Bugs and Kids

Currently at the playground where I work as one of the city playground programs staff there are two brothers who have a fascination with bugs of all shapes, sizes, colors, and types. Every day one of them catches something, be it a grasshopper, a giant June bug, or a hatching cicada. To one of them I recommended researching the bugs he found and/or drawing them in order to better learn about them.

Recently, while listening to the cicadas buzzing in the trees, my husband has remarked to me that he loves their sound. This was surprising to me because I had always thought of the sound as being the sound of the heat of the sun (as a small, ignorant child) and it corresponds to that drowsy feeling of the dog days of Summer. His love for their sound has sparked for me a curiosity regarding cicadas, their habits, and how they even make such a unique sound.

I looked up cicadas and how they make that sound. Apparently they have tymbals on their sides which function in conjunction with the other parts of the cicada's body to act as a mini speaker. They are capable of making sounds up to about 110 decibels (if I remember correctly), and are considered to be one of the loudest of all insects.

My husband showed me recently an app called Google Scientist which lets you tap into all the sensors on your phone to measure things such as decibels and much more. Shouting into my phone as loud as I thought proper for indoors and with neighbors outside, I measured my own voice at a maximum of about 75-80 decibels. Basically, those cicadas are singing louder than I was willing to shout (without hurting my voice).

My curiosity has been quite happily satisfied, then, to have been able to observe a couple of young cicadas hatching out of their nymph skins with their brand new wings. Those wings are a beautiful kind of teal color before they're dried. I've never seen such a thing before! It was quite fascinating.

I must admit, on a field trip yesterday I was quite pleased to allow the six kids in my group to hold the cicadas we found in a short nature walk. We were looking for as many bugs or birds, or whatever we could find (within a very short fifteen minutes) as we were able. We spotted a couple of dragonflies, bees, cicadas, cabbage butterflies, ants, but we were most fascinated by the slow, clumsy, and totally harmless cicadas. My coworkers were sincerely repulsed to discover the kids holding and carrying old cicada skins and the hatched adults in their hands. As much as many find this kind of activity repulsing, it hearkens back to my own childhood playing in dirt, leaves, sticks, and more. In this kind of play there were no rules, the imagination was key, and the possibilities were endless.

As for the two brothers who catch endless insects, I further discovered that their mom encourages this type of thing as her field of study in college was related to conservation and the environment.

Hermeneutical Spirals

In the first week of this class I was reading yet again about hermeneutics and the hermeneutical circle or spiral. Whenever reading for my classes I find myself lost in thought and hardly able to pay close attention to the reading at hand. I realized while reading that this is in fact part of the hermeneutical cycle. I am reading things that stir up thoughts which then stir up problems that desire solutions or some type of further thought or figuring. While some thoughts unrelated should just be jotted down on a pad of paper, others deserve serious thought and should not simply be shooed aside with the label “unnecessary” or “irrelevant.” 

If you have not heard before of a hermeneutical spiral, it is basically the idea that we come to a new idea with our preconceptions and assumptions, but as we listen, read, or experience more of life we reshape our conceptions and assumptions. Thus, our mind is formed and transformed by the taking in of new information.

Back Stories 1

Last year I had posted all the artwork in my current gallery. I was reminded, though, that sometimes simply seeing an image is not enough to help viewers connect with it, people enjoy hearing something about the back story and the process involved in the creation. So that is the purpose of this blog today.

 A couple summers ago I was able to take a day trip with some friends into the mountains of Romania. It was a pretty impressive trip for me since it was really my first time seeing sizable mountains. Being that it was a cloudy, misty day I actually was tricked a little. You see, I was looking at these amazing mountains when suddenly, in one small city, a cloud scooted over to one side and I was amazed to see the true height of a nearby mountain. I had to look a good 45 degree angle upward to see the summit of an immense geographical formation stretching above us. It was beautiful, rugged, and greyish-blue. Walking through the town to get lunch a lunch of shwarma, we were able to buy small cups of raspberries from an old gentleman who had picked them from the mountains earlier that day.

This particular scene is from a photo taken from near the top of one such mountain. There was a resort of some kind on the top as well as a ski lift painted red that could repeatedly be viewed overhead as we criss-crossed up and down the winding mountain road.

