Archive - The Cassandra Pages

Snowy Fields, Taking Flight

As many of you know, my big project during the winter and spring a year ago was a group of twenty charcoal landscape drawings. They eventually formed…

Apr 16 •

March 2024

Cassandra's Blog Day

21 years of writing

Mar 20 •

A Year in a Sketchbook

Over the weekend I finished the last pages in my current sketchbook, with the watercolors of artichokes and fruit that are shown below. This particular…

Mar 18 •

February 2024

Spaces of Our Hands and Hearts

Does the space where we work influence what we are able to do there? I think so. Space affects our mindset so dramatically that I suspect it partially…

Feb 28 •

Returning to Oil Painting

When we were in central New York for a short time a few weeks ago, I started an oil painting. It was the first one I'd worked on since 2018 - a pretty…

Feb 19 •

January 2024

Lately I've been working harder on trying to draw Manon from life. In spite of the fact that I've been drawing cats since the mid-1980s, I've never…

Jan 29 •

Centering and Simplifying

with a watercolor video showing some of the process

Jan 18 •

Snow-dusted fields near Lourdes-de-Joliette, Quebec. Watercolor, 6" x 9" in sketchbook. Whether we feel like we're gradually sliding, or hurtling, into…

Jan 4 •

December 2023

I feel like I read a lot in the last year, but there weren’t as many books as usual on my list, mainly because several were very big ones. The two…

Dec 27, 2023 •

The Shortest Day

Winter solstice sunrise, Montreal We don't have to be pagans to feel, deep in our bones, that something has culminated today, and then, slowly, will…

Dec 22, 2023 •

Review: "A Recipe for Daphne"

I'll probably never go to Istanbul in spite of it being a very enticing destination; my husband's Armenian heritage isn't compatible with Turkish…

Dec 19, 2023 •

Short Story with Swans

Mountains and Orchard The large mountains behind the city of Edessa intrigued us, and one afternoon, curious about what we might find, we drove west of…

Dec 16, 2023 •

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