If you look in the shadows between (and beyond) the 2 chairs, you might be able to discern a doe with 2 fawns, probably born that very day.
While getting gas at the Four-way (local vernacular for an important intersection), I snapped this photo. Barns this classic and oak trees this majestic, quercus lobata, are standard but disappearingTulare County items, and when seen together, they should be painted or drawn or just photographed. (If I paint this, I will edit it severely.)
This is called a vitex tree. Doesn’t that sound like some sort of diet supplement? We tend to refer to these as “lupine trees”.
I finished 2 more Mineral King paintings, both 8×8″, drying quickly in the heat.
My friend with the Hume Lake cabin sent me this photo, which might possibly be the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen. Maybe I shall paint it. . . yes, I KNOW it is in Fresno/Fres-yes County but it is a well-loved place, even among us ignorant, fat, uneducated, poor, diabetic Tulare County hon-yocks.
Do you know “Ranger’s Roost”? It is the higher ground to the west of Timber Gap.
I didn’t go. I was at home, dealing with a situation. More on that next week. . .
Trail Guy was gobsmacked by the abundance of phlox, as evidenced by the abundance of photographs of phlox.
Timber Gap has great views, both north and south.
Looking south into Mineral King Looking north into the middle fork drainage of the Kaweah river and the mountains beyond, none of which I can name.
I love trail photos.
If you are reading this post on the day it goes live, I hope to be back in Mineral King. Probably not hiking, maybe painting, probably just reading or knitting or splitting wood. Maybe next week’s Mineral King post will have photos taken by me with my camera.
P.S. You can tell these photos are from Trail Guy’s camera because the sky has those dark spots (from something on/in the lens, not chemtrails). He doesn’t mind. I bought him a new camera, and he declined it. I kept the new camera, and it went weird, while his spotty camera just keeps soldiering onward. I bought myself another new camera, and so far, so good.
On another hot day with my brave swamp cooler, I focused on the giant oil painting of the classic Mineral King scene.
I was thankful to have the sky finished—well, finished unless I decide later that it isn’t finished. It is just too tall for me to reach, so some logistics must be addressed each time I work on it. Tabletop about 3′, lowest easel setting about 5″, top of painting another 3′. I’ve used a ladder in the past but my numb feet don’t want to stand on a rung these days. I do have a large floor easel, but am too lazy to set it up. It’s just one painting—I can stretch.
Details on the peaks, building up the background as I work lower (and closer to the viewer in the scene).
Fix that cabin!
Sort out the river ripples, rocks, and layers of willows according to the “map” I drew a couple of weeks ago. This distinction isn’t very visible in the final photo, but it makes sense to me.
Give up and go in the house. Five hours in the swampy heat is enough for today. I’m guessing to have about 15 hours remaining to completion. That is a WAG (Wild [Donkey] Guess), for those readers who always like to know how long a painting takes. This probably already had 3 hours in it before I started back up.
Thanks for taking a detour with me to Hume Lake. I came home and went straight to the easels. Mineral King is my main subject this time of year, a short season with no time to lollygag around. (Imagine taking a vacation FROM Mineral King!)
This piece got sky, and I started shaping the mountains that form Farewell Gap. It is 18×36″, and will take awhile to complete.
So, it is necessary to focus on some small pieces. Again.
I finished these five. One of the Mineral King Family Cabin paintings was painted for a blog reader, but I haven’t heard back from her, so maybe she didn’t read the comment reply or the email I sent her. (HELLO, JO L! ARE YOU STILL INTERESTED?)
These two 8×8″ canvases will become Sawtooth #61 and Mineral King Valley #7.
All the paintings are to be sold at the Silver City Store, unless they sell here first.
This is a cabin. It’s a real cabin, not a fancy house in the mountains.
This is a pair of socks on the needles. Instead of spending hours walking around the lake, I got in some knitting.
My friend has a quirky sense of humor. This is in her front yard.
