not get these offenders but probably eat our well behaved best layers... :-)