Linos and road trips and shows, oh my!

I've been on the road a LOT the last few weeks, a circumstance that will continue right up until I leave for my annual trek to Maine in early July. Yesterday I talked a friend in to joining me on a delivery run to Oh Be Joyful Gallery in Crested Butte, just over the Continental Divide from Salida. Well, maybe it's not just over the Divide. It's about a 90-minute drive via Highway 50 over Monarch Pass... but the even-more-beautiful trip over Cottonwood Pass is longer and slower. Guess which way we came home?

Afternoon clouds gathering over Crested Butte South

Crested Butte is famous for its amazing wildflowers (and wildflower festival in July), but of course it's early June, so the bloom has barely started. We did see lots of fields of fading larkspur surrounded by more dandelions than I've ever encountered. They were really quite beautiful.

Dandelions and larkspur, aspen and the edge of the Crested Butte

Cottonwood Pass has only recently opened for the season, as snow lingers long and deep at its 12,126-foot summit. The road is dirt for the last 14 miles of the approach from the west side, which is why I was so happy that the rain held off until we were maybe 3 or 4 miles from the top. It can get really slippery really fast up there.

Looking back towards Taylor Reservoir on the Cottonwood Pass climb.
Rain is definitely coming.

Plenty of snow left on the top, although the rain will melt it quickly.

On the east side of the pass ("my" side) the road is paved, so the rainy descent was no problem.

Whew! Another trip checked off the list. But in just two days I'll be off AGAIN... to......

"Shower with a Friend," reduction linocut, @Sherrie York

The opening of the exhibition Animalia, at the Loveland Museum in Loveland, Colorado. I'll be there both for the museum's Member Preview on June 9 and for the public opening on June 10. I have two linocuts in this show, including an old favorite: the last remaining "Shower with a Friend." (If you have "always wanted one" this could be your last chance!)

From Loveland I'll head to Estes Park for a couple of days, in part to give a short workshop for the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies. After that I'll return home for a couple of days and then leave AGAIN... but thinking about that too far ahead just makes me more tired.

Believe it or not, there IS a linocut on the carving table. This afternoon I'll get paper set up for it, and maybe print the first color tomorrow before I'm on the road again.

Meditations on Fall at Oh Be Joyful Gallery

Oh Be Joyful Gallery's autumn show, Meditations on Fall, is on now through October 11 in beautiful Crested Butte, Colorado. Meditations on Fall  showcases paintings by David Grossman, Meredith Nelson, Cheryl St. John, and linocuts by... me!

Artists' Reception this Thursday, September 24, 5:00-9:00 pm, in conjunction with Crested Butte's evening Art Walk. I hope to see some local folks there!

OBJ Gallery - 409 Third Street - Crested Butte, Colorado - (970) 349-5936

Join me this weekend at the Crested Butte Arts Festival, Crested Butte, Colorado!

If it's time for the Crested Butte Arts Festival, it must mean I made it home from Maine. (Which I did, in the wee hours of yesterday morning.)

Please join me in CB this weekend for art, music, food, and luscious scenery. (I hear the wildflowers are still going gangbusters over there.) Booth 65, towards the west end of Elk Avenue in downtown Crested Butte.

Salida ArtWalk, and other mysteries

It's that time again.... Out of the studio and on to the street. Or in to the woods. Or out on the ocean. Or some combination of all of the above.

It's ArtWalk weekend here in Salida... My linos and I will be hanging out Saturday night at cultureclash gallery, so come on out and say hello.

And the Month of Crazy looms:

July 8-10: I'll be offering field sketching and illustrated journal classes at the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival. The western slope has had lots of water this year, so the flower show should be spectacular!

July 11: Linocuts grace the walls at the awesome Laughing Ladies Restaurant here in Salida. Through August.

July 16: Opening reception (and probably a little gallery talk) at the Project Puffin Visitor Center in Rockland, Maine... where all those seabird linos are featured for the summer.

July 19: Introduction to linocut workshop, "Seabirds in Relief," at the PPVC and Farnsworth Museum, Rockland.

July 20-25: I'll be on staff for "Sharing Nature: An Educator's Week" at Hog Island Audubon Camp, Bremen, Maine.

August 1-3: Crested Butte Arts Festival.

Ooph. I'm tired already, but it's gonna be fun! Hope to catch up with some of you along the way....

Coming up next: Crested Butte Arts Festival

Apparently my summer hasn't been chaotic enough yet– there are several big adventures yet to come.


First up, the Crested Butte Arts Festival. This will be my first such event (other than a little booth at our local Farmers Market a couple of summers ago) and WOW! I still have so much to do.

If you're in the area this coming weekend, come on by booth #7. (Lucky Seven? I hope so!) I'll have lots of linocuts and a few woodcuts to share, and maybe I'll even be working on a print! Shocking!

Festival opens Friday, August 3, 5:00pm until dark, and continues Saturday and Sunday from 10:00am to 5:00pm.

Trying to sort out a booth display with a mock setup in the dining room.

Workshop season: Where am I?

Ah, summer! Remember how "they" used to tout summer as endless lazy days on the beach with a good book and a cold adult beverage? Who actually has summers like that? No one I know. And it's definitely not me this summer, which you've no doubt guessed since Brush and Baren has been so sadly neglected.

Even without its usual bounty of blooms the Gothic Road
is something to see.

Last week I was off teaching sketching workshops at the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival. Our persistent drought meant that the usually flower-lush valley floor was parched and blooms were thin on the ground this year, but we had fun anyway. Tuesday I unexpectedly experienced my most diverse workshop dynamic EVER: My students ranged in age from 10 to 90! Wow.

