Dry stuff

On our way to Denver we made what turned out to be a longish stop at a bunch of sand in Southern Colorado. It turned out that only I was in a truly hiking mood, but just being there in the great silence and emptiness was affecting for all of us. Even being way out in a calm sea does not compare to this.

Self portrait: me in the desert:

After an hour or so of trudging though the sand Carol and Lizzie reached their limit of endurance (poor things):


However, Lizzie makes one last effort to follow in my footsteps in a style carefuly developed for this kind of terrain:



























Journey's end:



Time to say goodbye:



Onward:






View from highest point in this area of the dunes, about an hour and a half later:



A snaky form greets me on my return:



Meanwhile, Lizzie unearthed a dragon fallen from the sky:

The Great Sand Dunes in Southern Colorado. Note: we all left our hats in the car. A foolishness.
The bits of white, here and there, represent last bits of fast melting snow. The sand was slightly damp in places, which made for easier travel, but where it was soft and dry (most of it), walking was a seriously aerobic experience.

Wet stuff

Since I haven't been blogging that long, I thought I'd set myself a record for not blogging.

We've been traveling a fair amount lately. Well, it is "Spring Break". Our latest expedition took us to Colorado with the purpose of checking out the University of Colorado in Denver where Lizzy, our daughter, shows a faint interest in attending the Film School. I'll install images as I gradually awake and recover from the stresses and strains of these ordeals.
First, a telling glimpse of the extreme conditions of the local terrain. A frozen lake in the High Country of New Mexico:

Then, rising and dropping, and finally dropping down (talking altitude here, of course) into Pagosa Springs in Colorado. Big hot springs scene. I had to put up with sights like this at the motel:

I stay away from water. Nasty wet stuff, but my family seems to enjoy it. Others do too, so perhaps there is some kind of mysterious pleasure in wallowing in it. Note the multicolored sediments that built up over the years on the wall. The charming couple are enjoying their tall, cool drinks while their butts and other parts dissolve in that 105*F mineral mix:

In another pool, an interesting triangle:

View towards the river with still frozen mountains in the distance:

Climate Change

Middle of March, isn't it? You would think all this would ease-up a bit. But no, mid-winter blizzards carefully reconstructed for our pre-spring entertainment. For anyone who visits this blog just to check out the weather in New Mexico:

These plants look quite amazed, don't they:

A few moments later, the blazing, high altitude New Mexico sun comes peeking out. Solid changes to liquid and then rises as gas to presumably form clouds and start the whole cycle again further down the road. Earlier this morning, I saw very similar looking white clouds rising up in the air. That time (that part of the morning was still early summer, temperatures were climbing), a dust devil whipped through a male juniper pulling out a cloud of pollen, the most allergenic substance known to man. But much worse for woman:

And now its snowing again...

Meanwhile...

Meanwhile...

Leaning against the studio wall, stand all these.
This theater caper took me away from everything. I stopped painting, stopped writing, stopped digging trenches in the sandstone, and even stopped moving large rocks to more suitable locations all around the landscape.
Now I've committed myself to do a little oil painting of two friendly dogs sniffing each other pleasantly set against a scene similar to the main section of the stage set, as a present from cast and crew to the play director. This is both good and bad. Bad because it is kind of stupid to paint a couple of dogs being nice to each other, good because it will make me get my paints and gear out of hibernation, move me to the studio, and I hope, generate momentum to get me going on all my other work.

Writing, hmm.
I can hardly complain that I haven't had any time to write. A few days subbing at the high school did eat up some of my free time, but normally, with a laptop at hand, I should have been able to knock out a few hundred words...the kids are having exams, so I don't feel too guilty ignoring them. Besides, I can keep them entertained and amused, and give them insightful educational moments while going back and forth from the keyboard. It worked before.
The problem, obviously, lies somewhere else, somewhere deeper. The first short story, seven thousand odd words, I wrote in three or four days. Encouraged, I thought that I could just keep going like that, and whip out reams of the stuff endlessly. But that first story already sat somewhere inside me, and only grew as I wrote. This sucker, which I'm writing now is very demanding of the kind of attention, that I am not experienced in giving. It wriggles, writhes, and morphs completely out of my control; I have bits written which belong at various sections, which is really straining my composing skills to link-up and lay over the structure that I devised for the story.
Also, the monster is growing in size in a way that I cannot control. It wants be a novel, but I really, really don't want to write a novel at all. I want to write a short story. Short story is such a nice form. But, how do I fend of all the all the themes, sub-texts, and narrations clawing and whining for attention. I must be strong -- it must be a short story. A very long short story, but a short story nevertheless.
Writing, I am discovering, is a very different brain activity from painting. In painting, I devise a process, and then engage in the mechanical activity of going through its phases. I need to open intuitive, right hemispheric activity and I'm all set. This word thing, on the other hand, and all the words and cousins and nieces of words I can only reach in that linear quarter of the gray matter, but to connect them to what I am trying to put out requires stunning acrobatics of linking the two hemispheres together, melting my wimpy little white corpus callosum. Practice? Perseverance? No one told me this was going to be so hard; shame on you all.

