Decision Made

With orange light, smoky air, hot temperatures, dirty skies, and ash everywhere, I am CRAVING GREEN. This desire made the decision for me on the Yokohl Creek oil painting.

Fall used to be my favorite season. Now I dread fall, because it is fire season, and I want spring to last forever.

BLOVIATION WARNING: The next paragraph is something I learned about fires, based on an interview I heard with a former employee of the National Forest Service, followed with my usual stack of questions.

There weren’t giant forest fires when I was a kid. That is when forests were managed and before logging was outlawed. The National Forest Service used to keep the trees to about 30 per acre; now that logging has been shut down, there are about 400 trees per acre. The man described this as “too much vegetation for the landscape”. He also talked about the high percentage of fires that are human caused (84%), and that most of them (90%) occur along roadways, which are no longer being cleared adequately. He was only speaking of Forest Service land, but I’m guessing the info is consistent throughout our state. Until the 1980s, there were 151 sawmills in California; now there are 30, with only one in Tulare County.

Where are we getting our lumber? Why are we importing it if there is so much just going up in flames right here in our own area? Doesn’t anyone care that smoke is ruining our lungs and our air? Doesn’t smoke hurt the environment? Isn’t it causing some unwanted warming of our tiny piece of the globe?

Oy vey.

Spring, rain, green, FOREVER, PLEASE!

P.S. It isn’t finished yet.

 

Big Ideas Advancing

After many days of hunching over my giant magnifying light in the studio, the urge to paint became stronger than the desire to avoid smoky air, hot temperatures, and handicapping orange light. My paintings receive many layers, so if the colors and values are wrong at this stage, it is only temporary.

The photos are blurry. I am taking each cowboy and the dog all from different photos and sincerely hope to gather enough visual information to not mess any of them up. Entirely new territory for this Central California artist, but not outside of my declared geographical area of Tulare County. (Thank you to my friend Susan for supplying the photos!)

Time to move into more familiar subject matter.

Less Smoky in Mineral King

Trail Guy took this photo last weekend.

In the olden days, we would have said it was not a good clear day. These days we are happy to see blue sky.

This photo is from the road. Since Mineral King is closed, we are only allowed to go to our cabins and not “recreate” anywhere. This is also due to the voluntary evacuation order. If it becomes mandatory (very slim chance), officials will have to find everyone to say “time to go”. If someone is out on a trail, an official won’t come looking for you! MK cabin folks were reprimanded gently by a Park official who said he was “disappointed”* to learn that people were leaving their cabin area. However, I happen to know that it was Silver City folks, not Mineral King folks who defied the order. Yes, there is a difference, a 4 mile difference. 

(I just wanted to set the record straight and defend my immediate neighbors.) 

Instead of going to Mineral King, I went to the coast to see some blue sky. I’ll show you next Friday.

*I refrained from telling the official that we were disappointed that he didn’t open the campgrounds this summer – took a bit of discipline, but I managed somehow.

Big Ideas

As I continue to paint larger, the bigger ideas continue to come to me. I’ve been drawing more than painting lately, because I can shut myself into the studio with the air conditioner to filter the smoke.

Meanwhile, I do a little bit of preliminary work on the big ideas. Here are 2 of the latest. The top is 24 x 48″, and the bottom is 22×28″, leaning up against the 18×36″. 

“Man-aze a lotta work ahead!”

P.S. HB, JC!

One Done, Another Begun

Phew! We got this one. The customer is happy and I am too! This is the scanned view so you can better see the details. Actually, I feel a bit proud of being able to combine all these different pictures into one GIANT collage, one that pleases both the customer and me. I might need a nap now.

But no! No naps for this artist. I have begun the next commissioned pencil drawing of a cabin. This one will be a gift (not from me but from the customer to his friend) so I won’t say much more about it for now.

Adjusting and Advancing

I did it again – worked with a customer until she was happy with the sketch, and then after doing the drawing (well, not completely finishing), she wasn’t entirely happy with the results.

This is my fault because when I saw there was a problem, I made an unauthorized change to try to fix it. Instead, I should have gone to her first and said, “I think there is a balance problem here”. But if I had said that and she liked it, would she have felt stupid? It is a good policy to never lead a customer into feeling stupid. 

She made a suggestion, I countered it by proposing an additional adjustment, and then I warned her that erasing may leave a shadow. She was okay with that, so I feel good about our combined decision. 

Here is the before:

This is the after:

 I am once again awaiting her approval in case there are more adjustments. More will be revealed in the fullness of time.

Autumn Break

Today’s post is a break for you from my normal bloviations about art.

Something red caught my eye on my commute* out to the studio last week.(Feel free to get a pumpkin spice something to accompany these photo.)

And this, which looks like a symbol of wildfire to me:

Meanwhile, Pippin has been very delinquent, refusing to come into the garages at night, running around like an unruly hooligan. This makes him very tired during the day.

Tucker has had a campout or two, but likes to wait outside my studio for me to finish work.

Two out of three, always two out of three. Jackson is hiding somewhere. When he appears, one of the others will go away. 

We all sleep better when there are three cats safely locked up in the outbuildings.

But wait! There’s more! Why are these August flowers still blooming in October? (Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth).

It was still raining ash and the light was still orange last week when I took these photos. 

P.S. Happy Birthday, Blog Reader Anne!

*50 yard walk? 100 yards? how about 35 seconds?

Gloomy in Mineral King

“Dismal” and “grim” are the 2 words that come to mind when I think of the state of Mineral King and Three Rivers, and Tulare County, and while I am at it, California. But for this post, I’ll settle for “gloomy”. We were up the hill for about 36 hours after the mandatory evacuation was lifted, a chance to gather some things, and secure the cabin a bit. 

The lower gate was almost impossible to open, but Trail Guy muscled it open for these frustrated folks; we figured out a way to lock it back. This is all necessary because MK is closed for the season.
Peek-a-boo
This sign greeted us.
The sky was blue for a brief and welcome break from smoke.
A typo. Good grief, people!!
The smoke returned. Vandever is barely visible.
It shows more here.
The trail sign is covered with warnings.
The standard view is grim.
If I tilt my camera up, the peaks surrounding Farewell Gap show better.
If we got trapped in Mineral King and fire came to get us, we would sit under the bridge.
There was a little dam upstream from the bridge, and I decided to bust it down so more water would flow under the bridge. Probably useless, but it was fun. I’ll take whatever scraps of fun I can find these days.
Hmm. Barely made any difference at all.
When we left on Sunday afternoon, Trail Guy apprised the Forest Service fire crew of the water system in our neighborhood. I felt a tiny bit better leaving with these competent professionals in place.

May we please be finished with these fires? Please?? Sigh. I hear that rain is forecast for tomorrow. Please, God, have mercy on this place.

One Bite at a Time

Or, if you read Anne Lamott, one bird at a time*. That’s the way I will accomplish this large complicated custom pencil drawing.

My large paper has more texture than I am used to. This will mean adding more layers than usual.
As a right-hander, there is less smearing if I work top to bottom, left to right. (This isn’t smeared all over the center – it is the shadow cast by my magnifying light.)

The paper’s texture means that smearing is more of a problem than usual, so I cover it with tissue paper for protection whenever I leave the studio.

As with many of my projects, I start out wondering if I have bitten off more than I can chew. Once I see a little progress, my confidence returns, and pretty soon I start really enjoying the project. This one is no different; each segment gives a sense of accomplishment, so instead of thinking that the end is far away, I get to experience many little endings.

*Anne Lamott wrote a book about writing called Bird By Bird.