An Old Drawing Reappears

Someone I’ve never met called and actually left a message. I returned the call to learn about someone (Let’s call her AF) who bought an old home and had seen a pencil drawing of the house. The seller was supposed to leave it behind, but took it away. AF had the foresight to take a photo of the drawing, and then she sleuthed around until she found me.

It took a bit of conversation until I figured out what house she was speaking of. She was hoping to be able to buy a print of the house, but when she told me it had the date of 1995, I told her that I didn’t even own a computer back then, much less a scanner.

However, sometimes when I have prints made, I keep one in my flat files. I told AF that there was a possibility that I had one.

The bottom drawer of my flat files is very hard to open, so I rarely fight it and as a result, don’t know what it contains. But the label indicated it might contain the desired print, so I wrestled it open.

AHA!! EUREKA!! Here it is!!

I couldn’t get the drawer to go back in so I made like a snake and bellied up to peek inside. Look what was shoved behind that bottom drawer! I had occasionally wondered where these drawings were, but as someone who loses things regularly, I had other missing things to occupy me.

I called AF to let her know I found the print. She was quite excited, as was I. Before packaging it up for her, I scanned it for you.

I remembered that the customer had only the bottom portion turned into notecards, and just two weeks prior, one of my drawing students brought one to me that he found in his mother-in-law’s stacks of stuff. (Weird.)

Turns out, that card was the drawing that AF had seen at the house, and she had no idea that the drawing was an intricate collage of many parts. She has connected with my original customer and will get an explanation of everything included. (Obviously I drew this before instigating the rule of No Faces Smaller Than An Egg.)

I love it when things turn out like this, with the added bonus of finding missing items for myself too. (Who cares if I talked myself out of a drawing commission? That’s not as important as actually helping someone.)

Back to Work, Party’s Over

What party? Glad you asked! The party of one and sometimes two—goofing off, yardening, exploring, and basically not producing any art.

When we got home from exploring up South Fork, there was a serious distraction. Our neighbor’s beagle followed her nose and found her way to our cat feeding area in the workshop (same room where I paint). Apparently old beagles don’t lose their instinct to follow their noses even when they haven’t had the opportunity to do so in many years. I carried her toward her home and was grateful that one of her humans met me part way because she is solid, very heavy and wiggly too.

Finally, I started working.

First, two new large (for me) Sawtooth paintings. One is the scene from the door of my studio. I tried to start it outside, but Pippin kept wanting to participate, so I took a photo of the door to work from. (It wasn’t helpful.) The color is weird because I used my inferior camera phone, since my camera battery was on the charger.

I realize that the proportions are different on the recycled 24×30” canvas, but it doesn’t matter. I can make up this scene, but I will refer to a handful of photos. This will take many layers to cover the previous painting, done by a friend’s daughter as a college assignment.

Might as well begin the horizontal version (12×24”? 10×20”?)

Ultimately, I finished one, started two, and puttered around on four.

Well, I WAS Going to Work…

On a recent weekend, I said to Trail Guy, “I MUST paint on Monday! Do not distract me, and please, please, if you see me messing around in the yard or the house, remind me that I must paint because I messed around all week, postponing painting!”

On Monday, he said, “Want to drive up South Fork? I haven’t been there in a long time and I want to see how the repairs from the ’23 flood and the fires look.”

NO! NONONO!

Then I gave it another thought and remembered that spring does not last forever. (Yes, thank you Gnat, I know it is always spring somewhere in the world, but I am only here, not anywhere else.)

So I said yes.

He said it would only be an hour; I said it would probably be three hours.

It was very green but nothing looked photo-worthy until we saw Homer’s Nose.

This is looking back at the new bridge, built in 2021.

The road ended about 1/4 to 1/2 mile below the campground. About a dozen cars were parked along the road. I wondered where all the people went, and Trail Guy wondered how they would get turned around on such a narrow road. (We turned around with about a 5-point turn.)

There were three women walking along the road, and Trail Guy stopped to talk to them. Two are sisters from LA who have owned a home near the South Fork Campground since 1974 (well, the property—I don’t know what year the house was built). They were very interesting and told us to stop by to view the lupine from their deck. They were convinced that lupine seeds were scattered during fire fighting operations, when “ping-pongs” were dropped from the air to start back-fires. (Scary!)

They had great wildflowers in their yard.

One last photo as we headed down the road. If I hadn’t felt the need to do some painting, if my camera battery hadn’t croaked, if we had brought lunch, I would have taken another 2 hours or so for photography. Doesn’t matter, it clouded up, and we headed home.

I painted all afternoon. I’ll show you tomorrow.

P.S. We were gone 3 hours.

