[Wednesday night] Well, last night after dinner some of stayed late to watch a little documentary about Captiva. That was fun (and it is the excuse for why I didn’t get around to posting last night). Back in the old days before they built  the causeway to Sanibel (the island just south of Captiva) the place was remote. Things had to arrive by ferry and other boats. Teddy Roosevelt and others liked to fish hereabouts.

One of the important folks to the history of Sanibel/Captiva was J.N. “Ding” Darling, a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist and very important conservationist. The  J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel is named for him. In 1942 he built the Fish House overlooking Pine Island Sound on the east side of Captiva (BTW, in case you didn’t know you can get a big image by clicking on these smaller pix):

The story is that Darling built the place as a wedding present for his wife, but she refused to live there. (See a Darling cartoon about he Fish House: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/SW30000842/00001)

Darling did use the Fish House himself  and is said to have done a lot of his cartoon work there.

So,  the point of all this is that Bob Rauschenberg acquired this property. It is one of the amazing places here. Yesterday I spent a couple hours outside on the east boardwalk (facing Pine Island Sound) reading Anthony Everett’s Hadrian, and doing some drawing in a little notebook over some collage elements.

Earlier in the day I finished my first little work here, a long fold out book of collage:

And to close this post, here is where I sit when I am writing this stuff: