March 2021 – Cabin Art

Ten Things I Learned in March

Even after being away for twice as long as I lived in Lemon Cove, I still love the place. (No Trader Joe’s there, for sure.)

If you find a surprising rip in your clothing while out in public, packing tape is a handy quick solution.
Farmer Bob’s World is a new citrus museum just outside of Ivanhoe. I posted about it on March 12.
Somewhere I read that the way to wake up a body part that has gone to sleep is by shaking your head. What?? Someone please try this and let me know!
If you want to leave money both to charity and to people in your will, use your IRA for the charity, because they don’t have to pay taxes on it, but people do, just as if it is their own IRA. Just list the charity or charities as the beneficiaries. You’re welcome (because now you don’t have to pay a lawyer to tell you this.)
Three Rivers made #3 on a list of the 12 most charming small towns in California. Really?? They obviously didn’t dig very deep and learn that our air is foul, we are uneducated, unemployed, and fat. And, there is no Trader Joe’s. Here is the site: PureWow True, it is fabulous here in February and March.
I met someone who is convinced that Elvis didn’t die and is now in the Witness Protection Program as Pastor Bob Joyce (or Robert E. Joyce, as in “rejoice”) of Benton Arkansas. That guy was born in 1953; Elvis was born in 1935. He sings like Elvis, but so do lots of impersonators. It made for some fun conversation (and DuckDuckGo searching).
One of my drawing students has been painting with watercolors on used tea bags. Yes, you read that correctly. Her inspiration comes from Ruby Silvious. This sounds too bizarre to believe until you see it. I grabbed this image from My Modern Met
When pictures are hung in a group in a gallery, it is called “salon style”; when 4 are grouped together, it is called a “four-pack”.
If you live in Tulare County, have a power outage and the restart kills your 33-year-old refrigerator on which you have a DNR, call Frank’s Appliance first. (Whirlpool goes the distance.)
There are 2 kinds of naked ladies bulbs: one is called Lycoris and works where the winters are cold; the other is Amaryllis Belladonna and pops up in August after all hope for a decent looking yard has expired in that dismal month. (This learning was triggered by a gardening blog and is not relevant to March but I learned it in March, so there.)
Amaryllis Belladonna, always a nice surprise in my yard in August, because the deer don’t eat these.

New Virtual Drawing Lesson #2

Last week we saw the beginnings of C’s new horse drawing.

The eyes are the best place to start when drawing a living being. The eyes on Mr. Curly were too dark to see on the photo, so I used the computer to lighten and enlarge. (If you can’t see a thing, it’s almost impossible to draw the thing. Duh. You are welcome.)

Eye on the left after enlarging and lightening:

Eye on the right, after lightening and enlarging:

My demonstrations and notes, scanned a little darker than accurate in order for C to be able to read my handwriting, which makes the drawing parts a little too dark. There are many drawbacks to this virtual stuff, but C is a very committed drawing student and an excellent communicator.

I wonder how many of you will unsubscribe to my blog because this type of post is making your eyes cross.

Details, Details

The new Mineral King oil paintings continue along, three going from lacking in details to completed.

The background of this 6×18″ Oak Grove bridge looks pretty good, but there are some missing architectural details.

Details in place, drying in the sunshine.

Lots of missing details here:

Details in place, drying in the sunshine.

Here is the 8×8″ Oak Grove bridge painting in steps. Architectural details still missing, but background looking good.

Details in place, drying with its unfinished cousins.

P.S. Here is a link to a teaser page about my upcoming show, Still Here. Arts Visalia

Still Here, an Art Show

Tomorrow I will be delivering paintings and drawings to Arts Visalia for my upcoming show, Still Here.

The show will be visible online, or you can make an appointment to see it during gallery hours, Wednesday – Saturday, noon – 5:00. The gallery director will interview me on Wednesday, but I don’t know how soon the interview will be visible. (More will be revealed. . .) The gallery’s website address is here, and here too; I don’t know when my work will be visible. (More will be revealed. . .)

Here is the poster.

Baffled and Confused

Questions, questions, more questions, because inquiring minds need to know.

Why does one’s back only itch in the places that are impossible to reach?
Are all contractors not hungry? It is a rare contractor who returns phone calls or shows up when promised. What is the problem here??
Why do some people object to referring to a disease by the location of its origin? German measles, Hong Kong flu, Spanish flu, Lyme disease, Valley Fever, Hanta virus, but somehow China virus is offensive. Confusion abounds here.
Why won’t Trader Joe’s put a store in Visalia? Are our demographics really that much different here than in Bakersfield or Fresno? Have they ever added up the number of people from Tulare County who drive to Fresno’s TJ’s?
Why is it that a paintbrush will not release any more paint on the canvas but then takes 15 minutes to wash clean?
If “one year’s weeds make seven years seeds” (or is it “one year’s seeds make seven years weeds”?), then WHY AM I STILL WEEDING THE EXACT SAME STUFF IN YEAR #22??
Do my cats appreciate their safe location every night?

