Category: Desert Painting

  • The Plank Paintings: Playa, September 2013 — January 2014

    The “Plank Paintings”, more formally known as Summer Lake from Winter Ridge, has long been finished. I wrote about it earlier, under the rubric of The Project from Hell. I finished the last coats a bit more than a year ago, and I recorded much of the process along the way. Then life intervened and…

  • Playa: September 23 & 24, the last days

    Monday, Sept 23, last days…. A busy day in the compound. The full set of fall residents is to arrive next Sunday, so lots of staff members are here, working to make sure the cabins are ready and the Compound immaculate. I’m unaccustomed, even after this short period, to having so many people around (at…

  • Playa, September 20 & 21, 2013

    Saturday, September 20, 2013 I’m feeling that winding down sensation. The last weekend, then Monday, and then Jer arrives on Tuesday, we pack, and head out early on Wednesday, back to the land of trees and low hovering clouds. At Summer Lake it rained, stormed, stopped, and rained again. I snuck in a trip up…

  • Playa: September 19 & 20, 2013

    Thursday Sept 19 As I walked back from the Commons last night, I saw the moon rising in the east over the playa. It was not a huge moon like one sometimes sees but it illuminated the entire lake bed. More stunningly, it was golden, so bright that I didn’t need a flashlight. I was…

  • Playa, September 17, 2013

    Sept 17, Tuesday I had an exciting morning. Went out with Rachel at 6:30 A.M. — this meant getting up at 5:30 because I’m a nervous nelly –  and I needed to heat up a cup of coffee so I could pretend to be human. We walked up to the bone yard, where Pepper looked…

  • Playa: September 15 & 16, 2013

    Sunday morning, Sept. 15 I am outside on the Commons deck, where the lawn and ponds and playa are quite beautiful and the laptop is almost readable in the sun. It’s only 11 AM but I’ve already worked on a large painting on-site up by cabin 1. Cabin 1 from the front. The back looks…

  • Playa: September 13, 2013

    Friday, Sept 13, 2 013 The big excitement of the day, aside from the fact that I got two more paintings started and the one from yesterday was almost dry today, is that I saw, and then tasted, my first dust storm. Apparently dust storms on the playa are a common occurrence during the dry…

  • Playa: September 11th & 12th

    Wednesday,  Sept 11, 2013 (This post also can be found on my southeastmain blog, with a few photos changed). We left Portland about 8 and, taking our favorite Route 26 around the southern edge of Mt Hood, dropped further south on Rt. 97 through Bend.  At La Pine in southeast Oregon we finally left the…

  • PEFO Paintings, Mostly Finished.

    I promised to provide updates to this blog as I worked in my Portland, Oregon, studio on the Arizona Petrified Forest National Park Paintings. I am in the process of moving this WordPress.com blog, pages and posts, to my website, but until that process is completed and ready for public consumption, I thought I would…

  • Petrified Forest Residency: A concluding remark or two, in Context

    I have been shilly-shallying about writing this conclusion for close to a month now. And it’s not because I don’t know what I want to say. I think it’s because I can summarize or I can expostulate, and while the first is almost too brief, the latter is too turgid. So here are some silly…