Rain Ponchos

This, on blue circular stock, white colored pencil between the raindrop streaks, was inspired by a rainy day hike around the Trout Lake on the Cone Manor. We wore ponchos. Mine is new and I chose RED. No grown up black or blue poncho for me, thank you. Youngest really enjoyed this hike, and being out in the wind and wet. So did I. Oldest was at the rental house with a cold (loving the quiet to read and draw), and the ladies were a ways in front of us, so I had youngest all to myself (and vice versa).

I really grinned much of this hike, I think, but I don't know how to draw myself (from memory and in profile!) as grinning. It kept coming out like a leer. So I settled for this. My parents commented that we look awfully serious...

My hat isn't really waterproof - just water resistant for a while. So after an hour in the rain it was soaking through and my head was cold and wet. But the brim kept the rain off my glasses. And I've had that old hat for a long time now, and worn it in all sorts of weather. It smells like campfires, old leather, and wet middle-aged Hungaro-Italian hair.

Mountains Paintings - #7 and #8 - Paintings from the Dead

I used a photo of the funeral of Jerry Garcia, with a deadhead crowd in the foreground, to get overlapping blind contour drawings for these two. The crowd was a great source of crazy lines that ran all over, from person to person, form to form, all the way across the page. After getting the pile of lines, I picked certain ones, augmented others, and erased some. Then I inked the lines with waterproof and light-fast black pen.

Then I begin to paint, often with the lines, sometimes not. These were a lot of fun. The first I call San Simeon, and I feel it is the spirit of Hearst that overshadows the painting in blue. I have no further explanation or reason for thinking this. I will not try to explain the car in the foreground, or the perspective used to draw it. It happened.

The other painting was harder to extract from the lines, but was the most fun of all. It's my alter-ego Virgil Tangelo, father of the talented traveler Nigel Tangelo of Hamjamser. This is Virgil in his youth (and in his long underwear) riding a friend. Virgil seems to end up in paintings without his clothes. My kids especially like the toothy guy in the bottom right - so do I.

Point of View

Over thirty years ago I received the gift of an additional point of view. I was in my late teens, and, unsurprisingly, I wasn't really interested in the opinions of my parents. I had temporarily shed my concern about the opinions of peers and my teachers with the move to NC. So I was as free as I've been in my entire life, with no one's views to consult but my own. I ran a little wild for a few months, driving too fast, laughing out loud, spending my small wages with gleeful abandon.

And then I deliberately connected myself with the wits and heart of another. She saw the potential in the union first, an early sign that things were clearer from where she stands. She had to chase me some, but I wasn't hard to catch. I had been free, but feeling incomplete since I was about eight or nine years old, and in my teens I had figured out enough to know what I needed. I was looking for the rest of me. I had one point of view, and one heart; I was looking for that binocular vision that provides depth and perspective. I needed another head and another heart next to mine. I was looking for the right thing, but in the wrong places; she knew what she was doing and gave me a hand. That's what it's been like for thirty years. I'm generally close, but she's closer and I'm better off if I give her a chance to think it through and then I listen.

And while it has taken years to understand that her point of view is generally better than mine - closer to the truth, up above more clouds than mine is - I now know I'm usually happiest looking over her shoulder like this.

For instance, this day was her idea - we went to Roan Mountain State Park on the NC/TN boundary. Along with Grayson Highlands in Virginia, the Shining Rock Wilderness and the Black Mountains of North Carolina, this ranks as one of the most breathtaking and magical places I've been. The views, the light, the colors, the smells, the wind, the clouds roaring past, everything heightened the senses and sped the pulse. Crows flew over and my envy was a sharp painful pleasure, wishing I, too, could float over this incredible landscape and play in this living wind.

Mountain Trip - Paintings 3 and 4 - Grenouille Political Message

Here is painting 3. I thought I had photos of the process leading to it, but I can't find them on the camera. This one also started as the combination of three photos, one of which I recall was a view of a man made lake in Oklahoma, with several thin trees in the foreground. Those trees are still visible in some of the yellow verticals in this piece. Another photo was of a farm - and the buildings remain from that one. When this was coming into focus, which it did as I was painting it, I realized it was a storm - maybe even a tornado - approaching the peace of the farmstead.

