Linocut in Progress: The long wait and the quick finish

Two-and-a-half weeks ago I was working like a madwoman, trying to wrap up this chipping sparrow linocut before I left for the two-week filming adventure in Florida. I really, really, really wanted to be finished... to let the prints sit and dry for two weeks while I was away and be able to jump right in to something new when I returned.

But, alas.... I got this far and no further:

Linocut in progress: Step 13

I know! It seems so close, right? And it was! Infuriatingly close. All that was left were some little bits of spot inking... final darks in the birds, lighten up a few bird feet, and warm up the piece of rebar and the pole in the background. One day's work! But alas, everything was just that much too wet, and my first attempt to print was met with the disaster of wet rejection, so I cleaned up... packed up... and resigned myself to finishing when I got home from Florida.

Of course it was too much to ask to be able to finish this thing immediately. I had to take down a show up in Rockland and take care of a bunch of business-related tasks (read: paperwork with deadlines)... and...(dare I admit it?)... dig my car out of the mud.

Yes, it's mud season here in Maine, and I made a grave miscalculation about the condition of the ground in front of my house yesterday. I pulled in close to unload the show... trying to avoid (literally) 24 trips back and forth across our muddy parking area carrying artwork... but when I tried to pull out again... well. Let's just say the car spent the night somewhere other than where it usually does, with one tire just about up to its lug bolts in gloppy wetness.

But this morning my team of three strong women managed, with superior problem-solving skills and no small effort, to extract my mud-caked vehicle and I was finally able to get to work.

The final three spot colors... whew!

There were three main areas that needed the spot inking treatment: 1) warm up the rebar in the background, 2) lighten the sunny side of the birds' feet, and 3) last dark eye stripe and maybe one more dark in a few shadowy bits of the birds' backs. Fortunately all of these areas were enough separated from each other that they could all be inked and printed simultaneously! Last color pass!

Again I'm short on a title.... "Snow Fence, No Snow," perhaps. Final pass, step 14

And here it is! Huzzah! I'll give it some quality drying time while I decide what to tackle next, and in the meantime... I have to prep for more shows! Eek! The crazy season is already beginning! Maybe I should throw some metaphorical mud under the wheels to slow things down a bit. I've already had enough of the real stuff.

Spring Fever Hits the Studio

Yep. I've got it BAD.

73 F. Today's temperature was 73 (count 'em) lovely degrees. Even better? No wind. I threw open a few windows and tried to focus on tasks at home this morning, but I. Just. Couldn't.

So I gave up trying to be virtuous, grabbed my journal, and headed down to the river. I did walk there, a round trip of about 2.5 miles, so I told myself I scored at least a few points in the getting-some-exercise column.

There were a LOT of people down by the river this morning (clearly suffering from the same malady), so I tucked myself into a more-or-less hidden spot behind the bandshell and made a little drawing of the F Street bridge over the Arkansas River.

F Street bridge, downtown Salida

My semi-hidden spot behind the bandshell.

It felt quite nice to get out with my journal for a bit, especially since my practice has been sadly neglected through the winter months.

After my little field trip it was easier to work on projects in the studio, most importantly on a long-overdue birthday gift. It was great fun to carve some single-color linocuts, and then to play with the arrangement of the two separate blocks on different kinds of paper. (Full disclosure: the seated toad was carved a while back for another project. The leaping toad is a new block.)

Lino-toads

I also pushed around a few ideas for new color linos, although I haven't committed to anything yet.

Tomorrow, however, I'll be back to indulging my restlessness with a trip to the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge. The trip to MVNWR, stopover site for several thousand sandhill cranes, is a spring ritual, but this year it's gotten a bit out of control. Tomorrow will be my third trip there in 10 days. Is it any wonder I'm not getting much work done?

How can I resist THIS, though?

Yes! All cranes!

See? Not my fault. Wildlife spectacle is not to be missed, and with (ahem) spectacular spectacle weather, it would be pretty much criminal not to take advantage of the opportunity. That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking with it. Monday will be a perfectly good day to tackle the to-do list.

