The title of this painting is ‘And Never Leave…’ I’m glad to say that it has found its forever home with one of my favorite collectors!
Dawn off my back porch (there’s a new one every day but few look as good as this one). The poem written for this painting and painted into it is:
To step into a place and just belong
to stand within a sky and to believe
to raise your head, look up and to behold
and never leave, and never leave, and never leave.
“The Dome” is a community building in Vista Del Mar (which is kind of a suburb of Salton City). Technically it’s a club house for various city lots that are club members, but you can become a member even if your home lot isn’t a ‘membership’ lot. Anyway it’s really neat community venue with a beautiful building and a pool, built in the late 50s or early 60s.
At the side of the pool is the ‘Tiki bar’. It’s been years I’m sure since it was used as a bar, due to the newer regulations about selling liquor, or having glasses around the pool. Nevertheless it is there and occasionally requires refurbishment, usually in the form of a lick of paint. During the most recent refurbishment, I was asked by the board to put a design on the front. Nothing too complex – a bunch of palm trees. The pool is surrounded by palm trees.
As it is already quite cosy here, the only good time to paint is first thing in the morning, so on Sunday morning I dragged myself out of bed and was brush in hand and poolside by 7am.
Some artists are apparently afraid of the blank canvas, but I love them!
Step one is to install the sky.
Now how about adding a few stumps.
Had to start leafing it up at the right hand end, the sun is chasing me around the corner.
Just keep going…
And there you have it.
I took a side angle too, I was shooting into the sun which doesn’t help.
While I was making trees, Skeeter used some of the sky paint to refurbish the sign at the back.
To the flower.
I’m sorry,
that had to be incomprehensible pain
to be ripped from your plant
just when you were blooming
hoping for bees
to fertilize
to make seeds, a future.
But he plucked you I know,
doing it in love
of your beauty,
of me,
of the day.
He brought it with hearts in his eyes
one sunny morning
wanting nothing but to make me smile.
I talked to him later,
asked that next time he bring a photo,
leaving other flowers where I like them,
still on the plant.
He said he’d plucked you from a patch of your family
like a field of orange,
the world might not miss just you.
Then perhaps you can forgive him,
of your kind there were so many
and of him, that man,
and the love he has for me,
there is only one.
Today’s inspiration. I just love living here.
I love the desert rain when you can see it falling from a distance – sometimes the air below being so dry the rain never reaches the ground – the effect known as virga.
#1409 Desert Virga. Watercolor collage on foamcore, 7.5×5.5″ in mat to fit 10×8 frame. $45.
Contains the haiku:
Desert virga falls,
precipitation transforms
into a thin veil.
A little bit of progress on the spider mural today.
Start circling…..
…what a tangled web I’m weaving….
Right down to the details on the wall is a different story. The surface is really rough and not easy to paint on.
OK, that’s enough for today.
A recent sale of one of my larger paintings resulted in this young couple hanging a beautiful view over their dining room table.
“Away we go” has the following poem written for it and painted in just below the horizon. (The birds that it refers to aren’t easily seen at this distance.) The days approach the dawns’ bright glow we stretch our wings away we go.
I often get asked about the Salton Sea. Whether it is still there. Yes, but a little smaller. I am looking at a mid to dark blue sea as I write this, sitting at my dining room table (the view is better than the wall in front of my desk), which means it’s pretty breezy out there. I love the fact that I can tell the windspeed by the color of the sea, and that sometimes one half of it will be dark and the other light. That when there is no wind, it is the same color as the sky.
This morning I walked down to the shore, such as it is, now perhaps a half mile of what will eventually be salt flats – some of it dry enough to walk on, much of it not, so I can no longer go to the water’s edge without ending up up to my thighs in fish guano.
I took a photo of the ‘reflecting pool’, which when I moved here almost fifteen years ago was full of water up to the far side of that little row of vegetation in the front.
When I returned I wrote this:
Shining Sea
Palm Springs to Yuma – not a hint of breeze,
the silence is so loud you’ll hear your heart
beat in your chest. Your breath will stop and start
as you behold the mirror Salton Sea’s
become on such a day. A piece of sky
stretched on the desert floor – cerulean rug
of knots so fine. And ’til a stop will tug
the air, that blessed earthly canopy,
and then that sea to ever deepening blue
then gray, then black with whitecapse, watch this glass
this polished surface thirty five miles vast
reflects the sky it lives under, to you.
On windless days, the Salton Sea shines most,
more than the oceans found on either coast.
The upside of the return jetlag is being up in plenty of time for mornings like these. I lost a little red in those clouds when I went to get the camera, but it’s still beautiful.
Dawn off my back porch – my favorite place.
I have to say that this was one painting (or pair of paintings) executed under the most hostile of weathers. No, not so much heat, but the desiccating wind. I had to stop on the second morning and go back for a short session closer to dawn on the third day, and then it was a struggle. The good news is that once I’d drawn up the letters, I could quickly go from one side to the other, painting layers, knowing full well that that my start point would be completely dry by the time I returned to it in about 25 minutes. At the end of the second day I had to quit because the paint was drying on the brush. The east side of the boat was too hot to work, and the west side, in the shade and wind, I was shivering. And I still had to figure out how to spray with an acrylic glaze with the UV component – in a stiff breeze.
Nevertheless ‘Poseidon’ has its name on its sides and today will be test launched. Eventually this boat will carry a solar powered pump which will pump water from the Salton Sea into the marina ‘fingers’ in Desert Shores, to maintain the water level and mitigate red agae. Launch day is on Sunday.
Skyscapes for the Soul - Jeni Bate 