The Mirror Pool

(This comes from an event/print idea from earlier this winter. I thought it good to re-capture the story here...)

I slipped on the ice in the driveway the other night and hurt my back.

It was one of those falls, accidents, mishaps, that leaves you lying there like poor old Timmy in the well.

"Oh shit"

you think to yourself when you're staring into the sky with snow drifting over your face, because you find that you can't move your arms or legs.

Like Timmy, your faithful dog comes to your rescue, but she ain't helping much: she licks your face and lays down on the lee side of your body. It doesn't matter much, because you can't speak loud enough to tell her to go get a rope, anyway. You can't even breathe.

And all you can think is "Oh shit....."

It's not until later, when you're warm and sort of comfortable, that you think about how close you came to being taken out by something so stupid. Thoughts of family and memories flood down like a wave: a hot bath will put that kind of perspective on things.

A corner pool, right before nightfall. A few stems of grass hanging over. A fisherman:maybe, maybe not. A big fish being caught: again, maybe, maybe not.

A small, quiet time of the day.

I've had this idea for a print in my head for a long time.

My "ordeal" brought back pleasant memories of fishing with a friend at the end of this last season, and a quick look in my archives found the set of images that brought it all together.

Staying home from work because sitting in a car was extremely painful, I was terrifically bored.



It turns out that sitting hunched over my work table, putting constant pressure on my lats by way of hand carving the wood plates, was/is a terrific sort of therapy for my accident.




I used the same blocks to demonstrate the multi-block woodcut technique, at the Great Waters Expo not long ago in Minneapolis.