More Spring in Three Rivers—a Month Late

I wrote this post at the end of March and forgot to publish it. Will any of these photos translate into paintings? Maybe. No decisions yet. Just grabbing beauty when it is available.

The Lake isn’t actually in Three Rivers. The upper end is close; the dam end is closer to Lemon Cove. The lake level is even higher now, and the hills are mostly brown.

Some years there are fabulous lupine in great swaths at the water’s edge; they show in person, but not so well in these photos.

A popular turnout near the middle of The Lake (not out on the water—along the road 1/2 way between the intake and the dam) often has people pulled over taking photos. Me too. It is almost impossible to find a place to take the photo which includes Alta Peak and poppies. The poppies are excellent in the roadcuts where there is no shoulder, and the slopes are steep.

One day we were down the hill, we stopped by a friend’s orange grove and were probably 2-3 days early in terms of the blossoms being out. The oranges are fabulous. We expected to glean, but the grove hadn’t been picked yet. I gathered more photos for potential paintings.

Now get back to painting, Central California Artist!!

Thoughts on Casseroles

Today’s post has one token photo, and it has nothing to do with my normal topics. It is just me, expressing myself. Next week I’ll get back to business.

Trail Guy is the dinner cook around here—BBQ meat, giant salad. Simple, plain, really good. I fix dinner about once a week, normally just something I call Slop in a Skillet, recognizable plain food, mostly vegetables and meat, no recipe, no muss, no fuss.

Last week I decided to try a recipe called Husband’s Delight from an online acquaintance. It used ingredients that I am familiar with and seemed fairly straightforward. (Sometimes I am just adventuresome like that.)

I tried to follow the recipe, but WHY did it require a tablespoon of sugar? Nope, not this little gray duck. I didn’t have the right noodles, so I used a variety of whole wheat pasta shapes that are in my pantry, mostly going to waste because we are being careful to not become diabetic, and apparently carbohydrates are The Enemy. (All those lies about eating whole wheat pasta. . . who knows what “healthy” means anymore??)

I didn’t eat or cook ground beef for a couple of decades, so I was slightly revolted by the process. It was frozen in a tube that was hard to open and it bled on the counter. Ick.

Onions are also something I rarely use. I don’t like how they smell raw or during cooking or how sometimes they make my eyes water. I hacked off the amount called for, more or less, and put the rest in a ziplock bag in the freezer. I wonder if it will be useless later? Probably should have chopped it first, but I wanted to finish up.

And why did the recipe call a mix of sour cream and cream cheese “cheese sauce”? Nope, it was gloppy and got layered as plops, not sauce.

What happened to the grated mozzarella on the top?? It vanished into the 9×13” pan of “layers” once the thing was baked.

What an enormous output of energy! It took a long time, fumbling around with packages of this and that, oops, need another bowl, another pan, grab the colander, where is the grater, my hands are a mess, wash them for the umpteenth time, open another package of something—where are the scissors, nope, my hands are a mess again.

The thing about casseroles that seems so wasteful is that they have to be cooked in various steps on top of the stove and then baked in the oven. No wonder all those ‘50s housewives were on Valium.

Finally got the concoction in the oven and realized there were no vegetables for dinner. I was fed up with all that prep, so instead of making a salad, I chopped up a few fresh veggies and called it good.

So Trail Guy, AKA The Husband, was pleased with the casserole. I told him to be sure to thoroughly enjoy Husband’s Delight, because I am never making it again. I would have been a terrible housewife in the ‘50s. Probably would have taken up smoking.

If you made it to the end, here is a painting for you of a red pepper. Seems appropriate.

More photos, thoughts about Three Rivers vacation rentals

These are photos that could have been used in yesterday’s posts about what I learned in April. But since I am not working very much and Mineral King isn’t open yet, I saved some of them for today.

This white flower is a brodiaea that comes near the end of spring. Each one of those buds will pop open.

Lemon geranium is easy to start in pots, and I keep some ready to share on a regular basis. They came in handy when I needed a good ground cover for the vacation rental where I planted things last week.

While doing a bit of weeding at church, I realized that there were baby grasses of that roundy-moundy grass plant. I had just bought a new trowel, and this bowl was covering an irrigation timer, so I helped myself. Then I remembered to take a photo after we were on the way home from errands; hence the library book beneath the bowl.

My vacation rental manager/friend texted me from a nursery to ask if she should buy some society garlic. “Absolutely not!” said I. I have enough for a small island nation, right here in my herb garden.