Do it! Do it!

Go on, do it, do it, you can do it, go on!...

The End?

As a final note on the production of "Sylvia": I was quite amazed at the quality of the stuff that cast put out. They were really good. Oddly, I wasn't expecting that. Everyone seemed completely connected to their roles; I don't know how they do it.
This could be my last serious flailing at the theater production site this time around. I might go back to touch up a few edges, add a few branches, dab on some highlights, but otherwise, its over.Last panel, not too great, but it will have to do (Burnout produces overkill).
This is supposed to be an airport scene. It's on one of the revolving flats, the othr sides consist of the view of building out of a window, and the interior of the psychiatrist's office. People will be sitting and standing in front of it a lot of the time, so the bottom section will remain mostly unseen:

Tidy-up & do widzenia:

Now, back to painting and writing.

Technical

Time for winter to be over, and yet it persists. On my way to the theater yesterday, I had to face this chilling site in the Valle Caldera:

Anyway...back in Los Alamos, still snowing, but at least it was warm inside the theater since the cast and crew got there before I did. A few last minute adjustments:

Ready?:...

Director's table:

The sound and light booth:

And we're off. This is a "Technical" rehearsal (lights, sound, props etc.). Dress rehearsal ("Hell Sunday"), next Sunday. On the left, the husband, on the right, wife, in between them Sylvia, the dog (bitch?):

 

And goodnight:

 

(up)Front and Back(side)

Got very involved with the bookshelf today. Best bookshelf that I ever painted. The wall color is closer to hot pink:

Next, stupid building at night coming up. Meant to bugger-up the perspective much more, ended up with a neither here nor there effect (this is starting to drive me crazy -- I think I need to take a little break -- perhaps 'till Sunday or thereabouts).

Meanwhile ...backstage. Very quiet today. Dressing rooms:

 

Something for everyone:

Shelved

Started on the bookshelves today. The flat on each side of the central flats is a three sided affair, triangular in plan, which turn in between scenes. The left side will have these here bookshelves (but finished at some point), a building at night on the next side (not begun yet), and a black side (invisible against the black background when not lit). The right side will have an airport scene on one side (not begun yet), a view of as building out of a window (barely begun), and another black side.

The bookshelves (day one):

All three sections:

















Detail of central flats:

From flat to flat

Good progress today.  Most of the elements are in place. I am hesitating whether or not to make it more cartoony or less cartoony. The whole thing is much more contrasty than this photo shows, but I don't feel like spending any more time in Photoshop. Tomorrow I will start work on the side (revolving) flats. I need to paint four 4'x9' surfaces.

Day 2

Got just about all the "underpainting done. Quite the aerobic work-out this has been. From now on I will not have to leap around as much. A lot of what is down now will not be visible after the next stage of painting when the trees and leaves appear.Then I will finish up the detail in the building windows that remain visible and tune everything together. The grass on the left will get grass-like detail, while the grass on the right will be dominated by a tree with claw-like roots showing. Most of the time there will be a bench in front of the path, where a character will sit.

Day 1

The tiered seating has been pulled back to reveal a floor that is used by performance and dance groups between theater performances. This is the situation that greeted me a couple of days ago, with some the surfaces to be painted glaring down from the stage.

The lighting is a little awkward, with that shadow across the top; I'll have to wait for the lighting person to be around to fix that. After the first day's work:

In the park

Had first meeting in theater. Producer and director showing me the set-up, and where they would like my amazing painting skills applied:

My first impression of what this should look like, so far only in photoshop. Need to change some shapes, get the trees more comfortably "composed" and cartoony-jagged at the same time, mess with the colors some more. I'm trying not to make this a night scene, lighten the whole thing up, but at the same time have each window colored, as if light was coming from them.