Maybe.

Birds, Prints, Snow (??).... must be Spring!

Yesterday was the first Global Big Day, a birding event sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Birders all over the world submitted their day's sightings to the eBird online database which, if you're not familiar with it, is a great way to keep track of your birding checklists and contribute to the scientific record at the same time. I just checked the status page, and as of this morning 8,886 people from 108 countries had submitted 25,254 checklists, featuring 4,751 species. Cool.

You might have noticed that I do a lot of linocuts featuring birds, so I'm sure it's no surprise that I've got birder tendencies. Since I've been using eBird for a long time participating in the Global Big Day was kind of a no-brainer. But rather than just record data from my usual patch I teamed up with an old friend to check out some additional locations.

The day started out lovely enough....

7:00 am. Blue skies and a few clouds.

 8:00 am. Oh, look! A pelican in perfect light! Maybe another lino?

By mid-day we were about an hour up the valley from home and the sky had turned gray and thick with clouds.

 Early afternoon. Loggerhead shrike. Definitely some lino potential here.

By 3:00pm there was no denying that some serious weather was on the way, so we piled back in the truck and headed south.

Some rain, but mostly SNOW. Not sticking yet, but will be soon.

The weather continued through the night, and this morning my neighborhood looked like this:

Snow in May is not unusual here, and during the time it has taken to type this post most of it has already disappeared. It's lovely, in a "seriously-can-we-just-get-back-to-green-please" sort of way.

But cold, wet, and gray days are good for painting little bird linos with cheery and colorful palettes, so that's what I'm up to now. As for birds, we ticked 71 species yesterday... including a few that I don't manage to see every year. Birds, prints, snow. No denying that it's springtime in the Rockies!

In other news.... SNOW.

Yep, that's what I said. Snow. Here. Now.

The good news is that we didn't get hit nearly as hard as folks east and north of us, but still. Northern hemisphere...hello!?!? Going OUT of winter, not back in to it.

Carry on.

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.

Exhibition Miscellany

I finally made it the two blocks to the Salida Regional Library to check out the show "Haiku: The Essence." It really is a lovely exhibition, especially since it has introduced me to some local folks whose work I had never seen before. Here's a little shot of my piece alongside its inspiration, a "haiku of haiku" by Eduardo Rey Brummel titled "Ever So A Round."

Warp-speed preparations are also being made for the opening of my solo exhibition, "Intimate Landscapes," in Denver. The last few pieces are at the framer now, postcards have gone out, and the first round of emails... but there's still a lot to do.

If you're in Denver on June 5, I'd love to see you at the opening reception at the Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado Headquarters, Dos Chappell Bathhouse, 600 S. Marion Parkway, in Washington Park. 4-8pm. Music by none other than David Tipton, aka the Darling Man.

"Intimate Landscapes" will be on view through July 27, so if you can't make the reception you'll still have time to check things out. This will be my first exhibition in Denver in almost 10 years, and I'm looking forward to it!

And on a completely different note...

It's been cold and gray and windy around here today (sigh), and my woodcut attempt was unsuccessful, but the day hasn't been without its perks. Look who's been visiting our yard! (This shot made through the dining room window...)

Western tanager. Ain't he the bees' knees?

Change in the air

It's raining. In February. At night at 7,000 feet in the Rockies. And I saw bluebirds today. Cinnamon teal on Monday. I heard a rumor there have been tree swallows already, downriver in Pueblo. The season is changing, alright. Ready or not. (Ready. Definitely.)

A few other things are changing around here, too. Lino experiments are underway. Never-used-before supplies are en route from the supplier.

And I ordered a press.

Just a "baby" press*, mind you. A little tiny thing that will fit on a tabletop and make small prints. But it's a huge step for me. I print by baren and spoon and grunting, and I'm quite proud of that.

Who knows WHAT will happen now.

(*Yes, we've been through a lot of baby-pressing jokes over on Facebook. You're welcome to chime in now if you missed the earlier frackas.)

