Painting With Kittens

No, I’m not painting WITH kittens; no, they aren’t helping me paint; no, this doesn’t mean I have a painting with kittens as the subject. I’m painting with a paintbrush while the kittens are present and active.

This kitten is less playful than the others; we aren’t convinced that she is healthy.
She is a lovable little fuzzball, named “Maeve” after my favorite novelist, Maeve Binchy.
Why are there only three kittens here?
Because this one, the smallest, bravest and most adventuresome is climbing my skirt. Her name might be Scout, although we have used that name previously and I don’t like recycling names.

The other two kittens hang out together quite a bit; one hides the most so she is “Heidi”, and the little black one is “Tucker” because he is cute like Tucker Carlson.

I WAS painting, I was, I was!! See?

April in Three Rivers II, oil on wrapped canvas, 8×10″, $125 plus tax

6 Things I Learned in April

  1. If you don’t know how to tell a sheep from a goat, remember this: goat tails go up, sheep tails go down. (You are welcome – I’m sure this will be useful information to you at some time in your life.)
  2. Glazed ceramics are porous- who knew? We have this pretty bottle for dish soap sitting on the kitchen window sill. Trail Guy kept telling me that the outside of the bottle was slippery with soap, and I just couldn’t understand how that could be. Then one morning I saw what was happening:Soap is seeping through the almost invisible cracks in the glaze. Weird.
  3. Flying in a helicopter is magical. I always thought it was fun (except for that med-evac off Sawtooth when I was 16), but now I am convinced it is magical, EVEN WITH THE DOORS OFF! MAGICAL!

    I’ve walked on that road down there many times.
  4. If you make yogurt from scratch and use store-bought vanilla yogurt for the starter instead of leftover yogurt from your previous batch, it is REALLY good. (Yeah, I know, who makes their own yogurt?*)
  5. The place where the Dodgers play is called Chavez Ravine. No reason I should know this because this is a house of Giants fans (well, really only one, since I’m fairly indifferent to sports). Never heard of this until April when I drove past it and my sister, wife of a Dodgers fan, asked me to photograph it as we were passing AND a friend of mine was the recipient of the Dodgers make-a-wish type deal and mentioned Chavez Ravine. (No one in my life who loves the Dodgers reads my blog, so I could take this opportunity to really jab at them. But, as I mentioned, I am fairly indifferent to sports, so I’ll let the moment pass.)
  6. I’ve been doing Roman numerals wrong. I thought you could put smaller numbers to the left to subtract, but that only is acceptable on the number 9. So, 9 is IX, but 14 is XIIII. I think IXV is more efficient, but someone else made the rules. (I am taking the word of someone smarter and more educated than I am, but I haven’t consulted The Google yet.)
  7. UPDATE ON ROMAN NUMERALS: Only 4 and 9 use the “subtractive notation”. 4 is IV; 9 is IX. This means that 14 is XIV, not XIIII. So, I was right about smaller symbols on the left, but I did it the wrong way. I wonder how many of my painting series are numbered incorrectly?

*Me, that’s who. I make my own bread too. No, I don’t drive a Prius. . . they don’t come in stick. Besides, how smart is it to pay $30,000 for a car just to save some gas money? And what happens to the old battery when it is time to buy a new one? And doesn’t the making of the electricity to charge the battery have a more negative effect on the environment than burning gasoline?

Flowers in My Yard

April is the most beautiful month in Three Rivers and that includes my yard. Our yard. Trail Guy is great with the big stuff like heavy pruning, sprinkler systems, and power tools. I weed, plant stuff, and do girly pruning.

Ajuga grows in the shade and is a very low ground cover, except in April when it shoots up these blue spikes, which always show up purple in photos.
Lilac smells fantastic.
Fairy Lanterns are all over the hill on the backside of the property.
Lovely lavender – I have several varieties, all blooming at once. Never can remember how to tell French from Spanish, but I know this one isn’t English.
The blurry yellow blossom is a Jerusalem sage, about to grace us with its first flowers. The iris is a fantastic light periwinkle color, and that is rock rose in the background.
Fiesta flower is wild and goes bonkers all down one side of the driveway each year.
Rockrose!
Rock rose shrubs get kind of huge-ish, but my girly-type pruning keeps them in check.
Dutch Iris? Japanese Iris? Siberian Iris? Doesn’t matter – it is my FAVORITE.

