Land/Art Diaries

In the Service of the Beaver

2011-12-02T09:50:00.000-08:00

Valles Caldera: The Return of the Beaver / oil and mixed media on canvas / 16 x 12 inches

I was fortunate to be able to join WildEarth Guardians on a recent Beaver Restoration Project in Valles Caldera.

Cattle have recently been removed from riparian areas in the Valles Caldera Preserve, and wildlife biologists have been anticipating the return of native beavers, who were starved out of the area decades ago by cattle competing with them for food. Their preferred food is the inner bark of willow and poplar saplings.

Two wildlife biologists had been monitoring the entry and exit points of the San Antonio River in the Preserve for signs of beaver activity, but they spotted nothing--until recently. To their surprise, one of them stumbled upon a small beaver dam deep in the heart of the preserve. A trail cam confirmed the presence of an occupant. The little guy (or gal) trudged for miles to lay claim to a new home on the river.

By the time dam construction began, winter was approaching, and food supplies were scarce. WildEarth Guardians came to the rescue. Local Guardians loaded a large flatbed with willow shoots, some generously donated by Santa Clara Pueblo, and we set out for the site in the midst of one of the season's first snowstorms. We also brought more than forty willow saplings to plant on the river banks, so the beaver will have a food supply upon emergence in the spring. In the photos below you will see two handsome foresters operating an auger for the tree planting. (We're sporting day-glo vests because it is elk hunting season). WildEarth Guardians plant thousands of trees every year, hiring local labor to supplement their volunteer workforce.

We made our way to the site and spent the day off-loading the willow bundles, dragging them over a ridge and down the other side to the river, and placing them on the banks, cut side in the water, which served as the beaver's big refrigerator. We wished we could have seen the little guy's face when he emerged after we left.

A second beaver painting is coming soon.

Lone Buck Mountain

2011-11-16T13:32:00.000-08:00

Running up Lone Buck Mountain,

with a nice cold wind blowing from the west.

Going up. Looking across Bear Canyon at Picacho.

The top of Picacho, still above me.

One of my favorite color combinations. In oil paints, that green is ivory black + cadmium yellow light.

The first false summit beckons.

The ski basin comes into view, north, through the ponderosas.

A gap in the ponderosas.

Second false summit.

Looking west, across Santa Fe, to the Jemez Mountains, where the fires burned this summer.

The scruffy head of my old friend Atalaya. My parents' ashes lie on top.

The summit. The sun is just rising up here.

Picacho, below me now.

Looking south, across the slope of Atalaya, to the Cerrillos Hills, and Albuquerque's Sandia Mountains.

OK, no more photos of pink rocks with green lichen.

Ready to head back down. Sort of.

McLure Reservoir, at drought level.

One small step for man . . . Dang! I thought I was the only human ever to set foot in this pristine wilderness. I'm certainly not the only being. Just passed a pile of bear scat. My kids say no more scat photos.

Looking down on Santa Fe, St. John's College in the foreground.

Picacho, looming large again.

Noodling around with hand-held camera. I prefer going up to going down.

But it's down I must go.

Looking west one last time before it all disappears in trees.

The ridge between Picacho and Atalaya.

Last view of the ski basin. Into the trees.

I wandered too far south on the way down, apparently to photograph this dead tree. . .

. . . and ended up, as usual, overcorrecting to the north and landing between two sets of gnarly cliffs. I call it the Bermuda Triangle. Once, I was here in a big wind and I thought there was someone above, throwing rocks at me. After tearing a tendon in a wild attempt to elude my tormentor, and contemplating it in the ER, I concluded it must have been the west wind throwing rocks at me.

There's only one way out of the Bermuda Triangle.

Follow the tracks of a rabbit.

They always know the best way.

The best time of the year

2011-10-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

Big Red, oil on panel, 10 x 10 x 2 inches

I've been drawn to baby animals of late. Perhaps I should title the series "Don't Hate Me Because I'm Cute."

