Tossup and Seven-come-11 Throwing Blank, Round Dice.

Thickets bristle from rooted centers. Spikey, thatched, like bottle brushes or porcupines, but instead of sea urchin forms, I saw kimonos and reed-capes hatch across my page, throwing down round blank dice at the edge of an autumn field.

Painting about Kanzan and Jittoku (Japanese), or Han Shan and Shih-te (Chinese); they are characters from the Buddhist tradition.  

Read more at:

http://www.coldbacon.com/hanshan.html

http://www.hermetica.info/hanshan.htm

Remember drapery?

Flowing swirls and tucks, swathing bodies, piling up on chairs and floors?  Cottonwood bark sheathes white cottonwood core wood in rough draperies, flowing along branches and around burls.

Prismacolor pencil on watercolor underpainting. Easy to scratch up on a dinky, wobbling table in a tight-squeeze trailer dinette, jolting in blustery late winter weather.

Having fun!

Fixing My Trailer with Big Jim

Jim is a nice guy trying to recover from his most recent nasty divorce by camping out on LA Department of Water and Power land, picking up odd jobs and putting bicycles together out of dump junk and spare parts. Last winter when it was freezing I bought him some propane and gave him an old tent, and he figured he owed me. So he stayed a few days with me in Pleasant Valley campground, fixing lots of stuff on my scrappy old trailer, showing me how to scour the dump (photo) for parts, and being a fun companion. 

A buddy of his gave us some venison and he cooked it in the coals of our campfire, telling me rambling stories about great road meals: once he traveled with a woman who pinched an entire prime rib roast from a market, wrapped it up tightly in 25 feet of barbed wire borrowed from a fence, and just tossed it onto a big log in the middle of a campfire -- said it was the best roast beef he has ever eaten.  We scrounged for free firewood  from the constantly rotting and renewing willow and cottonwood forests in all the pasturelands. He grabs huge half-rotted willow logs and then smashes them up on the roadway to break them into pieces small enough to stuff into my crate. (photos)  He has a slingshot and one night chased a racoon around my trailer for awhile until it swam the river. He slept out on riverside grass wrapped in three sleeping bags stuffed inside each other with a thick fuzzy little girl's hat on his balding head.

In the dump we found replacement louvres for the windows, a grill to use cooking on the fire, a broiler pan for my dinky trailer oven, a picture frame, and a huge stash of perfectly OK canned food in one of the trailers -- lots of canned fish especially.  He checked out the wrecked bicycles, and found the stripped-out and smashed van of someone he had known on the street:  "Cat Lady." He said the civil authorities took her away to an "institution."  She was old and had 22 cats in that van. He warned me not to open the doors, but I did anyway and the stench was sickening.  I found an 18ft aluminum boat with just one dinged side that I really wanted to take home -- but he said it was beyond his powers to fix. We have a tentative plan to visit the Motherlode RV Dump in Benton out on Hiway 6 and find me a new rock shield--if he doesn't move to Gardnerville in the warming weather.

The river is rising as the Big Snows melt. I now have two of my recent paintings hanging in the Inyo Council for the Arts Gallery on Main Street (395 thru town). I hope to move back into Horton Creek for May, back home to the wind, the rats and the fabulous views.  

Happy Easter!

NEW PAINTINGS: Winter Trees, Mostly Cottonwoods

New paint-drawings done end of February into March, mostly while camped in Baker Creek Campground west of Big Pine. Cottonwood trunks stand shabbily in clouds of sucker shoots stripped of leaves, or carrying a few dried ochre leaves from the fall when they were deep yellow. New shoots sprout and slowly turn colors of magenta, brick, purple, graygreen. Now April and these gray trees are sprouting clouds of soft pale greens. 

(double-click to enlarge)

Early Spring

Spring in the Owen's Valley brought record snowfall to Mammoth Mountain (pushing on to 600 inches this winter) and a brush fire in the canyon west of Big Pine, where I was camped at Baker Creek county campground. I was evacuated (ma'am, you have 15 minutes, do you need any help?) to Pleasant Valley (see photos from last Nov) to get whooped by winds again. So GLAAAAAD to be living in a nice wind-proof trailer. Here's some photos, the red-birch drawing was done in chocolate syrup on paper plate. The gray willow thrashy trunk is a foretaste of the painting/drawings I have been doing and will post soon. The blond cow is unusual, most cows and calves in the pastures around here are black or brick colored. The pond is bucolic. Sunny weather is now forecast for the rest of March and I will be working on my trailer while it lasts ... everything moves outside while we pull extract the icebox and re-insulate -- right now it still has the original insulation from the 1960's: cardboard. Happy spring!

Watershed Wastrel?

