Cabin Life, Chapter Twenty-two (Finale)

Cabin Life: Final Thoughts

Someone’s Colorado cabin –definitely not small, rustic or rude

This is a backcountry cabin somewhere in Montana.

This rest of this post features drawings of Wilsonia cabins, where I spent 4 summers learning about that cabin community and discovering many common themes to the Mineral King community.

There are three distinct parts to cabin-ness:

  1. The building itself – small, rustic, basic, simple, often without electronic amenities. (But wait! What about the cabin pictured above?)
  2. The setting – rural, semi-secluded, in the mountains, taking an effort to get to (But wait! Have you ever been up Highway 180 to Wilsonia? And do these cabins look semi-secluded to you?)

     

A Wilsonia road

 

 

 

A Wilsonia neighborhood

The culture—slower, focused on people instead of technology; a place to play, recreate and relax, mostly outside; a place where meals and fireplaces become events in and of themselves; returning to nostalgic pastimes either of our youth or of some idealized youth of our parents and grandparents.

 

Outdoor dining is a big part of cabin life.

 

Napping is a regular method of relaxing at a cabin.

 

See? Outdoor dining area

 

Even outdoor cooking!

Fireplaces are a huge part of cabin culture.

 

Eat and run??

It seems that the culture part is the strongest determining factor of cabin life. Some of our cabin neighbors gathered in another location for several summers, due to illness of one of their group. One of them told me, “We do Mineral King things in Seattle, and Mineral King is present with us there.” (I probably paraphrased it beyond all recognition – Forgive me, Sawtooth Six!)

Thus, we conclude our 2023 series on Cabin Life. (unless I think of something else)

P.S. Most of the drawings in this post are part of the book The Cabins of Wilsonia, available here.

P.P.S. I can draw your cabin because. . .

. . . using pencils, oil paints, and murals, I make art you can understand, of places and things you love, for prices that won’t scare you.

Cabin Life, Chapter Two

Slower Pace

What in the world do people do at a rustic cabin up a difficult road in a place without electricity?

We slow down. We sleep more—go to bed earlier, sleep later (the sun doesn’t hit the cabin until around 8:30 a.m.), and some of us take naps. Could be the elevation, could be that it is cooler and there isn’t a great need to get up early to beat the heat.

We linger over coffee, usually while listening to the radio. (Remember those?)

The old wood stove provides heat until the sunshine hits; then the cabin doors get opened to the outside.

This stove is now history, because the oven didn’t work, and one time it tried to kill us. But that’s a digression, one I might share with you later.

In summary, at the cabin, we slow down. Or, as Trail Guy has often said, “We contemplate matters of consequence.”

Sold in Spring 2023

If you are getting this post in your email, go to the internet and type in jana botkin dot net (type it in computer style, not the way it is written here).

Sales have been slow. I am not defining “spring”, precisely, and it isn’t over yet. However, I am not producing very much: just editing and formatting 2 different books, teaching drawing lessons, communicating occasionally with the folks on 2 different pairs of murals, and wondering if there will be any reason to paint towards selling at the Silver City Store this coming summer.

 

Lest you think I am bored, your Central California artist is never bored. I am yardening, meeting up with an old friend from high school, cleaning out closets and rooms at church, yardening some more, reading, knitting, walking with my neighbor, and yardening (in case you were wondering.)

Winter Cabin

This cabin burned. I don’t know where it was or who owned it. The customer provided the photo and requested the drawing as a gift for the cabin owner. I haven’t heard the outcome. I feel fairly confident that the cabin owner won’t know about me or my blog.

P.S. If you recognize this cabin, shhhhh. It is meant to be a surprise.

Three Rivers Post Office

When it was time to mail the cabin drawing to the customer, I packaged it. Trail Guy came out to the studio to offer his delivery services, and I was delighted to not have to interrupt my work with a trip to the Post Office. Yes, I know it is only 3-4 miles away, but in the summers, my work days are limited because I keep going to Mineral King instead of keeping my feet planted in front of the easels. So, I value my work time and appreciate not having to do my own errands.

Trail Guy returned from the Post Office with the receipt and an explanation of why it cost $18 to send a piece of paper to San Diego – had to buy a box, pay for insurance, etc. And “piece of paper” isn’t meant to discount the value of an original pencil drawing, but essentially, to the post office, it was a highly insured piece of paper packaged carefully in an overpriced box.

He turned toward the counter in the painting workshop, picked up a taped-together bundle of cardboard and said, “What is this?”

Ahem. That would be the drawing that I thought he had just mailed.

