Decision Made

With orange light, smoky air, hot temperatures, dirty skies, and ash everywhere, I am CRAVING GREEN. This desire made the decision for me on the Yokohl Creek oil painting.

Fall used to be my favorite season. Now I dread fall, because it is fire season, and I want spring to last forever.

BLOVIATION WARNING: The next paragraph is something I learned about fires, based on an interview I heard with a former employee of the National Forest Service, followed with my usual stack of questions.

There weren’t giant forest fires when I was a kid. That is when forests were managed and before logging was outlawed. The National Forest Service used to keep the trees to about 30 per acre; now that logging has been shut down, there are about 400 trees per acre. The man described this as “too much vegetation for the landscape”. He also talked about the high percentage of fires that are human caused (84%), and that most of them (90%) occur along roadways, which are no longer being cleared adequately. He was only speaking of Forest Service land, but I’m guessing the info is consistent throughout our state. Until the 1980s, there were 151 sawmills in California; now there are 30, with only one in Tulare County.

Where are we getting our lumber? Why are we importing it if there is so much just going up in flames right here in our own area? Doesn’t anyone care that smoke is ruining our lungs and our air? Doesn’t smoke hurt the environment? Isn’t it causing some unwanted warming of our tiny piece of the globe?

Oy vey.

Spring, rain, green, FOREVER, PLEASE!

P.S. It isn’t finished yet.

 

Decisions, decisions

My very wise dad used to say, “Life is a series of choices and decisions”. (My very wise friend still says, “Choices and consequences”.) 

In preparing larger paintings while hoping for a show at a local-ish gallery, I have to keep in mind my mission, which is to show off the best parts of Tulare County with my art. One would think that choosing the best scenes would automatically result in sales; one would be wrong. 

It is painting the scenes that people love, scenes that ring a bell, touch their hearts, resonate, remind them of good memories, and doing all this in the most excellent way possible that MIGHT result in sales. (Anyone have a crystal ball that I can borrow?)

There is a scene that draws me back, in any season with water in the creek, and I want to paint it on an 18×36″ canvas. It is Yokohl Creek.

This version isn’t quite it, and won’t fit on 18×36″ format. So, have a look at the cropped version:

Better, so I started on the canvas.

But wait! Spring is the most beautiful time of year!

Shall I try to convert the view I cropped to spring colors? First, let’s crop this view.

This still doesn’t have the same visual pizazz to me as the brown version. What’s a Central California artist to do?

More will be revealed. . . (and I bet you can complete that sentence.)