Mineral King—the Season has Begun

For those new to my blog, Mineral King is an area of Sequoia National Park where I spend copious amounts of time in the summer. Next Friday I will provide a more in depth explanation.

Today’s post is a long one. You’ve been warned. . .

The road is under construction, so it is a mess, and there is a schedule to follow. This is what we saw at the bottom of the road.

We stopped by Silver City to deliver paintings and cards.

I’m given quite a bit of leeway in placing the pieces and actually took my own nails, easels, and hammer.

That’s my design on the tee shirt in the background.
This is that tall narrow space for which I paint something tall and narrow each season.
The most popular subject—sold a 6×6” version of it on the weekend.

Shortly after arriving at the cabin, we headed back to a friend’s cabin with an enormous tree blocking her driveway. The men didn’t have big enough chainsaws but eliminated some parts to create a path around, carried some of her gear up to the cabin for her, and supplied a hand-truck so she could get things back down to her car later. “Did you see Tracy’s tree?” was a question we heard many times over our stay.

She had some good flowers in her driveway.

Very very tiny unknowns.
Five spot is the name of these cuties. Those leaves in the center look like a cactus. What in the world??

Hiking Buddy and I hoofed it back up the road to our cabins.

I had a nice afternoon of watching the daffodils and untangling yarn from a sweater that fit me wrong.

Our after-dinner walk was beautiful, but my camera is fairly inadequate for this sort of lighting.

However, it is perfectly fine for this sort.

The next day was busy for the men as they assisted cabin neighbors in various opening tasks. However, I had time to continue watching daffodils bloom.

Hiking Buddy and I ventured up to Spring Creek to see if the bridge had been installed yet. Nope.

When the men were available, we took a walk together.

Some of the cottonwoods had quite a few broken branches, and one was swinging precariously. The guys tried to dislodge the widow-maker, but it survived (and so did the guys—no widows were made.)

Crystal Creek is running well, very wide and shallow (sort of like Facebook).

There was more time in the afternoon for unraveling that sweater and watching the daffodils.

More walks (I am unsure about hiking with my peripheral neuropathy this year. . . more will be revealed, but for now, walks are fine with me.)

These are the tiniest blue lips I’ve ever seen! All I had so that you can appreciate the size is this chapstick (okay, Carmex, but who knows what that is?) in my pocket.

It was chilly in the evenings so we gathered with friends around this ring of fire. (Someone besides me was wearing Crocs—mine show at the bottom).

Look at the daffodils just 3 days later. Yellow wildflowers are a little bit boring to me, but daffodils are neither wild nor boring.

It wasn’t a hot weekend, and the drive down was quite beautiful. Almost all the wildflowers were yellow, and I wasn’t bored. Bush poppy, flannel bush, blazing star, monkey flowers—all yellow. The bush poppies are prolific and abundant. I didn’t photograph the areas where they cover the hillside, because it isn’t prudent to stop the Botmobile on steep slopes or blind corners or when the road is just one lane or if someone is on our six and there is no turnout.

The lupine are hanging on too.

Thus we conclude our very long post about Mineral King. Next week I will show some Mineral King art (because this is my business blog and I came here to earn a living—any questions?) and explain for my new far-away friends a little bit about this place we locals love so dearly.

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.

Sources of Inspiration

Today’s post is about beauty, because April is beautiful around here. Color and light is a source of inspiration for paintings. (Detail and light inspires my pencil drawings.)

On my way down to work at the Mural Gallery I stopped in the usual turnout for a photo of the lake.

On the way home, I drove over Rocky HIll and took many photos. This is a small sample, and there are lots of painting ideas here.

Any one of these photos could be turned into a painting. There are even more photos that I didn’t show you.

My Favorite Things (as in Subject Matter)

When I started my art business, I named it “Cabin Art”, or perhaps “Cabinart*”, because my favorite subject matter was architecture, mostly cabins.

As my skill and confidence grew, my favorite subject to draw (and eventually paint) was the Oak Grove Bridge.