It's put me in a peculiar state of mind, knowing that this little thing will be arriving on my doorstep in a few weeks. There are the usual misgivings that come with an outlay of significant dollars, of course, but I can't say that I'm experiencing buyer's remorse. If I had space for it, I'd have been thinking hard about a bigger press. It's more of a creative panic than a financial one.

If you could peer inside my head right now (and trust me, it's not pretty in there under the best of circumstances) you would see my thoughts bouncing up and down like an espresso-laden 5-year-old on a new bed:

"Ooh! It will make blind embossing so much easier! I'll be able to combine techniques. Printing will go faster. Ooh! If I learn solarplate I'll be able to do etching again (my first printmaking obsession, tabled 25 years ago for lack of facilities). Ooh! More transparent inks! Ooh! More layers! Ooh! Chine collé! Ooh!"

And then I bounce myself right off the bed and hit the floor. Hard.

"Oh, geez. I won't know what I'm doing. I'll make ugly messes and waste materials. I won't have any ideas for new imagery. I won't recognize a good idea from a bad one. With all these new possibilities I'll discover that I'm actually no good at printmaking. Blah blah blah."

These sorts of mental gymnastics come and go for all of us, of course, but for some reason mine were magnified by the imminent arrival of a chunk of steel.  I am reminded of grade school and that fateful day when we "graduated" from pencils to ball point pens. Pencils became the tool of math class, where you could still use an eraser, too. All other subjects were suddenly burdened with careful mark making, considered penmanship, and no crossing out. Sure, I knew how to write. But did I know how to write with a PEN?

Sure. I know how to print. A little. But do I know how to print with a press?

Thankfully, the excited voices are generally louder than the nervous ones, and by the time the thing gets here I'll be impatient to get on with this new phase, whatever it turns out to be. In the meantime, I carry on as I always have... by hand. I printed a few experiments this evening for the haiku project: some white-on-white and white-on-cream for potential backgrounds. Yesterday I did the initial drawing for a new 9x12 reduction block, I'm hoping to get the first color printed tomorrow.

Of course, the DM will be playing a brunch gig at the Salida Café tomorrow morning, so his Number One Fan will have a scone in her hand before she picks up a baren. She will pass on the espresso, though. She's twitchy enough already.

Unusual weekend in progress

Here in the Heart of the Rockies we are experiencing our fourth straight day of clouds and rain showers. I realize that in most of the rest of the universe this is normal, but for us it's practically unheard of. RAIN? For FOUR DAYS? In a place with an average annual precip of only 10" or so?

So it's a peculiar holiday weekend that we have underway.

Friday night David played for the opening reception of Jon MacManus's show at the Paquette Gallery here in Salida. Despite the rain Jon enjoyed a fine turnout, and the venue gave us not only a view of Jon's fine work, but also a front row seat for the chocolate brown turbulence of the Arkansas River in runoff. We've already had surges of 2400 cfs, above the 100-year average for this time of year. It's not as high yet as it was in peak last year, but it's getting close! All this rain is definitely adding to the drama.


Personal creative dramas are also playing out. Weekend linocut experiments are so far showing dubious potential for success. Can YOU make any sense out of this mess?


I can't, either, but I'm trying to maintain a certain amount of optimism. Or at least flexibility. It's the mantra of the weekend, since all of our big outdoor plans have been washed away with the current. We desperately needed the moisture, though, so no one is really complaining.

We'll see what tomorrow brings!

Impatient

Spring is coming, but it's taking its sweet time about it.

I hate to use the word "typical," since weather patterns seem to be anything BUT typical these days, but true to spring-in-the-Rockies form we spent our entire weekend in glorious rain (and a little snow). We've been so desperately dry here that two cloudy, damp days were a blissful change. But STILL. Can't I put away at least one layer of fleece now?



Yesterday I took a long walk in the cold and gray and was rewarded with a pair of American avocets at Frantz Lake. Common elsewhere, avocets seem to only pass through our area, and getting a glimpse is a treat. A black phoebe is back, too... and suddenly I am twitchy to be out walking as often as possible.

