Roll(er) in the New Year!

The studio is tidy, the recycling has been taken to the recycling center. The Yay Jar has been emptied and it's ready for all the good things to come. It must be a new year!

As my first act of 2017... I took a walk.

The Arkansas River, between Sands and Frantz Lakes, looking to the
Sawatch Range and the Continental Divide.

I had extra motivation for getting out early. Since mid-December our little Sands Lake State Wildlife Area has been hosting an extremely rare bird for these parts: long-tailed duck.

Handsome visitor, a male long-tailed duck

The long-tail is a sea duck, typically spending its winters in protected bays of the Atlantic coast. That's a long way from Colorado, and while it's not unknown for one to turn up occasionally on the big reservoirs of the eastern plains, a mountain bird gets a lot of folks' knickers in a twist. Luckily he stuck around for our Christmas Bird Count (December 17), and for the last few days I've been crossing my fingers extra-hard that he'd stay here until the new year. Hoorah! He did!

I've been a bit obsessed with this guy... he's so darn beautiful. He's been hard to photograph, partly because he tends to stay beyond the reach of my camera lens and partly because he's just so busy all the time. He probably spends as much time below the surface of the water as he does above it.

But I've got a few ideas for linocuts that I'd like to pursue, and now I can't decide if the subject of my next print should be the merganser idea I've been itching to start or Mr. Handsome Long-tail. Art world problems.

Since I'm stymied by indecision, I took time in the last few days of 2016 to make a small lino of my friend Sue's pug, Pipsi. These days Pipsi is a mature dog of many talents, but this print takes us back to her puppy days.

I've also got a little cat image drawn up and ready to go, so I can waffle about a larger piece for a few more days.

"Pipsi," reduction linocut, 5" x 5"

Whatever I decide to do next will have to wait until the end of the week, however. Tomorrow I'm off to Denver for the opening of the Coors Western Art Show. It will be a whirlwind couple of days, since I have to get back right away to get ready to leave again next week, but I'm looking forward to catching up with colleagues and collectors at this amazing event.

My work will be in the Club portion of the show, which means that after the opening it will be moved to the gallery at the National Western Club. Although the Club is "members only," you can still get in to see the work if you're visiting the National Western Stock Show January 7-22. Just ask at the Coors Show gallery and they'll let you visit as a guest.

My 2017 is roll(er)ing off to a fast start! Thank you for being part of the adventure, I hope the new year is a great one for all of us.

Interlude

The Sawatch Range from Frantz Lake, Salida

Why, yes. Yes, it has been very quiet here at Brush and Baren. There is plenty of work going on in the studio, but I'm not quite ready to share it. Perhaps by the end of this week.

In addition to burnishing my shoulders and wrists into oblivion I'm also wrapping up work on a project for the Collegiate Peaks Scenic Byway, and getting two new contract projects underway. There are FOUR (count 'em) major exhibition jury deadlines coming up in April. AND I'm trying to wrap my brain around a week of linocut workshops and a steamroller printing event at the Woodson Art Museum at the beginning of May.

Maybe it's a (still-entirely-too-far-away) spring vibe. I'm spending an awful lot of energy putting an enormous number of things in motion– the benefits of which won't be reaped until the end of the summer.

This morning, however, I'd had quite enough of all of that and took myself out for a walk in "my patch." I've spent the last ten years cruising this same 3.5-mile loop, keeping erratic tabs on the comings and goings of plants and animals and fencelines. All the bird linocuts I've been making lately? Most have been inspired by adventures in my patch.

It's been a week since I stopped by Frantz Lake, during which time almost all the ice vanished. The surface of the lake has hosted ice skaters and fishermen and no birds for months, but this morning there was a feathered party going on! Ducks, geese, mergansers... a grebe. I spied this lone snow goose consorting with its Canada goose cousins... and immediately wondered if it might not be the same solitary snow goose that spent several weeks hanging out with its cousins last year at this time. No way to know.

