Thanksgiving Preparations-a week of thoughts

My Ostraka:  History IV:  v  22 x 30" 

watercolor, gouache and sumi ink on paper

This painting has been viewed in a number of exhibitions 

in the last five years throughout the midwest,

including a solo show the Director of the 

Contemporary Art Center of Peoria, William Butler, 

invited me to have.

Sunday, November 22.  I am going to post on my back deck until I have to type in mittens………

Sunny, about 55 degrees at noon.  Being an optimist, I have not put away my deck furniture nor deck umbrella.  I was pleased to see the grocery carts filling up at Kroger last night, families in anticipation of lots of cooking for Thanksgiving.  Hands down, my favorite holiday.

One of my colleagues has done a lot with food as the subject of her work and pointed out that Da Vinci chose to depict a famous meal in one of his masterpieces, ‘The Last Supper” though the associations are primarily poignant and religious, yet they center around sustenance and the metaphor for spiritual sustenance is clear.

Saturday, November 28.  This year, Thanksgiving fell on the 26th, which was the date in 1922 that British archeologist Howard Carter discovered Pharaoh Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb.  With the radio on while I was rolling out pie crust for my favorite pumpkin pie Thursday morning, there was Garrison Keillor airing his daily Writer's Almanac.  Keillor features brief biographies associated with writers and other notable persons of history and he covers notable events that occurred on that day. Keillor discussed at length the details of Howard Carter's stunning discovery 87 years ago.  It started with a young Egyptian worker discovering a step in the sand and furious digging began that led downward to the hidden chamber.

Carter knew he had come to an unrobbed tomb once all the sand and dirt was removed from the staircase leading down to the chamber because the clay seal on the door handle to the chamber was undamaged. His heart must have leapt when he saw the cartouche (royal seal) of Tut-ankh-Amen pressed into the clay.

I have used this black and white photographic reference of the door and the clay seal with Tut-ankh-Amen's cartouche in numerous paintings, both watercolors and paintings on canvas.  Of course, the door handle and seal no longer exists except in photographs because the seal had to be broken by Carter to enter the unimaginably lush tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen.  It is an artifact of memory every Egyptologist recognizes.  In the painting above, I featured Tut-ankh-Amen's door, door handle  and clay seal in a delicate red outline.  Behind it is the sculpted face of a royal queen, Tiy or Nefertiti that is called the 'Royal Fragment,' in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York.  I saw this beautiful sculpture in a seminal exhibit "Pharaohs of the Sun"at the Art Institute of Chicago. I am thankful Carter found Tut-ankh-Amen's tomb 87 years ago - November 22, 1922.