Mooney Grove V

Today let’s look at some of the more unusual pieces of Tulare County’s Mooney Grove Park. It will require a little bit of talk today.

Hugh Mooney often gets credit for donating the family’s acreage to Tulare County, but this sign says the Mooney family sold it the County for $15,000.

Maybe Hugh used that rifle to shoot squirrels. They are certainly a plague on the place now. Active squirrel holes are rampant.

What’s this? A platform to put a thingie for Frisbie golf, which can now only be called “disk golf”. There is an entire course for this popular game on the north side, but I saw the gizmos (“holes”) in other areas too.And here is another platform which used to hold a statue called “The Pioneer”. The plaster statue crumbled. (End of the Trail in plaster was traded with the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City for a bronze version).

There are 2 hills in the Park on the east edge. They were created with the dirt dug to form a recharging basin in the park. The formation is useful as an amphitheater, and one hill has a disk golf “hole”. When I went to Redwood High School, I used to look through the fence at a little log cabin that appeared to be abandoned. It was. After I grew up and became The Central California Pencil Artist (a self-ascribed title), the Boy Scouts reclaimed it, disassembled it, moved it to Mooney Grove, and reassembled it. I drew it as a fund raiser to help pay for the enterprise. (I wonder if I still have a copy of that drawing. . .)

Finally, I leave you with this Peculiar Sight.

Tomorrow we will conclude our tour of Tulare County’s Mooney Grove Park.

Mooney Museum Mural, Day 3B

After I finished the mural on the left side panel, I moved over to the right side panel to begin painting redwood trees, AKA sequoia gigantea, AKA Big Trees.

After looking through a small stack of pretty good photos of redwoods in sunlight, I chose one. Then I looked down at my scattering of business cards and got a laugh.Clearly, I like this particular view.

For once in my muralizing life, I wasn’t paralyzed by indecision. This felt easy to begin.There is no pattern to how I move around this wall – just a little here, a little there, maybe I can do this, if I do that it might help me see the proportions more correctly, up the ladder, down the ladder, step back, try this color. No matter what part I work on, the wall is getting covered.

I decided to put in sky colored background to define the edges of the trees, (including some smaller trees).Then I decided to get a bit more systematic, and work left to right.Then I didn’t want to work from the ladder any more, so I hunkered down in the mud to work on the bases of the trees.Not bad for a day’s work, eh? What makes this so pleasant and makes all this roaming around the wall in a random method possible is the fact that the wall is north-facing, and I never have to worry about protecting my palette or brush from the direct sun.

 

Mooney Museum Mural, Day 2

The mural looked like this in the morning. If you ran past it, it looked finished, but it needed detail.

Those middle hills were a bit confounding, so I just hunkered down in the mud to plant an orange grove. Oh-oh, this is going to be S L O W. Some friends stopped by, and I decided to be like Tom Sawyer. If someone had let me paint on a public wall in a park when I was 8, I would have been paralyzed with doubt, but maybe have just gone for it anyway. I told Justin that it didn’t matter what he did, just make some marks to see what it felt like, and I’d paint over anything that turned out weird.

County Parks Director Neil suggested wildflowers, which OF COURSE I should have thought of myself, and OF COURSE I immediately added in.There are poppies, fiddleneck, and mustard. You might have to see them in person to fully appreciate them.

Next, I will finish the details above the grove – a barn, some non-grove-like trees, a couple of wind machines. Then, I’ll move to the panel on the far right.

Stay tuned!