The Puppy project

Riverside Art Museum is holding a fundraiser called Art Bark in the Park to which I applied and was assigned a pup. I decided to paint the pup in oil – a skyscape with lawns on the bottom of each paw with dogs on, and my sonnet about dogs painted into the clouds.  So far I’ve done the sky and the lawns.  I will need to wait a week or so until that is dry enough to add the dogs and poems.  I didn’t know until I picked up the dog that I was getting a beagle.

The blank canvas. I’d had to fix the undercoat in a few places. The difference in undercoat color won’t affect the painting.

My fellow artist Mary Foote came over to see this as a demo so took some photos of me in action

I was showing Mary how to blend clouds in oil

Photographed this one at an angle to get the entire dog in.

And it’s possible to paint on the back, so I have another canvas to dream up!

Tales from the field #3.

So this is a fresh tail.  Sorry, was that a typo?  (All will become clear in a moment.)  Behind my booth at the fair in Scottsdale, is a dispenser for dog poop bags.  There wasn’t much of a crowd while I was eating the free breakfast.  (Oh, sorry, that’s a breakfast that you paid for in with your booth fee.  I’m not much of a muffin eater, but in cases like this, You Will Enjoy The Muffin Whether You Like It Or Not!)  So I’m reading the graphics on the side of the box.  I was wondering what design innovations Mutt Mitts might have come up with in the Joys of Dog Ownership department, but it turns out they are just bags.  With instructions, in case you didn’t know how to clean up after your pet.  Apparently there isn’t yet an app for that.

Brings a whole new meaning to artificial intelligence being no substitute for natural stupidity.

The whole subject reminds me of one night I stayed with an artist friend for a show, and after the Saturday of the show we walked her dog.  She commented that if aliens looked down at the whole dog-human relationship they could misconstrue the whole scenario.  Who feeds whom?  Who walks behind whom?  Who picks up whose poop and takes it home?

New display at Sm’Art gallery.

Alana, my wonderful gallerist at the sm’Art gallery co-op in La Quinta and Michael Angelo Hernandez have been repainting and reorganizing the gallery.  Here is my strip of wall as we finished hanging it earlier in the week.

While I was putting up a few new paintings, another new artist, Tomasso Biondi, recognized the tall sunrise on the left – he had seen it published somewhere.  If I had it published I lost track of it.  The odd thing is I don’t think it’s the first time that someone had that comment about it….

And yes, those are a couple of pet portraits at the bottom.  After I did one over the summer, Alana thought it might be a good idea to offer them.  (Yes, I can do them remotely…..)

Tales from the field #1.

I’ve been thinking for some time that I’ll add a ‘Tales from the Field’ thread to my blog because funny stuff does happen out there.  But this weekend just gone I had quite an experience with my airbnb location, which is something I can’t contain!  One of those things that you’ll laugh at later…..or in some cases, at the time….

So having taken an inadvisable “short”cut in the high desert, I ended up arriving at the Bay Area airbnb in the dark, which made arriving particularly difficult because I couldn’t see the map sufficiently in the dark and was on the wrong street at one point, thinking that the house didn’t exist.

When I did find it, it was one of those airbnb-only houses, a monster tract home with five bedrooms, all rented out, and an unused space which would normally be the dining room part of the kitchen, with a sofabed and a couple (flimsy) room dividers. I’ve done the “corner-cupboard” kind of set-up before and the price is right.  Before I continue, I have to point out that all the others in the place (I figure there were up to 9) were nice respectful people who didn’t make a lot of noise, play loud music etc. and it was all quite clean.

However the communal area – a large living room that was set up as a work area, the dining and kitchen areas, were all laminate floors and my sofa was the only soft furnishing.  It was an echo chamber.  And open plan, so if the light was on anywhere, it lit the whole place.

So I settled in to sleep.  Or try to.  Then realizing no one was downstairs I got up and turned off the light.  The fridge was unreasonably noisy and never seemed to cycle off.

Oh and the house is right on a flight path to an airport.

Later, the nice couple in the downstairs bedroom had their friends over.  They left the light on in the communal area and I got up and turned it off.  They chatted in the downstairs bedroom.  Not loudly, just normally, and the other good part was they weren’t speaking English, so it was a little easier to try to ignore, but even with their door shut, it’s still an echo chamber.  People crept in quietly and left the light on and twice more I got up to turn it out.  At 12:30am someone got up from the chatty group and chopped fruit in the kitchen for a snack.  They finally went to bed about 2am and realizing I finally had silence, I relaxed enough to sleep.

I had to get up at 3:30am to go to the show. 🙂 What’s the emoticon for zombie, again?

Saturday night I walked out to go to a nearby restaurant, which was fine, and with 1 hours sleep in the last 40 and two glasses of wine, I slept.  The fact that the house was silent that night I guess helped.  A few people came in late, crept in, turned off the light.  Yaay, I slept like the body laid out in the corner of the morgue.

Sunday night was also pretty quiet, and the guy who was working late at the downstairs work area was kind enough to turn off the light when he went to bed shortly after I did – about 10pm.

Around midnight, a couple guys came in the kitchen to cook.  Again, they weren’t noisy, and they weren’t speaking English – an Indian language by the sound of it.  They had no idea I was there.  During the proceedings, one of them needed to cuss.  I don’t know if it was about the conversation or the cooking, but this was in English.  However beautiful other languages are, I figure you just can’t beat that good old Anglo Saxon F-bomb to put an exclamation point in the conversation.

The incongruity of the casual ‘Oh ****’ in the middle of the conversation was a surprise that changed my whole attitude to the event – I don’t know how I managed to suppress audible laughter, but a pillow was involved.

They took their delicious smelling food upstairs to eat, and now I know how the dog feels when you cook and don’t give him any.