Gift Exchange

One of my long-time drawing students took as many art classes as he could cram in for several years at the local junior college. (Sorry, not sorry – “community college”) He completely immersed himself in art until suddenly, he was finished. Done. His interests moved into mechanical subjects, and currently he is immersing himself in all things automotive.

A few weeks ago he asked me if I’d like to have his oil painting supplies. REALLY??  Yes, please! What a generous gift!

So, I decided to paint a gift for him. 

It isn’t quite finished because it needs me to draw with my paintbrush in order to reach the level of detail to do justice to his Karmann Ghia.

Yes, I still have paintings to finish for my upcoming show, Still Here. 

But, in spite of those necessary paintings for the show, I am still. . .

. . .using pencils, oil paint, and murals to make art that people can understand of places and things they love.

February Was Too Short

My first favorite month is too short. I have more thoughts and photos to share than we had days on the calendar. Because it is so beautiful, it is hard to keep my feet planted in front of the easels. When Trail Guy asked me if I wanted to go for a walk in the middle of the day, I said yes.

The wildflowers have begun. (Yes, I am fully aware that the first photo is daffodils; thank you for your concern over a potential error on my part.)

SCARLET MONKEY FLOWER?!? I’ve only seen this one other time. It was along the Mineral King Road, maybe halfway up, in July 2012. (Yes, it was a memorable sighting, but I had to look up the date.) It was much smaller than this version.

Popcorn and fiddleneck are standard early season wildflowers. They are sort of boring, except when they first appear, a harbinger of the carnival ahead.

8 Things Learned in February

  1. It is possible to teach drawing or at least help established drawing students via email.
    “Rocky”, a pencil drawing by my anonymous student AKA “C”
  2. Paul Buxman is an artist from Dinuba here in Tulare County. He is also a farmer, and the subjects he chooses really appeal to me, although his style does not. He is a very accomplished painter, and speaks with humble authority about living and painting this area. We have never met, although I have read and heard about him for years. There is a great interview with him on the Arts Visalia page here.
  3. Blog reader and virtual friend Marjie sent me a recipe for persimmon bars when she learned that I don’t like persimmon cookies. I cut the sugar in half, and they were excellent! Who knew? I usually reduce the sugar when I bake by 1/4 or 1/3. I wonder if I can slash it even further, but this will have to wait until next persimmon season.
  4. Vinyl Composition Tile (VCT) used to be cheap flooring; now it is expensive, and there are very few solid colors to choose from. Several, nay, many cracked tiles in my navy and white checkered kitchen floor need replacing, but navy is discontinued. I suggested to the flooring expert that I just use red and let it be a random pattern. He said, “We call that a ‘scatter pattern'”; I said, “WAIT! It can’t have a name, because I just invented it!”
  5. More flooring news: if you have a cement slab foundation, it might make alkali pebbles beneath your linoleum or VCT. These pebbles will grow like stalagmites, lifting, cracking, and making holes in your flooring material. You cannot prevent this. Twenty-two years is considered a good long run. There will be no scatter pattern in my kitchen; there will need to be an entirely new floor, and it will not be VCT this time.
  6. I found a gardening blog by Anne Wareham who wrote a book called “The Bad Tempered Gardener”. She lives in Wales and keeps a garden that people pay to visit, along with writing for gardening magazines. I wonder if anything I read by her will translate to the Central Valley of California. . . prolly not. Too bad her book isn’t in our county library. Her subtle humor in her blog posts and photo captions feel very comfortable to me. An added bonus: she used to be a knitter – how does one stop being a knitter??
  7. Most of the murals in Exeter have hidden items. One of the earlier ones was painted by a friend of mine from high school, and he hid a Monopoly shoe. A few years ago, I could not find it so I emailed him for help. He couldn’t remember where it was either, and the brochures from the Exeter Chamber of Commerce didn’t even mention it. When my cousins visited a couple of weeks ago, together we walked the murals, looking for hidden items. Suddenly, I saw it! It is quite faded, but it is still vaguely visible in the Waterman mural.
  8. It is possible to paint on concrete stepping stones. I used some leftover exterior white paint for 2 primer coats, and then 2 coats of exterior latex for the brighter colors. It was easier than doing tile mosaics, easier than pouring wet cement into molds and tapping in some tchotchkes, and will be easier to maintain.

Odd Job

Sometimes I help my friend with her vacation rentals, specifically in the yards and gardens. (What is the difference? “Garden” sounds nicer, but when I do the yardwork, I think of it as “yardening”.) 

Recently we laid some fake grass (“artificial turf” is the real name) for a place to put up a children’s play set. We are figuring out how to conceal the edges, putting down weed barrier and planting all sorts of things around the “grass”. 

Next, we will add stepping stones to lead from the front of the house to the side area with the playset (remember when there were monkey-bars, swings, slides, and merry-go-rounds, all separate pieces of equipment, with asphalt beneath? How did we survive such barbarism??)

