First completed oil painting

I completed my first painting today. I could noodle around with it forever, I guess, but sometimes it's good to quit while I'm ahead.

Oil painting without happy trees

In the oil painting class I continued to build up the masses of color in the landscape and add some detail. Here is what I did this weekend. I used a fan brush to add some yellow highlights. Big mistake. I got "happy trees," so I reworked them.

Today I started on the water in the stream and continued with adding detail.

Painting a landscape

Last week in the oil-painting class we worked on a landscape based on a photograph. I chose a river scene near San Jose, New Mexico, that I photographed in August 2008.

Using pigment thinned with Turpenoid, an odorless paint thinner, I first sketched in the basic shapes. I didn't have a camera with me, but you can see below part of the sketch of the river.

Then we blocked in the masses of color.

The next part is to work on building the masses of shapes and adding detail.

P-doobie takes oil painting

I am taking an 8-week oil painting class for three hours every Tuesday. In the first session we painted a lemon. I was happy because it was recognizable as one of the edibilia. We also made a color chart. Last week we did a still life with geraniums, and the less said about that, the better.

This week we did a value study, a study of the lightness and darkness of a color independent of its hue and colorfulness.

Our first step was to do a thumbnail sketch with charcoal to show the areas of light, dark, and in between. Here is my thumbnail sketch of the still life with three plums, teapot, and vase.

Then we used the thumbnail and transferred it to the canvas with charcoal. When you make a mistake, it's easy to rub it out. Do not blow away the crumbs, because the whole drawing will disappear; I learned that the hard way. When the drawing was on the canvas, I sprayed it with fixative.

Next I used burnt umber: pure pigment and mixed with white in several tints. Then, working from the thumbnail and the still life itself, I worked on a monochromatic value study. It's a work in progress, and I haven't finished it.

I have also discovered that I paint like dad used to eat red chile. "Dad, you have chile on your neck." Even wearing gloves and an apron, I manage to get paint on my elbows.

Oil painting is hard work.

Liō

One of my great pleasures is reading comics, cartoons, and other graphics. I have a whole bookcase devoted to this genre: everything from the Fantagraphics set of the complete Peanuts (the series is now up to 1978) to Doonesbury, from the graphic novels of Lynd Ward and Milt Gross to a graphic treatment of World War I by Jacques Tardi. I love political cartoons.

Here's a picture of part of my graphics bookcase.

Chuckbert introduced me to Liō. We carry the Liō books in the store and can't keep them in stock. They've become a great favorite of kids and adults alike.

When I opened Chuckbert's Christmas gift, a framed Liō print, I did a little happy dance around the living room. Thanks, Chuckbert!

Trafalgar Square plinth

In Trafalgar Square in London are four enormous plinths, only three of which have statues because financing for the fourth statue fell through. For the next three months, the empty fourth plinth will be a public art experiment, consisting of 2400 Britons climbing up on the plinth for an hour each and doing whatever the hell they want.

Check out One & Other for the live webstream.

P-Doobie and Michele take a vacation together!

Michele and I had a blast on our vacation to San Diego and Escondido last week. 

Michele surprised me last year with tickets to Madama Butterfly, starring my ultimate hug-honey (after Michele and Natalie Dessay), Patricia Racette, who is an amazing singer and actress; I've been following her career since she debuted at Santa Fe as Emmeline in 1996. We had great seats, and the performance was wonderful (review here). I was emotionally drained at the end. 

Carlo Ventre as Pinkerton That Dope and Pat Racette as Cio-Cio-San

Our hotel was downtown in the Gaslamp District and right around the corner from the opera. It's luxurious enough that you feel pampered, and affordable enough that you don't feel you need to subsist on beef jerky and diet Pepsi from the Conoco station up the street. 

We also strolled around Hillcrest and went to the Ace Hardware Store, which is the coolest hardware store on the planet, and to the Obelisk Bookstore. The Obelisk seems to be scrapping along. Support your local independent bookstores!

We bought bucket hats at the Village Hat Shop so we wouldn't burn our noses and ears.

Two stylin' babes

We also went to Balboa Park and enjoyed the flowers, trees, butterflies, and photographs by Lou Stoumen and Edward Steichen at the Museum of Photographic Arts.


Times Square in the Rain, by Lou Stoumen

Michele's patient butterfly


A yellow columbine in the park

Tree trunk

After "a pleasant walk, a pleasant talk / along the briny beach" in La Jolla, we went to D. G. Wills Books, where I saw this label on a shelf.

LITERARY CRIT., CULTURAL STUDIES & UNIDENTIFIABLE SOPHISTRY

Further comment is superfluous.

Our visit with Chuckbert and Mr. Bears was a delight. We drove to Ramona and Julian and enjoyed shopping for bread, having a peaceful lunch in the garden of a converted cottage, eating pie, and poking around the shops. 

We also got to help celebrate Karl's birthday with the traditional homemade mac-n-cheese and brownies. Mmmmmmmm!