The best time of year is here, and I am getting out in the wilderness as much as I can. Land art resonates with me the clearest when I stumble upon it and it is not created by humans. This tree is a "scrape," used by a small mule deer buck to rub the velvet off of his new antlers. Once deer find a scrape, they return to it. This tree is girdled and its fate sealed (or peeled). It will be a standing home to many for a time and then it will fall and slowly become one with the forest floor, new life springing up in its form.

What painter could come up with so balanced a composition? The aspen leaves flow in an unbroken line out of the red striations in the rock. The streams in the mountains and foothills are waning as the harvest moon waxes. When I'm out running, I'm never far from a brook, always mindful of the munificence of water dakinis in a desert.

2011-08-26T11:44:00.000-07:00

631, oil and original acrylic gel transfer photograph on back-framed panel, 24 x 18 x 2.25 inches.

Two months ago, I wrote about the wildfires consuming the forests. The Las Conchas fire became the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, burning more than 150,000 acres, a third of them the first night, fueled by 60 mph winds. I watched it from my front porch, wishing I could do something for the animals made homeless or worse by the inferno. From my back yard, I watched smoke from the Pacheco fire, burning ten miles up the watershed. I started this painting when the fires were new. They continued, and I continued, for weeks.

I began by photographing an abandoned gas station at 631 Cerrillos Road. It had been a street art magnet for fifteen years. When I photographed it, I did not know it would be cordoned off and demolished within a few days. The disappearance of the gas station coincided with the erasure by the forest fires of human-built structures in the forest and of other, less tangible constructs that a fire of this order brings into question.

As I lay awake at night listening to the whir of water-bearing helicopters, the howling of coyotes, and the drone of planes dropping chemical goo on the fires, the painting began to take shape. I applied a mirror image of the gas station photo to a panel, using the acrylic gel transfer process, and then several layers of PVA ground. The gas station became a place of uneasy refuge for the forest animals I painted over it in oils. Meanwhile, bears and deer roamed the night streets of Los Alamos, driven into the strange urban landscape by the destruction of their habitat and nourishment. When I completed the painting, our summer rains finally arrived, and the fires were out, leaving 160,000 acres of charred wilderness.

2011-08-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

I found a beautiful pigeon with a badly fractured wing on a ridgetop in the wilderness. I've never seen a pigeon in the backcountry before. I ran for about a mile with her carefully wrapped in my shirt, and then drove her 20 miles to the wildlife hospital. The fracture was recent but gnarly; I fear they euthanized her.

She was so calm and sweet, and dare I say trusting. She had such presence. What an adventurous bird!

I do not usually name wildlife, but if there was a name for this bird, it would be Amelia Earhart. I often make a sort of offering to the animal in the painting; a symbol, some flowers, corn, snow; whatever comes to mind. Hence the painting's title, Apple Blossoms for Ameila Earhart (oil on canvas, 8 x 8 inches). May she live long and well.

2011-07-29T12:39:00.000-07:00

My newest painting, Baby Javelina Thriving at Wildlife Center (oil on canvas, 8 x 8 inches) has been written up on Santa Fe Reporter staff writer Wren Abbott's blog. Thanks, Wren.

News flash: it rained!

2011-07-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

Las Conchas Fire, Day 1, from my porch, 60mph winds

Up until a couple of nights ago, I could see the flames of the Las Conchas Fire running along the ridgetop and down into canyons 20 miles to the west, and shooting 300-500 feet or more up into the sky. About 1/5 of the western horizon is still glowing like the huge ember that it now is. There is another fire closer, in deep wilderness about 10-15 miles to the north, near our ski basin. If it comes running down the watershed, it will be at my house in no time, if the winds blow from the north. If the fire gets into the watershed, though, they will fight it aggressively.

My home is in no danger at present. Wish I could say the same for the animals in the forest. And the residents of Santa Clara Pueblo. After all of the prayers for rain, they now have to worry about flash floods and erosion, since the fire took their watershed last week.

The air has been smoke-filled for a more than a month. We have lost hundreds of thousands of acres, within a 25-mile radius, to 2 fires. Not to mention the massive Wallow fire still burning after a month, in Arizona and now western central New Mexico, the biggest fire either state has ever seen.