The state flower, California poppies, always more orange than yellow when grown in a domestic yard.

P.S. I have one power tool, and when/if it starts, it is great. It is one of those “easy to use” rototillers called a Mantis. I call it other things when it won’t start. Sometimes I just use an old tool that Grandma gave me instead. She also gave me her love of flowers. Today is her birthday, but she isn’t counting birthdays in heaven.

April Distractions in Three Rivers

I tried to oil paint last Friday but the greenery and wildflowers overcame my sense of duty. So, Trail Guy and I drove up North Fork Drive to the end.

My palette was ready to go.
I worked on Sawtooth a little.
After telling Trail Guy that I’d heard the flowers were great up North Fork and staring out the window a bit, he said, “Let’s go now!”

The road was longer, rougher, narrower than I remembered and all very worth the drive.

The last 3.5 miles are unpaved.
This is Yucca Creek at the end of North Fork Drive.
That’s one narrow little footbridge over a massive old culvert pipe.
Wowsa.
The yellow flowers are called Madia.
Heading back down has a view of Ash Peak with a blooming yucca and bush lupine.
Looking over the edge down to the North Fork makes one glad to not encounter any oncoming traffic on that narrow road with no turnouts.
Poppies are yellower in the wild than in my yard.
The poppies on the hillsides are what gave California its name of “The Golden State”. (Bet you thought it was the gold rush)
I love Fairy Lanterns, AKA Satin Bells. Pink isn’t my favorite color, but it is rare enough in nature that it stands out.

After we got back home, I painted a little bit more. There is this commissioned oil painting of Sawtooth for a very patient customer, and it would be good to make progress.

Sawtooth’s shape is improving, and it is acquiring colors and texture.

Then, I got distracted again and thought that wildflowers would look great on a 6×18″ canvas. Can you see the possibilities here? (Put on your rose-colored glasses with me!)

Planning a wildflower oil painting.

Easel Time

Have you noticed that the word “easel” is pretty close to the word “easy”?

It’s merely a word illusion. Nothing easy about being at an easel. 

This fact, combined with April as the most beautiful month in Three Rivers, has made it even less easy to plant my feet in front of the easel recently.

But, as I pointed out in the Eight Things I Learned in March blog post, often we must parent ourselves. (“STAY IN YOUR ROOM UNTIL YOU HAVE FINISHED YOUR MATH!”) So, I planted my feet in front of the easel in spite of the distractions.

Wanna see some of the distractions? I know you are interested.

In my backyard
Two brodiaea, Wild Hyacinth and Pretty Face, along with Common Madia
The South Fork of the Kaweah River
Pretty Face
Fairy Lanterns
Another  distraction, AKA Piper

Forget easel time and painting for today’s blog. See you on Monday. . .

 

8 Recent Happenings

Today there are many topics to address, so we will have a long list.

  1. I went away with my sisters and our Mom for a family funeral. Supposed to be a sad time, but it was surprisingly fun. 

    Me and four of the most important women in my life feeling happy to be together
  2. Tomorrow and Sunday is the South Valley ARTists’ Studio Tour. Will I see you there? You can buy tickets the day of the event at the places listed on their website.
  3. I hope the studio tour has more attendance than First Saturday Three Rivers. There were 4 people covering for me at my studio while I was with my chicky-babes (see #1) and 11 visitors.  ELEVEN?? Bless you, those eleven who came out in the rain. I hope you enjoyed your wildflower freebie!
  4. What a week of learning! I actually designed a website for my friend who manages vacation rentals here in Three Rivers. She got tired of waiting for the guy who said he’d do it for her, and I jumped in with both feet but perhaps only half my brain. We will do a lot of polishing, but the site is ready to be seen. Sequoiavacationrentals.NET It was thrilling to be able to help her, to have some experience, to have all sorts of photos to supplement hers, to FIGURE THIS OUT!! It was hard. I did it anyway.
  5. Why am I designing a site for someone and paying someone else to design a site for me? Because mine is very very complicated. There is much work ahead for me. Good thing I practiced on my friend.
  6. It was so beautiful in Three Rivers this week that instead of working in the studio (drawings to be done for the 2019 calendar and a few more paintings, including a Sawtooth commission), I pulled weeds. It was a nice break from figuring out how to build a website.