The beavers did a number on the massive willow tree "on the corner" of the lake earlier this winter. When they cleaned out the damaged tree limbs property managers did a number on other vegetation there, too. It all looks pretty ratty at the moment, but I'm hopeful it will recover this summer. There's a western scrub jay loitering on this corner now– my first at this location. Red-winged blackbirds singing. Goldfinches. Last week there was even one of those pesky common redpolls that have been popping up all over the country and making birders twitchy.

The last ice on Frantz Lake. Methinks I smell a linocut here.

I don't have any sketches to show for today's adventure, but it was more than wonderful to  spend some time with my favorite subject outside the studio instead of in.

Back to work now.

Time Out

We had great plans to get lots of chores done around the house this weekend, but you know how it goes. This morning our brains shouted "DAY OFF!" and who are we to argue with gray matter?

We were out the door at 8:00 and on the North Backbone trail by 8:10. I love this trail, and probably said so a couple of dozen times during our hike. (Just ask the DM. He will roll his eyes and confirm it. At LEAST a couple of dozen times.)

My favorite tree. It's two-dimensional!
All those lovely arms are in a single plane.
When you get around the side of this tree,
there are no branches sticking out!

We park a car at the north end of the trail and hike the... what? Four-and-a-half? Five? miles back to the house. It takes us a couple of hours, and on a picture-perfect morning like this one there isn't anything I'd rather be doing. Seriously. Not even drawing or printing.

Sherrie (for the 14th time): "I love this trail."
David: "You don't say."

 The trail winds through piñon-juniper woodland... juniper titmouse and pinyon jay territory. (Of course.) Mountain chickadees, bushtits, nuthatches, solitaires... ravens on a nest. A stout cottontail. And a fabulous view of our town, stretched out on the valley floor.

Our town from the North Backbone trail

It's nose to the grindstone tomorrow, but I won't mind so much now. Thank you, brain, for being good for "nothing more" than this today.

Settling down on a blustery day

It's the end of March. How the heck did that happen?

Saturday's field sketching workshop at Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory was great fun, although when I first got up that morning I was a little worried. It looked like this:

RMBO's Old Stone House Education Center

Atmospheric and lovely, but potentially challenging for a class that wants to be drawing outdoors. Thankfully it evaporated by mid-morning, as fog in the arid interior is wont to do, and we got to spend some time enjoying the early signs of spring.

Sarah exploring the details of new green grass two hours later.

I'm finally home for a several week stretch and it feels like coming out of an odd dream. Today I've been on my feet all day... charging from task to task and trying to wrestle my life back into some sense of order. No, really.

Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, the first hour-and-a-half of footwork was done on my usual morning walk. Getting outside for a bit is imperative, even (or especially) with piles of stuff everywhere in the studio and ridiculously changeable spring weather out of the studio. We're having a doozy of a day here, moving minute by minute through sun and clouds, ferocious wind, and even some snow showers.

Yes, that's snow on the left and sun on the right.
Frantz Lake, Salida, this morning.

The rest of the day has been errands (accountant to pick up taxes, framer to pick up work, post office to ship aforementioned work to a show, blah blah blah) and administrative tasks, but OOOOH! Look what arrived in the post:

I (Heart) weird chunks of wood.

Uh huh. It's a weirdly-shaped piece of wood. And I'm excited about it. It's going to be my contribution to the City of the World Monumental Collaborative Puzzle Print! (If that's not a mouthful, I don't know what is.) In short, over 100 printmakers from around the world have each received a small piece of one of five large wood blocks to carve and return to the organizer, Maria Arango. She will reassemble the bits and print them all together as five enormous prints... which each participant will receive. Amazing, eh? Personally I think Maria's insane, but she's organized projects like this before so I guess she knows what she's doing. Maria is documenting the process at the blog link above, and I encourage you to check out all the work she has done to get the project to this stage.