Here at 7,000 feet altitude we have only the tiniest bits of green showing through the ochre and brown. I don't mind too much, until I start wandering around the blogosphere and see photos of lower altitude gardens in bloom. (sigh) Patience. Patience.

When we moved in to this house last spring we were faced with a yard that had been sadly neglected. We did what we could to clean it up last season (a particular challenge during the month-long roof replacement adventure), but there is still a lot to do. With the generous help of mad gardener friends we managed to put in a few new plantings, and several times a day I wander out to the yard to see what has survived my novice gardener stumblings.

Here come the daylilies! Friend Scott, from whose garden these were transplanted last year, assured me that even an inexperienced gardener like me couldn't kill daylilies... and he was right!

Discovering things that we didn't plant and which didn't show their faces last year is fun, too. There are hyacinth, and tulips, and one or two as-yet-unidentified mysteries poking out of beds that last year hosted... erm... less desirable... plant life. Yippee! Now, if I can just keep the deer from chomping on them.

The grass is starting to green up in the park down the street and this, of course, makes me long for the farmer's market. Last week the DM and I paid our deposit for our veggie share from Weathervane Farm, our local CSA. Do I really have to wait until June to spend Saturday mornings visiting with friends, eating fresh-baked strudel, and procuring the week's foodstuffs? (another sigh) Patience. Patience.

Oh, forget patience. I'm gonna go check the yard again. Maybe something new came up in the last three hours.

Holy crabapples, Batman!

NOW we're talkin'. The plums and the crabapples have gotten showy in the last few days. We've a nice pink tree out front of the building, the crown of it square in my front window. Now that it's covered in blooms, it screens my view of oncoming traffic... a double bonus.

I'm glad I got out early to walk, since now at mid-day it has gotten cloudy and windy... a possible portent of thundershowers. Thunder. When did we last hear THAT?

I'm in a bit of a holding pattern on projects today- waiting for feedback from clients. Just as well, since I'm on my way out of town again on Wednesday and I might now think about what to pack. It's running-amok-with-artist-chum-from-France time again. Twice in one year! Twice in the same season! Unheard of. But Denis has a show opening at the Mass Audubon Visual Arts Center this weekend, and it was a good excuse to visit both with Denis and with artist friend Pat Burson, who lives in Boston and was a fellow artist-in-residence at Acadia National Park in 2005. There are a few other friends and colleagues in the area, too, so who knows? Could be one big brush-wielding bruhaha.

So, 'tis possible we're heading into the blog equivalent of radio silence (blogdio silence?) again. Fear not! I'm sure there will be all sorts of ridiculous stories to tell when it's over.

Cathedral willows

Between meetings and workshops and deadlines and goofy weather... not a whole lot of bloggable natural history or art going on around here lately. One day last week my car and I celebrated some milestones together: the car turned its 100,000th mile. I turned significantly more miles than that. We (the car and I) were headed back home from Colorado Springs meetings, so I stopped for a mocha granita to celebrate before turning up Bighorn Sheep Canyon for home. The car will get an oil change. Whoopee!

Yesterday morning it was snowing and raining. (See below.) Miserable. But this morning! (See below also.)

It's always good to get out the day after a storm and see what the wind blew in. Avian arrivals today included hermit thrush, common yellowthroat, a Wilson's warbler.... and some peeps which I am pretty sure were least sandpipers. But, SHEESH. I struggle to ID those little buggers.

At the "peak" of the trail (farthest point from home) I found that the wet snow and wind had pretty seriously battered a large willow tree. Branches and catkins littered the trail, so I carted a chunk home to draw. (You know what a sucker I am for catkins.)

I'm not a particularly good identifier of tree species-- at least not past their obvious family names: pine, willow, cottonwood. This particular tree species may or may not be related to two other large willows near Sands Lake... but in my own personal field guide they are the same. They are enormous, graceful, luminous. They inspire a hush and a reverence and compel me to look up. I dunno what an arborist would call them, but I like think of them as "Cathedral Willows."

Yesterday morning.

And today. The weather's almost as neurotic as I am.