    Lots and lots of weeds.
  7. Piper is doing well. There may be kittens soon; I hope the little guy adjusts and is polite.
  8. Trail Guy took a day trip to Mineral King. The road has a gnarly slide across it above the ranger station.

See why I had to make a list?? And, in case you were wondering, I am not superstitious about today’s day and date combination.

Eight Things I Learned in March

This month’s items don’t have anything to do with art or my art business, but they are all interesting to me and I hope they will be to you too.

  1. The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins says we have to parent ourselves because we will NEVER feel like doing the difficult or unpleasant things. Our brains only have two speeds – auto-pilot and emergency brake. We want to do what is comfortable, and the minute we begin something not auto-pilotish, our brains pull the E-brake. Self-parenting is when we tell ourselves to do it anyway, to think about the long-term results. That’s what I do to make myself paint when I’d rather be drawing. Do you parent yourself?
  2. Crocs are coming back in style. What? They were out of style? I’ve only had mine for about 3 years, and apparently I was 7 years behind when I discovered them to be the perfect shoe for my weird little cube-like feet. Do you wear Crocs?
  3. Amy Dickinson wrote one of the best memoirs I have ever read, Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things. I rank it with my two other favorite memoirs: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Do you have any favorite memoirs?
  4. “The Road Back To You” is the podcast (and book) from which I learned about the Enneagram. Now Ian Cron has another podcast called “Typology”, which is more about the Enneagram. Fascinating topic, and also the most relevant personality typing information I’ve encountered. Have you learned about the Enneagram yet?
  5. Nobody want a Nordic Track ski machine. A friend listed mine on the local Facebook Trading Post at $50/ OBO and we’ve had NO responses. Are you interested in this exercise machine? I will ALWAYS choose taking a walk over doing something repetitious inside.
  6. A friend told me this: all of the music we call Negro Spirituals can be played on only the black keys of the piano. (Say what? How did people without pianos know which notes were the black ones??) The slaver John Newton picked up the melody of “Amazing Grace” from the Africans in the hold of his ship, and after he repented, he put words to it. When I learned this, I went to the piano to try this theory and sure enough, if you start on D-flat, you can play the entire song on only black keys. But, The Google said the song’s lyrics were put to the music of a song called “New Britain”, so I’m not entirely sure about the origin of the melody. Still, it makes me want to find songs in this category and test the theory. Have you ever heard of this??
  7. “Dx” is the abbreviation for “diagnosis”. Does this enhance or simplify your life? (It makes me feel a teensy bit smarter about medical terms).
  8. Dreamland by Sam Quinones taught me about black tar heroin and Oxycontin. If you are interested in learning about the opioid epidemic, this book is very easy to understand, full of stories that explain the rise in popularity of both of these truly terrible drugs. The only good part is that Quinones is an excellent writer, so I might see what else he has written and learn more.
Just to make us smile, here is this sheep expressing her opinion of muddy feet.

What did you learn in March?

2 Items, One Personal, One Business

I love lists. Today’s contains one personal item and one business item.

  1. Today we have 2 kittens coming from Tulare. An employee of Sequoia National Park will be delivering them on her way to work. One is all black; one is a tuxedo. They are already named, but perhaps we will choose other monikers. (Isn’t that a great word for “name”?) We cannot stand the state of catlessness for another day. If the Tulare person can catch the other 2 litter mates, we’ll take them also. If the place where Perkins and Samson came from produces more kittens, we’ll take them too.
  2. My other blog, The Cabins of Wilsonia, was in a coma for several years. I let it lie there, wounded and neglected. Who wants to make the sorts of phone calls it takes to figure out such things? Not this Central California artist, nosirreeBob. Then, I got some weird emails about the site, the type of emails that are “phishing” for information, so I finally made the call. Now the website has awakened, awoken, woken up and I wrote a new post. I’ll start posting there again, but this time just once a week, the way the Internet Smart People suggest. I might even try to promote it on Instagram and Pinterest. . . nah. Prolly not. To celebrate the return of The Cabins of Wilsonia, let’s have a Wilsonia cabin drawing!
This is a commissioned drawing that I did after the book was published.