I feel pretty helpless. Animals talk to me in my dreams, asking for succor. I am working on a painting of ravens, a coyote, a fawn, a rabbit, and fire.

This is the worst drought in NM recorded history. The forests are still a tinderbox, but we finally had a brief rain yesterday. May it be a harbinger of things to come, and may it come gently to Santa Clara.

Tassel Eared Squirrel

2011-07-08T12:25:00.000-07:00

The Conversationalist in a Contemplative Moment,
oil on panel, 10 x 8 inches.

Here's the latest piece in my Horizontal Brothers series. Can you tell that I am slowly wending my way through John Muir's collected works? This little guy is an Albert's Squirrel or Tassel-Eared Squirrel. They shed their ear tassels in the summer. The painting is a portrait of a being I see frequently in Bear Canyon, near the Randall Davey Audubon Center. He lives pretty far back in the canyon, in a huge ponderosa pine. When I run by, he makes a loud noise, usually by pushing something out of the tree, which always gets my attention. Then he comes down and poses for me, often with hands on hips, giving me hell in squirrelspeak. I placed him in a snowy setting to protect him from the forest fires that are still burning to the North and West. I have begun work on another squirrel I see frequently at the Audubon Center, a ground squirrel who is much more shy.

Polaroid of My Mother

2011-04-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

New work: Polaroid of My Mother, oil and photographs on back-framed panel, 12 x 12 x 2 inches.

This piece is from the series I am working on called Horizontal Brothers--John Muir's term for non-human animals. It is new and different for me to be working the vein of realism, albeit expressive, abstracted realism.  Wildlife paintings are coming fast and furious. I am now working on ravens and a mountain goat.

This painting began when I went to K-Mart to buy plastic magnetic picture frames for my fridge. The photo in the frames recalled a polaroid I snapped of my mother when I was 10. While I was looking at those nine identical photos, the painting formed in my mind.

I've met eight  mountain lions in the wild, the most recent on the last winter solstice, in a nearby forest--the first one I have seen in its truest element--the night. I've seen more mountain lions than I have bobcats or foxes.   I feel like a lion magnet. All of the lions were fairly disinterested in me.

My most recent lion acquaintance had been marking all of the human trails in an area where I run, where national forest meets city.  Leaving scat strategically at the beginning and dead center of every human trail in an area is unusual behavior for these cats. I avoided the area for awhile, but I knew it was a matter of time before we met. I don't usually run at night, but there I was, under a full moon, on the solstice, in the snow.

There he was (an adolescent male, I believe), 25 yards ahead of me, planted across the trailhead as I finished up my run, in the exact spot he had marked earlier, his eyes fixed on me. As I met his gaze, all of his molecules soundlessly rearranged, 180 degrees, into a mirror image of the position I first saw him in, without his taking his eyes off me. Then, just as soundlessly, he dissolved into the forest--gone.

I went back the next morning to track him in the snow. Had I not seen the tracks, I might have doubted the whole experience. He had taken off up a steep pine-covered slope in 10-15 foot bounds. After that night, I saw his markings less frequently, and then not at all. Most likely he followed the deer to higher altitudes with the warmer weather. May he live long and well.

Horizontal Brothers

2011-03-04T12:16:00.000-08:00

Under Orion, On Coyote's Watch, oil and mixed media on canvas, 48 x 36 inches

This winter, I took an unexpected five weeks off of painting--the longest hiatus in my life. Now I am back in the studio with renewed energy and a new direction.

I am calling my new series of paintings Horizontal Brothers. That’s what John Muir called animals. Though the phrase is dated in terms of gender, I like it. It implies equality — that we are all animals. Which of course we are, but many of us spend a good deal of energy denying it. Encounters with wildlife have always been my most magical moments. It is in these brief encounters that we are the most sure—and the most unsure—of who we are.

