Trooper, the Equine Ranger in Progress

So much that has nothing to do with anything has been happening, so a brief update.
I had my first presentation in Scottsdale at their art league and it went so well, another group asked for me.  The scheduling will probably end up in November or so, with the league's schedule and mine.
Tempe, which is very nearby also wants me and this time for AUGUST!  So we will put that on the agenda.  I figured out the issue I had been having with projectors.  You see my reliable little laptop does not have the proper hood up for almost EVERY available machine I can borrow or afford.  The new laptops don't tend to come with the plug either!  SO... I literally got and returned FOUR adapters before I finally found a small, rather old, but running win10 very slow and very old model REFURBISHED notebook that I will try to use ONLY for presentations.  If it wears out quickly, it was only $30 more than most of the adapters I exchanged.
I am breaking it in.

And I have been working on a portrait.
Still not done but here are a few progress shots....

 I knew what I wanted to do with Tooper, one of the horses that come (two days before I left) to stay in the park for the summer, but I was a bit unsure of what I wanted to do with the background.  So I drew him, sketched the background (which changed) and painted it all in black acrylic so I could do the background and still see the horse.

I finally decided on the scene and blocked it all in before I even began to paint the horse.  I called it eating my veggies before I had desert.  I am so bad at landscapes.  I love vignettes, but it is a bit nuts, to be around all that beauty and not use it at all in the paintings.  So this area was from a snapshot on the road.  I am pretty sure it is just around Kachina point, very near home... but I had blur in the thing and just loved all the stripes of color.

So,  90% done, horse near ready for the rest of the tack and I really did not like it.  Could not put my finger on it, but it did not do what I wanted, did not look like a place that was truly there.  I spent a lot of obsessive time trying to fit the time of day (noon and strong vertical light) with a scene that would make sense, and try as I might, I was not able to get that sense of abstraction I wanted behind his realism..

I asked some friends and tried him in other backgrounds (more complex and suited to my obsessive mind)  and there was a general consensus that ALL of my ideas were good.... which did not help, but a friend reminded me of something I LIKE TO SUGGEST to artists stuck like I am.... Put a piece of plastic over it and experiment.

I am sure she is aghast at the horrible plastic I used, but I just needed to decide what color and how far I needed to go.
So why is this in this blog?
I am aware of something that happened to me there.  I have become REALLY unhappy now that I am home.  I do not feel connected to much.  The heat keeps me in the house like a cage and I don't know what to paint, don't know if anyone will buy them, how much more I can fit in here, and I basically and to afraid to start anything for fear of failing.
This was a free pass!
I gave myself permission to let go.
I got in there and started by darkening and moving the sky a bit...

Not too dramatic but then I started darkening the space behind to show the shadows of the clouds and eventually stopped trying at all to match the reference, just started playing with the colors.  I put the purple in the shadows of the rocks close in , and dotted the background with glints of light and basically started playing.  It was more about me painting my OWN Painted Desert.

I know you all don't think there is much going on that is revolutionary about this, but to me, it was very freeing, with my house full of art, to risk it and come back from where it was not so safe!

I need to let it be.  

It is finally to a point where when I leave it and come back, it is pleasing me!!!

Next post will be the finish.  I might have my donation piece....

Landscapes Win...

I have literally nearly gone blind trying to figure out which of these 3000 photos to paint from. Most of the shots were part of an idea or just an amazing moment that had to be captured.

I know I will do some more wildlife but as many pix of the teepees as I have, I found myself haunted by them.  Finally I just gave up!  I have a feeling the general public might like some landscapes so I started..... I is pretty daunting.

So many artists are just plain so much better at this than I am, but as I finally dug in, I started enjoying it..  This was from last night.

This morning I had a cat that just was NOT up for staying away.  He was total hell and I finally brought his cage in.... I was sort of leaving it in the car in case we needed to go somewhere.  (Aside from spending too much time looking for a new place to live, I fantasized of lovely car trips and of course, moving into that great place my PATRON set me up in.... I have been succuming to the heat, so please ignore my rambling)      (Unless you are a patron that really wants to help by setting me up in a new studio/living space.......)  I have him in the studio and he is much calmer just watching me.   No biting and play-time with the brushes etc...

And with his cooperation, I am at what I call SITTING STAGE.
This is where I MIGHT call it done but there is a good reason to stop and ignore it for a while.   The reason is sloppy, gloopy paint.  Not much oil lately but I apparently have a lot of enthusiasm.
I will get in there and fix the nuts spots when it is dryer in a few days.

I may do another.

I brought a stack of 11x14 canvases with me.  I have so many ideas in my head, it might just be worth it to get a few out and work on my ideas for my donation.  I don't have room for big pieces in the place so these small pieces are just about right...

On to the Real World.

