Another day, another rain-shower

It has been nearly two years since I last posted here.  The weather seems the same--moments of sunshine inserted into weeks of overcast and rain.  A typical Northwest November.

Today's afternoon sunshine is filtered through high haze of broken clouds. After soup and a nap I hope to get out to the north end of water walk and capture Mount Rainier in sunshine with my pochade oils.

So far this month, I have completed more than a dozen 6 by 8 canvas boards, most of them on the waterfront. I doubt that more than one or two of them are gallery-worthy. But I knew returning to oils, I would be starting at day one. But each 90 minute session is one notch up the learning curve. When I exhaust my supply of small canvas boards, I will step up the next size, moving into stretched canvases.

Success!  Another pochade sketch. This time I returned to the Point Ruston overlook, near the Port-a-Pottie.  Just the top-most mile of The Mountain protruded from The clouds. Everything on the canvas is a study in gray.

Tonight, a nearly full moon is shimmering through a veil of high clouds.I hope this promises to bring nearly clear skies tomorrow afternoon. In the morning.  I have a coffee date with the Thursday artists at Allen's house.

Are we there yet?

I suppose I could have tossed some shirts and shorts into a backpack in an hour, found my camera and checked the NOAA weather report for the Siskayous and central California.  Friend Jimmy came into the Cafe Brosseau Monday morning to announce that his son Gregg was leaving before lunch to drive to San Luis Obispo and Tucson before lunchtime, and I was welcome to ride along.

Two years ago, I leaped at a next-day offer of a similar ride, to San Luis Obispo, where Gregg was teaching at Cal-Poly.  He's a wonderful driving companion, expert at the wheel and well-traveled up and down the Left Coast.   A year later, we repeated the trip, with "a short cut to Eastern Nevada," where Gregg introduced me to a 5-millenium-old bristlecone pine.  We slept on a salt flat, and next to a glass mountain, and in a forest only yards from an unseen ring of Native American drummers beneath a full moon.  We climbed amid the roots of ageless redwoods, their tops lost in perpetual fog, and I painted sea stacks at the wave-tossed edge of the Pacific.

I knew I'd have a good time.  I actually spent a few moments imagining what I'd have to do to be ready, what I'd be leaving behind for Virginia to solve or bear, what I'd remember I'd forgotten as we rumbled across the Columbia River bridge.  I knew I'd be sketching roadside scenes on blank postcards as we zipped past them at 80 miles an hour.  I'd mail them from the hotels where we'd sleep over on two nights.  Gregg is generous with expenses, so I knew that even picking up one restaurant meal a day, my costs would about the same as the Amtrak ticket I'd otherwise acquire for the San Luis trip.

I had already made plans to Amtrak to San Luis Obispo next week.  My brother Chuck was moving his fifth-wheeler from Paso Robles over the range to a ranch on the outskirts of San Luis, a short drive from Morro Bay, where I planned to stay with a retired newspaper pal, Boxie.  

But I wimped out, citing "too many things going on," and "I've already bought my tickets".


I've been convincing myself that was the right thing to do.  Gregg would have given me all the time I needed to get ready, I'm certain.  I told myself that it wasn't fair to leave Virginia alone on such short notice--I hadn't asked her.  I told myself that my arrival would interfere with Chuck's intricate arrangements for moving his home--he wouldn't need to be told, since Boxie would have picked me up at the S.L.O. station.  I had bills to pay--I could have taken them with me--the U.S. Post Office has a mailbox in Morro, I'm sure.  December is no time to be I-5-ing through Sikayous, with all this now--I've done it before, and there's always U.S. 101 along the coast.

No, I wimped out.  I wonder if at 82-and-a-half I'm simply becoming an old man.  Afraid of what's around the next bend.  Weary of change.

Turn out that light!

Get off my lawn!

Lordy lord, I hope not!

One out of three ain't so very bad

Nearing the equinox, I'm mindful on this gray day that until the new year, I must interrupt my weekly coffee-house schedule.  Family priorities and cafe holiday closings mean I'll see only those companions who regularly join me on Monday mornings.  Those who share their wit and wisdom each Thursday and Friday shall remain distant until next January 7.

This enforced silence seems at this moment an eon.  Perhaps at my advanced age I feel a need for weekly assurance that their absence will not be made permanent by an accident of traffic or health.  More likely, I seek this weekly milepost to measure the distance of my own life journey.

Bon voyage, all.  I hope we meet again in good health and cheer that first week into Two-thousand-sixteen, Common Era.

What'd he say?

  Friend Jimmy delicately wiped whipped cream from his walrus-stache.  
  "I had this wierd dream last night," he declared.  "I wasn't supposed to use any words that began with a 'W'!" 
  "Like 'weird'? asked Jody, across the cafe table.  
  "Or 'word'?" added Keith, next chair over.
  "Wow!" I exclaimed. "What prompted that dream?"
  Jody pressed:  "When did you wake up?"
  "And why?" asked Keith.  "It sounded wonderful!"
  Jimmy took another sip of his latte, leaving another white ribbon across his mustache.
  "Wipe off your mustache," Jody said. "Who started this conversation, anyway?"
  "And where is it going?"
  "And when will it end?" I asked.
  Mornings at the Cafe Brosseau are like that. 
  