The stage is long and low and and quite deep. The lack of height creates a few problems; next time that  I design the set I would like to spread the set on to the ceiling above the audience.

Waiting for feed-back from director.

Setting the stage

After some pointless dithering, I have committed myself to paint a set at the theater in Los Alamos.The play is "Sylvia".
This has been an on and off activity of mine over the last few years. Last year I designed and directed the construction of the set for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and also painted the set for "Sarah Plain and Tall". Someone designed that last one, but all he did was set a table in front of whatever I chose to paint. It was an 'immersing' and physically demanding experience painting a landscape on that scale; lots of medium sized brushstrokes (smallish theatre), many buckets of sloppy mixed liquid media (not going to be archival, any liquid with a tint in it will do).

I'll post the development of the set here. Might be faintly amusing.

Back and forth

My daughter took a couple of shots yesterday on our way in to, and back from, school. Early morning mist rising above the Caldera after the previous day's heavy snowfall.

.Things settled down in the late afternoon, very calm, no wind. When the winds start up, big snow dunes form on the road, often making it impassable.

I finally posted my short story in "Redemption Postponed " (a working title. I will change that, since I drifted away from a focus I had in mind before I started the first paragraph, and then did not give it another thought). It's in Further Issues at the top of this page.

Some sun, some wood, and many words

Diversions, digressions, and their like, rule. I feel justified writing this kind of post, once in a while. Everyone else does, they're horribly boring to read, but strangely satisfying to write. So here goes: piddly, unimportant little details from my daily life, existential angst, the threat of biological extinction, and the hope of realization of my fondest dreams:

These last few days have been dominated by a most retro struggle for survival and an unexpected turn of events. This winter has been severe all around the Northern Hemisphere, as I understand. We (in the wilds of New Mexico) are dependent on two sources of heat. The first is the sun. Our house is solar(ish). We have an array of large South-facing windows, and when the sun is out, which is most days in this climate, it can become almost unbearably hot in the house, even on the coldest days. The sun warms the stone tiled floor, and most evenings you can sneak into bed at the end of the day's action without having to resort to any additional house-warming measures. But lately we have faced front after front of snowy, cloudy, and very cold weather. So the next, and only other available source of heat, is the wood-stove. There is a certain romance to wood gathering, lurching around crazy, rutted "dirt" roads in the "high country" in beaten-up trucks (vrooooom, vroooom), and then staggering around in the forest with chain-saws (vrooooom, vroooom). I gave up on that this year and decided to concentrate on scavenging wood from all around my property. Now, not many trees grow out here. We live on the edge of the desert, in the foothills of the southern spurs of the Rocky Mountains. The vegetation is what you might describe as Mediterranean at best, scrubby little cedar-like and pine-like things, rarely more than ten feet high.
A couple of years ago we had an infestation, epidemic. This was some kind of beetle that swooped down on our area in a fashion rather biblical, you might say. It attacked the pine-like trees (piñon, as they are known locally), in some areas wiping out all of them, completely altering the look of the landscape; down our way we lost about 50%. So, there is a lot of wood lying around. Trouble is, you still have to lug and cut the darned stuff. The terrain is complex, lots of ups and downs and other obstacles which makes it a major operation. Also, each tree does not yield much burnable wood; most of it is doodly little branches, which I have to leave behind littering the landscape, to be cleared up "some other day". But I really needed to do this at least once. Winter is at its perhaps worst, but at least closing stages, and today I have gathered enough to perhaps last till, if not through, March. So, if you happen to be living a few miles up the canyon, sitting on a few years supply of neatly chopped Pine, Spruce, and (nasty) Aspen, do not insult me by offering any of your hoard -- I will make it, not only that, but I will talk about it for years to come.

This distraction takes me away from my other distraction from doing art. This blogging thing is all very well, but I find myself going quite mad with the very process of writing. I can't stop writing. I get up in the morning, and I start writing. I write and write and write, and then I go to bed. Well, unless I'm lugging tree trunks around the landscape. If you look carefully, you might notice that I haven't made any blog entries recently. Then, your curiosity aroused, you might ask:"so what's happenin' man?". Well, I'm proud to announce the birth of a new mental aberration in my life: I'm writing a short story. I'm aiming at around 5 or 6 thousand words (that about right for an average length?), it's about 3/4+ done, will need a healthy dose of editing of course, a rethinking of some concepts, perhaps. I'll post the monster on my Further Issues page. So if you notice that I haven't written anything for a while, it's because I'm writing, writing, writing...