Biking Adventure

Today I spent part of the afternoon visiting Dick's Sporting Goods to get Youngest's bike tuned-up (bought the bike a few months ago, he learned to ride that same day) and getting some replacement tires and handle grips for my old Diamondback. Then, after tire repairs, chain lubricating, and adjustments, given the unusually clear day, and the mid-eighties weather (a reprieve in our NC July), Youngest and I decided to go ahead and take that ride we've been discussing, through the waterfowl impoundment north of Durham. The whole area is closed to cars and it makes a great off-pavement experience. This photo is of the place where the ride began, but I took it on a hike four of us took there in February, a year and a half ago. Picture it all overgrown, with six foot grasses on one side and a field of corn on the other.

We road more than four miles over gravel roads, stone causeways, and overgrown grassy paths. We took a long road I'd never taken on my previous trips, which excited him - the unknown. We never saw another human until we were back at the end. The sun set on the tail end of the trip, when we were driving back. The light was glorious, the riding was fun (even though I will be sore in fifty places tomorrow), and we saw so much wildlife. The place was shaggy, overgrown, and like the back forty of an old semi-abandoned farm. We startled a fox, who ran down the road ahead of us for three or four hundred yards, before ducking into the woods on our left. Later we had a deer bounding across the road in front of us, with tall leaps and several flips from its stunning long white tail. Gold finches flew around us in the fields, bending down the tall heads of redstem grass. We rode in a nearly constant cloud of dragonflies, which rose from the road in front of us. We saw passion flower blooming in one spot, and jewel weed, and jacob's ladder, and huge white hibiscus. The roadway itself was yellow with the small bright blossoms of thread-leaved helenium. Most of the old fields were fallow, but some were sown in corn, which was bearing. Some cobs were here and there left by the road, plundered and eaten by racoons. One section was planted in large sunflowers, just starting to bloom. Tiny toads hopped out of our way as we walked the bikes over the eighth stone causeway.

We ate a picnic dinner in a clear space beneath two old trees, where the large bright green June beetles (cotinus nitida) were buzzing around the ground and up into the branches. I caught one and showed it to Youngest, letting it vibrate loudly up out of my hand, its brilliant deep green back exposed by the elytra spread in flight.

Toward the end of the long ride we walked the bikes through the maintenance area, which was abandoned in the Sunday evening. We passed by one large garage where two heavy old trucks, early 80's vintage, one a Ford and the other a GMC, sat side by side, like old rivals/friends. A little further was an open garage bay, with equipment visible in the gloom within. We were so busy looking at the interior that we both nearly missed the large black animal stretched out on the concrete entryway. My entire body clenched at the sight of such a huge black dog, braced for it to wake up and charge us. Then I realized with even greater fear that it was a black bear. And almost in the same instant I realized it was dead. I have never felt such a rush of relief and sadness both hit me so suddenly together. Youngest had seen it just before I did, and I realized he was asking me about it. It was actually a small bear - but it would have been quite intimidating if it had been alive. We never slowed our walking - both relieved and weirded out by the whole thing. Neither of us wanted a closer look.

The entire ride was like a story, a strange fairy tale, even, full of birds and insects, and animal talismen, with a large dark scary creature dead near the close.

But we had another mile to ride after that, almost all down hill, over a long gently curving gravel road. We rolled along, side by side, and talked as the stones pinged and popped from under our humming wheels. Youngest wants to do more of this. So do I. At the end we put the bikes back in the van, pulled out some home made chocolate chip cookies (Tollhouse), more bottles of water, and walked back into the fields. We sat down in the middle of the gravel road (about half way up that photo above). I stretched, and we ate cookies while watching the slate blue clouds drifting north across a pale western sky. Usually we chatter each other's ears off when the two of us are in the car alone - but this trip home was fairly quiet, each of us full of thoughts and the relaxed contentment that follows an adventure.

The Lure of the Road

I've written before about how roads can take my breath away. This is an unusually beautiful road, in exceptional light. It's one of my favorites, and I've walked it in every mood of sun and shadow, and even in inky darkness. I've tried to photograph it many times, and this shot comes closest to what it means to me.

The desire to linger in this perfect spot, and savor this amazing view. Standing in shadows and looking forward into the brightness to come. The crunch of the gravel underfoot contrasted with the silence of the open space before me. The urge to follow the curves, restless to see more before the light disappears.

Life feels like this, a lot, lately. I feel like everything is larger, stronger, and better lit than ever before. I want to hold all of this, keep it all, and I want to rush on to the next things. I'm hungry for it all, my eyes and heart consume everything before me.