Riparian waters are the cradle of life on this planet; we are slowly coming to understand their role in the renewal of all the natural resources we exploit. Western civilisation, the "first world" has focused on end results—unmitigated development of human ingenuity—and has let the sources of life get depleted, wasted, destroyed. As if we wouldn't need them anymore.

Water from the Western Sierra watershed flows down into the Sacramento River delta and waters Sacramento, the central valley and the Bay Area. Water from the Eastern Sierra watershed flows into the basin between the Sierra and the White and Inyo Mountains, and from there is conveyed by aqueduct to water the Los Angeles Greater Metropolitan Area.

All the Federal Bureau of Land Management campgrounds and most of Inyo County's campgrounds are situated beside creeks that drop out of the Sierra side of Owens Valley, Round Valley, and Long Valley. So, I have considered re-titling this blog: "Watershed Wastrel."

But, since all Californians are watershed wastrels, it seems too generic.

Well anyways here's some water pictures....

Ash Wednesday

Remember that from dust you were made, and unto dust you shall return.

_from the service for Impostion of Ashes

By the age of retirement a woman 

should have little in hand, a lot to forgive,

and memories, overwhelming memories.

How else shall I account for my present

condition? Aching gritty joints, floppy flesh,

colorless hair littering floors and solitary

pillow. Now are the days of roots exposed,

grey bark flaking and cold limbs cracking 

off into background loam and leaves.

Lying awake in winter with eyes closed, 

dreaming under the sign of Ashes,

a parade of images more alluring than any

fantasy of future virility and triumph

compels my attention and before me returns

into a luminous warm dark, beckoning.

Riparian Wood — the Paintings

(double click pix above to get larger view)

I have always been obsessed with branching "fractal" scatter patterns, shooting them over and over from several points of view. The mass of detail in my over-all-pattern photos seems to be pictorially complete to me, but when painting I usually want to rig up more of a landscape composition, or to introduce something into the center, such as a chair, a gate or door, or a little hut, a hermit; a figure. A figure to set against the ground (as in the background, or "setting" for the subject), instead of leaving out the figure and letting the ground fill the picture space as a valid and complete subject in itself. Photographers Harry Callahan and Eliot Porter explored "field" subjects in nature. I think Jackson Pollock worked his way into this kind of ground-for-subject with his drip-splat paintings and ran with it out to the end zone. He may have been exploring a way to reintroduce the figure before he died. Before Pollock and Callahan, all-over patterns were considered suitable for the visual enhancement of fabrics, flooring, wallpaper, and "English" gardens.

Large trunks of many hardwood trees can become figures against their ground of branches and landscape in photos or paintings; I have painted many anthropomorphic tree figures. But the riparian family group grows in clumps along the edge of waterways — especially aspen, almost like bamboo in its field of staves — and red birch, or water birch, grows like bunch grasses carpet a plain, but in clumps instead of a turf. When I draw or paint them, I paint the clump, not the overall frieze/plain of riparian wood. The uncountable amount of similarly-sized detail seems impossible for me to keep track of — where's the focal point? where's the architecture? — and although I know many naturalistic painters do paint these fractal patterns (and successfully), they are both too much and not enough for me as a subject for painting. I wonder about this, since I do not hold the same requirement for my photographs. Perhaps painting, for me, is primarily about the figure, set against nature or inside of nature; whereas a photograph can depict ground only, since the act of taking the photo in some way contains the photographer; the photographer's eye is the implied figure — as in "Look what I saw!"

I also wonder, idly, if a human figure being added to a background in any way mirrors the idea of Aquinas that Grace is "added" to Nature, or perhaps that human beings are figures "added" to the ground of nature. We are our main focal point, and many people in many cultures have held the uneasy feeling that we don't belong here on this planet; whether because we our origins were actually in another ground of reality, or that we have gone to far in deviating from our earthly one, is a point of difference among various faith traditions.

As I write this, I am camped at Baker Creek, near Big Pine. Unlike Independence Creek, Hilton Creek, McGee and Tuttle Creeks, in its streams there is almost no red birch. I don't know why this is, and must consult Ranger Becky next time I see her. It may be a matter of altitude.

Outside the wind is lowering the snow boom down to 3500 feet and I may wake to a white campsite. My little trailer is shaking like a clump of sagebrush; I hope it doesn't bust loose and tumble into the creek. The temperature is also dropping and once again I am grateful for the invention of the portable propane heater. To distract my fearful mind from the stormy quaking, I am drawing fanciful figures in a calm landscape, such as two pilgrims in a silver boat floating down the lower Owens River. Looks like an illustration to Lord of the Rings. Maybe if I add plaid shirts, bomber hats and backpacks.......