When I got back up off the floor from laughing, I emailed my customer to tell her to expect a box of cardboard, minus her drawing before actually receiving the drawing.

Later that afternoon, I went to the Post Office with the actual drawing. The clerk retrieved the box from the back, we opened it, inserted the drawing, and she taped it back up. No new packaging, no new payments. It was in time to go out with that day’s mail.

I LOVE THE POST OFFICE IN THREE RIVERS!!

This is the Kaweah Post Office, not the Three Rivers Post Office. The unframed original is available for $200. Interested? Give me a pair of minutes to look for it because I can’t find it right now. What else would you expect from someone who mails empty boxes to customers?

 

Pencil Reminiscing, Part Eleven

This is the final part of our Pencil Reminiscing series. This last set of pencil notecards is Mineral King again. This one was done near the end of the last century, after I figured out how to handle the textures of landscape views. I don’t remember where this set falls in the sequence of notecard sets, but it seems fitting to conclude this series of posts with Mineral King.

These views still look the same today. Well, not TODAY, but last summer, and hopefully the summer of 2020, after all the snow melts.

Hockett Meadow, Two Pencil Drawings

The customer allowed me to put color in the flag, a technique that I am very partial to. I added smoke, scanned it, and did the Photoshop clean-up.

As I was adding the grassy meadow to the foreground, I was thinking about the first time I drew the Hockett Meadow Ranger Station. It was part of a notecard set called “Backcountry Structures”.

Back in the olden days (in the 1980s), people used pens to handwrite notes in cursive, put them in envelopes, address them, LICK a stamp to put on the envelope, and then place into a real mailbox for people in other parts of the country to receive. 

How quaint. Those were definitely kinder, gentler, slower, more personal times.

Now, hold onto your hats, Dear Blog Readers, because I am going to show you something frightening. 

Your Central California artist needs to keep reminding herself that it is good to be humble.

Growth is good.

People were very kind in the olden days and hadn’t learned all that anonymous internet rude behavior yet.

If you bought art from me back then, THANK YOU!!

Another Secret Cabin Drawing

How “secret” is something on the World Wide Web? 

The one who isn’t supposed to see the drawing doesn’t know about my blog, so we’re safe. (also true for the drawing shown on this post)

Working from photos I took before my customer was even born showed me the upper window with the shutter opened.
On the table: I worked on this all day on First Saturday December in between visitors to the studio.
Almost finished, except for all that grassy foreground to figure out first.

I put in the grass, thought it was finished, scanned it, did the Photoshop clean-up, emailed it to the customer, and then I remembered that he asked me to have smoke coming out of the chimney. 

Well, oops. 

Tomorrow I’ll show you the finished drawing, along with something that might drop your jaw.

Mineral King Cabin Pencil Drawings For Sale Now

In the last century, I began drawing people’s cabins in pencil while I lived in a cabin. These were mostly in and around Mineral King. My business name, Cabinart, was born at that time.

Houk, page 119, 8-5/8×6″, $52


 

About ten years later, my friend Jennifer suggested that I make a book of drawings. Because this was all before  print-on-demand,  Amazon, assisted self-publishing, and all those other nifty tools, I called my cabin neighbor and friend Jane Coughran for help. She was a picture editor for Time-Life Books, and was thrilled to join me, as long as I allowed her to include historical photos. That decision took me about half of a second, and together in 1998, we published The Cabins of Mineral King.

Goldman-Davis, page 73, 9-1/2 x 6-5/8″, $63



 

All of the books and most of the original drawings sold. (You might get lucky on Amazon or eBay.)

 

Mann-Kennedy, page 114, 8-5/8 x 6-1/2″, $56


 

Now that I am working on The Cabins of Wilsonia, I am looking for more space in my studio for all the new drawings. Thus, I located 18 unsold drawings from the Mineral King book (more, actually, but the others are too big for my scanner, so I’m not showing them.)

Bissiri, rear, page 118, 5-1/4 x 6-5/8″, $35



 

These drawings are available for anyone who would like to buy them. Six appear in today’s post with a BuyNow button; the other 12 will be in consecutive posts.

Goldman-Davis, page 72, 10 x 8″, $80



 

The prices are well below my current (and even my former) commission prices because  I want to sell them and because they are on odd sized pieces of paper that might be a pain to frame. I’ve put the name as it appears in the book, the page # from the book, and the exact size of the piece of paper it is drawn on, in case you get lucky and have the perfect mat and frame waiting for one of these original pencil drawings.

Mann-Kennedy, page 115, 9 x 12″, $108