Oats

It's fast becoming Summer and the grass is growing faster than I can even think about cutting it.
In the fields are witchgrass, rye, wheat, and many others but the showiest in mid-May are the individual plants or stands or fields of oats (avena sativa).

 I've enjoyed listening to the birds and watching the young immature flowers/seeds swing and dangle in the breeze--akin to watching the flickering of a fire or the lapping of the waves. Rhythmic and predictable; so barely but infinitely variable.

I've been cutting them and bringing them in and I have carafes and jam jars, water glasses and vases full of stems and stalks.
Green dangling jewels like earrings or bangles or dry, spiny, bearded, spring-loaded seed heads or the flags they leave behind--"we're off, we're off" for the wind to rustle.

 Here are a few oat-inspired etagami.
The Japanese reads, "they invented dance"--my way of acknowledging the seeming joyful swaying and and almost synchronous ballet of fields of little green ballerinas.
Above, instead is a drypoint print--the sprig of green, immature oats drawn and then incised with a sharp point onto a flattened, recycled, Tetrapak container, and printed with a small press.

More naked (caution--drawings of naked women by REAL artists)

I cut a third block and printed a few copies for a color version of my nude woodblock print.
This is on a thin, home-sized kozo washi 40g/m2 and now mounted onto thicker paper so it lies flat.
I'll probably print a few more to have a small edition (e.v.) on good washi in this color version.

It's no longer abstract so harder to read as or mistake for a flower or tree.
I like to think I'm channeling Schiele more than Courbet but either way I'm 100-150 years too late and both did a better job with the subject.

Schiele's female nude with red stockings (1914)

Courbet's "origin of the universe" 1866