And I'm also old enough to be able to stop, grin, and sit on the side of the road for a while, enjoying those who pass by, knowing that I can get back up any time and walk some more. I no longer feel so rushed. Eager, pulled forward by the desire to see what's next, but not pushed from behind.

I would never go back to my twenties, nor even to my thirties. I have never felt younger or more free, in some ways, than I do now. Everything feels like the open road - this open road, familiar and yet always new.

Many Days in One

Do you ever have days where there are so many different emotional backdrops that by bedtime it feels like several days? Compared to normal "at home" time, vacation often feel this way to us, and on trips we sometimes talk at dinner about how many days we've had since waking that morning.

Dearest and I have recently discovered that if we get up at 7:00 and go downtown for a walk (we live in a charming historic Southern town), and include a visit to the farmer's market there, and then come home for elevenses made with whatever we bought, that by quiet time (the introvert down-time we try to have every afternoon from about 3:00 to dinner time) we feel almost like we've had a whole weekend already. And there's still Saturday evening and all day Sunday to go!

Our market usually has some kind of live music by late morning. This Saturday it was an accomplished bluegrass band, made up of very interesting looking musicians (beautiful faces with long silver hair and/or full beards) and even a clogger. The photo above is one Dearest took with my camera - that's me holding produce. (The way I stand looks like my Dad.) This time we bought duck eggs. They turned out to be quite different looking (they tempt you to pick them up and see if light shines through them, like a smooth white quartz on the beach), with smoother shells (they're surprisingly hard to grip to get out of the egg carton), and with much thicker shells (which seem to tear more than crack), but otherwise they taste surprisingly like chicken eggs with possibly a little LESS flavor (that really surprised me) though slightly creamier in texture.

And we bought two loaves of French bread. No, REALLY. The man who sold them to us is French, and when I opened the careful wrapping to cut some for elevenses the smell that rose up from that loaf snapped me back to the Riviera. It made me realize that all the "french" bread we've been enjoying since we traveled to France back in the 80's has been a pale imitation. We had not remembered how different it could be.

Before elevenses, though, we took photos of our own gardens. The fun thing about panoramas is that you can get the same figures in them more than once... Click for a larger image, where you can see some of the beautiful things Dearest has raised in this outrageous border (our newest and best). And you can also admire her beautiful Baltic blond hair.

I cut a lot of flowers to bring to my mother. She had medium-minor surgery several days before, and then some ER visit the next day for hormone related heart palpitations - nothing serious, it turns out, but scary. Daughter drove me down to their house, where we could not get anyone to come to the door by quietly knocking. Their car was there, so we assumed they might be napping (both would have had plenty of reason for that) and we left the jar full of phlox, daisies, black-eyed-susans, Nile lily, and one pink amarylid on their front porch where they couldn't miss them. This photo is actually of the bouquet we brought Dad for Fathers Day - he loves Day Lilies.

Mom's bouquet was similarly large and informal, but mostly phlox and her favorites - the Shasta daisies. This shot is how the daisies looked before I cut all of the fresh long stemmed ones for the bouquet. There were so many buds coming on that by Wednesday it would look just like this again. This shot is from about the same spot Dearest is in the panorama, above. The Dearest on the left...

Lunch Saturday was more of that bread, some salami (Oscar Mayer - it's all we had - not real saucisson) fruit, olives, and so I opened a white wine. So then I felt a little off balance, but happy in that special way a Chardonnay creates. Actually this one was a Chardonnay, Semillon, Gewurztraminer, Viognier, Sauvignon Blanc blend - it was tart, refreshing, and a good foil for the smoky flavors in the salami, the dark olives, and the wood oven bread. Not so sure about how it went with the cherries.

Then I cut Youngest's hair. He said his friends told him after my last cut that the "fuzz" style looked stupid (he was laughing about it while telling me, while also hoping I could do something differently this time). So I used the scissors all over, and then the shears only for the tapering around the edges. He liked it much better. It's Oldest's turn in a few minutes. He's performing in a musical in a few weeks, so he doesn't need the "fuzz" look, either.

After queit time I made one of last weekend's dinners over again. The family had requested an encore. Penne rigate with chopped prosciutto, topped with a rich Alfredo sauce (I make a mean Alfredo sauce the traditional way - cream, butter, freshly grated parmagiano reggiano, and nutmeg). I steamed some yellow zucchini that we bought this morning (I'm holding it in that market photo above. The corn on the cob was for Sunday's hot dog cook-out before I drove to Atlanta for the start of my work week). And we had the rest of that incredible French bread.