When I painted this scene I had recently just purchased a set of watercolor paints and was quite new with them. This took about three hours to make, which is about twice as long as I usually spend on a piece. I really enjoyed the process of getting to lay in the rich colors of the tree branches and the more subtle colors of the mountains beyond. Most people would paint the scene with no telephone wires, but I have found a fascination in telephone wires and the lines they can create in a composition, thus I left them in. Not to mention the color contrast with the basic blue and green hues that dominate the scene.

The scene above is also from a misty, foggy day, but in quite a different setting. Many of you may be familiar with Pewaukee Lake. My sister and I used to work as nannies for a family in the area and sometimes would drive to and from work together. This place happens to have been on our "commute" home, and sometimes we would get out, walk around, rent a canoe, or get coffee at Brewer's 2 Cafe. For this painting I actually had my paints with me but no paper, so my sister let me use a piece of hers. We were in a coffee shop and I was really just painting some photo from my phone because I often use painting or drawing as a way to unwind when I am just too tense.

In this painting I wanted to experiment using some of the colors I never seem to touch, purple for example. (Who likes purple anyway?) But purple actually works quite well as a shadowy color and it played it's role quite well in this piece.

What I really loved about this piece is the way the misty trees come together to form the backdrop, the brilliant color of the man's jacket out on the pier, and something about the monochromatic scheme it took on. Everything works together to create this quiet and thoughtful scene.

This piece was actually purchased by some friends in 2015 when I was raising money to travel to Romania, but later given back to me when they were downsizing from a home to a camper. It was later chosen by some other friends of ours when we wanted to give them a gift and let them pick from any of my ready-to-hang pieces.

Restart

It has dawned on me that blogging, while not that complicated, is something I have not been doing the last couple of years. I'm not generally one to broadcast all the goings-on of my life, but I thought it might be worthwhile to return to sharing some of the things I've been discovering or experiencing since these might be beneficial to others as well.

I'm not sure whether to stick to art in this blog or to use my other blog for some of these more general categories. The problem with this choice is the blog names and original purposes of my blogs, some of which are a little obsolete for where I am currently in life.

While my other blog still exists, the Calarasi Chapter of my life has finished, not the relationships formed thereby, but that season and chapter has shifted and phased into something mostly, but not entirely, different.

Blogging with missions updates on the Calarasi Chapter was always a struggle for me because I wanted missions in Calarasi and/or Romania to be a long-term goal. But even when it comes to missions and serving him, God can change our long-term goals.

Blogging my artwork for the purpose of allowing people to enjoy it or even in the hope that it will eventually sell is not something I have had a lot of time for.

I am a student at Moody Bible Institute and a student of life. I work with kids, currently through the Parks and Recreation department of the City of Waukesha and the local school district, and this allows plenty of learning opportunities for me to learn to teach and to interact better with the people around me.

Rather than going to Romania long term, I went for the better part of a year and was praying about direction and God's guidance through that time. There was at that time a relationship brewing between me and a Taiwanese grad student at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, and as it turns out, we just got married in June exactly two months ago today.

Thus, my name is no longer Rachel Richardson but Rachel Chen and I will be moving to Taiwan at the end of this year for the year of 2019 due to my husband's obligatory year of military service in his homeland. This year has been difficult in some ways, joyful in many others, but the year to come and the years ahead of that one will be much the same - difficult and yet joyful. I am anticipating getting a teaching job in Taiwan, learning more Mandarin Chinese, and further developing the relationship with his family, which I have had little opportunity to do so far.

In the topic of art, this year has been quite an interesting one for me because I had the lovely opportunity to teach art at a wonderful school called The Augustine Academy in Merton, Wisconsin, a school which I would highly recommend. I learned a lot about simplifying what I have honed and practiced over the years for the minds and ears of young people many of whom have never had the opportunity before for formal art instruction. I saw some of the most interesting pieces from my students and it really was a joy to see how they were able to develop and progress over the year.

This is a longer post, but I am writing with the realization that blogging can be simple and it can be regular. I want to challenge myself to do something along those lines and perhaps share some of what I am learning as well. The types of things I am thinking of writing about include the following topics:

- Study strategies
- Accelerating formal education with standardized tests
- Learning Styles
- Teaching Tips
- Communication with students and coworkers
- Drawings and Ideas for drawings
- International Travel
- Long Distance Relationship tips
- Things I've learned about relationships
- Language learning
- Studying cultures at home and abroad

I don't know how this will go, perhaps it will be too "drawn out" and not be very focused, but I want to start somewhere.