A little note as it ends (again) and I hope I get to post such things regularly!
I tried to make my stay valuable to the Park.  I am a dogged advocate and supporter of the NPS.  I had a great chat with Suzie and Steve as they departed this morning as well.
Not sure if there is any way I would have the resources to donate more time to them, but I want to look into the Park Volunteers!  These are the backbone of the place.  So much of the park is run on nothing but love and good will.
I came home with over 3000 photos and have hundreds of ideas in my head how to use them.
There is no telling what the donation will be but I hope to spend a few days in October delivering it on my trip to Denver.

I am not as bottomed out as I was before, even though the morning was a bust.
I tried to see the new babies at the tree on the south exit but they did such a great job of camouflaging their condo, that I could hear the babies yelling, saw one of them dive in for breakfast feeding but could barely see a nose a couple of times and NOTHING else.

I guess when I get back they will be hovering over me, hopefully giving a little guidance.

So I will take the advice of the sign below and STOP and let it all sink in.

YES I will update.

There may even be a chance to participate in Holbrook Wild West Days in July.   Doubt it could be as hot as here, and I really miss the wind already.

Zombie Returns to Where She Belongs... for now.

I did an awful lot in what seemed like absolutely no time! From the Park, the trip home was not a waste:

I brought my own sheets so the loaners were cleaned and folded for the next tenant.  Took the rugs (Thing had some furball issues... and they were obviously not part of the general clean up) to destroy my home washer... and indeed they tried!  So the floor looks all pretty.

I had a hard time rounding things up to leave, as the cat still woke me for sunrise but I was running on 4 hours sleep today.  Only forgot the laundry soap and never got the RUBBER CEMENT so my my birdie will be finished when I get home.

I just kept throwing things in the car.

I traded out most of my paper art samples and brought a few more of my rock repros.  (Like I said... there is still Yellow Horse...)

But when I hit the road about 8, I was physically running on empty.

Nearly got dozey on 377, the last third of the trip and my favorite part of the drive. High chapparral, lots of shrubs and flat.  I started smiling again as I turned on 40 out of Holbrook.

I have a grocery list I gave up on.  I rolled in, and wanted nothing but to sleep.  It felt like a wave of peace and energy poured over me

I am going to try to be more visible.   

I had talked to a weaver and bead stringer named Jane who was up for me doing her portrait.  She was in PDI today, so I made myself walk over with camera and got a couple of good shots.

I determined to pull out my newly tidied-up pastels and see if I can remember how they work.   I am pretty sure I do not... 

I sat on the patio, put the thing in the cage and enjoyed the COOLNESS.  No wind, and just brisk enough to NOT be Phoenix!! I drew and dozed.  

Here is my start on Jane.  I am planning to see if I can do a watercolor under pastel.  I have not done it for a portrait for years.  I also know I will kick myself with the amazing necklace she was wearing.

My boyfriend says he is ready to see more art and less travelogues.  We shall try!!

Day 13

I am writing this in real time.  It actually IS he 13th.

One of the problems with my blog idea is when and where I can upload it, so I am sitting with day 12 in the mini computer waiting for me to go to wifi capability, but not always able to do it in the earlier parts of the day.

I put the cat in the bathroom at 4 and managed to sleep through to 7!  This is somewhat of a milestone.  I am sure it was the exhausting day in Holbrook, and I do not have a voice anymore.  Having become a hermit in town, has made this so very easy, but I blossom when I do get out among folks. But I get raspier and raspier.  I did stay up working pretty late and was happy at the progress on my portrait, but figured to get busy with some bird or small things to demo for the weekend in honor of Mother's Day.

I was advised to get out and do a walk in honor of Migratory Bird day.  Hallie who is such a great voice for the park and in charge of the daily notes on the Facebook page, met lowly me at 9 as publicized, in the Puerco parking lot and we went to a few semi forbidden places, accompanied by more wind than the birds needed to migrate around us.

I know I am allowed to avail of the rangers, and volunteers as long as I don't interfere with work, but I still have nothing but questions.  Each new discovery leads to more to look for.
Who would have thought that her love of wildflowers would have lead me back to the casita, after an attempted and non-productive nap, to go sit in the wind on my patio.  The temperature was perfect.  The grasses were dancing and all I saw was wildflowers.  I just walked around snapping these microscopic little things.
The sound of the wind is perfect now.  Tomorrow it may be more scary, but just for now, it is so soothing, I am happier NOT to be asleep, just listening.

What exactly is expected of an artist in residence?  The more I ask, the more happy I become.  I am such a night owl... besides if the cat watches me in the evening, he is less inclined to be bored and keep me up all night.  I do more painting in the casita, even though I did enjoy both jaunts into the public venues, I would rather talk and snap photos.  I will easily have over 2000 photos when I am done.  I do wonder if I could be a professional former Artist in Residence!  I know there is work for me but I have GOT to find an audience.  I get funky thinking about how to sell it, and that is when I stop THINKING.

