Grace and Beauty in Unexpected Things

Bugs!

Sumer is winding down. Here and there Autumn is beginning to peak through the tree leaves. She stirs the weather patterns changing not only the appearance of the sky but the way the air smells, too. The wild roses have long dropped their petals and now have big hips. Raptors will soon migrate, and insects will hibernate or complete their warm weather life cycles. This time my post isn't about painting or drawing. It's about something I've noticed in nature. Sometimes I'm surprised to find beauty in otherwise unpleasant creatures.

Vultures have often visited me when I’ve been landscape painting in the mountains. They're more interested in me, I'm sure, than in what I'm painting. Since I’m focused on what I'm doing, I usually don’t know they’re there until one of the vultures strikes me with it’s shadow. That’s when I look up, startled, to see them swooping and gliding, obviously enjoying their ride. Sometimes one or another of them will fly close enough that I can see them cock their red head to observe me. They’ll do this for a little while, then slowly move off, regaining altitude. I have to admit, I enjoy watching them fly. They seem to take such pleasure in their gliding flight, especially on windy days. I’ll also admit I hope vultures never get TOO close!

During the height of summer, huge swarms of pale midges appear near Utah Lake. Their masses form clouds and wispy columns that look like smoke from small, scattered campfires. These insects are about the size of mosquitoes, maybe a little bigger. They don’t bite, however, and cause no problems, unless you happen to blunder into one of their low swarms. Then you run the risk of accidentally inhaling one or two of them. *cough*yuck*

One evening in June I was walking along the bank of the Provo River near the lake. Earlier in the day the weather had been unsettled, but now the clouds were clearing out. The air was quite pleasant, though the breezes were still gusty. The sun had set, and an orange glow on the western horizon offset the deepening blue of the coming night. I stopped to watch one of these swarms of midges as it hovered above the trees by the river. The gusty breezes forced the swarm into fascinating shapes and patterns. The swarm would stretch and collapse, divide and rejoin, swirl and form graceful arabesques. Rarely do I think of insects as graceful, but this swarm of midges seemed to be. I watched the midges for several minutes.

Suddenly, three ospreys came wheeling overhead, circling and calling a few times before heading off northward. There might be grace and beauty in vultures and midges, but ospreys still trump them!

A few stars began to appear in the eastern sky, and I headed home.

Fremont Indian State Park Show

Photo Courtesy of Candee Osborne

The photo above shows me with an exhibit of my plein air oil landscapes in the Sagebrush Gallery at Fremont Indian State Park. The show runs from September 17, 2011 through January 2, 2012. Twenty six of my paintings are on exhibit there. This is the largest exhibit of my paintings yet, with a wide variety of landscapes represented and seasons depicted. Sizes of paintings range from 6" x 8" to 18" x 24".

There are a few works by other artists exhibited there also, including the potter who made those wonderful pots in the display case my grubby little fingers are on. Names of other exhibiting artists are, Joe Venus, Sharon Linde, Dennis Zupan, Finn Murdoch, Vanessa Allen, Vandy Moore and Randy Esplin. 

If you get a chance to visit, check out the FISP website for more information. Besides the Gallery, there is a visitors center, campground, miles of scenic trails to hike and a huge amount of ancient Indian rock art scattered throughout the park. The Sagebrush Gallery is free admission. The rest of the park has a small entry fee. Come and enjoy a visit!

Scenes Surrounding Spring City

Last week was the Spring City plein air painting festival. This was my second year in the event. Spring City is a beautiful little town in Sanpete Valley in Utah. It has done much to keep it's old pioneer buildings and charm. Many of the old pioneer homes and even some barns are built out of oolite; large pale yellowish blocks of limestone that give the buildings a unique and attractive quality. The town is surrounded by hayfields and ranches. East and west across the valley are mountains.

The paint waggon, stuffed with painting and camping stuff.