The monsoons have finally arrived, but the rain held off during
workshop hours!

On Monday I'm off again, this time headed east to Maine and Hog Island Audubon Camp, where I'll be an instructor for Educators' Week. 

I'm really pleased that I sat down and made a new journal when I did, since I've managed a few moments here and there to make some entries. The most difficult part is finding the book in the disaster that is my work area right now. I have piles of papers from last week, stacks of items for next week's workshops, stacks for an art festival the week after, AND another workshop the week after that. My drawing table feels like a "Where's Waldo?" book. Can you find: My phone bill, a linocut that needs to be shipped to a buyer, my paint box, workshop materials that need to go in my suitcase, a draft of a contract project, a checklist for an art festival, my "Square," my journal, my checkbook, a supply receipt, and... oh, gee... is that a bottle of aspirin? How do you suppose that got there?

Postcard from the Butte

I'm perched on top of an unmade bed in a swanky condo in a mountain resort... cool glass of tea at my side... laptop in my lap. And I have the audacity to call this working!

Okay... truthfully, it's the quiet moment at the end of a challenging two weeks. When we last heard from our hero she was "coming down with some sort of cold/flu thing." That cold/flu thing quickly deteriorated to a nasty sinus infection which, three days before the start of an intense teaching week, sent me to the doctor with a plea for miraculous healing. Yikes.

The doctor declared me "yucky" and handed me an armload of pharmaceutical wonders. Ordinarily I try to avoid such things (my last trip to the doc was in 2006), but desperate times called for desperate measures.

 Bob from Montrose, pouring over his sketchbook at Crested Butte.

Thus fortified I arrived here in Crested Butte feeling functional, at least, and have been delighted once again to have great groups of enthusiastic, engaged, and FUN students at the Wildflower Festival. Thank you so much, students "old" and new... it has been so rewarding to work with all of you.

I've got one more day to go before I head back over the Continental Divide to home and all the other projects that were neglected last week when I was on "sofa arrest." I haven't forgotten about the door prizes I owe folks from the 500th Postiversary party, and there are plenty of other projects waiting for my attention, too. (I don't know about you, but I'm feeling like it's been WAY too long since any ink has smudged this space.)

 But first I'm going to go have another look at some wildflower-saturated hillsides.

Having a great time, wish you were here.

Taking the super-long way home

Sunflowers on the Gothic Road

We've had the most ridiculous day... "stuff into the car, stuff out of the car" to the nth degree. We awoke in Crested Butte, loaded up the cars and made a quick trip up the road to the hamlet of Gothic, home of the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab. From there back down to CB and then the 100 miles to Salida.

Unload the cars (we had two, because I'd been in CB since last Monday and the DM arrived on Friday). Get into the DM's car and drive 60 miles to Cañon City to take down a show there, then turn around and drive back to Salida.

Unload the car again.

Get back in to MY car and drive 25 miles to Buena Vista to collect our farm share (we missed the market yesterday), have some supper, and then drive back to Salida and unload the car AGAIN.

Had there been a reasonable route for managing all this, we would have taken it, but instead we had the surreal experience of coming home three times before finally arriving. We've now got multiple piles all over the house, but at least they're in one geographic location.

But hey... I told you Crested Butte was a fine place to teach classes. See?......

Workshop participant Carey, drawing in the lupine!

In the Gunnison National Forest, en route to Gothic.

Off to the Butte!

Zoom! Another summer weekend disintegrated and another "to do" list only half completed.

We kept close to home for the holiday, happy to visit with a friend from New Mexico and dance with our neighbors at the Riverside Park band shell before last night's fireworks. We've had enough rain this season that the "grand finale" wasn't grass fires on S Mountain, as it was last year.

This morning we took a hike up Bear Creek, just downriver from town. I'm finding it quite delightful that a year after his arrival in the Upper Arkansas valley, the DM is finding new routes and taking me places I haven't been in my seven years as a local. We marked this trail a winner, full of an amazing diversity of plant and bird life. Dry slopes and wet creek bottoms... warbling vireos and hermit thrushes. Pine, fir, scrub oak, aspen, maple, juniper... cactus...yucca... moss.

And one particularly lush stretch of horsetail... (I decided to be kind and not post the images of the DM making his way to and from this particular slippery perch.)


On the way back down, we took a pic of this lovely butterfly, some species of comma, but I'm not sure which one. (Hoary comma?) Once I started messing with the image, I realized there's likely another linocut in here. Yikes! Suddenly a backlog of linos.



And I'll be lagging for another week, since tomorrow I'm off to Crested Butte for a week of teaching at the Wildflower Festival. I'm looking forward to it, but Double Yikes! It's already 5:00pm and I still have to pack gear and food and clothes and...

I'd better get with it.

Not sure if I'll be able to post whilst away since hijack-able wireless signals can be hard to find. See you all when I get back!

Bye-bye, CB...

A week in Crested Butte is now over... a week of great workshop participants and grand vistas, and just a little rain. Well, there was quite a bit of rain, but most of it was NOT during the times I had folks in the field. Thank goodness. Yesterday we had to make a dash indoors when big lightning and hail hit, but otherwise we were lucky, lucky, lucky all week. We even dodged most of the evil black flies.

So now it's back to illustration work, deadlines are looming. Hopefully I'll get to sneak in some studio time, too. My lino tools are lonely, and my linocut drying rack is empty and gathering dust.

Workshop participant and friend Margot sketching at the Pavilion above Mount Crested Butte.