I grew up with wildlife. My mother had a talent for healing animals. People brought wounded and orphaned wildlife to our door, and, under her care, many got better. She never refused an animal in need. She grew up in the backwoods and had no veterinary training or college. She did not speak of her gift, but she practiced it diligently and with considerable humor.

A rehabilitated fighting cock lived in our kitchen, a recovering raccoon on the back porch. A starling rode on her shoulder. Rabbits were everywhere, including my bedroom. A red-tailed hawk found floating in a barrel of dirty motor oil stayed for a year before he was rehabiltated and released. He returned each year with a mate, lighting on my mother’s arm with a melodious keen when she whistled.

A new crop of fledgling birds and kit rabbits were either healed or buried ceremoniously in our backyard cemetery each spring. It was just a matter of time before wildlife became the primary subject of my paintings.

Coming soon: mountain goats, rabbits, deer, and, of course, a red-tailed hawk.

All I have to do is complain

2010-10-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

All I have to do is complain about the lack of rain and it rains. It's raining now and it rained a good deal last night. There is a dusting of snow on the high peaks. The skies are my favorite shade of gray and the colors are heightened and saturated.

Early this morning I got out into the mountains in the mist.

So much can change in a day. My foot is now well enough that I can run again. What a delight! Hobbling around for five months had the affect of making my world--and my paintings--smaller. It led to increased introspection, or neurosis, depending upon your point of view (just ask the people who live with me), and an idea for a new series of paintings based on life's transitions and inspired by those yellow signs that mark changes in the road. More about that when the paintings are further along.

A Different Autumn

2010-10-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

I've been lame in the foot for five months now, and it has changed my painting. Rather than running in the mountains, I am hobbling around the neighborhood and foothills and finding beauty where it lies, which is everywhere. My painting is becoming more focused on unexpected beauty.

Looking North, toward the upper Santa Fe watershed, at dusk:

As the sun slipped into the West, this doe showed herself to me. My camera recorded an eery silver light.

A little further upriver, a couple of days later, I joined my daughter's class on a field trip to Nichols Reservior, where we recorded insect populations in the Santa Fe River, learned that the water is still pretty clean here, tracked a bear, and discovered an abandoned beaver lodge, high and dry.

The boom and bust cycles of water in this desert affect me and my art more than any other single factor. Last fall the skies were cloud-hidden, brooding, and wet. The colors of the landscape were saturated with autumn rains, a rare treat here in the high desert Southern Rockies. The winter brought above average snowfall,

and our luck held until late spring, when the runoff was raging and every cliff became a waterfall.

Then came a summer of little rain and a now a warm dry autumn. I seek out water and find beauty in what there is left.

My paintings of late are small focused moments, maps of a dry season, in which memories of mobility and rain comingle with artifacts gathered last year on long runs in the backcountry. Click on the painting (The River Is Moving . . .) at the top right of the blog see what I've been up to.

The Rabbit Diaries, continued

2010-06-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed a small foray into Bear Canyon yesterday just after dawn. Rabbits are still very much on my radar. This one patiently agreed to pose for a couple of photos.

I know that a rabbit wants to be in one of my paintings soon. To that end, I'm doing a little research,

including contemplating things from a bunny's eye view

No wonder this spot is bunny central in Bear Canyon. There is a stream just to the right. To the left is a housing project-sized rabbit warren. When passing by, I can never resist spending time here. It attracts like the field of opium poppies in the Wizard of Oz. The residents seem to be growing accustomed to me.

No, this is not a rabbit warren. That would look more like holes. This is human land art. Wherever I go, if I am within 1/4 mile of a trail, there is human land art. The compulsion to make art is strong. Most of what I see takes two forms: phallic rock towers or stick-shelters like this one. The latter seem to be a manifestation of the fantasy of living in the wild. These creations are everywhere. The more we trash the planet and its non-human inhabitants, the stronger our fantasies of retreating into their habitat. The former . . . well, sometimes a phallus is just a phallus, and sometimes it's a pile of rocks.

