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Every year the sudden proliferation of buttercups heralds the coming of summer, and every year I’m seized by some weird artist-hoarder’s compulsion to harvest them all, as if I could somehow capture this time, this feeling; this strange, rich light that pours down on the world like honey. Irish summers are so fleeting. I thought maybe I could use the flowers somehow – perhaps draw with the pollen like yellow chalk, or just make some kind of installation. 

This year I actually gave in to that vague, futile impulse and went and sat in a field for hours, patiently decapitating buttercups, and adding them to a little pile that never really seemed to get any bigger. I carried them inside in a cardboard box and they have just been quietly wilting under the stairs for over a month now. 

I don’t know what the moral of this story is. 

I thought getting that book done and scanned would be cathartic, and maybe I would stop seeing everything as being short-lived and absurdly fragile and in a perpetual state of Ending – but then I came home and found this little finch. It appears he flew into the window, knocked himself unconscious, bounced into the water barrel and drowned. Which is ridiculous. He was still warm from the sun when I fished him out. I decided to take photos and make drawings, which is my default response to a corpse, and why I should never work in a funeral home. 

Still workin’ on a comic/book/thing about death. In the meantime, here is a detail from a drawing I did based on a 15th Century woodcut from the Heidelberger Totentanz – a book of images of the danse macabre. The book is basically a series of illustrations of dancing skeletons gettin’ all up in people’s business in order to remind them of their own mortality.
It is beautiful and poignant and friggin’ hilarious.