The flayed man

Well, they were out of beef short ribs, so I got pork spare ribs instead, and... hmm.

It’s kind of... it’s a bit “Theon Greyjoy”, isn’t it? I should have put the other two ribs in the composition, but I dunked them in marinade..

I like the loose brush strokes, anyway.

the wild car

The boys didn't take any good pictures of fire hydrants on their trip to Japan, so I painted Ron's busted Ford Anglia for them to remember the trip by, instead. 

We've still got a few jelly slugs and chocolate wands to compose a still-life, but if I do that I'll be in danger of eating my models again (see: walnuts).

No, if it comes to painting food, I'm going to be painting a pork chop, out of pettiness (I still want that $350 pork chop). Or maybe I'll paint a cut of meat that is more locally-favored, like ox tails.

or maybe... maybe not

Short ribs, then.

BEAUTIFUL - pin it on the inspiration board 

I will go to the neighborhood grocery and see which meat speaks to me - skipping past the skinned pig faces, which just scream, mostly.

I have, as mentioned, the dietary scruples of a raccoon, so I would eat pork face if someone prepared it for me, but that's an ingredient that would be hard to explain to the police if they looked in your freezer.

plein air fail

If I don't go to a painting workshop this year, I thought, I could spend the money on actual paintings and support the same artists without having to go anywhere or learn anything. Flawless logic. I was narrowing it down to a painting of a raw porkchop and one of a dead raccoon, and that is when the man packed up the portable easels and said we were going painting. 

We drove over to my mother's house, ditched the kids, and went across the street to Valley of the Temples. I don't have an aptitude for painting buildings, and I've never painted a landscape, so why not start with a Buddhist temple at the base of a rainy mountain? SURE. This is a good idea.

One look at the architecture on that temple, and I started auditioning rocks and puddles to paint, instead. There were handsome turtles sunning themselves and nice frogs loitering in the pond, but the problem with painting from life is that you don't actually have zoom vision, and it is very hard to pitch an easel in the middle of a pond. That pea-sized speck from where you're standing is going to be a pea-sized speck on your canvas. Stupid analog eyeballs.

We set up our easels way in the back, off of the pathway, next to a strip of warning tape and a sign that says DO NOT ENTER, and tourists still picked their way through the mud like goats to get behind us and watch us paint. Whiny children yelled, "I WANT TO PAAAAINT," and their parents looked at me expectantly, as if I would turn around and hand them my brushes. If you are doing a thing in public, you are a public entertainment feature, after all. Luckily, it started to pour just as I was considering flinging one of the children into the koi pond by the ankles for the black swans to eat, and the tourists cleared out for a few minutes. I tried painting in the rain, because oil paint is waterproof, but it turns out that paint boxes fill up with rain and brushes skid uselessly over water droplets, so we finally admitted defeat and went for a beer at the mall, instead.

"To still-life painting!" we toasted.

The guy who should have posed for me

nope

STAY STILL, CLOUDS

Fine.

It was a good day - though next time we're buying a pork chop and a dead animal and painting in the studio, instead.

nuts

It is freezing cold over here, and the winter windstorm knocked over our banana tree just as it was making tiny bananas. AGAIN. Third year in a row. We will never have bananas. We are doomed to subsist on lychees forever.

The mainland newspapers noticed that it snowed on Maui and they spent a few days panicking about it. You guys, it snows every winter up on the mountains. The temperature drops, it rains for days, and the wind knocks down trees. This is our February weather. They missed the real news story, which was that a couple of endangered hornbills escaped from the zoo and the zookeepers chased them around in circles with giant nets like Wile E. Coyote. It was beautiful.

Had a couple hours at home after a trip to the hospital’s x-ray department with my most accident prone child (it’s just a sprain, not a break; cafeteria benches attract gravity zephyrs and she just crashes right down off of them), so I painted some nuts and posted a couple of upside-down process videos over on Instagram. May need to devise a film setup that is better than a phone propped on a corn starch container.

I might lighten up that background so we can see the shadows better

And here is a picture of me not getting out of the warm car because it is rainy and cold out there. 

Happy Valentine's Day

First get it covered with paint

Well, her head and forearm look like detached puppet limbs, but every bit of the surface is painted. Next week I’ll go in and repaint the hair, adjust the neck so it matches her face, and soften that wooden arm.

I’m just glad she has fingers now.

It looks a lot better in evening lamplight than it does in washed-out daylight. When I get fed up, I’ll just hang it in the hallway where there is no natural light and call it a design element.

So this year my goal is to “put down the feel-bad machine”. Go analog, read books, journal on paper, only post art (here I have rationalized “but this part of the  post is just a quick update, it doesn't count”). It had all been going pretty well - and then my car was burgled.

Nothing was taken, because I don't have drugs or cash or snacks or whatever the hell else they thought I'd be keeping in a glove box

So now we have new locks and a home security system that has been pinging me with hundreds of alerts a day for every marauding chicken, cat, and pigeon that passes by. This feels kind of the opposite of disconnecting from the feel-bad machine. NICE TRY, TECHNOLOGY. I am handing the digital reigns over to the man and teenager. They can yell with their analog voice boxes when it's time for me to come charging out of bed with a baseball bat.

