Seeking Wildflowers in Mineral King

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The trail to Franklin Lakes and Farewell Gap has terrific wildflower variety this summer.

Mariposa lilies are like polka-dots over the landscape, among the sage. Very prolific this year!
This is a juniper tree. It isn’t a wildflower. I just wanted to show you the bark.

This is the weird view of Farewell Gap with all the overlapping ravines.

Flax were plentiful along the trail, and the red ones are Indian paintbrush. The white ones? Meh. But I love seeing red, white, and blue together, so I took this shot looking down into the canyon.

There was a tremendous variety along the trail to the junction.

The pennyroyal were very thick and fragrant, as always.

I guess you had to be there to get a feel for all the variety along the trail. 

Sometimes Pride of the mountain grows on rocky ledges that don’t appear to have enough dirt for anything to grow.

Same for this penstemon, the variety which I have forgotten (did I ever know it?)

This trail junction was our destination, and it is usually solid with a zillion different flowers. This year it wasn’t special, but the trail getting to the junction was simply amazing with the variety.

This is looking back down at those overlapping ravines in the canyon.

Angelica was very impressive. It looks like cow parsnip, but its leaves are lacy rather than solid. Maybe that’s why it has a prettier name than cow parsnip.

Franklin falls is quite impressive in spite of the low water year. That is arrowleaf groundsel in the foreground.

Let’s end our tour with a rainbow.

I have about 4 copies of Mineral King Wildflowers: Common Names remaining. Want one?

Mineral King Oil Paintings For Sale

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“Mineral King Oil Paintings For Sale” sounds pushy. That isn’t my intention. The idea is to let you know these are completed and available. Their next stop is the Silver City Store, four miles below the Mineral King valley. However, if you’d like to intercept one before it heads up the hill, that can be arranged.

Sawtooth I, 8×8″, oil on wrapped canvas, $125 (plus California sales tax)
Mineral King Aspens, 8×8″, oil on wrapped canvas, $125 (plus California sales tax)
Honeymoon Cabin III, 8×10″, oil on wrapped canvas, $125 (plus California sales tax)
Sawtooth Ridge, 6×18″, oil on wrapped canvas, $165 (plus California sales tax)
Mineral King Alpenglow, 6×12″, oil on wrapped canvas, $125 (plus California sales tax)

P.S. They all look better in person.

Wildflowers as Tiny Colored Dots

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Wildflowers drive my hiking choices, and ever since publishing Mineral King Wildflowers (almost sold out), I look for opportunities to put them in my oil paintings. Because I paint small, they end up as tiny dots. 

Doesn’t matter, because those tiny colored dots are magical enhancements of scenes that would otherwise be primarily green, gray and brown.

Remember this oil painting? It sold very quickly due to those tiny colored dots.

So, of course I painted it again. Here is the sequence.

Once it is dry enough to scan, I will show you a non-shiny version with colors that are closer to the real painting.

Chop-chop and Doing What I Want

If you subscribe to the blog and read the email on your phone, the photos might not show up. (Some people get them, some do not; it isn’t a problem I know how to solve.) You can see them by going to the blog on the internet. It is called cabinart.net/blog, and the latest post is always on top.

Here is another new Mineral King oil painting of an old subject, the Honeymoon Cabin, which is a museum for the Mineral King Preservation Society. It was in a state of rough first layer for a few weeks, and then suddenly July happened, which is when sales pick up at the Silver City Store.

Chop-chop, Central California artist!

8×10″, $125 (+sales tax), probably underpriced, quick, get it before I raise my prices.

I looked again at this painting of Sawtooth, which has been hanging for awhile as I mulled it over before putting it on the scanner. 

While flipping through my photos, I ran across one with my favorite yellow wildflower, Bigelow Sneezeweed (terrible name for a delightful bloom). I said to myself, “Self”, I said, “Why not?”

If this 6×18″ oil painting with its radical addition of yellow flowers doesn’t sell, I can always paint them out. I am 62 years old, self-employed, experienced in all subjects Mineral King, and I get to do what I want to my paintings.

Any questions?

Making Two Paintings Better

If you subscribe to the blog and read the email on your phone, the photos might not show up. (Some people get them, some do not; it isn’t a problem I know how to solve.) You can see them by going to the blog on the internet. It is called cabinart.net/blog, and the latest post is always on top.The other day I just sat in front of these two Mineral King oil paintings with Tucker shedding, purring, and slobbering on my lap. While holding my favorite cat (sorry Pippin and Jackson, but I have known your uncle a year longer than I have known you), I studied the paintings carefully, wondering how I could make them better.

The answer usually lies in better contrast, and shaggier edges. Not that shaggy edges are always the answer, but in this case a few edges were a bit smoother than real life.

Never mind. Just look now and see if they look better to you (bearing in mind that they are now too wet to scan and that they always look better in person).