After dinner we watched "Good Night and Good Luck" on DVD. There was the usual sort of interesting conversation after that. We have talked before about the blacklists, the red scare, and Joseph McCarthy. We've described the way Edward R. Murrow brought him down by letting him talk for himself. McCarthy did all the work - all that was really needed to wake everyone up was to get the small minded, fear monger into the open (outside that dreaded arena he had created in the Senate) and get him talking (and lying - about a reported all of America trusted). A brave act, though, for those reporters, and it cost them their spot on the network, in the end, as the CEO couldn't stomach the risk, or the costs, of running such a newsroom.

And that was my Saturday. About four days long, I think. I hope yours was even half as good, and that you realized, as I did repeatedly, what a wonderful day you were having. That morning, on the streets of our town, walking several miles in a deliciously cool breeze, we felt like we were stealing something from July, and I wanted to shout and laugh for the impudence of it. Walking away from the market (where I'd gone back because we realized we wished we'd bought more of the bread), I tossed a loaf in the air, laughed aloud, and caught it. I looked up to see Dearest grinning at me through the windshield of our car. I could have jumped high in the air and clicked my heels. (I did do that, at one point, last weekend - I can't remember where I was.)

I was seizing the day and getting all the juice out. Horace would have been proud.

Art Insights - The Usefulness of Absence

I've been pulled back from my art, and after a while that lends perspective. I'm not saying I was deliberately stepping back for the bigger picture, but I seem to be getting some insights by accident.

1. I realized that I want to push my paintings. I'm not satisfied doing the same thing well - I want to be reaching for more.

2. I'm still excited by color, more than anything else.

3. Certain artists have come into the foreground for me over the last few years. I'm drawn to them. They're my artistic family, with have similarities I can't ignore. Hundertwasser, Nolde, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Klee, Cezanne, Bernard, Klimt, Schielle, Munch. These are my guides, somehow.

a. They are not at all afraid of color.
b. They paint recognizable subjects.
c. They let paint be paint, but also make the paint serve the image they are creating.
d. There is a sense of light and place in most of their works.
e. Their paintings are generally beautiful, though the subject matter is not always.
f. Their works are composed, and the compositions are recognizably part of their style.
g. Possibly most of all, there is an immediacy and feeling of exploration in every stroke which feels like their inner child is holding the brush. That child may be hurt, or obsessed with the erotic, but it's still a child that is painting. Their work isn't too polished, either - it has a reality that makes it breath, like a musical recording where you can still hear the fingers move on the strings.

4. I still prefer to strive for a sense of play and a gleeful light to come through the pieces I create. I'm moved by strong, sober paintings when I visit museums, but I would not want to live with them, or spend a lot of time creating them, either. I feel like these preferences are simply choosing the company I keep.

5. I am impatient of spending time painting something I don't care about - something I don't want to paint, something I don't LOVE to paint.

6. I find that my pieces have more meaning for me, and that I'm pushed harder to create the right image, if there is a story. Having something I am striving to illustrate brings more of me into play, and the art shows this, I think. The paintings I created for a friend's poem (she is looking for a publisher) are still among my very best, I feel. And painting them stretched me considerably.

7. I've instinctively been looking for a subject or a poem that drives images. Today I leafed through a book of Cavafy poems. They stirred me, but they didn't seem to be from the right country. I'm looking for the verse or prose that is from the same country as my paintings. I know it exists. I sense it's at the tip of my fingers. It probably in a book right here in the house.

8. Most importantly, regardless of the other ways my creativity is being expressed right now, I miss painting. It fills a part of me. I don't want to live without it. I am enjoying feeling the tug of it on my heart while I'm busy doing other things. The tug is growing stronger.

I spent part of the last few days in bookstores, looking at several artists. Seurat (I like his drawings better than his paintings, which seem over-composed to me). Chagall (I love his colors and the dreamy way his paintings make me feel, but his paintings seem under-composed to me). Toulouse-Lautrec (So much acid green and pink, reds and oranges - I felt like I was looking at the Mannerists, again, who painted after the Italian Renaissance, and who also favored these hot hues and exagerated human figures. I love his drawing - his paintings always work as fine drawings, as well). Cezanne (I bought a small book, and I'm looking forward to reading more about his method - looking at things the way he did. More than most artists, I think his art is about SEEING).

Yesterday Daughter and I were out driving and then spent some time on Ninth Street in Durham. We went to the Regulator bookstore, which was open even on the 4th of July. I could not believe the number of art related magazines on their racks. I looked through more than ten, all with slightly different focus, from the more traditional ArtNews, to some avant garde and "art brut" publications. They made me tired. Some interesting or intriguing things were there, but mostly it felt like trying too hard to impress. I used to be intimidated by these trade rags, and the seriousness of the art they publish - now it just seemed sadly grown up, in a boring way. Some little voice in my head wonders if I'm dodging the challenges implied in the magazines - copping out on trying to create something that relevant - but that makes me grin. Nope. I just think it ought to be more fun than that.