We didn’t just sit around the cabin. We had to figure out why the BBQ wouldn’t light and why it smelled so strongly of propane that the Hume Lake Fire Department showed up at 11:30 one night, sniffing around to find the problem. The next day, two of us spent a couple of hours cleaning the BBQ, then refilled the tank, which solved all the problems.
And we did walk down to the lake a few times. The grass was newly planted, just irresistible.
Summer camps for kids hadn’t yet begun, so the whole place was very calm and quiet.
Even the office has tremendous curb appeal. The entire place is well-maintained, landscaped, and ultra-friendly. (And it has electricity, working telephones, wifi at some of the private cabins, paved roads, and a fire department.) It isn’t Mineral King, but it has its own appeal, and still retains common cabin community characteristics.
The route home went back through Sequoia National Forest and Sequoia National Park. I left early enough to not have to deal with a ton of traffic, except for hoards heading up the hill once I was past Giant Forest. These are two attempts to get photos for painting.
OF COURSE I won’t paint in the speed limit sign. But I think the light on this tree was worth a quick stop.
Tomorrow we will return to watching paint land on canvases.
Compared to Mineral King, Hume Lake is a city. It is a city with some subdivisions I didn’t know about, in spite of having spent 1-1/2 summers living and working there, along with a handful of days each year for the past 7 summers. It is a growing city.
Let’s ease into our Hume Lake photos with a wild blue flax photo.
Instead of small rustic cabins that house 12 girls, with a little outdoor trek to a bathroom, THIS GIANT BUILDING holds 8 “cabins”, each housing 12 girls, each “cabin” with its own fancy bathroom. THIS IS NOT CAMPING, PEOPLE! Well, staying in rustic cabins wasn’t exactly camping either, but holy guacamole! I counted 6 of these buildings, and that was just for the girls. I didn’t see where the boys stay. Maybe they have all those rustic little cabins that used to be for the girls. I had no idea this section was at Hume.
There is even a skate park, which wasn’t quite set up yet. Skateboarding at summer camp in the mountains wasn’t even an inkling of an idea when I used to love summer camp (not at Hume—there was another camp in my life.)
This is all too much for my simple old-fashioned self to take in. Let’s just take a walk around the lake, shall we?
Hume’s geography always confuses me because the dam drains to the east instead of to the west.
Do I show you the same photos every year? I am always amazed by the abundance of the wild iris, love to walk around the lake, love to see the other wildflowers, and see the dam.
This year my feet have betrayed me, so I am thankful to have gotten in one walk. The rest of the time was spent hanging out at the cabin. I’ll show you some of that Monday.
A friend from childhood inherited a cabin at Hume Lake. In 2018, she invited me to join her and another friend for several days. We had such a wonderful time together that she has invited me back each summer since.
Every time I go, I choose a different route to get there. My favorite is to go through Sequoia, then take Ten-Mile Road to Hume. Some years the road has been closed, so I take my second favorite route, which is Dry Creek Road to Hogback to 245. This year 245 is closed.
So, this year I went through the Park both directions, in spite of road construction below Giant Forest and some logging activities in the Forest Service stretch.
There were beautiful wildflowers and flowing water. Even the dogwood was still in bloom, but the flowers were never near a turnout. My destination was Hume Lake, so I didn’t pursue the flowers.
Let’s take a tour.
This is the middle fork of the Kaweah River with Moro Rock appearing to tower higher than Alta Peak. It’s an illusion. Might make a nice painting, doncha think?
When I was a kid, the road went beneath Tunnel Rock. No mas. I could paint this, but not sure anyone would care.
Through the windshield is never an ideal way to take photos. But, this is another triumph of hope over experience. I could paint from this inferior photo.
If I was still using a film camera, I would declare this shot of the Sentinel Tree a waste of film. However, I could paint from this.
I photographed the Marble Fork bridge last fall when the water was almost nil. This would make a nicer painting.
Not painting this. Since 2015, there have been 3 devastating wildfires in Sequoia and Kings Canyon. I’ve lost track of which fire wrecked which areas.
