With the upcoming show (opening August 7), with many days and nights away from home, with a little stretch of mild summer weather, I have shifted into overdrive when it comes to cranking out paintings. I am focused on getting some inventory ahead for the local shops that sell for me, along with finishing things that previously didn’t feel very important.
This means that I sometimes set up paintings assembly-line-style.
Does this make you wonder where the creativity comes in?
It takes thought to decide what subjects and sizes will best meet the “demand”*, to prioritize, to organize, and to be highly efficient with my limited time. Then it takes focus to be sure that each painting is the best it can be. I don’t go for perfection, which is basically driven by anxiety. Instead, I view each painting as if I am a critical customer unwilling to part with my hard-earned green pieces of paper with dead presidents’ faces unless something really speaks to me. (Because I have been that person many times.)
Oops. Sometimes I flip my canvas upside down to paint and forget to see if the hanging hardware is going the correct direction. That’s easy to fix once the painting is dry.
*No one I work for is demanding—every last one is wonderful to work with.
These paintings of rural Oregon scenes were high on my list of Want To Paint, but rather than go to a retail establishment that caters to visitors to Sequoia National Park, they will get framed and then be part of my upcoming show, Around Here, and Sometime a Little Farther, in August at the Tulare Historical Museum and Gallery.
I wonder if I should title it “Somewhere in Oregon”.
Then this one could be called “Somewhere Else in Oregon”.
Because yesterday was Independence Day, today’s post is a bonus. I wouldn’t want anyone to miss out on a weekly Mineral King update!
“Hanging out” has ceased to be slang; what terminology did people use before this?
We don’t hike a lot anymore. Bum knee, numb feet. Walking is good enough for now. We headed toward the upper valley on this trail which was a road during Trail Guy’s childhood.
There were a few stray carrots lying on the ground, which Trail Guy retrieved to feed the stock.
A mule or two usually get out of the corrals. This causes many questions: 1. How? 2. Why? 3. Why just one? 4. Can’t some Park Packer Person make the fence tighter? (I’ve learned mules can leap pretty high, but I’m not convinced.)
We encountered some friends at Crystal Creek WITH A DOG. Everyone knows this is against National Park rules, or do they?? These fine folks were being very careful about it all, but if other people see them, they’ll assume dogs are okay if they are on a leash. Nope. It might be okay in the National Forest, but Mineral King is in Sequoia National Park, where dogs are not allowed on trails.
If you don’t want to get your feet wet crossing Crystal Creek, go a little above the trail and balance on those sticks. (I just walked through, as usual.)
My destination was Franklin Falls; Trail Guy’s knee along with his dislike of straight up-and-backs caused him to turn off the trail while I powered upward.
If you want to cross Franklin Creek, this is how the dry boulders arranged as stepping stones look.
I turned around and met up with Trail Guy just above Crystal Creek. The flowers were excellent, as one expects during late June, early July in Mineral King.
The rest of the photos are from meandering around, nothing noteworthy other than peak season in Mineral King.
So many shades of green.
This is sort of interesting: like beachcombers, we find all sorts of things while meandering around. This time it was a Benadryl Itch Relief stick, a blue carabiner, a fork, 3 grommets from tarps, and a large bottle of water sitting by the road.
When I began oil painting with only the primary colors (“double primary palette” means 2 each of the 3 primary colors + white), I wondered why I thought that 2 different sets of 120 colored pencils were necessary. Colored pencil is not a main part of my art-making life: De Quervain’s tenosynovitis, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and extremely slow production combined with low sales sent me to oil paints.
If one can paint using only the double primary palette, doesn’t it stand to reason that one could use a box of just 12 colored pencils?
In the last handful of years, my favorite brand of graphite drawing pencils is Tombow. This is a Japanese word which means “dragonfly”, for some unknown reason. (A country that names its companies things like “Google” or “Yahoo” isn’t allowed to poke fun at something as straightforward as “Dragonfly”.)
When ordering some art supplies recently, I saw that Tombow has colored pencils. I bought their box of 12. They aren’t available any longer, although I only bought them a week or two ago. Life is full of mysteries.
This stellar jay caught my attention (they are fairly demanding birds) in Mineral King a few weeks ago, and I chose it for my trial use of Tombow colored pencils.
