Meditation for the End of November

Soft News Report for the Week of November 20th

Text in above illustrations:

Tuesday, Willamette Valley.
The brilliant sun and heavy rain have been tumbling across the valley for days. No one knows where the misty grey blanket they normally snuggle under has gone.

Saturday afternoon, Pettygrove Street west of 21st.
Three crows look for bugs and such under the wet leaves. All three crows denied comment.

Saturday Afternoon, Lower MacCleay Park.
The creek rushes like a tiny river. The reddish-brown leaves snuggle into the ground, one on top of another.

Toward Winter

Three Wings

Air Rusts

Autumn Samba

Dreaming of Spring

Speaking in Trees

New Work

Here is my favorite illustration from my latest poem book, The Wind Returns with Autumn. I posted the whole book and a new acrylic painting, Saint Patefacia on The Weight of a Crow. I hope you'll check them out. I was considering publishing my book through an on demand publisher but I couldn't find the size I wanted available on ecologically sound paper. Maybe I will do a bigger project later. I've also been busy creating a Facebook page and Twitter account to make it easier for people who like my work to keep in touch. Using social media is not really my nature but I have to admit, I'm starting to really enjoy it.

Treescape 5/100: Off the Wild Cherry Trail

I believe I have moved from avoiding painting leaves to going through the motions of painting leaves. A slight improvement but I need a little more focus to paint more than yellow blobs. Another mystery is creating more of a sense of background and foreground. I learned some tricks in school but I haven't employed them too successfully. That means it's time to go look at what other artists have done.
Composition-wise I shouldn't have included the red branch in the foreground but I am so interested in what trees really do, it breaks my heart a little to think about rearranging things to make a better painting.

Soft News Report for the Week of November Thirteenth

 

 

 

 

Text in paintings (roughly):
Tuesday Morning, NW 20^th Ave and Lovejoy.

One crow sits alone and completely quiet in the top of a birch tree. He preens.

Tuesday afternoon, Wallace Park.

A boy looses most of his banana while running to catch the bus. He has not taken one bite of the banana, clutched upright in his hand, as if that first bite is simply on pause. The exposed fruit breaks unnoticed and leaps onto the sidewalk just under a little girl's gait. Miraculously, she passes over the banana without incident. The boy looks down at his banana mid stride, looks behind him, registers the facts and runs onward. Unfortunately, a well-meaning mother picks up the fallen banana and calls to the boy. He hesitates, halts, does as he was taught and the banana ends up in the trash.

Wednesday morning, Wildwood trail, Hoyt Arboetum.

Two birds fall out of a tree together. The tree was a cacophony of little song birds, something crashed through the leaves...two birds, intimately twined fell through the branches flapping their wings just enough to drift down slowly and land gently on the ground. The bounced apart from each other then, but immediately got back to whatever it was they were doing. I assumed it was spring and when I realized it was Autumn I realized a great truth about birds that fluttered in my cheeks like the glowing leaves around me.

Thursday afternoon, the west end of Lovejoy street.

The leaves are all in their places on the ground lounging in their pungent memories of summer. A jay sings in the top of the maple.

Treescape 4: a Loose Interpretaion of NW 21st and Overton

This painting seemed especially challenging and I'm not sure if it's because I was lazy when I was out sketching or if it's because I didn't start out with a line drawing under the painting. I opted not to paint the cars, buildings and street signs. I included them in my first sketch but I wanted to capture the foresty feel of the neighborhood and all that stuff made for a cute but frenetic city painting. It does look weird to have empty streets though...one more thing to figure out.

Phone Photo 2, aka Human Habitat Microscape

I have to admit, I have a secret mission with these phone photos. I feel like a mouse attempting to scale Big Pink or some other monstrous skyscraper, but what better place to attempt grand feats than on Blogger?
My mission is to encourage people to see their lives through the eyes of an artist or photographer so that they might have the freedom to enjoy their current existence as it is without feeling the need to improve things. I'm not at all against improvement but there are plenty of images out there showing us the way to improvement and inciting us to feel inadequate with our current situation. My secret mission is no new notion, but I have no idea what sort of images I personally can make that will inspire people to see the beauty of their own lives. Also, I want to be for a positive current instead of against a negative one and I have no training in such things. Hopefully I will learn as I go, here's a picture of a cupboard in my kitchen.

Cumberland: Treescape 3/100

I painted this from the bench on the Cumberland trail. I had the most fun walking up the staircases into the west hills to this trail. It was just after Halloween and there were some amazing decorations out, skeletons in shabby attire hiding around corners, spider webs, witches in striped socks. Of course all the changing trees were just as mesmerizing.
I could use more work learning to paint fog and ferns but I really like this piece as a whole.

Treescape 2/100: Behind the Winter Garden

Treescape number two...Oddly I don't like to paint outside, I make sketches and then come home and use them to make the painting. It was hard to see what I was drawing because it was raining out and hard to see through the water drops on the plastic over my sketchbook. I love being outside in most weather so this wasn't really hardship for me.

I'm posting the sketches for anyone who denies themselves the pleasure of sketching because they think everything has to be a beautiful drawing to be valuable. I felt that way until I looked at Bonnard's sketches. I was mystified by how scribbley they were and it freed me up to see sketching as a way to collect information and learn rather than a quick form of drawing.

 

The Smoke Tree and 99 other Treescapes

I was out sketching the smoke trees in the arboretum the other day when I caught myself pretending the tree didn't have leaves. The leaves were all these amazing, iridescent shades of Autumn and I am just hacking away at the structure of the trunk and branches. the obvious then occurred to me: I avoid painting things I don't know how to paint and the only way to learn how to paint something is to paint it. So I decided to get to work painting 100 treescape paintings with leaves, underbrush, complicated backgrounds, evergreen boughs...all the things I avoid.

These are the three different versions I did of the smoke trees, in reverse order. The middle one I painted right on top of my field sketch and I like it the best.