On Saturday we went to La Jolla for a little gallery hopping. We went to the Martin Lawrence Gallery. And There. They. Were. Lithographs by Robert Deyber. We spent lots of time talking with Teresa the Curator. Then we walked around La Jolla. I thought a lot about the lithographs. Then we went back. I bought "Bag of Tricks." 

A rebus

Ike was glad to see us when we got back yesterday. Flicker said, "Oh. You were away?"

LED Sheep Art

Michele directed me to this video, which appears to be going viral.

Nature in art

Today, to ward off cabin fever, Michele and I went to Santa Fe to do some errands. When we had finished buying underwear, niacin, and office supplies (when it comes to having a bag o' thrills, we madcaps have no peers) and having a little lunch, we wondered what to do next. Michele suggested that we walk the labyrinth on Museum Hill. Unfortunately, the snow was still covering the ground and obscured the path. 

So we went instead to the sculpture garden and then to a sculpture of a Mountain Spirit Dancer by Craig Dan Goseyun, a member of the San Carlos Apache tribe. (I took the images with my cell phone.) Here is the sculpture of the dancer. It's about 10 feet high.

Charles Russell, the artist and sculptor, knew that most sculpture was designed to be viewed from only one vantage point, so he created his to be viewed from all angles and vantage points. So I started walking around the piece to see everything, and in the bell on the dancer's left boot, I saw this.

A bird's nest!

Now is there some sort of fair on the square today?

Michele and I went to Indian Market yesterday. We left home before 6:00 so we could have breakfast at Tia Sophia's. When we got on line, we were at Uli's, two doors down from the restaurant, but we were still in the first wave to go in. Our waitress brought our breakfast burritos and said, "You have two minutes to finish, then get out!" How we laughed.

We had read in the Indian Market guide about Wanesia Spry-Misquadace, an Ojibwa artist who lives in Santa Fe. She is preserving a very rare form of art, birch-bark biting, so we stopped by her booth first. Her pieces are exquisite. Here is an image of what the bitten birch bark looks like. It's not one of Wanesia's pieces, though. Hers are more intricate; she does turtles and insects.

Two Great Quotations

We were a couple booths away from Wanesia's when we heard the first of the Two Great Quotations of the Day. A woman was looking at a sculptor's work and asked, "Are you selling this?" There was a long pause while he looked closely at her and decided she really hadn't just been beamed down from the mother ship. "It's all sold [before 8:30! How cool is that?]," he told her. She said, "Well, you should put up a little sign then."

Later we were looking at the booths on Lincoln Avenue and heard the second of the Two Great Quotations. A woman said to her companion, "Let's go to the other side of the street. You can get the stuff on this side in any store." We assumed she shopped at Walatowa-Mart.

The best-dressed tourist contest

The contest was a toughie this year. Would we choose the woman dressed in diaphanous skirts, pink full-quill ostrich boots, and layers of floating scarves that trailed behind her like exhaust? How about the woman wearing every bit of her silver and turquoise jewelry? Ordinarily it would take six men and a boy to hold her up under the weight, but for Indian Market, it's best to solo. We finally decided on the woman clomping around in her bespoke boots featuring Our Lady of Guadalupe in colors so bright and vibrant they could have been given a coat of tan.

What we brought home

Michele got a Zuni fetish of a bear.


My friend Tony, a Santa Clara sculptor, gave me this little bear. We worked together for several years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and he said he wanted to give me something to celebrate our friendship over the last 25 years. What a nice guy!


I got this little beaded sheep from Ronda Dosedo of Zuni, New Mexico.

Who are you really?

Wednesday was the all-district meeting for the faculty and staff in the Los Alamos Public Schools. I set up a table outside the Duane Smith Auditorium to pass out informational flyers with valuable cents-off coupons, get addresses for our teachers-only newsletter, and feature the cool books, games, and toys we have at Otowi Station. And to make sure that I was noticed, I wore my Cat in the Hat hat, which has a 14-inch crown. When I wear it, I'm really hard to miss, as the folks behind me at the Santa Fe Opera can attest.


(Not really P-Doobie.)

But some people were confused about which literary character I was portraying.

"Good morning, Dr. Doolittle!"

"Hey! It's the Mad Hatter!"

You gotta have art! All you really need is art!

Chuckbert, JerBear, Michele, and I were talking yesterday evening about the cool pieces that the guys had acquired during their visit, and the talk turned to whether I had acquired any new photographs. The most recent one is by Jack Spencer, "Yellowstone River, Montana, 2005," which we haven't hung because we need to reshuffle the wall space. I also have his "Sheldon Church Ruins, Sheldon, SC, 1998." I like the painterly feel and narrative sense of Spencer's images.

Yellowstone River, Montana


Sheldon Church Ruins, Sheldon, SC

I've been reading Larry McMurtry's memoir Books, and his reflections on collections. He collects travel writing written by women; the rest of his library, he says, is an accumulation. I have a collection of images of women by female photographers. The rest of the pieces are an accumulation. I love every photograph in my collection and accumulation.