Graphite on paper, SOLD
Oak Grove Bridge #28, 24×30”, oil on wrapped canvas, $1800

During a particularly wet winter after several dry ones, I became enamored with rushing water.

Steady Stream, 11×14”, graphite on paper, $400 (unless it already sold. . . there’s a little story there.)

Next, it was orange groves with foothills and mountains in the distance.

In the Orchard, oil on wrapped canvas, 11×14”, $300

After a handful of years of painting multiple variations on this theme, I seem to be transitioning into beach scenes.

More on that later. . . Monday is time for a monthly Learned post.

*For a typo-psycho, I certainly am ambivalent about the spelling of my own studio name.

BUT WAIT! ONE MORE THING FOR YOU! MY FRIEND HANNAH IS OPENING A NEW SHOP IN THREE RIVERS!

This and That: Wandering Around Three Rivers

There is an excellent museum in Three Rivers, and parked in front are some old fire trucks plus this tow truck. I had to wait for a couple of friends stuck at one of the many ongoing lengthy roadblocks, so I wandered around with my inferior phone camera.

On a recent walk, I took this photo because it reminded me of my painting titled Swinging Oak. You can see it below with a convenient link for purchasing from my website. It’s just business. (I’m tryna earn a living here!)

Swinging Oak, oil on wrapped canvas, 12×16″, $375 (plus tax in California) Available here

Where’s the other chair?

Why am I not showing you any paintings or drawings? Because I am spending most of my time in the studio, editing another book for another writer on another topic.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Mental Acrobatics While Painting

A good friend, mentor, and wise man asked me if I have a relationship with my paintings. I wasn’t sure what he was seeking, so I just told him what goes through my mind while painting. Then I looked at the email conversation and thought, “Hmmm, this might be an interesting blog post”.

Just a typical view on a morning walk in Three Rivers. Nope, not down those steps to the river—just passing by on the road.

When I start a painting, I have photos to look at, and I copy what is there while also trying to improve on it. Move a tree, brighten a color, ignore a tangle of branches, don’t get too weird about making those rocks or cracks in the cliff perfect, increase the contrast, make that insignificant part blurry or leave it out. . . on and on and on, a continual mental conversation about how to depict a scene realistically but cleaner than real life. Real life is pretty messy, and I try to clean it up. 

Often I think a painting is finished when it isn’t. It takes awhile of studying it, sometimes a couple of years, before realizing that it can be improved. This isn’t improvement to make it look more like the photo, but improvement to make it more appealing to the viewer.

A very popular place to walk in Exeter—and the way we prefer to drive home when the hills are green. I used to walk this in the olden days when I was training for some very long walks, before my feet were numb.

My method of painting is to layer and layer, over and over, tightening the details, correcting the proportions, remixing the colors with each layer. Usually when I start, it is very sloppy, getting better with each pass over the canvas. This is similar to writing, where you tell yourself the story in the first draft. Then as you edit and rewrite, you refine your words, rearrange your paragraphs, realize that something can be misunderstood so you correct that piece, decide that something sounds foggy or stupid or unnecessary so you delete that sentence or phrase. Then you think it is done, until you look at it the next day or the next week or after you hit “Publish” and WHAM! THERE’S A TYPO! Or you wonder “why did I say that??” Or you think, “Nobody cares, why did I write this?”

A friend and I went boldly trespassing through some orange groves on a walk a week or two ago.

I’ve never thought about it as a relationship with a painting. It is a project, separate from me. I talk myself through it, talking to myself rather than to the painting. Sure, occasionally I’ve said to a painting, “Buddy, you are toast!” just before painting it out entirely.

But the conversation is entirely to myself—“WHAT are you doing?? Stop licking the canvas! Choose the right color, get it carefully on the best brush for the job, and decide what you are doing before you just dab and jab. Okay, that is looking good, so now do it again over here. Your brush is too small and this will take forever. Whoa, I thought that part was finished and it looks really weak. Oh great, now you’ve missed entire pieces of the conversation on the podcast you are listening to because you were trying to mix a better green.”

So now you know what goes through my brain while I am painting.