And in these next two photos (click to see them better) you can see the line drawings that start painting 4. The first is just one set of lines from one photo. The second shows how I flipped the paper over and sketched some of the contours of the rocks over the top of the other.

It's this collection of lines that I sit and daydream over, turning it around and around, looking until some lines either suggest something, or erasing lines if they irritate me. Eventually the image at the end of this post emerged - a longer than usual stretch from the line drawings, in this case, so it took me some time to match them up and be certain that these photos and line drawings led to this painting.





>>>> Appendix de Grenouille <<<< If you have visited us often, perhaps you know that I am not a tree grenouille. So what am I doing in a tree? Voila, I am illustrating a point.

If you hire handlers for your image, and polls show you are not looking good enough, and then you hire other handlers and they ask you to look yet another way, and then the situation changes and, voila, a new image, and a new message, and maybe yet a third set of handlers, you might be so confused by the end that you, like moi, end up sitting up in a tree. And we are suggesting that perhaps this is not a dignified thing, and perhaps dignity and integrity are important for a President?

One candidate has had one look and one message throughout the primaries and campaign - "Change, Hope, Unity - together we can do this." The words and focus sharper now than at the start, but message and image the same. Meanwhile the other has changed the image and message over and over: Maverick, no, Experience, no, Stay the Course, no, Change, no, Suspend Campaign and help fix the $ crisis, no, get out of the way, no...

And in these final weeks he is standing by, "We don't really know who the other guy is." Etienne has a Latin phrase from his philosophy classes in college that applies - "Tu Quoque." "You too." Etienne says it's the cry in debate when the opponent has actually proved the point they were trying to stick on you. We don't really know who THIS guy is. He is whomever his handlers tell him to be. Do we want a president in a tree?

There is never enough room in our kitchen cabinets. Mostly they're too high, especially for dearest, who is just a little over five feet tall, and who points out frequently, in many houses, that cabinets are put up mostly by men but are used mostly by women. This means a third to half of the upper cabinets are out of reach for all but the tallest of us.

And then there is the fact that the kitchen is not just for meals, but also for flower arranging. We're not formal about it, but every year sees frosts or storms that cause an exodus of blooms from the garden, seeking shelter in the house, and they must all be put up in vases. Sometimes we have over fifty scattered around the house at those times.

And like nearly everything else in this house, the vases have stories. The Orangina bottle found in the stone wall at the top of Baou Ste. Jeannet in Provence... The patent medicine bottle found in foundation stones we used to build the gardens, which says that, "Children cry out for more!" The tiny cut crystal salt shaker we used in our first apartment... The triangular bottles which a neighbor gave us for Christmas, filled with home made limoncello and orangecello, which later made that month's neighborhood poker game so memorable...

Cat - Circle 3

This was the third in the series of circular pieces I drew and mailed to my parents. Like the anteater, they initially couldn't see what it was, then couldn't see anything else after they had the "ah ha!" moment. Drawn on orange stock.

Mountain Trip - Painting 2

Here is painting number 2 from the vacation (click for larger version). This was a few days before we went to see the big waterfalls at Linville Gorge, something our older two recalled, but our youngest did not remember, but the hike and gorge were probably on my mind when this image emerged. It took me a while to get the values the way I wanted, to create the feeling of haze - I put color on, then lifted it off, then put it back...

We had a good time on the hike. This photo was taken from the other side of the 400 foot gorge, where we got the best views of the falls, the cliffs, and the river running away from it. Going over these falls is usually fatal - they're bigger than they appear here.

In this shot you can compare the painting to the photo (in the Oklahoma book) that I used for some lines to get something happening. What struck me was 90 degrees around (that happens often) and things changed. For instance, the sky at the top of the lake photo ended up being part of a cliff or something in the right hand edge of the painting. And the rocks jutting into the water became larger rocks and small peaks jutting into the sky. Other rocks became trees in the middle ground at the bottom of the little painting, etc.

This was the most traditional image out of the bunch. From here they diverged much more, though some are still inspired by the trip and our surroundings.

The next painting I have the line drawing photographed, as well as the photos that were combined, and the final piece.

>>>> Appendix de Grenouille <<<<
On the trip the family bought a set of French refrigerator poetry magnets. The youngest pointed out to Etienne that, voila, one of the first words on the top of the package, showing through the transparent box was grenouille. As Etienne quotes the Romans, "Mirabile dictu!" We are everywhere.