Hooray! Writing a blog post means I've been sitting for a little while, but it's time to jump up and get back to it. There are prints to be made, by golly!

Would you believe six-and-a-half?

I can hear you snickering already. "Told you she'd never stick to six."

I'm back to work on the "ground cover" linocut, but of course the first thing I discovered when I returned to the block was a mistake in the previous carving. Oh, horrors! (She says with tongue firmly planted in cheek.) There were just a couple of leaves that should have remained yellow and/or green when the third color was printed, but in my rush to squeeze in one more pass last week, I overlooked them.

I tried for a while to figure out a way to ink just the one section in green and the rest in the next reddish color so I could do it all in one pass, but in the end it was faster to cut a little stencil, ink only that small area, and print it. Just a little section to clean up, and then the reddish color could go right over the top.

Of course, I forgot to take a photo at that stage, but you'll just have to believe me. Colors 3 1/2 and 4.

Tonight I did pass number 5-- another blend. This time from light at the top to dark at the bottom. I struggled with my 6" brayer... it's developed a bit of warp and it won't roll out evenly... but in the end I decided it was okay. Didn't want it TOO perfect. (Cough. Ahem.)

I also struggled with a dilemma I don't usually have indoors. Gnats. Little. Tiny. Gnats. Small enough to find their way in through the window screen and on to my work table. Thankfully I finished before I squished too many of them on the back of prints during burnishing, and before too many spent their last moments expiring in my ink. Who knew studio work could be so much like Wild Kingdom?

Curiously, the green stenciled area shows a shadow more in the photo than it does in real life. The red-orange has gotten lost, too... too much direct overhead light or something. At any rate, there's just one more color to go. Should be able to wrap it up tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed!

And on a completely different subject... Monday I went out on my favorite morning walk route,  through clouds and rain and sun and clouds and... well, you get the picture.

I wanted you to get this picture, too. Frantz Lake, about 5 minutes before it started to really rain. I stood under some trees and listened to the shower intensify as it swept across the lake surface toward me. A lovely moment, especially since it didn't last long enough for me to get completely soaked and I made it back home without squishy shoes.

Count down to camping, count up the spring migrants!

Is it still "getting away from it all" when you have to take so much STUFF along? Tent, sleeping bags, stove, cooler, utensils.... (sigh).

Ah, well, we're approaching preparedness and I think we'll manage to keep it reasonable, anyway.

It's a little disconcerting to be on the verge of a camping trip when the weather all about us is completely unruly. Fortunately our route to the south looks better than the route directly west. Twenty minutes up the pass from here it looks like this today:

Nice, huh? We're turning the heat on in the house again this morning, and I'm clinging desperately to an improved forecast for the next few days.

Still, the crazy spring isn't ALL bad. Yesterday morning's walk started out cold and gray and lonely, but ended in a bit of a surprise party, just for me. 

I get a little "funny" about walking just now-- determined that every single day should yield some new sign of the advancing season. Halfway through my walk it looked as if I was going to get skunked (figuratively, not literally). Not one new winged arrival and several species "missing," no doubt hunkered down out of the wind. Bummer.

But as I approached Frantz Lake I heard some sort of cacophony... gulls? Hm. I don't see a lot of gulls here, maybe 2 or 3 at a time during migration... up to a dozen on a "really good" day.

It turned out to be a really, really, really good day, as I found 150 Franklin's gulls swirling and wailing against a steel gray sky. Below them? 60-plus white-faced ibis. I'd seen one ibis a few weeks ago and a couple of gulls last week... but THIS? Yeah, baby. Great.

And I was the only one around to see it.

Adding to the delight of the spectacle were two snowy egrets, my coveted first-of-the-season arrivals for the day. They looked like tattered plastic grocery bags caught in a still-bare tree, but, nope.... egrets. Finally.

 Sadly, all I have is a little point-and-shoot camera, so you'll have to take my word for it. You can trust me, though. I would never joke about spring arrivals.

