There is a house above us on the hill that has been empty for a little over a year. The residents got old and went the way of all flesh, but the family can’t stand the idea of letting the house go. So, it is becoming a vacation rental, and granddaughter of the residents is […]
Bridge Building (With Paint)
Incremental Improvements Painting #38 of Tulare County’s best bridge (according by your Central California artist) is inching forward into excellence. Can you see the incremental improvements? We can probably consider it all finished now, EXCEPT FOR THE BRIDGE ITSELF! Ahem. Excuse me for shouting. It just surprises me that after I put an enormous amount […]
Oil Painting Some Local Stuff
What word did people use before “stuff” became so ubiquitous? A little more work on these quail made it good enough to sign. More work ahead on this one: The scanner could not do this justice, so I put it in the sunshine and took a photo with my inferior phone camera. And this one […]
De-egging a Mural
Never before (as far as I know) has one of my murals been messed with. I can’t say that anymore. A couple of weeks ago, some stupid hon-yock threw an egg into the sky of my Ivanhoe mural. So, I told the librarian to have county maintenance see if it would wash off first, and […]
MURAL UNVEILING
“Unveiling” is obviously a euphemism here. Murals are highly visible, and no one threw a tarp over the one on the side of the Ivanhoe library. (However, someone did throw an egg on it and tomorrow I will go touch it up. Sigh.)
The Building in the Library Mural
When I was designing the Ivanhoe Library mural, I dug around for photos of a building that is cemented in my memory as a beautiful old structure. (Apparently, I’ve loved old buildings all my life.) I found a photo of the Ivanhoe School auditorium in Laura Spalding’s book Ivanhoe—the Town with Three Names: Klink, Venice […]
Library Mural, Day Thirteen, FINISHED!
The mural looked like this when I arrived in Ivanhoe (photo from the end of the previous painting day—I arrived early enough that the light wasn’t yet on the mural.) After talking to an old friend who remembered more details than I, I added a hint of a door on the porch of the old […]
Library Mural, Day Twelve
Last week I did not work on the mural for reasons that are irrelevant to my public life, as shared here with my tens of readers. The week before last, actually, since I show you on Mondays what I did on Fridays. Never mind. This is how it looked last; it’s kind of hard to […]
Library Mural, Day Eleven
Day Eleven was a day of doubt, feeling like a fraud, an imposter, a Jane Bag-of-Donuts masquerading as an artist. This is probably a result of attempting to paint something with an inadequate photo, on a very rough wall, in a space where I couldn’t back up quickly to observe from a distance and then […]
Thoughts on Internship
My Intern Today I am painting, progressing on the mural on the Ivanhoe library. I am writing this post before I have painted today, thinking ahead. Each day I work on the mural, there are multiple decisions to make. In the past, when I’d get a little stuck, I’d pick a somewhat mindless task, such […]