The November full moon is called the Beaver Moon because this is the time beavers are extremely busy repairing and fortifying their lodgings and storing food for the winter. It is also the fourth and last Super Moon this year; the first one in 2025 won't happen until October.
The photo above at left was taken at 2:15 AM on Thursday night, just before the cloud cover totally swallowed it up. The center and right images were taken last night at 4:15 AM, before dark, fast-moving clouds obscured every hint of light. Although what I saw was more muted than if it was a clear sky, it was ethereal and lovely. The quiet glow of the moonlight created interesting shadows and otherworldly tones of color in the pre-dawn landscape.
Why This Project
As the Full Circle Around the Sun project was coming to a close in mid-October, the idea of creating with the cycles of the moon presented itself as a next concept, particularly once I started thinking about lunar cycles as an alternative way to measure time. As I looked back through photographs of the many works I've created over the past 35 years of being a maker, similar abstracted themes kept reappearing: aging, cycles of growth and decay, cliffs, stones, suns and moons. Everywhere I have lived or traveled, I have explored: mountains, cliffs, waterfalls, creeks, stones and rock formations. So I chose abstracting those from the landscape as my subject within the framework of the 13 Moons time period.
In addition, I am feeling a great desire to connect the dots of all the things I love - nature, pollinator gardening, visual art, crafts, learning and writing. I needed an umbrella that could bring all of them into a cohesive mix. A project like this can do that - it has a scope that could become a "magnum opus" (which means "great work") in a creative life - if nothing more, it becomes my "ikigai", a Japanese concept of a meaningful and purposeful life that gives a person "a reason to wake up each morning."
A Structure but Super Flexible
Structuring this idea as a project also creates a container for exploration. Exploration invites some sort of planning and review process. The desire to reactivate my blog and record what happens over this period of time emerged in tandem with some of the planning of what to do and how to do it. Since I'm no longer a business, not concerned with marketing products or building a brand, I'm free to pursue what my true desire is, which is to nourish, nurture and participate in creating creative community and sharing insights and wisdom together.
So I came up with a structure to start with, one that can evolve as the project does:
Create daily to flesh out ideas and approaches to the subject. It doesn't matter what, a drawing, a color sample, a collage - any studio work around this topic.
Make samples and experiments on papers that will basically become fodder for future collages or sketchbook pages - photograph them and take notes on tools and techniques and what ideas they generate to try next.
Keep a brief daily log of what happens each day - include: ideas, experiments with techniques, notes from research, references to a blog post, website, image, book, article, class or lecture.
