Flattened, spotted, signed...

Afternoon flea-combing prints.  Just the usual.  Quite a process for an image to make it to film, to proof, to print to exhibit.  Really, almost nothing makes it through process.  I have whole bodies of unseen work with no place to go.  Doesn't matter I guess.  Make more.  More people have seen things online than anywhere else.

River House, Utah

Copperhead in Martini Glass.

Fallen bough, Wild Pear

Feather ladder.

Dogwood Pages, Feather Ladder, Cicada hand.

Feathered fingers and Copperhead Martini.

 

Morning light show at AC Gentry's garage wall.

Obsessed with watching.  I want something.  What IS that, exactly?

 

Plowing creative ground. Flowering.

  Renter of 30 years is in nursing home.  Chances not good of return.  She had an Amaryllis bulb in a sack that started growing in a circle.  I liberated it from the sack and put it in a pot.  In the light.  Trying to get curve out.

I don't know anything about flowers.  Someone had to correct me on what it actually was.  I thought Iris.  May not photograph, but will watch and watch.  Is there anything to learn, really, ever?

Maybe if my hand forms get enough light they will bloom.  Never know.

  

 

New and exciting things....what are they, again? Dancing and Drawing.

Dancers at Cowboys.

   I'm interested in the things I can't seem to learn.  I plot ways around them...or at least salute and squeeze by.  Frustration usually means I've have found an edge beyond which I don't normally go.

  A lot of the human brain is set up, apparently, with music in mind.  There is lots of proof of this.  I learned my ABCs singing them.  Anyone can identify thousands of songs within a bar or two, some within a note or two.

  But.  I can't sing or play an instrument.

  Turns out I love to dance and have for a long time.  Since ballroom dancing in 5th grade or so.  Most of my girlfriends have been honky-tonk bar dancing partners.  We weren't drinkers or there for much of anything but dancing.  Dancing is my avenue into musicing-up my brain.

  But I'm a slow learner, on new dance moves.  It's an edge for me.  Therefore, into dance lessons I go.  I hate the process, but, like anything: keep grinding and you get it.

  in the last century I was on a ruin with a group and one of the older folks, an anthropologist, pulled out a sketch book and started drawing a petroglyph.  I offered to take a photo of it and send it to him, which he accepted, but he made the offhand comment that he DREW these things so he would be sure he had actually LOOKED at it and SEEN it.  Impressive.

  This Spring, after decades of thumbnails and cartoon-illustrated post-cards, I've decided to take a drawing class.  Get some expertise or at least instruction.

  It's working.  I got my ID renewed and a parking sticker.  I'm a college student again.  It's fun.  Since I'm at a junior college I'm in with a group of young people showing every sign of the stresses of modern life.  They are on screens.  Plugged in.  Doing something else besides task at hand.  Several of the kids have yet to speak to the instructor or each other.  K-12  beat them into silence. 

  That's my strategy for staying fresh-brained.  Dancing and drawing.  They combined when the Blue Gypsy and I were at Cowboys on Thursday night and the DJ announced that it was College Night. 

 I'm a college student.

  Where's my free T-Shirt?  Where's my free shots at 11:00?  Let's break off the hottest new dance moves!

Normal cartoon approach.  Postcard.

Cartoon approach.  Walking skeleton stuffed with books.

Artist wandering desert with ravens.

Sunflower chair.

Confronting internal contradictions...in the desert.  Cartoon postcard.

Classwork.  Draw a sphere, a cylinder, a cone and a square.

Poetry flowing through Rita.  Postcard just for her.

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.  At first.  ACs house with shadow in 2-point perspective.  I actually learned that.

Second try.  This is more what I am after.  Drawing something while looking at it.

Today was Still Life Day.  I like still life....First of two shots at drawing a skull...while looking at it.  Wednesday I'm going to do a stack of three.  Yes, this is a terrible drawing.  Second was better.  The third will be mixed.  But I'm learning.

Daily Light Show across the street.

In Tyler, we certainly love our trees, even if we starve them to death by hauling away their fallen leaves yearly.  

  At my house I had a huge Hackberry that was in on the edge of some WPA rock work.  Had come up, as Hackberries do, as a volunteer, and gotten big when the property was a rental unit.  When I took over in the early 80s it was too late to do much about it by hand.  Later I planted a Wisteria near it which grew to epic size over the years.  In two decades it climbed into the Hackberry and killed it.  As the tree came down, the vines tended to "catch" them, so little by little I disposed of a huge tree.  I expected to cut the Wisteria down to a big ball.  Instead, last years freeze killed the Wisteria graveyard dead.  

  Wisteria usually can't be killed without nuclear weapons.  But, now they are both gone.  At the same time, a few trees were taken out across the street in AC Gentry's back yard.

  This opened up a view out the front of my second story windows every morning.  I live on the second story.  An amazing thing happens around the first of the year.  I'd never noticed it before, though I admit that I've only been here 50 years or so.

  When the Sun is to the South, (Winter, they call it...), and the leaves are off the trees an amazing ballet of reflection and shadow plays on the gray blank wall of AC's combined garage and studio.

  This is the last year of this.  By the Spring the main tree showing the most interesting shadow will be taken down.  It's dead- killed by new owner who had it trimmed.  It was starving to death, like most big old city trees.  I argued for NOT trimming it, or cutting it down, so she just had it trimmed enough to kill it a couple years later.  

  Every sunny morning I'm after it with Hasselblad and roll film.  Every morning it changes a little.  Over a week it changes a lot.  

  Last year I shot negatives with both my view cameras.  This year its all 120 film and usually an 80mm.  I don't bother to even check exposure any more.  I've got it in my head.

  Gets a couple frames at least.  Yesterday it got a whole roll.  I have a six foot ladder,  (My desert landscape ladder that is too ratty to steal).   My neighbors were already used to my eccentrics.

Big cams and Lucy supervising last March.  Shadow morphs along.  I'm not seeing this yet.

I have a bulging file of negatives and proofs.  This is hardly even a sample.  Actually bought a 250mm for the Hasselblad to isolate this wall.  Didn't really help.  80 and 150 are plenty.

Just the window reflection.

What would Minor think?  Of course, he wouldn't think.  He'd react.  In the flow.

AC is gone a couple years now and the house is sitting.  Two spindly Holly Hocks sprang out of nowhere last year.  One of them disappeared, mysteriously.  I think the ice took it.

Yesterday.  Off ladder.  One of the charming things about iPhone is that it timestamps the info along with the photo file.  This was 8:17:13 AM.

Yesterday morning, February 18.  Had to drop a phone chat with Providence friend and bounce out the door.

I don't want anything fancy.  Just show me the regular stuff and I'm happy.  That's me waving at whoever I was texting.  Rita, probably.

 Writing this at 3:30 AM.  Sunrise at 7:00.  Who knows?  Hasselblad has taken to sleeping by the door with one eye open, ready to jump out to work at a moments notice.  My busted desert ladder is behind a bush across the street.  Nobody would ever steal it, though they might throw it away.

  Not a one of these printed.  Nobody wants my dramatic stuff, much less images of a building wrapped in shadow and reflection.  Still, art obsession doesn't care about anything but itself.  It's like a bad girlfriend who knows she's good looking.  Just keep spending money on me and I'll let you.

  But she's exciting to be around.