After checking in and getting my canvas panels stamped, I headed to my first painting spot. Last year I wanted to paint this scene, but found another painter there so I passed it up. I thought about it all year, so this year it was the first place I went to. Nobody else was there this time. At least not while I was there. Here's a photo of the place:

It was hard to decide whether or not to add the poles into the painting. A couple pieces of straw were used to help me visualize the poles.

I didn't like the way they cut up the dark shape on the left, so I left them out. This caused a minor controversy later at the exhibit. Here's the finished painting:

Later that day I drove toward the other end of town and painted this, looking in the other direction (sorry I don't have a photo of it in it's frame):

It sold at the show. 

That night I drove up into the mountains and camped. In the morning, squirrels were eating pine seeds and tossing the left over pine cones out of the trees. After my own breakfast, which didn't include pine seeds, I drove back into the valley to a mown hayfield not far from where I had first painted the day before. Here is the second day's painting:

It sold, too.

The next day began nice, but quickly changed it's mood. Just north of Fairview, I set up in a sheep pasture. This scene was sunny when I decided to paint it. After shooing away two sheep who tried to chew on my easel, I set to painting. By the time I had blocked in the initial scene, it had clouded over. When it was time to sign the finished painting, I was huddled under the hatchback chasing raindrops off of where I was signing.

Saturday was the paint out. Out on the west side of town, I made this painting:

It won a merit award.

A Dry Desert Place

Edge of the Mojave  8" x 10" Oil on Canvas Panel

Earlier in the year I went to the desert near Littlefield, Arizona to paint. This is a different kind of desert for me. Just up the bank from the dry wash I was camped beside, I set up my 8" x 10" pochade box and did the painting shown above. Here is my set-up for that day:

Just off to my right were these awe-inspiring dry mountains. Someday I'll have to return and try to paint them:

In the two days I spent there, I explored nearby stands of joshua trees:

Joshua Trees, Cholla Cactus, and Many Other Desert Plants.

There were more varieties of cactus there than I have ever seen anywhere in the wild. Many were in bloom.

Other desert plants were also in bloom.

As fascinating as they are, several of the plants in this area are pointedly hostile. I was careful when I took a closer look at them. Even the joshua trees aren't very cuddly things.

A Joshua Tree and Me

Exploring up the alluvial slope, I walked through the joshua trees, past different kinds of cholla, barrel, and prickly pear cactus. Lizards and small birds were the only wildlife I saw. It seemed to me that the birds and lizards were also interested in me, judging by the way they seemed to watch me. Climbing down into the wash, I hiked the dry wash back toward my camp. During my return hike, I saw a curious thing in the wash ahead of me.

When I reached the out-of-place thing I found it was a warning sign.

Water? What water? Did I miss the undrinkable water? Was it not here yet? Did this sign come from somewhere else, carried down the wash by a flash flood? Flash flood not safe for drinking! I suppose if someone were out here for too long without water, a lot of things become not safe. Hallucinations not safe for drinking!

I could afford to entertain myself with such thoughts. I had brought enough water - this time. It was a lesson learned the hard way the first time I came to the arid West from a water rich eastern state in 1982. Back then I had tried to climb a mountain without enough water, without knowing where to find water, and with no comprehension of just how dry it is out here. By the time I staggered back off of the mountain, I felt weak, my knees were wobbling, My mouth was so dry my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and I couldn't spit. My speech was slurred. When I came to a public water fountain I drank for several minutes before finally beginning to feel less thirsty. People stared. I didn't care.