This is small—5×7” piece of paper with about 1/2” margin—so it didn’t ignite any wrist troubles. You can see that I made up the background, and the colors aren’t exacatacally* right on the bird. Trying to do exact matches is good learning practice, but I am a little past that in my career now, and besides, no one cares. I loved the challenge of trying to force the right colors from a box of only 12.
If you are really into colored pencils and want to know a bit more, these are very soft, possibly even softer than Prismacolor. I prefer the Blackwing brand of colors, but they include a white and a silver pencil, which I find to be almost useless; this causes their overpriced box of twelve to only contain 10 useful pencils.
I painted these two Sequoias one day, then set them outside in the sun and breeze to dry. They dried quickly enough to be scanned and delivered to the store two days later.
Sequoia Gigantea XXI, 6×18”, oil on wrapped canvas, $195
Sequoia Gigantea XXII, 4×12”, oil on wrapped canvas, $175
The smaller of the two is a new size to me. I found these canvases while in Oregon. They are probably available somewhere in my county here in Central California, but since I only go to The Big Town of Visalia to either see my mechanic or grocery shop, who knows?
The proprietor decided to accept both paintings. The smaller of the two sold off the counter before she could even hang it on the wall, before I even made it back home!
Three Rivers will be getting a pharmacy again! Maybe, if governmental regulations and insurance companies don’t block progress. We are supposedly getting the golf course back, along with 2 restaurants in town, but between the Keyboard Warriors and the county regulators, the delays are legion. The French bakery and a high-end hotel gave up because of these hateful people who block progress, who don’t accept the precept that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. STOP IT!!
2. In just one Canadian province (Nova Scotia—Hi Elisabeth!), there are 2 time zones, one of them only 30 minutes later. That would be highly annoying! From Elisabeth: “. . . there is actually only one time in Nova Scotia (AST) which is 1 hour ahead of E.T. But in Newfoundland (a nearby province) it is AST + 0.5 hours. So if it’s 12:00 pm in New York City, it’s 1:00 pm in Nova Scotia, but it’s 1:30 pm in Newfoundland.” You probably already know that there are 4 times zones in the contiguous 48 states, and Hawaii and Alaska add 2 more.
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3. Intermittent Fasting is an eating fad that is supposed to slow aging and keep blood glucose lower. I’ve been trying this, nay, doing this for a month. The idea is that you only eat within an 8 hour window, and fast in the remaining 16 hours. It is sort of hard, but I am learning how to manage, hoping that “closies count”. I won’t know if it is worth it for another 2 months. Oy vey.
4. The week before I acquired a new-to-me car, a friend (Hi again, Elisabeth!) posted a link to a post on this website about life lessons from driving a manual transmission car. I learned that driving a manual transmission is more automatic to me than driving an automatic. I am in mourning, while at the same time feeling very grateful for a newer car.
5. Did you know that the second ingredient in seasoned salt is SUGAR??! Boy am I mad.
6. A site called BookCrossing is a worldwide community of readers who share books and then track where they are. If I had nothing else to do, this might be fun. However, I have more than enough just keeping up with the people I know in real life, along with a handful of not-yet-met friends, so keeping up with my books after I read them isn’t going to make The List.
Why was there a pickleball on my morning walk in a neighborhood without a court?
Have you noticed that I am really enjoying the use of the non-word “tryna”?
While in Oregon, I loved seeing those rural scenes with barns, but only took photos through the car window because we were always on a schedule without time to meander along back roads. Freeways don’t often have scenic turnouts, and many country roads don’t either.
I lamented that I had no reason to paint Oregon subjects; then, my artist friend Krista told me to paint them and then look for an outlet to sell them in Oregon. (She is full of bigger ideas than I ever think of.) My sister said, “I don’t know why a barn picture wouldn’t sell. It is a thing to have a barn picture.”
Then I remembered that my upcoming solo show in Tulare is title “Around Here, and Sometimes a Little Farther”.
So, I went for it, using 11×14 canvas boards instead of my usual wrapped canvases. Why??
That was so satisfying that I did another one. (The photography part was an interruption so I skipped all the steps on the second barn.)
I wonder if that hay stack is a little too weird. too centered, perhaps.
Whenever I finish something in fairly short order, I almost break my arm patting myself on the back. Inevitably, when it is dry, I scan it, view it on my laptop screen, and groan: “WHY DID I THINK THAT WAS FINISHED??”
At least I know what to expect after these are scanned.