What am I talking about? The Cabins of Wilsonia is a book I published in 2014. It took 4 years and ton of learning. They are still available on Amazon, here on my site, and tomorrow at Anne Lang’s Emporium from 10 a.m – 4 pm. I’ll be there for First Saturday Three Rivers. My friend Sam the Gourdist will be the featured artist, at the Three Rivers Arts Center! Go, Sammy-Sue!!

8 Things I Learned in February

Daffodils bloom in February here in Central California.

I began writing this post on February 5, and was quite happily surprised that I learned the first 3 things on this list so soon in the month. I think we all learn things constantly; writing them down helps us realize it is happening.

  1. Young Miner’s Lettuce tastes good. I’d heard this most of my life, but didn’t get the “young” part, and would pick it when it was in flower. Then, it tastes bitter. “Young” means newly sprouted, pre-flower stage.
  2. There is a new podcast on the World Wide Web called Women’s Work. Tsh (yeah, I know. . . it is pronounced “Tish”. . . whatsamatter with her parents?) Oxenreider interviews women who work in interesting businesses. I discovered the vowelless Tsh when she was interviewed on What Should I Read Next, and I liked her book choices. 
  3. Did you know there is an International Correspondence Writing Month? Yeppers. It is February, and in the spirit of creative, cute and trendy, it is called “InCoWriMo”; I learned of this from Pencils.com. They, the pencil people, said to write them a letter and they would send something in return. (Prolly just a coupon for a slight discount on a product if you spend an enormous amount first. . . yep, I am cynical.) InCWriMo actually has a website, and it is simple and beautiful, the way I hope my own will become.
  4. There is a thingamajig that goes on the end of a special camera lens that allows one to insert a slide and then photograph it to convert it to a digital file. In the olden days, art was photographed onto slide film, and it was tricky business to get the light right and the image square. Now, when we want to see pictures of our old work, we hold up a little slide to the light and squint, unless we have a friend with a thingamajig on her camera. But, this teaches us that our slide photography was dismal and horrible and didn’t show off our work. Is this why we didn’t get our work accepted into juried shows? (Notice I am hiding behind the royal “we”?)
  5. For some reason, Guatemala keeps appearing in my life. A few months ago, I proofread a book called Rooftop Reflections for a friend about his home-building trips in Guatemala; a few weeks ago, 2 friends went to Guatemala on a mission trip; recently, my niece announced her engagement to a fine man from Guatemala. Yesterday I met a man who is married to a woman from Guatemala.What does all this mean? (This one is more of an observation; learning will come later, if at all.)
  6. The word “anthropogenic”: it means environmentally despoiled by humans. Can’t say that I’ll use it much in conversation, but it is always good to increase one’s vocabulary.
  7. Cows rarely have twins. Did you know that? I didn’t. Ewes are more likely to have twins.
  8. Ever seen the classic portrait oil painting called Pinkie (painted in 1793 by Thomas Lawrence, hanging in  the Huntington Museum)? Did you know Pinkie had TB and died a year later at age 12? New info to me.

Field Trip

Last Sunday afternoon, we drove down to Lake Kaweah to go walking among the cockleburs. I think the dam was built in 1962 or ’63, so I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t there. 

It is sort of ugly, but interesting at the same time. There are nicer places to walk in Three Rivers, but variety is a good thing. Keeps you and your brain from settling into a rut, something my paternal grandmother preferred to call a “groove”, which she said made for smoother travel.

There are old home sites and even a former swimming pool. A metal detector might yield some interesting results.

pool tile and cockleburs

The bridge is interesting with its styling in the concrete. It crosses Horse Creek.

We followed Horse Creek for awhile. Not much to it, but it became messy, so we went back to the road and followed it into a flock of red-wing blackbirds. Raucous critters. The mallards and snowy egrets are quieter. We encountered another bridge across Horse Creek and headed back. The flower is mustard.This was a field trip just for fun, not for work. I don’t think there is anything pretty enough down there to paint, although a view of Alta Peak and Moro Rock with the lake in the foreground might appeal to a few folks. Minus the cockleburs. . .