Lunar Plein Air Studies

Small Sketches in a Small Sketchbook

Here are a couple studies I made during a lunar eclipse. It was sketched in colored pencil on an August night in 1989 when I lived in Pennsylvania. To make this sketch I would go into the back yard and observe the eclipse for a while, then rush through the back door into the kitchen where I had my sketchpad and colored pencils. With the kitchen lights on to see what I was doing, I would sketch as much as memory would permit, then go back out into the darkness to observe the eclipse more. I did this several times over the course of these two little studies. Observe - sketch - repeat. The top image is totality. The lower sketch is about 45 minutes later. I wasn't concerned with the lunar montes, mares or craters. That information could be easily had another time. The goal of these studies was to capture the color of the event and the spherical appearance of the eclipsed moon. The full moon usually looks more disk-like to me, but during an eclipse, it appears as an orange ball. This is information I can use in any future studio works that might need it. In fact, I did a larger colored pencil drawing of a night scene of bighorns, jagged rocky cliffs, and the moon back lighting part of the scene using these studies. That drawing sold several years ago, and unfortunately I have no pictures of it. I do have ideas for future works with the lunar eclipse theme, though.

Of course, a lunar eclipse is a fascinating thing to observe whether you're sketching one or not, so go see one!

Strange Evening at Church Rock

Church Rock  8" x 10" Oil on Canvas Panel

In June, I visited some people I know in the little Four Corners town of Blanding, Utah. I've been there a number of times, but this time the trip home was a little interesting. Normally the full moon doesn't cause me any concern. Actually, I rather enjoy it. Things started getting a little weird on that drive home, though.

I stopped at Church Rock to do a painting. This solitary sandstone formation with it's enigmatic rectangular opening has tugged at my curiosity every time I have driven past it. The first thing I wanted to do was explore Church Rock a little, so I hopped the fence and walked down the red dirt road to the man-made opening in the rock. The opening doesn't go very far into the rock; it's not much deeper than it is wide. A concrete foundation at the entrance, with remnants of 2x4s show that the front of the chamber must have been walled off at one time, with a door built into it. A steel corral gate wide enough fit across the opening was sitting off to the side instead. A few nesting birds took off when I stepped into the room. Inside, the walls are covered with graffiti. Disappointing, but not too surprising. Names and dates, this person + that person, etc. Nothing seemed unusual about the graffiti. A few empty beer cans lay in the dirt on the floor, with an empty pop can. A few "Ave Maria" candles sat on the left side of the wall foundation. I've never seen that before. Outside, I explored around the base of the rock and climbed on the red slickrock a little.

There were prairie dogs all around the place. They must not get shot at very much here, because some of them allowed me to get as close as 30 or 40 feet away before disappearing down their burrows.

My tracks were the only human footprints in the dirt up to that point, but as soon as I headed back to my car, several youngish touristy types came down to explore the place, too. Up at the parking area, I met a man who asked about Church Rock. He said he was originally from Moab, and had heard people there talk about a "satanic church" that used to be held in a rock. He asked me if this was that rock. Astonished, I shrugged my shoulders and said, "I dunno." I mentioned the Ave Maria candles and said those didn't seem very satanic to me. He guessed that maybe it was another rock in this area, indicating there are more than one of these rocks with rooms drilled and blasted into them. (Thinking about this later, I suppose the candles could be used for any purpose anyone wanted. Maybe I should have looked at the graffiti closer.)

I set up and painted in the roadside parking area. A pleasant couple from Australia stopped and chatted with me for a few minutes. A bunch of retired looking French (or maybe French Canadian) motorcycle riders stopped to visit. One of them spoke English, and translated for the others. They snapped some photos of me painting, asked if they could mention me in their emails, or email me, I'm not sure which, and headed on their way. A nice visit, really.

My finished painting didn't look very satanic to me. Actually, I'm kind of happy with it.

On my way home, for some reason, I felt like listening to a CD I have of Eastern European folk music. Enjoyable, but kind of melancholy. The CD is produced on a label called, "Songbat Records." The singer explains on her website, "Why 'Songbat'? A songbat is a creature who requires songs to live, as a fruitbat requires fruit. This creature can't help but do things a little differently, and spends a lot of time upside down; furthermore it doesn't mind darkness a bit and in fact rather prefers it. That's all the explanation I can provide since there isn't any more."

So far, I have a full moon, a possible satanic church, melancholy Eastern European folk music on a label that has something to do with bats...

