Landscapes and red flags

Well, I am absolute trash at landscape painting. 

 

Trees, why are you?

But I learned some things and troweled on a lot more paint than I usually do, so that’s an improvement. Each one just needs to be better than the last. 

 Now that can sit in time-out while I paint a nice safe still life, instead.

- -

Unrelated 

I have been having a bad feeling for the past week, and I can't seem to shake it. It's creeping into my dreams, but there's nothing I can really point to and say, "aha, that's what the problem is". To distract myself, I have been cleaning up the basement studio and fixing the lighting, spraying and baiting the corners to fight the roaches that lick the oil off my paintings at night. It gets dusty down there from dirt sifting loose when people walk overhead, so a ceiling needs to go up. Then if I get a mini fridge and a fold-out couch down there, it'll be kind of like having a vacation house. A vacation house where you can hear people stomping around upstairs looking for you.

Jogging also helps, if only to move snails off the road, smell flowers, and see some good clouds.

When that doesn’t work, bake some bread.

I hope everyone is okay out there.

At it again

Hail! In Wahiawa! 

At midnight the sky was streaming with sideways lighting, and suddenly the world began crackling. Two car alarms went off, and I went outside to see ice bouncing around the yard and rolling down the street in the rain. I watched to see if my chickens would get brained and fall dead out of the lychee tree, but it has dense branches and did its job to protect them. When the ice began to let up, I got back into bed, and Zenny climbed in with me, crying. I rubbed her back and told her my best childhood hail story:

When I was 9, we went on a summer road trip in our little blue pickup truck. While visiting family in Fargo, my mother decided she wanted a camper for the back of the truck. "I just need a basic little camper shell," she told the guy at the auto place. "No, you want fiberglass," he said. "Do I?" she asked. "Fiberglass." "Okay, fiberglass." She bought the not-cheapest fiberglass camper, and we headed on toward South Dakota. At nightfall, somewhere around the badlands, it began to rain so hard she could barely see the lines on the road, and suddenly olive-sized balls of hail began cracking off the windshield. "To hell with this," she said, and slowly pulled over into a McDonalds parking lot. We climbed through the sliders into the back of the truck, and slept the night on the crib mattress she had thrown back there. The next morning we woke up, got breakfast at McDonalds, and carried on down the road. Not even 200 yards away, we passed a car with its windshield smashed. And then another. And then we saw that all the cars along the road had smashed windshields, and their hoods were pock-marked with dents. The hail had come down the size of baseballs, and hunks were still melting in the gutters. If we had kept driving, we would have been right in the middle of it, but instead we were cuddled up, sleeping safe and cozy in our new camper. "Fiberglass," my mother said gratefully.

"Just like we're safe and cozy right now," I said. Zenny calmed down and fell back asleep. Wild night.

(Edited to correct some details about where we were driving; I was 9 and couldn’t remember that stuff reliably.)

It's only life after all

Between upcoming travel and the backgrounds of my horse paintings looking like shit, I decided it was time to have another stab at learning landscape painting.

Landscapes are my discomfort zone. About 5 years ago I decided to confront my bad attitude about landscapes, but I just ended up making it worse. The workshop I chose was in Portland, because my favorite studio on Whitbey Island wasn't offering a landscape class that fall, and also because I had discovered through lurking on Linkedin that someone I used to care about had moved there. I was depressed at the time because of medical/relationship bullshit, and my way of dealing with depression is usually to t-bone it with something it doesn't see coming. A unicorn latte. Jogging down a different road and getting chased by dogs. Sneaking into an unlocked construction site at night. Buying plane tickets to a place I have no business being.

I waffled about it, but I really did want to take a landscape workshop, and the only other one I could find was in Sedona for $3,000 more and 14 hours of driving.

First thoughts: Oh, just do it, you are not banned from an entire city just because someone who dumped you lives there.

Second thoughts: And maybe he'll see me posting that I'm in the area and want to catch up over coffee, and we can be friends again!

Third thoughts: He's going to think you're stalking him and shoot you on sight.

I told my brain to shut up and went anyway, hoping I would get so good at landscape painting that everything else would be put out of mind.

That did not happen, of course. I absolutely sucked at landscapes, and I was tweeting my location like a middle schooler. I figured if he didn't read my tweets, nobody was bothered. If he did read them and wanted to catch up, that would be okay. And if he wanted to actively avoid me, it was a helpful heads-up. I wasn’t trying to surprise anyone. On my third night, I was sitting in the Kells Brewery, drinking a beer and doodling customers in my sketchbook, glancing up at the door every time someone walked in and feeling stupid about it. It was open mic night, and at about 9pm a beardy man with a guitar got up and began playing Indigo Girls covers. He sang 'Closer to Fine', and then started in on 'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright'. I put my pencil down, suspicious.

It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If'n you don't know by now
And it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It'll never do somehow
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm traveling on
But don't think twice, it's all right...

The guy made eye contact and sang the last line right at me, You just kinda wasted my precious time, but don't think twice, it's alright.

Okay. A message from the universe delivered by a stranger in a hipster beanie. I laughed into my beer, paid up, walked back to my hotel, and went to bed. When I got home a few days later I deleted my Linkedin account.

The world shut down before I could take another workshop and put some space between me and my shame, and then there was college airfare and family funerals that ate up the travel budget. Luckily, the pandemic created a leap in online course availability, and all I had to do this time was fork over $26 for a month at East Oaks Studio.