The blue squares still hang forlornly on the rack, as an illustration deadline demanded my attention the second half of the week. That's done... so after a few more pre-trip errands this morning I'll see if I can't make post-able progress on the print before departure, too. Just in case I don't manage it, though, I wish everyone a great week. Sketches from the canyon when we return!

Agony and...

About this time last year I bound a set of little booklets, ten small books that fit just so in a cigar box. A single booklet fits in the pocket of my jacket, so I always try to have one with me when I go out. Four or five of these little books are now filled with species lists and walk-induced musings, along with the occasional lament. Recent exasperation with the fickleness of the season prompted this scrawl:

April is agony.

 Rainy April morning on the Arkansas River

Uh huh. Agony... and delight.

I'm back in my morning walk routine, in part because it's the time of year when every day yields something new: migrant birds arriving, grasses sprouting, tiny proto-leaves emerging. Friday I went out the door in the rain and was rewarded with wave of 500-plus swallows along a 2-mile stretch of river. Sure, yesterday it was snowing in the morning... but today dawned crystal clear and glorious. Winter may be reluctant to concede defeat, but the season is changing.

It's agony for me to stay indoors and get work done, but I do keep trying. (My printing-first-thing-in-the-morning-whilst-still-in-pajamas routine has been supplanted by my walking-along-the-river-first-thing-in-the-morning routine.) I mounted the new 14 x 14-inch lino block last week, and this weekend drew up the image. I'm still trying to decide how to begin, whether to go ahead and do this image as a reduction print or to plan for two separate blocks. I anticipate just four colors for this edition (WHAT?), but I'm undecided about the first one... so here we sit.

I did get a stack of paper trimmed, though.

The week ahead will be a busy one, especially since we're headed out of town next weekend and I need to get some contract projects in good order before we go. Hopefully my enforced efficiency will also get this print underway.

What was that? You want to know where we're going? Well, since you asked.... We're going camping at the Grand Canyon! Yippee! The DM has never been to the canyon, and I haven't seen it since I was a child, so off we go. Keep your fingers crossed for us.... the forecast calls for SNOW there this week and we'd rather that not be the case when we arrive. The trip is going to be exciting enough without having to shovel out a spot for the tent.

But even if it's a little on the cool side, I'll have the perfect new field sketching attire. For everyone who so kindly cheered my epic scarf-knitting project, I proudly offer proof that it won't always take five months for me to finish. Behold! Fingerless mitts made in a weekend! And I figured out how to use double-points all by myself.

Yeah, April might be agony, but it's definitely not boring.

Burning Questions

Everyone wants to know how many mini books can fit in a mini cigar box, right?

The answer is precisely ten.


Next go around (because, yes, I have more boxes!) I think I'm going to face the books spine up and make slightly wider, harder-bound books with actual write-on-able spines. But sadly it won't be today, as contract duty calls. (Byway interp panels are in their last go-round and scheduled to go off for fabrication tomorrow. Naturally this means I changed a whole bunch of things around yesterday.)

Anyway... I put the first mini book in my pocket and went off for my morning walk yesterday. Aside from slowing forward momentum due to irresistible urge to write down everything that came to mind, it worked great. Each book has 20 pages, so I figure I can get 9-10 days worth of notes in each one. That's 2 weeks of walk notes per book, since I don't go every day. Times 10 books.... I'm set all the way until autumn migration!

Furtive time

I met a deadline today and the next one is on hold until Wednesday, so suddenly, surprisingly, it looks like I might have time to think about a linocut tomorrow. No promises, but fingers are crossed.

This morning's walk was cold and windy, but I never regret getting out. I saw my first Wilson's warbler of the season, I was entertained by the antics of swallows, AND I walked in to the middle of one of those dodgy human-caused wildlife messes.