It's a very buggy night. As I drive, I need to stop at every town I come to just to wash the bugs off my windshield. The last stop I make is at the Shell station in Helper. When I begin to wash the bugs off the windshield with a squeegee, I notice something stuck on my car's radio antenna. I look closely at the object trailing off my antenna like a tattered flag on a pole. It's a bat's wing! Really! It was severed at the shoulder and was somehow attached to my car's antenna at the severed shoulder part! I use the squeegee to try and get the bat wing off my antenna, but it doesn't seem to want to leave. I squeegee it down the antenna. When the wing finally falls off the antenna, it's soaked with window washing fluid, so it sticks to the fender. With a final swipe of the squeegee, the washer fluid soaked bat wing splats onto the pavement. Driving away, I pop the Eastern European folk music CD out of the CD player and pop in something more upbeat. It's not Halloween, is it?

I feel bad for the poor bat. Somewhere between Green River and Helper, a bat met it's demise from a 1/8" wide piece of metal cutting through the night air at 65 to 75 miles an hour. I also feel bad because bats are endangered, and here I go inadvertently smacking one out of mid-flight. There's been many a time I've sat in the afterglow of a fading summer's evening and enjoyed watching bats flit acrobatically through the twilight. Rest in peace, poor bat. I can't explain how the bat wing stuck to my antenna the way it did.

Postscripts:

Since I first wrote this in an email, I did some research into who might have cut the opening into Church Rock. As the story goes, the organization that used the rock might or might not deserve the reputation indicated by the man I met in the parking area there, but it certainly was strange. The organization was an Utopian society called The Home of Truth, run by a spiritualist named Marie Ogden. I was going to include some links about it, but decided that proper research into the group and their leader is beyond the scope of this post and would distract from what the post is really about. But you're welcome to look it up yourself.

Another note: Since that time I've enjoyed listening to that CD of Eastern European folk music on other trips with absolutely NO weirdness! 

Back to the Little 8 X 10 Paintbox

This was originally posted on a plein air painting forum. It was in response to a question someone on the forum had about how to hold open the lid on a homemade pochade box they were building. My suggestion received positive feedback, so I'm posting a slightly expanded version of it here in hopes it might be helpful to others.

There are many different ways to hold a pochade box lid open. This little thumb box uses a sliding catch with a knurled nut to fix it in place. It's sturdy enough, compact and easy to use:

Unfortunately, the only lid supports of this kind I could find were made for large wooden chests, and seemed like overkill on a small pochade box. They're way too bulky for what I wanted.

Here's an underside view of a box with hinges that have wire stops built into them. They are easy to use and aren't bulky, but they don't hold the lid firmly open in windy weather:

There are other means of holding a pochade lid open, but no commercially made hardware I could find would fit the bill. So here's how I made the lid support for a box I built. This is an 8" x 10" pochade box, but I used the same idea on the smaller ones I built. The hole in the lower part of the box goes through the side. The holes in the lid only need to go partway through. One of the holes in the lid holds the top open slightly past 90 degrees. The other hole holds the lid open at a wider angle. (I rarely if ever use the wider angle, so it may be unnecessary.) 

The holes in the side of the box are sized so the bolts on the support can easily slide in without excess play. The bolt holes in the support arm are sized for a tight fit to hold the bolts firmly in the arm. Here's the box open:

And a close up:

The support can be made to go on either side of the box, depending on whether your pallet slides open or lifts out, and whether you're left or right handed. This is a close up of the inside of the box showing the wing nut that secures the support:

Here's all there is to it: a piece of wood, a short screw, a longer screw, and a wing nut. When not in use, the lid support is detached and stored inside the box. That way there is nothing sticking off the box to snag on things inside your pack or carrying bag.

Some advantages are that it's very simple and easy to make, and absolutely positively holds the lid firmly open - wind won't slam the box shut on you like it does on a commercially made box I bought. Some disadvantages are that it holds the lid open at only a limited number of fixed positions. It also has loose parts that can get lost. If you decide on this kind of lid support, be sure to carry extra wing nuts!