Something about leaving traces of my passing in the wilderness goes against my grain. I'm of the old school "take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints" vein of thought. Like a bear, I do my best not to leave footprints. It's a good challenge. The bears are a lot better at it than I am.

Like every other mammal, I'm drawn to water. As summer progresses, it is getting harder to find water. Below is what's left of the raging run-off that enlivened Bear Canyon a few short weeks ago. What we laughably call the summer monsoons have started, so I take heart. Thunder heads are again forming over the mountains as I write this.

Leaving Bear Canyon, I walked through the Randall Davey Audubon Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, where I still have a painting hanging in a group show. The gallery is part of the original building and has a lovely Old New Mexico feeling.

I appreciate the access to wilderness that the Center provides, the birdseed they put out that the mule deer come down to feed on, the fact they understand and buy more birdseed, and the work they do educating kids about nature. If you are looking for a good nonprofit to support, look no further.

Appreciating Summer

2010-06-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

I'm a winter person. I've been working on appreciating summer. This work is easier at the crepuscular times of the day, and at night, under the stars. I went out this morning just after sunrise and made my way up Two-Doe Mountain, one of my regular summer early-morning haunts. I tracked a doe and fawn for half an hour and lost them at this stream crossing.

It was a pleasant place to be led to. It had everything a doe and fawn require: water, food, and dense cover. That last item can be hard to find in the Southwest.

In order to better appreciate summer, I took my camera along to record what inspires me. Deer, of course. I follow them even when I am not trying to, or trying not to. But deer are for all seasons. I find magic in snow, but there is inspiration in summer. Here's a shortlist, all shot this morning.

Water

Mountains, and a certain summer color of sky. Sam Scott, whose artwork and writing you should know if you don't, taught me that the eye sees the three primary colors, and, when one is absent, adds it. He talks of seasonal color palettes. On late spring/almost summer mornings like today, the eye adds a hint of red/magenta along the ridgetops.

Flora.

Animal homes.

Land art created by the elements.

This lightning-killed tree is a painting waiting to happen. It's also a home to more living beings than it was when it was alive.

I was thinking yesterday about monumental land art like Spiral Jetty, corn mazes, etc. While there is something there to appreciate, they are monuments to ego, as is, perhaps, all art that is not temporary. When land art is created by the elements, it is without ego. Perhaps that's the definition of magical. But then my eye sees it, and I want to recreate it as a painting, a monument to my ego. Ha!

Rabbits

2010-06-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

After a 5-week hiatus from running and walking, due to a strange little injury, I went out early this morning for a hike. It was glorious (before the 95 degree heat). I revisited one of the waterfalls pictured in my last post, now dry.

There is still a trickle of water in Bear Canyon. As I walked through tall grasses next to a stream, a baby rabbit stopped in its tracks. I did the same, and sat down. There we were for 20 minutes, joined by a horned lizard and a white butterfly. At first, the rabbit demonstrated its skill at appearing less and less visible without moving a muscle. It appeared to melt into the earth. Then it relaxed and started eating grass.

The last rabbit I saw stood beside a road, dazed, with a huge bloody eye, likely slashed by a raptor. I picked it up and drove for an hour to the wildlife hospital, where, the last I heard, it was recovering. Raptors occasionally blind their prey before the kill. That rabbit's eye has been in my dreams and waking mind ever since. It was invigorating to see a young, healthy, two-eyed rabbit, and lovely to spend twenty minutes with it.

Sooner or later, a one-eyed rabbit will appear in one of my paintings, perhaps only in a form recognizable to me, and perhaps in the company of a rabbit kit, a horned lizard, and a white butterfly.

Snowmelt Runoff Art

2010-04-28T15:36:00.000-07:00

Most of the snow is gone, but the land is still exhibiting some dynamic art. Follow almost any stream far enough this spring, and it will reveal a waterfall. In this desert, that is a small miracle.

Spring Redux

2010-03-29T15:23:00.000-07:00

I dusted off my bike and went for a ride yesterday. This morning I went for a run up a favorite ridge to check the runoff in several streams. Who can resist the allure of a heart-shaped rock? It is going to be a wonderfully wet spring in this high alpine desert. There has been so much snow that I've been skiing all winter, not running; hence, I'm experiencing that run over by a truck feeling that comes from calling upon a whole different set of muscles.