Ten-Mile Road was a mess last year. This year it is a dream—a skateboarder would have loved the beautiful asphalt. Asphalt isn’t a subject that interests me for painting. Prolly doesn’t interest you either.
We have reached our destination! I could paint this, but it isn’t in Tulare County, and I’m unsure of my market having an interest.
Hume Lake
Monday I’ll show you some photos of my time at Hume.
Remember last week or so I showed you some completed paintings intended for Silver City, unless they sold first?
They sold.
Someone else asked for the one called Mineral King Family Cabin about 5 minutes after it sold, so I told her I’d paint another one for her.
Of course I needed to paint some new little pieces for Silver City too.
These look distorted in the photo; in reality, they are each 6×6″.
These aspens really caught my attention, maybe because of all the details, maybe because I have been painting many paintings of the same scene recently. They aren’t finished, but I signed them anyway. It was so hot in the workshop even with the swamp cooler, so maybe my brain was melting a little.
This one needs a do-over on the sky, and the flowers were put in too early. It needs to dry before I put those dots of color in. I signed it too. Brain melt.
I figured these could wait until another painting session, but a friend came over and kept me company, so I just kept working. Such a good friend, to sit in the swamp cooler “cooled” workshop with me!
This is a view of the Honeymoon Cabin I haven’t tried before. I signed it too. It isn’t finished —the angle of Vandever is too steep, and the cabin roof is the wrong proportions. But, that melting brain did at least allow me to get this far.
It was the first hot spell of the season, and maybe it isn’t hot compared to real summer. (It is still spring on the calendar.) Things felt hotter than normal because the previous night we were without power for 12 hours. This means no A/C, no fans, no internet, no landline, no cell phone (because we don’t have service without wifi). It also meant almost no sleep.
I thought about why we can easily live without any of those things in Mineral King. Simple. We live simply there. Woodstove, propane fridge, no phone, and no A/C or fans required.
What does an artist do all day? For this artist, every day is different. Yeah, it seems as if all I did all winter was paint, paint, paint. That’s different right now.
First, I walked with my neighbor (numb toes, but manageable for 2 miles), then I worked in my herb garden for about an hour.
The deer aren’t messing with these hollyhocks. Haha, deer.
I put together a bank deposit, and then had to make a phone call that ended up taking a full hour. It was a successful attempt to untangle a Word problem. Nope, not a crossword type word problem, the Microsoft type of problem.
This led to about 2.5 hours of proofreading.
Suddenly, the morning was over, and I had to paint a sign. Sometimes I do odd jobs like that.
Suddenly the afternoon was almost over and I hadn’t oil-painted and it was killer hot and the swamp cooler hadn’t been turned on. Yikes! I went into the studio for a bit to scan 2 new paintings in hopes that the swamp would have a chance to get rolling.
Classic Mineral King, 8×10″, $145
Classic Mineral King 2, 10×10″, $200
I had some iced tea (herbal, because caffeine is a bad choice in the afternoon), and then went to the easels. It was too hot to putter or just dink around*, so I dove in fully focused with a game plan. Mike Rowe kept me company interviewing Riley Gaines—no relation to Chip and Joanna as far as I know—about her new book**, Swimming Against the Current. (The link is for ThriftBooks rather than the big A.)
A few hours later, this was almost finished, and I was too.
All it needs is the edges painted. And a few houseboats—I forgot about that part. It also needs a title beyond the working title of “Rachel’s View”. Full Lake? Full Lake at Sunset? Lake Kaweah is Full? Still Waters? (corny. . . nope) Drowned Wildflower Seeds? (My great-uncle used to mourn the drowned wildflowers after the dam was built. . . I guess I have come by my love of wildflowers honestly, eh?)
*Sometimes I am not very focused, just moving from painting to painting, dabbing a bit here, perfecting a bit there.
**Imma wait for the liberry copy. It is because that’s what frugal people do.