Contemplating matters of consequence

With drawing, things are much easier, more automatic, and it is easier to talk to other people, or listen to a podcast while drawing. But I don’t feel as if I have a relationship with my drawings either. Many years ago I had to learn to keep emotional distance, to stop viewing them as something fabulous and irreplaceable or it would have been too hard to sell them. 

And here is your reward for reading to the end of this very long post.

Some friends went to Mineral King in January and shared this photo with me. Now I am sharing it with you. (Thank you, KC!)

Walking in Nice Places

Let’s just enjoy some photos today, no chitchat about going to town, no stressing over prices, no struggling with plein air painting.

That pair of red chairs is so insignificant in a photo but calls to me every time I look across the canyon.
Twenty-six years ago when I walked in this place, it was hard to find the trails. Now everyone who walks here seems to know the place because it has been splashed all over the world wide web.
At least now there are good bridges over the creek.
This would make a nice painting. Not plein air, at least not for me. Too far to schlepp the gear, and the light wouldn’t hold. Too many people hovering too.

Another walk, another lake, in another town.

Peach trees in bloom in mid-January!!
This is one weird plant.

A Walk on the Lake Bottom

Trail Guy and I went to Lake Kaweah— “The Lake” —for a walk. It was a crystal clear day.

All I know is Moro Rock and Alta Peak, not the snow-covered mountains on the left.
The river was reflecting the sky, and Castle Rocks are peeking behind on the distant right side.
The last time we walked at the lake, the road was entirely buried in sand, several feet thick. It has taken awhile, but finally the road has been cleared, but not all the way.
Mustard is the earliest wildflower in the foothills.
Cockleburs are horrible. I think they are native to this area. They don’t mind getting drowned each year—it seems to be what causes them to thrive.
This is looking downstream toward the dam. The lake is very low, to make room for the winter rains and spring snowmelt, always a situation we hope takes place.
This isn’t a very pretty walk, but the blue of the river takes the edge off of all that grayish brown.
This is where we turned around. After studying it for awhile, we concluded that the lake is slowly filling up.
When heading back to the parking lot, it occurred to me that this could be a nice place to do a little plein air painting.

Stay tuned! I might do some painting here soon with my friend Krista who needs to do a few examples of plein air painting in order to qualify for a job. Like me she is a studio painter, but unlike me, she wants to expand into plein air. I have more experience at it than she does, so I can help her, we can hang out together, and maybe one day, I will actually improve my plein air skills in spite of my less than stellar attitude about it.

Walking in Three Rivers

Walking isn’t as easy as it used to be. I walk shorter distances more slowly than I used to, wearing Crocs instead of these shoes, which I now have listed on eBay.

Until the time change, my friend and I walked in the dark. Sometimes it felt adventuresome, as if we were getting away with something. On the days when her schedule isn’t tight, we still go 4-5 miles, although that’s nothing compared to when we trained together for a 1/2-marathon. Still, we are happy that we can walk and can do so in places without traffic, traffic lights, or sidewalks.

In the predawn light
During daylight hours
In the predawn light
During daylight hours

One day recently, Trail Guy and I poked along our street where he pointed out a peculiar sight on our neighbor’s lot.

Not real, mighty peculiar, and completely without an explanation.

I found a small sparkly on the ground, which I ended up securing to the fence of the former day care at the Presbyterian Church.

While admiring the view from the Catholic church, I wondered what the bright red was in the distance. It most likely is a truly spectacularly bright tree. We weren’t so fortunate when we chose our own Chinese Pistache trees, nor when they created volunteers on our lot.

I’ve always admired this barn across the highway, and being November, I also admired some red trees in the distance.

Walking more slowly and going shorter distances does increase one’s awareness of the surroundings. That is a good trait for an artist to cultivate.

P.S. Yeppers, two churches in our neighborhood, neither one “ours”.

SIMPLY HOME

Walnut Orchard, 10×10″, $200

CACHE Gallery hours are Fridays 1:30-4:00, Saturdays 10:00-4:00, Sundays noon-4:00.

Tuesday, November 12, 6:30-7:30, I will give a demo/talk called How To Draw at CACHE. It is full.