Walnut

A few weeks ago, I found a wood frame at the thrift store. Spent a few days looking at it, trying to figure out what it wanted to be. It said, a walnut. I imagined tiny portraits, curled figures, decorative objects, but it just kept saying no, just a walnut. So I took out the nut bowl and arranged a few walnuts on the table, with some filberts for contrast, but the composition wouldn't work. Just one walnut, stupid.

Fine.

So I painted a walnut.

Walnuts are meaningful to me. In the winter of 1990, we spent Christmas at a great aunt's cabin in the sequoia forest. My grandparents showed up with a mesh sack of walnuts the size of a dead body, which they bought at a roadside stand on the drive up from the airport. They dropped it in the middle of the room where my mother and aunts were sitting and said, "Whatever you can shell, you can keep." For the next week, we all sat in the cabin by the wood stove, talking and cracking and bagging up walnuts in big ziplock bags. By the end of the holiday, we had shelled about half the sack, and everyone was packing fat baggies of nuts into their suitcases. My grandmother looked from the mesh sack of unshelled walnuts to the neat baggies of nuts my mother had stacked on the coffee table, and said, "Actually, we'll just take the shelled ones. There's no way we can get that sack of walnuts on the plane." So we went back to the reservation that winter with a sack of walnuts the size of half a dead body rolling around in the back of the truck. There were no satellite dishes or phone lines on Black Mesa, and for much of the winter the mud roads were impassable, so we took our entertainment where we could find it. We had the only VCR in the teacher's housing, and a subscription to a mail service that shipped 2 movies every other month, which Donna (the former cop, who would shoot herself in the leg the following spring) filled up with Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis films. And we had nuts, goddamn it. For the rest of the winter, teachers trudged over to our trailer in the snow, kicked the muck off their boots, and plopped down on our couch with empty mason jars to watch Lethal Weapon 2 for the hundredth time and crack walnuts. The nutmeat went into one mason jar, and the shells went into the other. Donna and Diane lived in a hogan down the hill, with no electricity, no heater, and a mountain lion stalking the outhouse (which would lead to the aforementioned gunshot wound), and the walnut shells were really good for throwing into the wood stove to keep the fire burning on long, cold nights.

Walnuts in the winter mean safety, family, friends, and warmth. And Danny Glover on an exploding toilet. The important stuff.

long weekend painting - tv and toads

I love painting this kid.

I've been using a new brand of clear gesso, and it's perfect. If you're shopping for this stuff, make sure you don't buy one with "tooth". Tooth is code for "sandpaper". Or maybe "kitty litter". Or "actual, ground-up teeth". This is not something you want in a painting surface.

When I was happy with that, I pulled out my still-mostly-blank painting and added a bronze toad. 

The face took 7 hours, the toad took 45 minutes. That is how it goes sometimes.

paint and murder yarn

I'd like to be the kind of painter who produces large, atmospheric portraits and elaborate still-life scenes, or pages of tightly detailed pen-and-ink drawings with gruesome humor, but what I am is a librarian who likes small, soft, cheap paintbrushes and 5x7 rectangles of paper. I admire designs filled with flowers and bats and skulls, and what I paint is fire hydrants and children and cats. That's okay.

underdrawing-in-progress

Monday was my first painting day in more than a month. I got overenthusiastic and ended up biting off more than I could chew, because I bought a new adhesive to mount my oil paper onto hardboard and didn't have any boards smaller than 2 feet wide. And I'm not going to cut them down to comfortable 5x7 chunks, because power tools are on the top of my "DO NOT APPROACH" list, right next to fireworks and trampolines. I still have a lump on my head from falling face-first into the pointy end of a barbell in 2017. Whatever kind of a painter I think I am, I'll be a worse one without any fingers. But probably more popular, as a human interest piece.

So now I am staring at the expanse of empty background resentfully. Who wants to spend hours painting backgrounds when there are little pink ears and fat fingers and the soft corners of mouths to get caught up in? What was I thinking, painting something this big?

Too late now. Get it done, self.

This is just a detail. The rest is EMPTY EMPTY EMPTY.

And I have been giving my knitting another shot at killing me. Again. Of course.

 Lungs, like swatches, are for sissies.

varnish vids

The best part of finishing a painting is the varnishing. 

Even when the varnish reveals bits you mismatched because the color sunk between sittings. Like knitting a swatch before starting a sweater that won’t fit you, oiling in so your colors match is for sissies. 

I made sure to varnish in the lucky cat hairs - my marks of authenticity. The only realistic art heist crime novel will be cracked by detectives who can identify pet hair, and it will be about 3 paragraphs long. “Unless Fra Filippo Lippi owned a maltipoo in 1469, you will find, sirs, that this is a FORGERY.” The End. 

who knows where

The song I was listening to on my evening run told me to follow the strange trails, so I went trespassing into a dark construction site like a complete ding-dong.

 

Here is the resolution for 2019: put down the feel-bad machine. I bought a paper journal to replace my blog. I'll still upload art, like this post, but I've removed twitter, facebook, newsfeeds, netflix, and pretty much everything else except my e-reader. It's time to stop dropping breadcrumbs and be done. 

My email is tempestpilot at the g mails, and I'll receive direct messages from fb if anyone needs to get hold of me. 

 -h