My statement that AiR fall into two main categories.  The very rich with plenty of time on their hands to drop out for a month and the very poor who have NOTHING else to do for a month.  Guess where I am.  I am choosing to regroup.  Not probably the wisest but the healthiest.  I want to just have all this visual stimulus pour into me.  Painting can come later.
......
 I had originally thought this might be a two-part post. But the rest of the day kind of finished out the way the first of it went.
It was a great recuperation​ day. The cat even wondered why I was napping.

I prepped up for the next day at the Painted Desert Inn, with all my I rocks and reproductions and a little bit of everything.
I actually went to bed 8:30!

First Event is on the Schedule - May 12

Holbrook, the little metropolis on the edge of the park, has wonderful arts events featuring the Artists in Residence at their historic Train Depot!

The Park cosponsors the Holbrook Art Series featuring the monthly artist in residence and give a great way to see what the Park is doing and help me with promoting my art.

I am planning a demonstration of my Tin Cup style.

I did a lot of the Pony Express historical re-enactors from the area a few years ago.  I figure showing my pieces and explaining my technique would be a great way to make a new PeFo related piece and interact with the community!  I will post the images when we get going.

BRAND NEW ART

EVERYONE knows I am not a landscape painter.
I paint anything with eyeballs.
So although it will be fine to follow through on my plan to do portraits: of Rangers, of volunteers, of willdlife, visitors and even prehistoric people, I decided to take a class that features wildlife art and elegant, loose vignetted landscapes with Morten Solberg.
It is mind boggling.
Yesterday we worked on waterfalls.  Something I doubt I will have much opportunity to paint during the Artist in Residence, but I was excited about the versatility of only using two paints and white!  So I put in a little wolf.

It had so much potential.

Today, we learned a very creative technique, which I frankly failed like a ton of bricks.... BUT it was a completely different approach to how to  use paint.   

Instead of the exercise, I had a brain stop.  I just could not do it.  Realizing I had only 4 hours sleep the night before and woke up three hours before class (to put in my tiny wolf....) I took a break, ate lunch, which I had forgotten, and came back with a photo from my visit to the park last year.

You may not find it exciting, but as these were both 6"x 14" paper sheets, I THINK I came up with a way of using the essence of the land, but not the usual, tight, representative style that is me!    PERFECT for the little bits behind my guys:

Ah the fun of being an artist!!!  I still cannot wait!!!

Amateur Traveler

I have been looking at other blogs of artists spending their time in the PeFo (that is shorthand for the park) and they are young and hiking and heading bravely into the badlands.  I hope you all will forgive me if you don't see a lot of bravery here.   I am a visitor,  representing the people with their Senior Passes who do not need to be survivalists or athletes!

The beauty of this park is how much you can see in a half day.
From Phoenix it is about 3 hours and there is no casual camping or places to stay within the park.  It is beautifully vacant.  One cafe in the gift store and a few places to shop and a lot of places to learn. It is a perfect day trip from the city.
You drive up through our mountains and see the green trees and can easily find snow now and then in the winder months en route.   You can grab a bite in Payson and check out the history and see how Zane Gray lived.

Then you could choose to drive up through Show Low or across a wonderful open desolate but vast Chaparral to get to Holbrook.
Most people enter up north as they see the exit and drive right on to Gallup and Santa Fe, but go to the south entrance and if you are fascinated by the actual petrified aspect, there are still legal places outside the park to pick up some rocks of your own.
Entering from the south, you are closer to the museum and really amazing logs and lots to learn.   If you are NOT up for a full day, you can have a wonderful experience and still get home again before dark!

Or continue through the park drive that is well under an hour, just driving and take as long as you want at the pull outs.  

You will see truly amazing stone trees (NO they are not still standing.  Long ago they toppled and the minerals that replaced the wood formed horizontally, but the chunks left are phenomenal.





You might have learned all about them in the museum as you entered...) and with a very short walk, experience and ancient home of the ancestors of the cultures that still live outside the park.




A bit farther up you can view the place they call "Newspaper Rock" where those people and probably others, left their mark on brown stained rocks by chipping off the patina.  Whether for self expression or communication with others or their deities it still speaks to US today.

At the end of the drive is the Painted Desert.

A Harvey Inn built on unstable clay is on view near the amazing overlook that is self-explanatory of how it got its name!


Finally there is the last visitor center, where you can buy t-shirts, books and gas.  Have an Indian Taco before you head home or off to the wonders of Indian Country.

And none of it requires anything but eyeballs and curiosity!