Story goes like this:

Next to one of the lakes I frequent is a house. In this house is a woman who no doubt has a kind but misguided heart. Years ago someone dumped domestic ducks and geese at this lake. It's possible they would have succumbed to fate had it not been for this woman and others like her who insist on feeding these interlopers. Now, instead, the domestic geese are the most prolific breeders... fat and happy and noisy and aggressive. At this point I don't think any wild waterfowl species breed on this lake anymore, except a few mallards and maybe a pair of Canada geese.

I met this goose-feeding woman one morning. Caught her in the act of tossing corn, actually. She beamed at me and happily prattled on about how much she loves birds. Bird Loving Woman is also, apparently, Cat Indulging Woman. Her cats were skulking around the periphery. "They never bother the birds," she told me, with utter confidence. ("Right," I thought. "They don't bother the geese that are four times their size, but what happens when you're not around?")

It's probably a good thing I haven't seen her since, because by now I have a thing or two I'd like to point out to her, in addition to the excess of Chinese geese on the lake.

Last year, for example, I discovered downy woodpeckers nesting in a tree between this woman's house and the lake. (This is a distance of MAYBE 10 yards.) A few days later I saw her cat with a paw in the hole. I never saw woodpeckers there again.

This morning? Not birds. A fox. And a cat. And a potential for disaster that I did not stick around to see. (Although I'm fixin' to put a bug in the ear of my local wildlife officers.) I was on the trail, just about to come even with the house, when a ruckus came out of the bushes. Fox, pursued by cat.

I am sure that the fox was after food at the house. The cat was having none of it. The cat chased the fox, the fox ran, but then stopped and tried to go back to the house. My appearance slowed the action, but did not stop it. Cat would approach, fox would back off. Cat would stop, fox would try to head back to the house. Both looked at me, but neither was intimidated enough to break off the skirmish.

(sigh)

My sympathies, I admit, were with the fox. Not the fox's fault that the lure of free food would be so strong. It infuriates me to no end that "problem wildlife" have to be killed when the problem is not the animal in the first place. But you KNOW that if something happens to that cat, the fox will take the rap. And what if the "friendliness" of this fox turns to aggression when it's hungry? What if it bites Bird Loving, Cat Indulging, Wildlife Baiting Woman?

Oh, golly. I seem to have gone on a rant about Humans Behaving Badly when my intention was to relate the furtive behavior of a fox snatching treats to my goal of snatching some unexpected time for linos tomorrow.

Hm.

Well.

I'm not taking it back. But I am taking time. Tomorrow. For linos. Really. Even if I have to be sneaky about it.

Maybe I'll do a fox.

Fog event!

If by chance you've managed to stick with this blog for any length of time, you might remember that I get pretty excited about fog.

For those of you who live in places where atmosphere exists by default such excitement might seem a little odd, but you have to remember that despite living at 7000' altitude in the Colorado Rockies, our average annual precipitation is 10 inches, give or take.

Yes, I know... 20 minutes away at Monarch ski area they had 360-some inches of snow this year. And that doesn't even TOUCH what they got last year. But that is there, and this is here, and most of the time we are forced to run a humidifier so we don't completely desiccate overnight.

Fog is a big deal.

I felt a twinge of guilt as I charged out the door with binoculars and camera: The DM is wrapped in blankets on the sofa, suffering a nasty sore throat and cough.

Didn't STOP me. But I did feel a twinge. Really.

It probably took an entire hour to get around Sands Lake, since I had to keep stopping to take photos. (Well, that, and to suss out what birds were on the water in the fog.) I knew the fog wouldn't last long, and sure enough it was gone before I'd gotten 100 yards up river. But it still made for a lovely morning.

Fifty species of birds didn't hurt, either.

Fog is burning off already, just upriver from Sands Lake.

Turn 180 degrees from the photo above, just a moment later,
and it looked like this:

Finally the bloody ibis have shown up. They're LATE.

Could have turned up while we were away, but that was still later than normal. Slackers.
This shot was taken maybe 90 minutes after the first one above.
No sign of fog. Anywhere.