She and I have landscaped an entire rental that began as squirrel holes and weeds. We did it on a shoestring, using plants that self-sow, rooting cuttings in dirt, rooting cuttings in water, and digging up plants all over my yard. It looks pretty great, albeit not formally landscaped. We definitely made some mistakes when buying plants, not understanding how large they might get. That’s okay—she now has someone who does mow/blow/go with occasional pruning, me for weeding, and the pair of us for transplanting.

When you live in a small town like Three Rivers, you get to know lots of people. This brings opportunities to try things, to experiment, to help friends out: hence, my “side-hustle” as a gardener.

Many people complain about vacation rentals, and it is true that there are too many in Three Rivers. “Too many” because normal people have been priced out of the market. Our town is hollowed out of actual residents—folks who put children in school, join clubs, attend churches, serve on local water boards, and lend you an egg or a can of tomato sauce in a pinch.

However, those vacation rentals are well-maintained, well-landscaped, pay their bills, don’t have barking dogs, and don’t park on the lawn. They also provide gainful employment for locals and people who come from down the hill to work (because they can’t afford to live here). Sigh.

Seven, no, Eight Things Learned in April

1. Here is a fun list of 100 ways to live better: Less Wrong (Warning: needless occasional vulgar language and some controversial suggestions with an occasional gem.)

2. The “platform” where my blog lives did a tech update again. This time it actually improved things. Now when you are a subscriber, you can see photos in your email from the blog. I wasted countless hours trying to figure out why this stopped working for some people about a year ago. Apparently it was caused by the “platform”. (It surprises me how many of my subscribers don’t know how to click on the title of the blog post in the email and go to my website to read the blog and see the photos.)

3. Sometimes I don’t want to paint*. I had a week like that in April, and it coincided with the need to pull weeds at one vacation rental and do some planting at another. It wasn’t hot, the mosquitos weren’t out, the satisfaction level was very high, and I got paid. With art, one produces without any guarantee of an income, so instant gratification is an occasional threat to the production of art.

4. Have you wondered why we are assaulted by teevee ads for prescription medicine? We aren’t doctors and can’t prescribe, so why are they telling us about this stuff? I learned that the reason is if we tell our doctor to prescribe something and (s)he doesn’t comply (imagine telling THE DOCTOR WHO KNOWS ABOUT MEDICINE what to prescribe!), then something goes wrong in our bodies which we blame on not getting that medicine, we can sue the doctor for not following our recommendation. As usual, follow the money. (Why would anyone want to be a doctor these days??)

5. It’s extra hard to find a good used car right now. Did you know that if an old car is running at all, it will probably sell for $1500? I’ve learned this because Fernando has cancer. He’ll be okay for a little while, but it is (past) time to find a car. It must be Honda or Toyota. Since I’ve owned nothing but three-pedal Honda Accords since 1981, I may need to do some mental readjusting and accept whatever I can find. (Please please, not red or black…)

6. Holland Mountain is a new name to me. It is close to my house. Why have I never heard of this before? I can’t find it on a map. Who names these places? Why do people know about this but not me when it is in my backyard??

7. Anne Lamott says “All truth is paradox.” I’m not sure what she means by this, but I think it might be similar to something I am noticing more and more. “Bury coffee grounds to enrich your soil”; “coffee grounds have caffeine which is an herbicide”. “Put crushed eggshells in the dirt beneath your tomatoes”; “Eggshells do nothing in the soil for tomatoes.“ Thus and such is likely causing your problem,” says one doctor; “Poppycock,” says another. “First prize!” declares an art contest judge; “The emperor has no clothes,” says a regular person.

8. The website called “Bookpecker” which summarized books has gone the way of all flesh. Phooey. That was helpful site, but it probably got shut down by booksellers. Or maybe there were too many people like me with a giant list of books to be read (called the TBR list) who were looking for a shortcut, and the site couldn’t make money.

Thus we conclude another month of living and learning. Thank you for joining me in a month of semi-retired life, with more soaking up spring than producing art.

*A friend said to me, “Yesterday I did nothing all day and today I realized I wasn’t finished yet.”

Working Toward a Solo Show

In August, “Around Here and Sometimes a Little Farther” will open in Tulare at the Tulare Historical Museum’s Heritage Gallery.

What is this? So glad you asked! It is another solo show of my art.

Pieces have sold since the show last fall in Exeter at CACHE, new pieces have been painted, and it is time to assess the collection. Do I have enough paintings? Is there enough of a spread of sizes, shapes, and subjects?

How do I figure this out? So glad you asked! (Have you noticed how many times an interviewee responds to a question with “great question”? I try to avoid clichés, so I made my own clichéd response.)

Trail Guy and I set up my display screens in the painting workshop and hung all the larger paintings. I made lists: how many of which subjects, how many vertical, how many horizontal, which ones need to be touched up or improved or finished, and what shall I paint next?