Because we want it to be enticing to kids, we want stepping stones that are inviting. After kicking around all sorts of ideas, we chose painted cement circles. This was a frugal decision, because we are careful with the home owner’s money.

Trail Guy set up a temporary table for painting the stepping stones in the sunshine.

I have many gallons of paint for a primer coat.

The paint dried fast, so I was able to put two coats on within an hour and a half.

My friend and I bought small cans of blue, red, and yellow so I can mix many colors. We learned that with small cans, the strongest brightest colors aren’t possible. All the tint needed to make the colors bright would cause a little can to overflow. So, we got the brightest primary colors that the hardware store could mix for us.

As a professed color junkie, I just dove into the colors. Our ideas were many, but thinking about the time involved, we settled on one solid step per color, and the rest could be decorated a little more elaborately.

I began with the first design, an obvious idea for February 14, the day I painted.

Then I just kept going. I painted the 6 very solidly, and messed around with blending colors on top of the other 6. It wasn’t particularly successful, but it was a fun way to experiment and get a base coat on the white primer.

This is really fun. When we figure out how to decorate the non-solids, I hope I remember to photograph them and blog about it. And if they look good leading through the “garden” to the “grass”, I might show you that too.

It might be a bit of an odd job, but I continue to. . .

make art people can understand of places and things they love for prices that won’t scare them.

P.S. Is this art??

Peculiar Sights

Strange and vaguely interesting although peculiar sights have crossed my path lately.  Before I show you these, there is some confusion about “site” versus “sight”. A site is a place; a sight is something to see. I saw these things, so they are sights, at various sites.

Hey Central California artist, will you just land that plane already?

Yeah, no. 

Have you noticed how many people use this absurd expression? Now that I have alerted you, you will hear that the airwaves are filthy with this strange verbal juxtaposition.

Are you going to show us or not??

Just having fun in February, my first favorite month.

February Distractions

February is my favorite month. Wait – it is my First Favorite. I also love March and April. In February we can get brilliant sun or cold storms, the green shows up, wildflowers begin, and fruit trees pop into bloom in orchards down the hill. I would like February to have 31 days and August to only have 28. (Just 14 would be fine too.)

February brings distractions.

I’ve been weeding baby poppies, hoping to give them a chance to go bonkers this spring.

A friend requested some help laying artificial turf at one of the vacation rentals that she manages. (This house)

Then a friend let me come by to pick some Mello Gold (super sweet grapefruit looking citrus), I had a package to mail, and a book was FINALLY ready for me at the library. My vacation rental manager friend and I have plans to make some stepping stones for one of her yards, another place needs some ferocious weeding, Trail Guy and I like to take walks, several friends like to come to Three Rivers to go “hiking” with me (they call it that but I don’t take a pack with water or food so it is just a walk), and I have a big knitting project on the needles.

Maybe February needs to be 40 days long.

Sunny Afternoon

Sometimes, I just take time off. In spite of the upcoming art show Still Here rescheduled from January 2022 to April 2021, it was too clear and beautiful to just stay indoors to work one afternoon last week.

Trail Guy and I headed to Lake Kaweah on the lower end of Three Rivers or the upper end of Lemon Cove, which is still very low and not very green. However, it is spacious, outdoors, and not crowded. Sometimes I engage in the pointless mental exercise of trying to decide if it is an ugly beauty or a beautiful ugliness down there. 

Across the river there were 3 cowboys on horseback with a dog, all trying to convince a big black bull to get out of the river and go back to his home on the range. I was slow on the shutter so you’ll have to take my word for the bull.

This is Slick Rock. 

Mustard in bloom and cockleburs up close; Alta Peak in the distance with new snow.

We often find a peculiar sight or two on the lake bottom.

What? Let’s look a little more closely.

PVC pipes, with holes in them, spray painted with brown and green, with a concrete weight on the bottom. I give up.

If we could tip this upright, you could see it is some sort of a pedestal. There used to be homes and a motel down here, so there are all sorts of leftovers from that era.

Enough! Back to work, Central California Artist.

Goofing Off

I have some very dear longtime friends from the northwest who decided to escape the cold, wet, and gray for a week in January. Well, oops. During their visit, we got the most rain and cold that we’ve had yet this winter. I didn’t work while they were here, and surprisingly, I didn’t take many photos either. My friend (since age 17) and I decided that we look like 10 miles of a bad road, so it didn’t really cross our minds to take a picture together, until we realized that the next time we are together, we will probably look worse.

We found some grapes while poking around the river – sour sour sour!

This little waterway was completely dry 2 weeks ago. Wow, we are so thankful for the precipitation.

It is getting green. I love green.

We got permission to pick oranges in Lemon Cove on their way out of town. That is a privilege I never take for granted or take lightly.

