Camping in the Pine Flats

I have been escaping the August heat in Owens Valley by visiting with friends up in Mono County in a dispersed camping area I have nicknamed The Pine Flats, although it's actually flat only in places. We hiked up to a ridge that overlooks the former Alpers Trout Hatchery ponds and loops (now a ranch retreat). The headwaters of the Owens River collect in this area and flow through a "hidden" valley I had never seen before, mostly private ranching property, down into Long Valley and Lake Crowley.  

My fishing experience has been dismal recently, except for catching one brown trout in Pine Creek. Browns have golden fins and rich red dots along the sides--almost too pretty to eat, but also delicious. I am looking forward to autumn.

Cottonwood Snow and Owls

In early summer the cottonwoods set loose their namesake in drifting piles of seed fluff. At times it looks like blowing snow. Great shaggy popcorn balls of it hanging high in the big old green trees. Toss a lighted match and it will explode in a fireball. After the wonder of it, the nuisance; when the yard guys hose it down, it resembles old rags, which they rake into truckloads, as they did the yellow cottonwood leaves in autumn.

I painted a few small owls for a friend who wished to buy an owl picture from me. She likes Saw-whet Owls, and I assumed that meant she likes small, cute, harmless creatures, like toy poodles. But when I showed her the paintings below, she chose "Sinster Owl", saying "Oh yes, he looks vicious!  That's what owls are, they are ruthless, vicious hunters!"  Ya never know.

 Perky Saw-whet

 Sinister Saw-whet

Spooky Saw-whet

Barn Owlets

Summer evenings elsewhere

I have been musing over old photographs of mine taken of California hills on the other side of the Sierras; here are two paintings from that reverie. The road from Boonville hills in the Anderson Valley, the center tree and hillside from Point Pinole, Bay Area. Everywhere oat grass catching sunshine, flaring against the shadows.

Life at J Diamond Mobile Ranch has been too exciting lately--two trash fires in the residence area and a sewage backup due to underwear in the bilge pump. I hope for a return to easygoing boredom; always a good thing for painting when there's nothing else to demand the painter's attention.

Except home improvements: I have purchased a solar panel and multifarious widgets that render and modulate and parsify the power of sunshine into 12 volt battery storage and out again to another set of widgets that spins fans, brightens bulbs, and pulses sound through speakers and sunshine through cameras into computer screens. My shoulders ache from the tension of trying to understand 12volt electrical system, and even when it's late I can't leave off, I continue to fret among the pillows. Interesting, because no matter how difficult or frustrating my painting session becomes, I do not tense up about it; rather, painting seems to relieve bodily tension and I usually sleep well after painting. I slip into sleep easily, with colors and shapes swirling around in my mind, somewhat like floating.

More later....

Winter Into Spring

My new paintings this past winter-into-spring are of dusk and what I have come to call the "grottoes."  I feel they are deeper visions of mine and I have a sense of vulnerability in painting them. I feel they are archtypically feminine, as Marian visions often appear to young women and are thereafter  ensconced in grottoes, around springs in shallow caves, such as the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in France. If male imagery can be defined as a phallic shape thrusting outward, surely the female icon could be that of an entrance into a secret garden, an oasis among the rocks, a hidden source of rest, nourishment, healing and preparation; a riparian nursery, curtained by thickets, a sanctuary for contemplation, for the intimacy and peace of prayer.

Art Show at the Black Sheep Cafe

This month I have 11 paintings hanging on the school-bus-yellow and fire-engine-red brick walls at the Black Sheep cafe in back of the bookstore on Main Street. Climber hangout, lotsa foreign accents, a new venue in Bishop. A young woman who works there (my J Diamond neighbor of the Thanksgiving Dinner last November) was my "in" to the proprietors, and I am grateful for her efforts. I have never hung art work in a coffee shoppe before -- this opens up possibilites for me in the area, such as eateries in Mammoth. Follow-up next blog to see if anything sells.

Red Neck Reaction to Lady Painter

Phil, one of my bowling team mates in the Bishop Road Runners League this past winter, when I tried to invite him to come to the artist reception at the cafe and see my paintings on the wall, replied: "What? Come to see your panties on the wall?"  Ironically, I suppose this remark could be taken as one expression of my exposition (above) on the feminine nature of grotto imagery, but I rather think he was reacting out of the standard issue red neck arrested development pattern, wherein males seem to hit a wall at the age of 13, splatter, and stick. Boys are naughty and Girls are nice, and even when they get older (we are in our 60s and 70s here) the women display mild disapproval (roll eyes, shake head, flick wrist like a little slap) in combination with complacent indulgence (smile broadly, flutter eyelashes) towards naughty male behavior. And people out here ask me, over and over again, "Why didn't you marry?" And my truthful answer is "I didn't want to be a wife, I wanted to be an artist." My answer is meaningless to them, they stare at me and shake their heads.  

