Clouds and Rocks in the Alabama Hills

..... just east of Lone Pine, close by where I am camped, almost too rich a source of sky forms to limit with a camera, but here’s a few of my faves:

The Lozenge

 precipitated out of the lenticular solution — the blur is not from a fast drop caught by a slow shutter, that’s the way it smeared itself in the breeze: 

The Oyster  

hovered for a long afternoon, changing colors and shapes into the sunset: 

I captured the Gold Saucer shapes, went inside to load new batteries, and emerged into the red version of the same shapes:

Rock Formations of the Alabama Hills are similarly almost impossibly rich in shapes and colors; how to choose? Where to stand? Changing light changes colors minute by minute, harsh glare and shadow reveals, then obliterates, their shapes.

Tuttle Creek Campground Easter 2015

WINDY !— April winds, my Chalet triangular peak a fiberglass boat standing in boulders and sagebrush against an ocean of air. - hope it doesn’t turn into a sail … wish the winds carried water — Sierra snowpak at 12% of normal. I am worried about fires, but the lady in Lone Pine who cuts my hair said there’s not much left to burn — she’s lived here 70 years and says she’s never seen it so dry. 

I continue to make watercolor-and-color pencil paintings and will post photos to my painting-portfolio website: 

www.innajaneray.com

Those of you who have already seen it, I will henceforth post the new stuff under a link: RECENT WORK   (sometime soon....)

Cool enough at night to turn on the Li’l Buddy Portable radiant propane heater. I performed a DIY swap-out of the pilot assembly fix (available on Amazon for 16 bucks instead of replacing heater 80 bucks) and now it does work again, although I worry — since after I struggled to tinker it apart and then wobble it back together, I realized I had three screws left in my pocket that I had taken out and not put back in, plus bits of broken plastic on the floor, oops. 

On Easter and other big weekend holidays myself and the other LTVA (all-season-long) campers bunker down and hide in our rigs. Traffic is crazy-dusty and visitors try to swim in the creek, which is all of about 4 inches deep and swarming with coloform bacteria ….. however, it appears women are nervous about contagion from latrines and swath the toilets in layers of toilet paper before they perch, and then leave their swathings for the next suburbanite to throw on the floor and in turn weave their own fluffy emergency toilet seat sanitary covers — got knee-deep in there one weekend with a church group. But that’s better than the ones who just stand on the toilet seat and let fly. I thought the suntan had died out with smoking as cancer-friendly behavior, but out here I see visitors strip to swimsuits or undies and sit in the sun with a bottle of coconut oil, and smoke. Old timers smoke too, and living in an RV is one way for a non-home-owner to continue smoking at home, but desert rats don’t sit in the sun. They sit in the shade or walk around with long sleeves, long pants, and big hats — like real cowboys do. How to tell real cowboys from pretend?  Gloves — people who work outdoors wear gloves.

Stay well, save water, and remember that insect bites and salad greens are more likely to infect you with deadly germs and viruses than public toilet seats.

Signs of Borrego

Spent the winter at PegLeg flat dirt dry campground just outside of Borrego Springs — the townsite private property donut hole in the middle of Anza Borrego State Park. 

View from PegLeg:

PegLeg is an unofficial campground of uncertain jurisdiction. Apparently the acreage was once private property but has since been deeded to the Park, and the Park continues to tolerate its decades-old tradition of dry camping. Favorite snowbird sojourn for Canadians and Californians. Nice folks for neighbors, and warmer weather than the Eastern Sierra, especially at night. However, I had arrived just before a December storm, snow in the mountains, and departed just after the spring storm with (less) snow first week of March. Many wildflowers! — but mostly I liked the local signage:

A few miles up the road lies a sandy, muddy flood plain where real estate for sale signs have aged into the condition of a strange indecipherable language:

And southeast lies Ocotillo Wells State OHV Park, and this cartoon vehicle signs the entrance to a private campground across the road where more hootin’ and hollerin’ behaviors are allowed.

Farewell Borrego Springs, I am on the road to Tuttle Creek in the slopes of the Eastern Sierra!

It Was a Long Summer in Tuttle Creek Campground

and it’s over. I haven’t written a post since July, so I’ll y’all up on happenings since then. In September I searched for, found, and bought a new-to-me trailer from a retired doctor living in a 3-storey cabin at the north end of Lake Tahoe. It’s an A-frame pop-up by Chalet of Oregon. The triangular walls are made of a foam core-plexiplastic-sheathing laminate, and fold up on long piano hinges somewhat like one of those white Chinese food take-out cartons. Makes a low, flat, lightweight  package pretty easy to tow. Has the same floor plan and square footage of my Santa Fe Trailer, but more elbow room and less storage. It has good brakes, intrinsic stabilizers, and best of all: a refrigerator! 

The falling-out back end of my bohemian Santa Fe bed-sitting studio was re-fastened to its undergirding by a resourceful and reckless camp host, Shane, and wife Jasmine. We agreed on a price (cheap) and Shane jimmied the springs (crawled under the trailer and pounded boards into rusting iron sections) to raise the frame high enough to clear the speed bumps-drainage gutters out of the campground, and then towed it south to the Salvation Army in Ridgecrest, where it was accepted as a “donation.”  I told them the truth about its condition, but they seemed to think it could still be welcome extra housing for a poor family out in the boonies around Ridgecrest or Inyokern. Maybe a Grannie House — I’d like to think of it as being again a peaceful shelter for a woman.

