I had a little encouragement and companionship while working on the regreening of the Mineral King mural. It wasn’t the normal type, with questions and requests for business cards. One of the most difficult parts of painting a mural for me is that the brushes don’t hold their shape. They get clogged up by paint, […]
Unfading a Mural
The primary colors of red, blue, and yellow plus white are how I mix colors to paint murals. The paints are supposed to be highly pigmented and lightfast, but yellow ALWAYS fades first. Since green is made from blue and yellow, greens turn to grayish blues. Two years ago I repainted the big Mineral King […]
Work That Doesn’t Feel Like Work
In my normally slow month of December, I finally had the chance to work on my upcoming book Mineral King Wildflowers: Common Names. It seems to be cooking along just fine, and then something goes wackadoodle with InDesign or the template ceases to do its templatish magic or it takes hours and hours to resize all […]
Lucky on Amazon?
On Friday’s post I said that the only way to get a copy of The Cabins of Mineral King, by Jane Coughran and me, published by Cabinart Books in 1998, is to get lucky on eBay or on Amazon. Then I decided to look for myself. Nothing on eBay, and this is what was on Amazon. […]
Almost Mineral King
One day last week, Trail Guy and I drove up to the Conifer Gate (the upper gate) on the Mineral King Road so he could replace the combination lock that allows cabin folks to access their cabins in the winter. That is the elevation where the black oaks are, and they can be so glowingly […]
One Last Peek at Mineral King For the Fall
Trail Guy and our friend went to Mineral King one last time. They closed the Honeymoon Cabin, which serves as a museum for the Mineral King Preservation Society, did a few final chores at our cabin, and took a walk. I stayed home and finished a pencil commission, which I cannot show you because the […]
Summer Sales, Part Two
Did you forget that I was showing you the Mineral King oil paintings that sold in Silver City over the summer? Here is the other half: As before, the sizes shown here are a little whacky in terms of how they are relative to one another. I was shocked by the stellar rise of the […]
Closing the Cabin in Mineral King
We usually choose a weekend in the middle of October to close our cabin for the season. The date is not weather based, but instead it is based on what fits our schedule, that of our neighbors, and how badly we just want to put away our duffle bags for the year and STAY HOME. […]
Summer Sales
Since 2010, the Silver City Store has been selling my oil paintings. It began as a tentative experiment, with no confidence that visitors up that rough road would want to spend their hard-earned dollars on original oil paintings rather than (or in addition to) tee shirts and post cards. The highest number of paintings that sold […]
Quick Trip to Mineral King
Happy Birthday, Anne!! Trail Guy and I had plans for 2 more stays in Mineral King before closing the cabin. Then he got a viral infection of the upper respiratory tract so we adjusted our plans. Then I got it. Well, bummer, but I still had to make a trip up the hill to photograph […]