I don't know where this hiatus will end up, but I'm aware that, under all the lack of activity, I'm on a journey. I also know that at some point I have to paint my way along that road, I can't just ride above it all with my brushes standing upside down in jars, clean, dry bristles in the air, and with my face in books.

Painting in the photo above is "Singing the Catfish's Song" - the first painting I sold, on opening night of the gallery we founded in Hillsborough, NC. I left the gallery after a year, but it was a great experience and launched my art again. I visited the Gallery on Friday and was greeted warmly by one of the other founders, Chris Graebner, a talented painter of large, vivid blossoms, and a certified botanical artist. This third year is their best year, even with the recession, and seven of the original 15 artists are still there. It's a co-op, owned by the artists. If you're in Hillsborough, check them out. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts.

Not Back Yet...

I am so completely buried at work I'm breathing through a straw I stuck up through the top of the pile. I have so much to learn and figure out in the next few weeks - I feel like I'm back in college, and taking two semesters worth of classes at once. It's creative, interesting, and real work in a vital field, and I'm delighted to be part of it, in the middle of it, but it is using almost all of my creative energy right now, and most of my waking time, too.

So I haven't been here - in part because of the work, and in part because I moved some hardware around at home and had no connection on this PC until I bought some more gear. And I haven't painted much, either. We had a great vacation - and I'll post some photos of that in a while - but I didn't paint a stroke during that week.

Last weekend I tried and it seemed pretty far away. Then Dearest said maybe I should relax and not work on a painting in progress (they looked to me like something someone else was doing, anyway), but instead to just paint or draw anything at all. So I painted this, in an hour and half, all in one sitting. This is where watercolors thrill me - when you can swoosh things around fast and loose and get something close to the heart. I have always loved these spunky, pouting, bug-eyed little characters. I'm not one to own a dog, really (we're cat people) but if I did, a Boston terrier would be one possibility.

Watercolor - about 10 x 12 inches. Click for larger view.

Off to read a few your blogs (haven't done that in weeks, either) and then bed. Lots more work and a party (and poker) tomorrow. Enough rest is one key to this whole crazy period.

The Last Pansies, May 2009 - Mostly Gone First Half of June

Each year the pansies have to be pulled out, after they get all leggy from the heat, so they can be replaced with summer annuals. Oldest cuts as many blossoms as he can on the last day, arranging vases all over the house. One year I think there were about fifty separate little arrangements. This one struck me as I passed it on the stairwell, so I carried it upstairs for this photo, and to capture one of the pansies in a drawing.

The large one in the center is a pansy, the others are actually violas, the violet cousins from which the larger hybrid pansies were bred. Dearest loves all of these, and plants dozens of kinds every fall, all over the yard. She has to visit several different nurseries over several months to get the variety she wants.

The drawing was for a Mothers Day card for my Mom. Round card stock, about 5 inches in diameter.

Between the job, a long set of meetings out of town, and a family vacation I may not be online at all until June 15th or later... We'll see. It's all good stuff, but the first half of June will FLY by.

See you in a few weeks... Maybe with a few little paintings from the trips...

New England Barns

Today I needed to do a piece from start to finish. Too twitchy to work on something larger...

A photo in a post on Little Bang Theory, the blog of The Cunning Runt, was the model for this watercolor and ink painting. I drew first, then inked in all the darkest areas, then went with the watercolors. The finished piece is a little over 10 x 14 inches. Click for a larger view.

The light scattered in all the leaves is beautiful in the photo, but it distracts from the larger shapes and patterns of light and dark that made me want to paint this. So I just went for the large dark masses, using blues, violets, and greens.

What I loved about this image is the lights and darks in the foreground - particularly the interplay of the shadows with the black of the windows and all the shapes around the brightly lit gables and dormers. I also love the red of the barn in the center right. And the height and details of the cupola.

And it helps that the Cunning Runt has composed the whole thing so it works immediately. All I had to do was get the proportions correct in my drawing to preserve the feeling I wanted. My page is a little shorter than his, so I do lose a little of the vertical drama of his photo. I was able to restore a little of that by making the cupola look a little more high and remote (size and atmospheric perspective).

Happily I could also edit the image in my head as I transposed it. So I left out details I didn't like, and I could trim the branches out of parts of the barns that I wanted plain and crisp edged. The Cunning Runt might have liked some of the details I removed... or not. But unless you want to get busy with Photoshop or other tools, those details are not something you change in a photo.

This is the second time I have been inspired by The Cunning Runt's photos. Click here for the previous watercolor sketch (of Mount Greylock), and here for his post and photo. Today's effort is more of a finished painting than the previous.