It’s kinda like moving out of a lath-and-plaster apartment from the 20’s and into a suburban subdivision condo; “you’re moving up!” as a friend teased. And it is a well-preserved 2003 that was handled gently and stored for six years in a carport before I drove it to Lone Pine. I don’t love it the way I loved my splintering vintage Santa Fe tinder box, but it is a clean machine that keeps out the rodents, the rain, and the cold. 

I dunno about painting in it, tho. May be too “nice.” A studio is a place where you can make a mess, nail stuff to the walls, screw stuff to the table, spill paint, slop paint. I think I”ll buy a replacement dinette table and keep it in storage, so I can make my art messes on the one I’ve got without anxiety about “ruining” it. (How does that middle-class “nice” still have the power to make me nervous about ruining it for the sake of making art? Maybe I should just stomp out to my truck, retrieve the hatchet stashed therein, charge back inside and whack some liberating ruination into this Flawless White Formica before I go to bed tonight, already, dammit.) I have lotsa drawings and plans for new work but haven’t felt “seated” or “centered” enough to let go of vigilance and sink into the deep interior pool of focus and feeling that painting requires of me.

As it gets colder, I am thinking about moving south for the winter — maybe check out Yuma, Quartzite, other Snowbird winterhavens. I am visiting Tucson for a week before Thanksgiving, and if I like it, I may look for a winter campground nearby. 

Lanterns in the Wind

Ten lanterns from the windy slopes below Lone Pine Peak. Small paintings, all 6 x 8 inches on watercolor paper. Lanterns or lamps. Using up a small pan of Pelikan genuine gold watercolor that I think I've been carrying around since I left Los Angeles in the late '80s.

ART NEWS: Teaching Technique in Ridgecrest

Ridgecrest is surprisingly rich with Arts Action: potters, sculptors, painters, crafters. Members of local art groups support the Maturango Museum and its Flora Lamson Jewlett art gallery, where my paintings gilded the walls for two months January 17 - March 18 this year. The "Four-D" art group (Four-D as a riff on "3-D" or three-dimensional art, meant to open its membership up to a wide range of media and makers) invited me to present a workshop in my Pencil-and-Watercolor Technique by which all the paintings I showed had been created, and I accepted.

To illustrate what kind of color can be produced by my pencil-paint method, I made a rather free-form color chart by painting a grid of watercolor background swatches, dark-to-light, and then built up color pencil areas on its surface, so that the color of the background shows through the sketchy pencil, instead of white paper.

Usually, color pencil images show a lot of paper white, and consequently the media color looks "pastel", meaning that all the colors are mixed down with white. A (dried) watercolor underpainting essentially stains the paper, and that stain-color shows through the gaps left by "scumbled" wax pencil color. This technique is a way of mixing colors on the paper; mixing different transparent colors of stained paper with overlaid strokes of different wax color. Similar to painting with "broken" color in oils, where distinct colors in the brush do not mix on canvas but make a richer color when mixed in viewers' eyes, and the colors can be saturated.

Paula, a ceramicist and jeweler, generously hosted the workshop in her large studio, and 12 artists signed up for a day of flat art on paper using watercolor as underpainting, and Prismacolor wax pencil for building up the final image. Most participants worked from landscape photos, but also offered advice on a parrot, two cats, an angel, and a cupcake. There was a short potluck lunch break, but my students arrived early, worked earnestly, and all had produced an original piece by closing time. I floated around, encouraging increased contrast, more robust application, and a wider palette of color. My first-ever workshop was judged a success, and I hope this was at least generally true for all who attended -- I enjoyed the entire thing more than I'd imagined. Paula put me up for two nights and also invited me to a ham Easter Dinner on Sunday with some friends.

Tuttle Creek and Trailer Trashed

Tuttle Creek Campground

Looking south: 

 Looking north:

 New Stone Foundation for Trailer! 

My wooden Santa Fe travel trailer, built in the late 1960s, is literally falling apart. While I was driving up the access road to Tuttle Creek Campground, I had to slag it over high, angled speed bumps that caused extreme side-to-side lurching of my rusted-springs-and-no-shocks trailer, which busted loose its last splintering fragments of stability, and the bottom fell out the backend and dragged its aluminum-alloy skirt in the dirt up a guttered fifty yards of dirt road to what will be its final campsite. 

Dry rot had splintered out the buttress-like armature that holds the side wall up over the wheel well, and so the wall was slowly sagging down outside the tire to the ground. My stove was attached to this wall, not resting on the floor as you would suppose, and is now bulging out the side as the wall slips down. The stove top tilts, so my pots and pans kinda roll off the burners a bit.

Ramshackled!  But it still keeps me dry and warm and out of the wind in the late storms of April this year, and it is home and comfy in a very beautiful area. The down-slope gusts from the Sierras shake it like a terrier shakes a rag doll, but so far it hasn't stumbled off its pins, its stabilizers.

I have shored its corners up with piles of stones, but when it leaves this site (and it has to leave Tuttle by the end of October) it will ride out on a flatbed. Where this flatbed is coming from I do not yet know, but rumor has it that a non-profit in Ridgecrest will haul away old trailers to fix up for low-income housing. One local said just leave it on a side street with a "FREE" sign, or call a rancher who will pick it up for bunk housing during roundup.

So I must be buying another trailer this year -- am looking for an up-to-date fiberglass model with a genuine 3-way refrigerator, indoor plumbing, and maybe even an awning. But this little beach shack on tires has been my home for four years and it will be hard to let it go.