The sun came out the afternoon that they left.

The sun was out the week before they arrived too.

It was a great week of goofing off. Now, I have a show to prepare for.

But wait! There’s more! I suddenly noticed a peculiar sight along the highway. A dinosaur with a Rudolph nose and lights? Why didn’t I notice this in December?

P.S. Nope, not gonna show you the selfie we took together. If I was inclined toward exhibitionism, I’l be on one of those social media sewers.

Learned in January

  1. My friends don’t think of me first as an artist; this means I am not very self-promotional, which can be both a good thing and a not-so-good thing.
  2. Quesadilla Gorilla is not just in Visalia and Three Rivers; it is also in Fresno and Hanford and is raising money to expand by selling bonds. How in the world do people learn how to do this high finance stuff?? 
  3. Sharpshin hawks are creepy cannibals; one keeps getting other birds right in front of our kitchen window.
  4. Nosocomial means “in hospital”; sometimes illness is spread nosocomial. I hope none of my blog readers ever needs to know this word.
  5. Tucker, my black cat, is a digger. I was burying kitchen waste in the herb garden, so I dug a hole, dumped the stuff in, turned away to rinse out the container, and then when I turned back, Tucker was covering the pile up for me. I actually filmed him doing this, but don’t think it will work on the blog. Besides, there are plenty of cat videos out there on the World Wide Web. (Maybe not one covering up garbage.)
  6. I went 30 days without sugar or sweets. The results: both a sense of accomplishment and one of deprivation. 
  7. Horse bangs are called a “forelock”. I wonder why people forelocks are called “bangs” instead of a “forelock”. (A person could bang her head on the wall trying to figure this one out.) In Britain, bangs are called a “fringe”; I learned this back in the days of Princess Diana.
  8. When you have tech troubles, it is helpful to engage in activities that cannot be accomplished with a computer. I had a bad couple of tech trouble days, and was helped immensely by Apple, but still took great comfort in knitting, baking bread, and yardening. Try those things on a computer, you Virtual Digital Techie Robots.
  9. Bears might be able to wear a size 4 in Crocs.

Everything is Hard

Brace yourself for a long post with thoughts about life and how it has changed in my 61 years.

Ever noticed how anything you might want to accomplish is hard? All the possible places for things to get hung up, snagged, delayed, misunderstood, broken, unavailable are endless. It is a wonder any of us get anywhere on time, keep ourselves together, keep moving forward. Look at these examples:

A. We need a new water heater and want to switch from electric to propane. My current favorite contractor said that he could do the job. That was in August. The number of obstacles he has encountered since then would just flatten anyone. I kept calling. When we finally connected and set a date, it didn’t happen. I learned that he was waiting on the plumber, whose truck broke down. And who knows how many obstacles that poor guy encountered? Plumber #2 couldn’t get the right brand of water heater, so on and on it goes.

B. Two years ago we switched from Huge & Rude Telephone Company to Spectrum. It took many weeks, many hours on the phone with both companies, and no business telephone for 6 weeks. (In case you are wondering, the internet is great, the teevee selection not as good but the quality of the picture much improved, and the landline okay but it cannot call the cell phone.)

C. A customer requested that I buy Microsoft Word to be better able to help him (I am editing his book). Microsoft’s chat feature didn’t work, and the phone number didn’t reach a real person. I just bought it anyway without getting my concerns addressed, and then I learned that my Mac operating system wouldn’t run it. I had to upgrade my operating system but couldn’t because my computer didn’t have enough available memory. Many calls to Apple (all were quite helpful) eventually said that I had to erase my computer in order to install the new OS. I hoped that the external hard drive where I back up my laptop actually contained the information and wasn’t just a dummy. (Yep, I prayed over that mess.) Now that my system is up to date, neither my scanner nor my printer will work with my computer any more. 

These are just a few examples of how complicated our world has gotten. You probably have many examples of your own.

In the olden days these things were true: checks were free from the bank; grocery bags were free at the markets; places that sent a bill would provide an envelope (even stamped, in some cases!); the newspaper kept their opinions to the Opinion Page; everyone was allowed to have a fireplace and a lawn; someone else would put gas in your tank and even wash your windshield; you could walk into an airport, pay for a flight, and board, all within an hour’s time; real people answered the telephone at work and at home; you could actually see people’s faces when out in public.

I am so thankful to be able to just head out to the painting studio, and begin. The only obstacles to getting work done are finding the right reference photos (a large obstacle when doing custom art for people with vague ideas of what they want), the sun too bright or too weak to mix colors correctly, the inability to see my own errors, or Jackson biting my leg because he feels deprived of food. (The neighbor’s barking dog isn’t an obstacle, only a nuisance.)

Let’s just look at a calm photo and try to be thankful for the moments of ease and peace that remain (NO! DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT LISTING ALL THAT THE VIRUS HAS STOLEN!!)