After watching a few hours of demo painting, my homework was to go outside and paint small studies - just taking color notes, not trying to make a finished piece. I decided to go to Kaena Point, thinking the dry mountains over there would be less green and maybe have some atmospheric distance. I was wrong. I had no focal point, no eyeline, no distance, and the color notes were GREEN. With GREEN. A spot of brown in there, but not enough to save me.

sad trombone

It was fun anyway. Spent the last three days keeping my eyes peeled for the right location, and almost got in a car wreck on the way home from work because I was looking at a nice tree. After dropping the kids off at school this morning, I drove over to Kaiaka Park and went wading through thigh-high wet grass in my work clothes to get a look at the early morning light on the mountain. 

Maybe I want to paint dramatic lighting. Or a sentimental location. Maybe the ocean? Actually, I am still mad at the ocean for throwing a shark at me, so not that.

"You're overthinking it," my friend at the library said. "Just paint. You're a better painter now than you were 5 years ago."

 

Get ready for a lot of bad landscape paintings, here I go.

10

Zenny made it a decade. She has been the hardest one to keep alive, between head injuries, seizures, kidney surgery, and covid — but hopefully her upcoming preteen growth spurt will make her body sturdy enough to cruise through her second decade with no health-related excitement. The world is dangerous enough for teenage girls without them having to worry about kidney function.

Year nine was a big one for this kid. She was in the hospital for a week, recovery for a month, then started training to compete in the kids Spartan race, went to Lake George, learned to drive a boat, and got into horseback riding. At this time she still wants to be a doctor, but she’s starting to get interested in the science end of it instead of the medical end. She asked for a microscope for her birthday, and she’s had her eyeball stuck to it ever since.

She’s a happier, more sociable child than I was. Still squeamish about blood, and she cringes with her whole body and covers her face if someone on tv does something embarrassing. She’s a reader, an empathetic listener, and she reads my mind in an unnerving way if she notices I’m thinking about something.

Love this kid so much.

May your next decade be full of all the good stuff, kiddo.

Droopy v. house

Droopy is the sweetest cat of the bunch, but he is not allowed outside. We found him as a kitten in a neighbor's wheel well, and every time he shoots out the front door he makes a wild run to return to his native homeland: the underside of a car.

On Sunday the rain had stopped, and we brought out the ladder and rollers to work on painting the house. Droopy squirted out the door as we were going in and out, and Leif threw up his hands, following him from car to car in the driveway. The cat finally ran into the neighbor's garage and hid where we weren't comfortable pursuing. I kept painting. Leif was annoyed to be the only person chasing the cat.

"Why is it not more urgent to you that Droopy got out?" he asked.

"Because we're all outside, so he's safer, and he'll come out eventually," I said. 

My back was to the driveway while I painted the wall of the front porch, so I didn't see what happened next, but Leif yelped and suddenly Droopy leaped up and slammed into the wall next to me, panicking, legs pinwheeling like a cartoon cat as he tried to run vertically up the outside of the house. I grabbed him and he thrashed around like a fish, slamming us into every freshly painted surface, shredding my arms and legs and coating himself with white paint, until I finally wrestled the front door open and he launched himself inside. He sprinted through the entire house before we managed to catch him and fight him into the bathtub. He stood on his hind legs, face pressed hard into me as I bent over and washed the paint off of him with warm water. He finally calmed down enough for us to wrap him in a towel like a baby and carry him out to the living room. 

The floor was criss-crossed with white paw prints. The concrete porch and stairs were splattered with white paint. The wall was covered in claw gouges and orange fur. Droopy hopped up onto the couch and started drying himself off, purring.

He is fired from house painting. 

Do we know what scared him so badly? We do not.

Did it stop him from trying to jet outside every time we open the door? NO, IT DID NOT.

Unrepentant animal.

Not again

It is the springtime windy season, and this means birds. Birds smacking into the side of the house, birds tumbling out of trees, and birds stampeding through the yard like tiny dinosaurs. In one week, my mother the bird witch (rehabber) has been given a dove with an injured wing, a baby finch that fell out of its nest, and five orphaned chicks. Most of these birds were given to her by my own kids, but still. Out of control. 

I had to take two hours of vacation to retrieve the baby finch from my son at the high school and then drive all the way around the north shore of the island to bring it to my mother in Kaaawa, passing hundreds of happy people along the beaches who were using their vacation time for actual vacation. Felt very jealous, even though I could have yanked the car over at any moment and leaped into the water alongside them in my work clothes. I owe myself one spontaneous action item.

Meanwhile, the domestic bird situation isn’t any better. After re-homing the handsome rooster that tried to move in with our girls, we spent weeks hunting out all their secret nesting spots and stealing eggs so we wouldn't end up with another tribble situation. 3 hens, 2-3 eggs per day - we were on top of it. Until today, when one of the girls came popping out from under the house with eleven little butterballs rolling behind her. She went straight into the coop and settled down with them to wait for food and water service. She‘s too smart for us.

Using up all my sick days

We’ve been passing around a seasonal kid virus (non-covid, we tested), and it’s had me laid up for a week. You’d think this would result in a week’s worth of painting, but it turns out it’s hard to paint while you’re sleeping off a blinding sinus headache. 

I got a little bit in anyway, because I am stubborn and bored and my family was getting exasperated about how much bread I was baking.

Went for it and painted up the first page of my new sketchbook.

Painted another horse, because I’ve already drawn out a few of them and they’re ready to go.

And then back to my disgusting nest of tissues and half-empty tea cups.

My vegetarian/pescatarian Lent resolution does not extend to Sunday dinners, so I am holding out hope that I will be cured by pot roast this evening. Worth a try.