I found bear and mountain lion tracks near the trailhead/parking lot. With the lion, there appeared to be a kitten. It's possible, since cougars can go into estrous at any time of the year, like humans, rather than seasonally, like most other mammals. Tracks are hard to read in melting snow, so I reserve judgment. It is definitely an area that has been a cougar's territory for years; of that I am certain. I've seen plenty of signs.

Bears are emerging from hibernation, with cubs. I saw signs everywhere of them digging like mad to uncover insects to eat. Imagine the appetite you'd work up in 3-4 months. It seems mercilessly ironic that early spring is the time when forest animals starve to death in harsh climates. They manage against the odds to survive a brutal winter, and then, when the sun is shining, the birds singing, the streams flowing, and temperatures rising, they starve. Spring may have arrived, but there is little to eat for herbivores, omnivores, and, the carnivores who hunt them. All have severely depleted the fat reserves with which they began the winter. I am offering prayers that all beings find enough to eat.

At least one coyote family I've been watching looks reasonably well fed. They are in my neighborhood, in the foothills. We've been crossing paths often lately. I only recently learned that coyotes live in family units, much as we do, not packs. I assume that the small group I've been seeing is a mother, father, and perhaps a yearling from last spring, and that there are probably pups in a den nearby. I'm not going looking for the den. I don't want to be the stressor that causes them to move. I'm pretty sure of its general location, from the sightings and the howling.

I visited a nearby beaver pond the other day and saw that they, too, made it through the winter. Likely there are kits in the lodge.

I haven't seen any deer yet this spring, but I saw signs this morning that they are heading up into their summer territory, much of which is still covered with hard-pack snow and thus largely out of bounds for me. The deer and other forest animals must treasure this time, before the trails are crawling with two-legs.

I have a problem painting hanging on the studio wall. It is not going where I thought it was, and it is not offering up any guidance re: where it is going, so I suppose it is time to give it a little rest. Perhaps I shall begin a painting that is rich in the greens that I want the deer and bears to find in the forest.

Meanwhile, I am still driving around with my gaiters and yak trax in the trunk, hoping for one or two more good snows. It looks as though we might see one this weekend, at least in the high peaks.

Spring

2010-03-22T21:08:00.000-07:00

Accepting that spring has arrived is always a bit rough for me. I love the snow so much that I get attached to it. But every year there is a day when I acknowledge that spring is actually here, and I start loving it. Today was that day. I went for a hike with my nine year old daughter on what just might be my favorite mountain. The air was fresh and clean. We moved over deep soft-packed snow, gingerly trying to stay on top of it, and invariably punching holes in it. Carmen got stuck when she took a high route over the snow-covered roots of a huge fallen pine. She broke through up to her chest and was held in place by the roots. I had to pull her out. The photo above is of our destination, a waterfall that has begun to thaw and flow. Nothing like the raging runoff we'll experience in the coming weeks, but the falls have broken through the snow. We'll get another couple of snow storms, no doubt--that's spring in the southern Rockies.

The steady drip of melting snow, and bobcat sign, are everywhere. I'm concerned about the latter. Just above the falls is a fawn birthing area. Some of the deer have wintered over and others will return soon to give birth.

Even in this steep, shady box canyon, the south facing upper walls are bereft of snow, and the lower walls are warming fast.

No, Andy Goldsworthy has not been running around the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This snow spiral was created by gravity alone. These natural sculptures occur when snow falls off a tree on a slope and rolls down, picking up more snow as it goes. This one is old and its edges have been softened by the freeze/thaw cycle. When new, snow spirals are often perfectly symmetrical geometric forms. They surface in my dreams and my paintings.

Sand Skiing

2010-03-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

I found a couple of photos from that sand skiing expedition that I mentioned in the last post (March 15). Alamosa, Colorado, 1987.