Time for another "The Bob Show"

  I'm looking out my living-room window, choosing colors that I'd use to paint the neighbor's birches, which only now are beginning to lose their leaves.  Yellow oxide?  Some of the umbers?  Another winter fog dilutes the deep greens of the conifers up the block.  I won't be painting any of them.  Does looking through a window still count as plein air?  
  This fog will burn off by early afternoon.  Brilliant yellows from a low-hung sun will light the tree barks beneath a too-cerulean blue sky.  And I won't paint any of them, either.
  An all-white bulk carrier ship, waiting for a berth at the Ruston Way grain terminal, anchored off Point Ruston's Copperline Condos last week.  After a late lunch at the Antique Sandwich Co. on North Pearl Street, I drove the Artmobile down the hill and found a parking spot in front of the new movie house.  I loaded my paints, easel and canvas onto the collapsible stroller that is my sidewalk kit, and wheeled it around to the Waterwalk.  I set up the easel, my work table, loaded up the canvas--and took them all right back to the van.  Forty degrees, and a brisk north wind seemed just too damned plein air for acrylics, and for me. 
  It didn't help that the ship swung end-to-end while I was setting up.  This constant see-saw of my subject between the wind and the tide plaqued me all last winter, when I was painting oils of the container ships idled by the longshore slowdown.  It wasn't until I began framing those pochades for my show at Cafe Brosseau last fall that I realized I had painted some 20 of them.  Photographs taken of me by passing strollers show me bundled up like a Santa pack, with rocks suspended from the paintbox tripod to keep it steady against that wind.
  Tomorrow afternoon I'll be addressing a small audience at a church on Tacoma's South 56th Street where I've hung 33 canvases and panels.  Most are small oils, but I have some larger canvases that I began painting last summer.
  My topic is listed as something about plein air painting as a path to spiritual peace and enlightenment. 
  How about plein air painting as a path to constant challenge and frustration?

Home from the Old Country

  Friend Gary joined me this morning at the Treo's coffee house in Tacoma's Old Town.  Rain whispered on the rooftops.  A flat, gray sheen of water to the north lay beneath a flat, gray sky.  Not a boat was visible from North 30th Street.
  Gary had returned this week from an extended visit to family in Geneva, Switzerland.  He brought with him to our weekly show-and-tell two small notebooks of pen-and-wash sketches.  Each painting was exquisite.  Every one brought an aging, urban landscape to life. 
  Gary is an architect.  His eye and pen captured details that, otherwise unnoted, contribute to an overall statement of sometimes recent and sometimes old construction that reflects Geneva's centuries of established beauty.
  He is no stranger to freehand drawing but relatively new to plein air sketching and watercolor painting.  He works from a small pocketbook that carries his watercolor-paper notebooks, his india-ink drawing pens, brushes and a small tray of watercolor pans. 
  Plein air artists work fast in any clime--but Geneva in winter--despite this month's Indian summer there--dictates rapid sketching, rapid painting.  Despite this enforced haste, Gary has captured Geneva with bold lines and sensitive washes that provide an illusion of detail and completeness.
  I can't wait until he turns his educated eye upon Tacoma!
 

Painting in the plein air rain

 A drumming downpour on the roof the the Nature Center at the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge this spring morning surely was the last gasp of a fast-moving weather system.  Gray sky couldn't make me believe that sunshine wasn't far behind. After eight decades, a guy has to know something about weather patterns, right?  And sure enough, the pounding on the shakes eased up into a misting drizzle.

So Allan Dreyer and I left the company of the Washington Plein Air artists who were setting up to paint a quite-adequate scene of willow-lined wetlands and noodling mallards at the Center.  With art-making materials to hand, we trudged out along the boardwalk for the covered watchtower that overlooked the broad estuary.  Allan was to sketch, but I had acquired a 12-by-48-inch canvas that was absolutely made for the horizontal compositions of that scene.  With fast-drying acrylic paint and a 1-inch brush, I was certain to create a masterful, impressionist souvenir of this day.

As we moved along the glistening planks, I was overjoyed to see the subtle greens and browns through the leafless trees.  The defused morning light from the low-hanging cloud cover brought out colors that are all but invisible in the dark shadows of summer.  I looked forward to slapping paint when we reached the shelter.

Allan is a lifelong man of the mountains.  His sure-footed steps set a rhythm that I hard time matching, although he is much older than me--by some 14 months.  His pace would eat up the few miles to the estuary and we would be there in no apparent time at all.

As I struggled to keep up with his red jacket, I noticed that puddles were splashing higher from his weathered mountain boots.  And water was dripping heavily from the brim of my stylish woolen hat.  Hell, it was raining again!

We left the company of the alder and cottonwood and trekked out along the graveled dike.  Two Canada geese on the trail ahead watched our approach.   They goose-steeped down the berm toward the water.  We kept on.

The watchtower was in sight, barely defined through the now-heavy rainfall.  A half-mile to go?  A mile?  Allan, a keen judge of distance from his years as a forest ranger, fire-fighter and national-park volunteer, stopped.  He turned. "Too wet," he announced.  And headed back.  For the first time, I was ahead of him!

We all but loped past the plein air painters crouched behind their easels beneath the Nature Center's roof.  I opened the doors of the van.  We tossed our sodden packs and coats in the back.  In 10 minutes we were at Norma's Breakfast Grille.in nearby Nisqually, warming our hands on cups of coffee and a light brunch.

And came outside a half-hour later to cerulean- blue skies and marshmallow clouds.

When things dry out--say, in mid-August--we'll be back.