NEWS IN JANUARY

Quite a few distractions have taken up my art time and on January 3, the first working day of the new year, I got a call in the middle of a family crisis from Kip, the AIR Ranger in charge! Dismissing myself from the ruckus, I spoke with him an he asked if I might wish to share the month of May with another camper.  It seems the casita will be empty as the Artist for May has a great big travel trailer and only needs a hookup in a different area of the park... so if I did not mind sharing my month, I could come in the spring.

I JUMPED on it!
I was there last year in May and found the wildlife reference I was hunting in Colorado - pronghorn and bighorn sheep - wandering around, taunting me!! I used a couple of them on my rock art.

The chilly months elsewhere are wonderful here in the Valley of the Sun - Phoenix AZ, but the summers are hell.  And our summers tend to start about March in the 90s.  YES I would love to come in spring.  TODAY it is in the high 90s and I am feeling it.

So the blog went live on March 16.  

45 days out from the month I get to move in!

I hope to update it regularly during the residency, but I understand I may have to set up camp in the visitor center with my laptop during business hours.  This will be a major upheaval!  I turn to the internet at home in town for solace and companionship with human beings.  I am a private painter but love doing demos and talking to people.  I will have NO PROBLEM interacting and enjoying my time with the public, but look forward with dread and anticipation to the isolation.  It will not be hard to fill my time making pictures.   They bounce in my mind all the time, but the purpose of my residency is to experience it.  But I tend to be a night owl and this is going to be a project about ravens....they fly all day!

The theme I presented dealt with following the ravens where they lead.

I was kept company last spring by any number of black birds that were watching me and the other visitors as we watched them.  Somewhat like useless tour guides who simply shepherded us.

Long before humans realized this was a special place, the animals just watched.....

I firmly have vowed to let the experience as a visitor - simply being there - fill me.
I want to meet other visitors, and the people working there, visiting the park for their livelihood, coming to explore, and dig into visitors of the past.  It will be trying to subjectively celebrate the experience.  Not a hiker or an outdoors-woman, I am a visitor.  I expect to connect with the nature that we all need to recharge, but as an artist I have a give that will help me make permanent those moments to share with others.....

Wish me luck!

Every Little Penny!

I have decided to lighten the load of some of my miniature reproductions on flagstone ahead of my departure.  Of split minds, with the distraction of prepping and planning and the real need to hold down the fort at home, I am putting one up a day on my facebook page.

So I am showing my first sale!

I started making these pieces as original art on great scraps of flagstone for wall decor.  I liked the brown on brown as a great surface for wildlife art.

This is the original piece, 11" wide and I sell it for $250.00.  

By downsizing and making completely handmade decals using acrylic medium, my reproductions are different sizes and directions. After I transfer them on to the rock, I  touch up with paint. It is a recreation of my own work... not really an original, but lets call it Artist-Enhanced... oh I guess I did on the small tag!!

Since October... about a year out.

(NOTE:  The diary began when I got accepted, but decided not to bore you or obsess too much by holding off to 45 days out.  My original, assigned date was October....)

November 2016 is half over which means I am LESS than a year from my start date!
I passed through the park in October on my trip to Denver at the beginning and end of the month.  Frankly, as much as I was hoping for a deadly hot month to help me through the usual cabin fever of the Summertime Phoenix Inferno that lasts 6 months or more of 100 degree days, the beauty of the fall colors of southern Colorado moving down through New Mexico and into the park, was nothing but perfect.  I understand a few flurries of snow but a rather unrelenting wind may be my worst weather problems.  The roads were full of tourist buses and the gift shop was just busy enough I did not get to talk to anyone on the way back home.
Heading out, was a real adventure.
I had contacted Ranger Kip, the AiR coordinator and my cat and I pulled in the visitor center after a slow drive through the whole park (no stops, but plenty of slowing to really appreciate the lay of the land) and he had me bring my guy into one of the meeting rooms and out of the car (again PERFECT weather, but not good for parking with pets) in his portable cage which lays flat and pops up.

Then I got to go to the laboratory where the zoologists were "skinning' two birds who had mistaken a window for open territory.  By prepping the skins, they can use the information for later study.  From there I was shown. along with the two AIR's for this year, the Museum storage.  I was drooling over a wall of original photographs through out the history of the park, but there were fossils and even some of the artist's works ready for new walls.   In the main laboratory they were using bone fragments to create 3-D printed skeletons for research!  Such great toys!

Which brings us back to this day in November...
Well yesterday.  I had a large envelope waiting for me at the post office when I opened my box.  Inside was the welcome packet!

Which included a few forms and thick printed mini-encyclopedia of the park as well as all of the rules for living inside the park.  Which is thrilling.  I expect to have it all well worn long before I arrive. 

First thing was punching holes and putting them all into binders.  I really love the little folder it was jammed full into!!

So that will keep me busy for a while.... not quite enough, but no whining!  I can dive into the history, wildlife, archaeology, fossils, rocks and all, any time I start counting the months again.