I feel I have chosen rightly.

Winter Paintings, and Rothko

"... artists pick what already exists in the world, but what they do of course is to pick what corresponds to their own sense of truth."

— artist Sean Scully, speaking in the documentary film, "Rothko's Rooms."

I wonder if my picking thickets as carriers of truth was influenced by, or presented to me in my childhood through a TV cartoon of Grimm's fairy tale of the Sleeping Beauty. Flip-book-like animation of thorny bramble cross-hatched the screen, obscuring and engulfing the castle, wherein the comatose guests and Briar Rose slumbered for a hundred years. When the right sort of prince came along, an opening appeared in the impenetrable thicket through which he entered, found, and awakened the snoozing fraulein with a kiss (who never woke up and said "Yuck.")

I have always felt this tale to be about (among other things) the artist's muse, or interior awareness of and attempt to grasp a beloved or an ultimate meaning. One that must be searched out, captured, and expressed; praised, actually, and praised to the point of exhaustion. "This is the most important thing I have to do in life, really the only thing I need to do, the work that can give my life a purpose." Now, this could be read as a statement of the male biological impetus to impregnate the female (in some written versions of this tale, the prince rapes the young woman, who wakes up pregnant), and/or it could be understood as a statement of spiritual ambition: to transcend accidental material existence with a conscious demand for meaning, for participation in a greater life.

Abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman wrote about his vertical stripe paintings, explaining that the primal vocation of a human being is to stand up out of the ooze and consciously confront the reality of personhood and the intuition of God, "... to stand in a place."  To stand forth, to be aware, to seize the opportunity to recognize the other and demand to be acknowledged.

OK, so why all the drums and trumpets for some messy bushes, dark roads, and a muddy canal? Guess I haven't yet got as far out of the ooze as Newman did. But I see glimmers:

Dusk down by the ooze seems to open into the dark matter of the cosmos, a camouflaged interior that can be sensed but not seen when the bright light of day reflects and richochets around the faceted surface of the world, distracting the mind from searching for an opening into its deeper, simpler, more distilled and more demanding truth -- perhaps something like the truth in Rothko's large, dark, "room" paintings.

A New Year in Anza Borrego

I took off on a January road trip and visited fulltiming friends dry camped in Anza Borrego for the winter. Mild evenings, cool mornings, pleasant days -- not freezing-the-pipes nights like Bishop.  Lotsa fan palms, date palms, teddy bear cactus. A bowl of alkaline earth, circled by mountains.

An Afternoon at The Slabs and Salvation Mountain

Websites to fill you in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_Mountain

Slab City was one of Chris McCandless' stops on his way to Alaska in the movie Into the Wild. We visited the Range Stage where he sings his duet with the young trailer lady. The irrigation canal at the "back" of the grounds was newly earth-worked and fenced. The place did not seem as crowded as I had imagined. We waved at many folks coming out of RVs at the end of the day to sit on folding chairs and chat. 

I had seen many photos of the the heart slope but I was unprepared for the spectacularly colorful interior armature of Leonard Knight's Museum rooms constructed of straw bales, branches, clay and paint, paint. The late afternoon light lit up the branching ceiling structures, falling through small irregularly spaced windows -- although the word "irregular" is impertinent here, for the regulation is evident, but it is not derived from an engineer's blueprint but rather seems to mimic the fractal growth patterns found in nature. The colors glow and reflect into one another like sunlight refracts through stained-glass windows in old churches. The interior spaces are very small and close, but while looking up into their ceilings, the armatures appear to extend into a greater space than is actually present. I was reminded of the Watts Towers, cathedrals, playground jungle-gyms, color-coded illustrations of neurons in the brain, the painting classroom at Immaculate Heart College with its banners, puppets, blocks, and Mary's Day parades, and the boxfulls of photographs I have taken and continue to take of trees and thickets, thickets. He painted no figures -- it's all words and flowers and waters (the blue and white striped areas are the Sea of Galilee).

Alas, I came too late to meet the artist himself. Here is some of his work:

Winter Colors

Dry and cold, late autumn and early winter in Owens Valley. Donkeys, mules and horses stand in the sticks, nosing up to the fence when I stop to take pictures. 

Winter colors rarely appear in postcards. Stripped of the stuff of vacation fantasies, the armature of winter stands stark, leaning into shadows, then catches for a moment the late horizontal sunlight as it strikes across the valley before dropping behind the ridge. What lies underneath, what remains, what still contains the power to surge into summer.