The two blank canvases will become Sawtooth paintings, one horizontal, and the other vertical. The vertical canvas is turned around because it has a painting on the other side, done many years ago by a friend’s daughter. She passed the canvas along to me, rightly discerning that my frugal self would say a hearty “THANK YOU!” and turn it into something else.

These look rather undignified, all squished together, crooked, some on the floor. Doesn’t matter for purposes of this evaluation session.

I wanted to go lie down, eat some chocolate, read a book, pull a few weeds, knit something, or just rock while staring out the window, but instead we schlepped all the paintings to the studio and replaced them with pencil drawings. Sometimes I can find my inner warrior and soldier through.

Are there enough? Are any too tired to show? What pieces need to be added? Do I have frames that will work or will I need to fork out money for more framing? (My framer is wonderful, in case you are interested. I take him pieces, tell him my budget, sometimes indicate a mood such as “formal” or “rustic”, tell him to make it look good and call me when it is finished. His name is Ed, and his business is Express Framing in Visalia. Tell him I sent you.)

This list is shorter than the oil list because I have many many many pencil drawings. How many? Glad you asked! A LOT!! (I don’t want to count.)

Currently I have 24 larger paintings, about 15 smaller ones, and 9 tiny (5×7”) ocean scenes that will sit on easels. That is 48 paintings, but there is a chance some of them will sell at Silver City this summer. There are two new large ones to paint (maybe more if the asphalt paver coming to repair our driveway decides he would like to barter), three to improve, and one to finish.

I will probably add about four more to the current batch of pencil drawings: another pier, another portrait, and two with some color in them.

What was so tough? It was a lot of schlepping, but that’s no biggie. Sometimes it is just hard to face reality: is my work good enough? How much work remains? Have I bitten off more than I can chew? Can I do better? Am I promoting my work enough? Does anyone care? Should I just go get a real job?

All of this thinking and planning is simply part of the business of art.

Fading Spring in Three Rivers

The old rhyme “April showers bring May flowers” isn’t exactly true in Three Rivers. Here it is more that April showers prolong March flowers.

The turkeys are very busy right now. Too bad we don’t know where they lay their eggs; on the other hand, if you found a turkey egg, it might have a partially formed turkey inside. Guess I’ll take a pass on that situation.

These wildflowers are so predictably fabulous on the slope behind our house, and then we hire someone to weedeat them in early May. Weedeating would be a way to earn a steady income around here in the spring.

I walked across the middle fork of the Kaweah River last week. This is looking upstream (the left photo) and downstream (bet you can guess which photo) from that large bridge. It is the road that we call “North Fork”, in spite of the fact that it initially crosses the middle fork.

We walked in a new place last week. It was hot and dusty, so we didn’t go far. The green is hanging on by its fingernails.

The hill with 3 bumps is called Blossom Peak, unless you are a purist. Then you call one side “Blossom” and the other “Britten”. The details and precision of which bump represents which name eludes me.

The distant peak on the right is Case Mountain. Lots of people say they have hiked Case Mt. or sometimes they claim to have climbed it. If this is so, they went about 20 miles round trip, trespassing almost the entire way, and going through 7-9 private gates. Just want to set the record straight about that. I recently learned that a peak in that area (more like a tall steep hill) is called Holland Mountain. This is a new name for me, and I need to study a map to understand where it is. I love maps, learning new things, and knowing all I can about this county that’s been my home for 65-1/2 years.

I thought that perhaps this was a sketchy photo of the river in terms of painting, but since I had plenty of film (OF COURSE I AM KIDDING—film?? what’s film?), I took the shot anyway. All those stringy wild grape vines, the indecipherable brush. . . nope.

Thus we conclude another peek into Three Rivers in the spring. I want it to be spring forever.

More About Business with a Friend

Two of my friend’s new paintings were just right on her wall. The third didn’t fit.

She took me up on my offer to exchange, so I put 3 new paintings in the pick-em-up truck (because Fernando is under the weather) and headed to her house.

This is the one she sent back.

Choices are good, and seeing the pieces in place is especially helpful. She said she was hoping for a painting that filled the space vertically, so these are the paintings I took to her.

She had expressed an interest in the painting with oranges, hills, and Alta Peak; I thought it might look good with the view looking east off Rocky Hill beneath the square painting to give needed height.

The winner? Well, me, because sales are always welcomed. But that’s not what you are wondering.

She chose the Oak Grove Bridge to hang at the top of her staircase!

I tried to include photos, but the ones texted from her phone to my phone to my laptop just don’t cooperate.