Mrs. Polly! 

You’re so talented.  I love your ability to work in the negative.  To see what’s not there is often harder than seeing what is, if that makes any sense.

Absolutely gorgeous!

Brava!

If only I could confine it to just working in the negative!

Thank you.

Mrs. Polly, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Djuna Barnes’ illustration work (her novel Nightwood is what most people would probably know her for), but yours reminds me of her style in all the best possible ways.

Only vaguely, Oblomova, which is disgraceful considering that I lived in the Village where you can’t enter a bookstore without knocking over a stack of Djuna Barnes biographies.

Now I’m going to have to make up for lost time. Thank you for the compliment; her work is really wonderful.

Exquisite. I loved it.

ooh!  ooh!  at the end, when the group is up, the one with the woman holding a ball, with the dog—can you tuck it in a tiny envelope and send it along to me?

they’re wonderful, but i particularly like that one for the subject matter but even more because of the way the figures are outside the frame.

lovely stuff.

Wow, those are gorgeous! I’d never heard of scratchboards, but when I was a kid, I used to love scribbling all over a sheet of construction paper with all sorts of colored crayons, then coloring over the whole page with black and scraping drawings into it. Sounds like a similar principle, only more sophisticated.

Wow, those are gorgeous!

I was going to use “gorgeous”! Damn you, Betty Cracker!

But they are. Even more so knowing they’re not bigger than 2x2.

Absolutely stunning.

Beautiful pieces, Mrs Polly. The stylization and composition are very nicely done. They remind me of woodblock prints. Maybe that should be your next venture so you can reproduce them for sale.

They make a lovely collection. Great work! :-)

These are wonderful, Mrs. P. and I loved the musical accompaniment. Thanks for sharing with us!

Mrs. Polly, I make a pilgrimage to Patchin Place every time I’m in Greenwich Village. e.e. cummings lived there too—there’s a plaque up for him, but not for Djuna. Which may be as she would have wanted it, recluse that she was. Story goes that one time she fell and broke her leg in her apartment and cummings had to come through the window in order to help her. Thereafter, he would occasionally yell across the courtyard they shared “You alive over there, Djuna?”