Diebenkorn in New Mexico

2010-03-15T22:03:00.000-07:00

This morning there was a crash or an avalanche or something on the ski basin road. I hope no one was hurt. I and hundreds of Texans in SUVs were turned back. I've been contemplating the carbon footprint we leave behind when we drive out into the wilderness to recreate. Seeing all of those SUVs roaring back down the mountain really drove it home, so to speak.

Last week, I saw a guy riding up the ski basin road on a mountain bike with skis strapped to his back. He put me to shame. I haven't ridden a bike with skis strapped to my back since I was in college. A bunch of us skied the sand dunes of Alamosa, Colorado, in the summer, under a full moon. We drove to Alamosa in a VW bus and marooned our bikes in the sand when we figured out that walking would get us to the base of the dunes faster. I haven't been riding since I crashed my bike (and my face) last summer. I resolve to look into those new bamboo bikes. Stronger than steel, and only a tiny carbon thumbprint results from their making.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, I've been struggling a bit this week. I finished two rather large paintings last week, so I can't complain.

This one is called The River Is Moving, The Raven Must Be Flying (oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches). It's one of the more obvious examples of how I process what I experience in the mountains onto the canvas. Followers of the blog may recall these two photos I shot last fall while on a run in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

The ravens (actually two shots of the same raven) came back while I was in the studio a couple of weeks ago and demanded that the painting be reworked around them.

For months now, I have been pouring over the images in Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico. What a gorgeous book. Diebenkorn received his masters degree at UNM. This book features dozens of plates of paintings from that period. The work is raw, primitive, vital, and confident. I like the paintings better than his later, much more geometric and controlled work. The New Mexico landscape is evident in the early paintings. They read like a birds-eye view of the canyons, draws, spires, arroyos, valleys, and mountains of NM, filtered through a dream, or accessed directly through a visual unconscious.

These last couple of months, while under the spell of the Diebenkorn book, I've been out in the mountains on my backcountry skis a lot. It's an El Niño year, which always means great snow for northern NM. While I was struggling in the studio this week, I was struggling with my new skis on the descents. Trying too hard. Measuring my progress or lack thereof. Getting frustrated. Finally, the other day, I began to relax and ride the mountain, feel its contours beneath my feet, feel my feet beneath me in my boots, laugh at myself. When I went back into the studio, the same thing happened with the paintbrush. I was back in a groove, mapping the land that I'd been experiencing on my skis; painting, not thinking. There's nothing like a little laughing yoga.

Map Art

2010-02-17T11:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I wrote about how painting might be considered Land Art; about my painting as map-making. The primary function of art is the integration of unconscious material into consciousness. Nature and the unconscious are one and the same; hence, I think of my paintings as maps that integrate nature/wilderness into visual consciousness.

As a contemporary art map-maker, I am in good company. Google “map art,” and you will be overwhelmed with the volume that is out there. Elisabeth Lecourt folds maps into representations of clothing. Sara Cardona paints organic forms over topographical maps. Bill Gilbert, co-founder of Land Arts of the American West, transposes his travels, signified by dots and lines, onto topographical maps, with audio narratives, recorded while walking the routes marked on the maps, accompanying the resulting wall art. These he calls “Physiocartographies" (http://smudgestudio.blogspot.com/2009/08/bill-gilbert-exhibits-physiocartography.html). I’ve been watching Gilbert’s art for some time, with considerable interest. It foregrounds the extent to which we have barricaded, fenced, poisoned, and covered the land. It makes me think of the difficulties encountered by wildlife just trying to get to a spring, a waterhole, a rabbit hole, wherever they happen to be going. It speaks of the necessity, and the urgency, of the wildlife corridor approach to land management. Gilbert's Physiocatrographies are beautiful and engaging. They make you think.

Juxtaposing Gilbert’s art with Cardona’s, I began to wonder if the dots-and-lines/geometric shapes way of making map art is a man-thing and the more organic designs, like Cardona’s and mine, are a woman-thing. I am probably on pretty shaky ground here, so I will stop, and retreat into my studio.