Forrest’s Dream Cabin Again

The title of this commissioned oil painting is Forrest’s Dream Cabin, so it is imperative that I move it from nightmare to dream status. Here is the next painting session of step by step improvement.

Sky first, painted upside-down for easier reach.

2. The colors on my palette look so dull.

3. Water next. I could reach this part right-side up.

4. Mountain and foreground branches

5. I want to start drawing with my paintbrush on the cabin detail, but I think the water and background mountain will need more layers first.

The colors are so much duller on screen than in real life. Forrest said, “it’s like a ghostly cabin is emerging out of the scene, nice!”

P.S.This is not a houseboat; it is a cabin on stilts in a lake in Northern Italy.

New Virtual Drawing Lesson

Look at this beautiful photo of a horse by my drawing student C. She wants to draw it and I will do my best to help her, through emails.

The first set of instructions was this:

Trace the main parts to simplify the visual information
Copy the tracing onto the drawing paper, rotating directions. Start upside down, then sideways, next other sideways, finally right side up. Each direction will show you different shapes and angles that need to be corrected.
Trace a few more details onto the first tracing.
Add those details to the drawing, remembering to rotate.

This is what C sent to me after finishing those actions.

She is drawing the same size as her printed photo. This means she can scoot the tracing over the top of her drawing to check her accuracy.

When students draw the exact same size as their photo, they can do this sort of checking. Here are some thoughts about that:

Always force yourself to draw first, BEFORE laying the tracing on top. We all need to exercise our “seeing muscles”, and practice is the only way to learn to see accurately.
When you draw the same size as your photo, you aren’t learning to see proportionately as quickly as if you draw larger or smaller. Sure, you will still have to see how things relate to one another inside the drawing, but you aren’t looking at the whole to learn to think thoughts such as “half is always half” or “a third on my drawing needs to be the same as a third on the photo”.
When you draw the same size as your photo, sometimes you get paralyzed by the thought of changing size.
If you are dependent on drawing the same size as your photo, it is even harder to transition into drawing from real life. Drawing from real life is the hardest way to draw, because you are going from 3 dimensions to 2 dimensions, and every time you slouch a bit or accidentally lean to one side or the other, the image in front of you changes.

Stay tuned. The virtual drawing lesson will continue.

Loving March

No particular order, no particular reason. Just sharing some of what I love about March in the foothills of Tulare County (where there is no Trader Joe’s).

Searching for a Bridge

Three Rivers has one river, the Kaweah, pronounced “kuh-WEE-uh”. Four forks come together into the Middle Fork, but apparently only three mattered when it was time to name the town. (No, I don’t know which three.) Middle, Marble, East, South, and North are the names of the various branches.

A week or two ago, I learned that the brother of two of my former drawing students took on something called a “bridge project”. He was commissioned to create four 2×2′ tile mosaics to decorate a new bridge somewhere in the county. I asked around and concluded it must be the bailey bridge at the upper end of South Fork Road. So, Trail Guy and I went exploring.

You can see evidence of the SQF Complex fire that burned a lot of South Fork, threatened Three Rivers, Case Mt. and Mineral King

Here is the bridge, going in just upstream of the old bailey bridge, and still just one lane wide:

You can watch Nate Norman talk about making these tiles on this YouTube video. (You might want to fast forward past the first few minutes of someone talking about Arts Consortium business and get right to Nate’s presentation.)

I did a screen shot from the video to show you one of his truly beautiful mosaics. As someone who has experimented with tile mosaic in the past, I can assure you that this was no small undertaking.

We drove up near the bridge, but it was being worked on so I just took a couple of photos. I am guessing the tiles will go on each of 4 main pillars, one of which I have circled the spot in red for you.

The bridge is about 11 miles up South Fork Road, and I think the campground is one mile farther. We didn’t cross the bridge, but headed back down. It was such a beautiful day that I almost forgot about August. And heat. And smoke. And smog.

There were poppies, but they were closed up due to the overcast day. However, I did get this poor photo of a few wildflowers by kneeling in the mud on the side of the road.

You are welcome.

I do what I can to find the beauty in Tulare County, but not so much that people will flock here. Remember, we are uneducated, poor, unemployed, fat, and diabetic. Oh, and there is that bad air filtering down through the Altamont Pass from the Bay Area for which we get penalized. Further, there is no Trader Joe’s and never will be.

Just keeping it real.

Fake Tucker and keeping it real Tucker

Summer’s Coming and so is the Bridge

Last week it got cold and rainy but I painted in the unheated workshop anyway because summer is coming and I will wish it was cold. Yes, there is a heater which Trail Guy offered to light for me several times, but I declined. It was overcast, and I knew I wouldn’t be painting all day because it was a little hard to see the colors correctly.

In deciding which of the 7 Mineral King oil paintings to work on, it may not surprise you that I chose one of the Oak Grove Bridge, my favorite subject to draw and paint.

The bridge needs to be refined and the foliage needs to be finished. Then I will probably start on the other oil painting of my favorite bridge in all of Tulare County.