Each of these paintings is 8×8″, and I spent way more time on them than justified by the $100 (+tax) sales price each.

It is probably time to raise my prices. That is hard to do, because people are just trying to keep food on the table and gas in the car, and art is not a necessity. (It is for me, but I think you understand my point.)

Seeking Calm at the Easels

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Sometimes life is hard. Oftentimes life is hard. Even if my own life is wonderful (and it is), life around is less than wonderful. Friends are suffering, the world seems to be on fire. I could list the worrisome items, but you probably have a similar list.

So, I will simply continue to seek calm at the easels.

I hope that seeing the progression of this Mineral King oil painting brings a bit of calm to your world.

Mineral King After a Summer Storm

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Last week there was such a storm in Tulare County that the marina at Lake Kaweah experienced some real destruction: the docks slammed around, wrecked houseboats, the docks broke apart or sank or both, and five houseboats also sunk. Now they are just in these large jams and people can’t get to them. What a freak of nature storm.

I was down the hill; Trail Guy was up the hill. The evening after the storm, he took these photos in that beautiful glowing light called “the magic hour” by photographers everywhere.

A couple of days later he took these photos out on the trail. This first one is white flowers that I have never seen before. Maybe I saw them and thought, “White, meh”. But I don’t remember.

Another Cold Weekend in Mineral King

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Some cabin folks across the creek registered lows of 20 and 21 degrees on their thermometer over the weekend in Mineral King.

Here is a little visible evidence.

A cabin across the creek from us keeps a sprinkler running, and it made a large patch of ice.

 

My ax froze in its bucket of water. We put it there when the handle gets loose so that the wood swells. (Froze my ax off?)

Here is the neighbor’s ice patch after the sun did its job.

The weekend was beautiful and clear. The parking lot was full of cars wrapped to keep out the marmots.

This marmot wasn’t interested in cars because he lives under a cabin.
The cold flattened the corn lily, AKA skunk cabbage. This mule belongs to The Park and is not interested in staying in the corral.

Crystal Creek was low. Nothing was melting up in the high country.

Brrr. We came home early where the weather in Three Rivers was moderate and comfortable.

Are You Really Painting Sawtooth Again?

If you subscribe to the blog and read the email on your phone, the photos might not show up. (Some people get them, some do not; it isn’t a problem I know how to solve.) You can see them by going to the blog on the internet. It is called cabinart.net/blog, and the latest post is always on top.

Yeppers, another Sawtooth oil painting. Sawtooth is visible from the flatlands of Visalia on a clear day and is the signature peak of Mineral King. It has recently become the most popular of the Mineral King subjects that I paint, and a few weeks ago, someone commissioned another version of the “Sawtooth Near Sunnypoint” view. This is number 8, and the first one in the ratio of 1:3 (6×18″, vertical).

As usual, I started with a scribbly base, and then put in the sky, working my way closer and closer to the front.

Suddenly, I was confused on all those mountain ridges, so I dropped into the stream to pick apart the rocks. I photographed the stream in order to see the rock formations at higher water, before the seasonal growth obstructed my vision. I don’t understand water flow well enough to convincingly make this up.

This represents an afternoon of work, trying to perfect the detail on the first pass, knowing full well that I will need to make corrections as the other parts get completed. And then those “other parts” will need to be corrected.

It would be satisfying to spend as much time on every painting as I am on this one. But paintings don’t require the level of detail that pencil drawings do, it isn’t cost effective, and for the most part, my customers don’t even recognize that level of intense detail. (Not everyone is as near-sighted as I am, albeit it with strong cheater-readers these days.)

Links to other posts about painting Sawtooth:

  1. Department of Redundancy Dept.
  2. Lots of Sawtooths (Sawteeth? Nah)
  3. Almost finished with the Sawtooth paintings
  4. You just won’t believe this one
  5. Back to Sawtooth

Trail Guy Hikes For Us

Who is “us”? 

You, me, anyone who reads the blog but isn’t retired or on vacation in Mineral King. While I was painting walls inside Three Rivers buildings, Trail Guy went hiking in Mineral King.

He went up toward Timber Gap, and then to Empire, but not to the top, just a loop that gives good views.

While he was there looking at the mountains, I was painting the very same peaks in the Mineral King Room at the Three Rivers Historical Museum.

This is Ranger’s Roost, AKA Mather Point, looking through the timber of Timber Gap. When you are looking at Timber Gap, it is the bump to the left/west. The Mather Party came over Timber and saw Mineral King. I drew the cover in pencil and colored pencil for a book about it, but I haven’t read it. I just look at the pictures. (This was a second edition—the original drawing on the first edition went missing so the publisher commissioned me.)

There were a few flowers: shooting star, Western wallflower, phlox.

This is the rock outcropping on Empire that gives the false impression of being the actual peak. It is a favorite for enjoying alpenglow in the evening light.