I also figured out that in the upcoming show, all my paintings of local scenes are on wrapped canvas, and all the “sometimes a little farther” paintings are on boards. These will require easels or frames. Aha! The visitors to the show might be able to differentiate just by the format (and possibly by all the ocean scenes. . . duh.)
Ka-Ching! That’s just part of the business of art.
Sunday morning’s temperature at our cabin was 33°. This was on the second day of SUMMER! My 7 year old neighbor and I discussed the fact that the seasons don’t always follow the calendar.
Because it was unseasonably cool, we opted to walk up the usually hot and dusty trail toward Timber Gap, Monarch Lake, Crystal Lake, and Sawtooth. Nope, those were not our destinations; we chose to go to Groundhog Meadow. It was just a walk, not a hike. (Hikes have backpacks with food and water; walks are just walks.)
The parking lot was full of cars protected from marmots by blue tarps. Usually the marmots have ceased their automotive destruction by this date, but most people don’t know this and aren’t willing to take chances.
The trail is steep with giant steps for the first 1/4 mile or so. After passing the turn to Timber, you eventually come across this funny little spring, just shooting directly out of the side of the mountain.
I remembered the trail wrong: I thought there was a long straight section, with more steep steps to the so-called meadow. Instead, it was more steep steps to a long straight section that led to Groundhog Meadow. Our little friend viewed it as a hike and carried a pack in spite of my explanations. This girl makes up her own mind.
Groundhog Meadow is a weird name to me. What meadow? And aren’t they marmots, not groundhogs? Who named this place? This is Groundhog Meadow, which to me is simply a stream crossing.
Being close to the beginning of July, which I view as the peak wildflower season, there were good wildflowers.
If you take the old Sawtooth trail, it leads to a nearby meadow; maybe this is Groundhog. Sure has a good view of Sawtooth!
There is one dicey part of the trail pretty close to the stream crossing on the way up. Here it is on the way back down.
Boring unknown white flower. . . if I do a second edition of Mineral King Wildflowers, will this make it into the book?
Hiking Buddy and I walked up to Crystal Creek. It has all gotten so lush and green in just the 3 weeks since I was last in Mineral King. Some of the ferns might croak due to the low temperatures, and a few of the lupine looked droopy.
Crystal Creek looks low, but it is because after the wet winter of 2023, its course changed to three spread-out sections across the trail instead of one charging stream.
Ugh. So many dead trees. Drought? Some sort of beetle that takes advantage of a weakened state? We’ve had some decent winters, but the preceeding dry winters have taken their toll.
Indian Paintbrush was the dominant flower on this walk. That’s Timber Gap in the distance, in case you need help getting oriented.
This is looking up the trail toward Farewell Gap, Vandever in the distance.
Thus we conclude another Mineral King report—walks, not hikes, grateful to be able to walk, wearing my latest hiking Crocs, called All Terrain Atlas Clogs. These have thick soles and I think they’ll last awhile.
(Take that, stupid Peripheral Neuropathy! You can’t stop me from walking on trails, so there.)
We passed this air museum multiple times on this day of geographical challenges. It is enormous, and finally, I shot a photo through the windshield (as a passenger, fret not).
This beach is known for a giant sand dune. I climbed it two other times and wanted to test myself, SIXTEEN YEARS LATER. (I’ve never been this old before.) It’s the mostly bare one with a little group of trees on the top left.
I followed these people (whom I didn’t know), and when it got too slip-and-slide, I resorted to using my hands too, after watching one of those folks get up that way. It was not dignified, but I only knew my sister, and she’s seen me in many undignified situations through our years.
Looking back down from the top.
This is looking over onto the other side. I don’t know those people.
It is pretty doggone fun to step-and-sink-and-slide back down. My sister is a tiny speck down there somewhere.
There was a less steep way to ascend, a bit of a trail, so I went back up that about 1/2 way to the top for a second thrill of step-and-sink-and-slide back down. It was on the pretense of accompanying my sister that way up, but I really just wanted to descend another time.
After we left the beach, our old friend called. She said she was so very sorry to have missed us, but that she was in town picking up flyers for the service.
“WHAT SERVICE?”
Oh, wow, oh no, her husband died. My wiser older sister put on her pastor’s wife hat, flipped a U, and we drove on those now familiar roads straight back to see her.
It was a very good decision.
It was a very good day.
P.S. I let my sister drive the whole day because she will miss that car and because she supposedly knew where we were going and because I wanted to sight-see.