What does this have to do with art?

2010-02-15T16:35:00.000-08:00

I’ve been writing about human coexistence with wildlife. What does this have to do with art? My art, my paintings, have everything to do with wilderness.

My paintings are reflections on my experience of wilderness. Without access to wilderness, I wouldn’t be painting. When people see my paintings, they often say things like “interior landscapes.” I appreciate that every viewer sees something different in my work. Some see emotions, some landscapes, others colors and symbols. Recently, at an exhibition, a woman said “these paintings are maps, aren’t they.” This was the closest anyone has come to divining what I do when I paint. I do not try to make maps, but map making is what happens.

My process goes something like this: I go out running, wandering, or skiing in the mountains, off-trail. I follow water or I find water. I avoid humans. I encounter wildlife. I try to be unobtrusive, but I am human--a giant ape crashing through the forest. I meditate. I listen. I explore the land with my body, traversing ridges, climbing scree, bounding down pine-covered spines in the snow, following streams, climbing waterfalls, falling still and watching deer, turkey, muskrat, pika, marmot, ferret, rabbit, raven, hawk. All the while, I am being watched, by mountain lion, coyote, bear; the more elusive beings. I stay out there as long as possible. Often, I think of Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening,” the last stanza,

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”

I come back. I go into the studio. I paint. I remove layers. I add layers. Like weather, water, wind, time. I let the painting rest. I work on other paintings. Layers come and go. At some point the painting is finished. I live with it for awhile. Maybe it is not finished. Or maybe it goes away. Sooner or later, I realize that it is a map of my wandering in the backcountry. I traverse the land with my body, never in a straight line, rarely on a trail, always following some inner map. I come back, and I paint, with little agenda; no conscious idea what I am doing--the same way I run.

I consider my work land art. How can a painting be land art? My paintings wouldn’t exist without the land. Without forests, mountains, water, wildlife. They are visual chronicles of my interaction with nature. I make maps.

Mountain lions, hunting, and, finally, those cougar book reviews

2010-02-03T11:11:00.000-08:00

It’s snowing. You can't see it in the photo I just shot in the back yard, but it is.

I've finished the shelf of mountain lion books at my local library, and a few other volumes on the subject as well. After a couple of slender glossies that were mostly photography, some of it quite marvelous, I moved on to those that contained no images. Interestingly, all of them were more about humans than lions--and all of them announced this in their titles or subtitles. Over the past few years I have read everything I could get my hands on about deer, and the deer books were in general more about deer than people--facts about feeding and rutting habits, growth, migration, etc. All did, however, make a pitch in favor of herd management, a euphemism for sport hunting. This has its roots in the Old Testament injunction that humans were created to lord over all of the beasts and are not beasts ourselves. I'm betraying my biases, but, in truth, I am ambivalent about hunting. I grew up with it, in rural upstate New York, just two hours from New York City, but it could just as well have been rural Alabama.

The KKK was active in every little town—they ran the volunteer fire departments, an historical connection that goes back to the Civil War. Poverty was endemic, and recession was a way of life. As far as I know, it still is. There was no interstate then connecting our county to the nearby cities of Albany, Schenectady, and Troy, which were referred to collectively by locals as “The City,” and visited as little as possible. Hunting was as much a way of life as distrusting outsiders, Catholics, Jews, leftists, and dark- skinned people, few of whom ever ventured into the county.

Nearly every male hunted. Those who didn’t were suspect. The primary prey was deer, but folks shot anything that moved at every opportunity, whether it was edible or not, whether it was in season or not. Since humans wiped out all of the large predators in the Northeastern United States before I was born, and, hence, deer do overpopulate and starve to death, I can see what leads people who study deer to conclude that hunting by humans is more humane than starvation.

It is the reality and culture of hunting that I find repugnant. The deer books I read made hunting sound noble, compassionate, legal, and sober. Where I grew up, it was none of those. I doubt that this is any different anywhere else in the U.S. I have not seen it to be, in my travels and changes of residence. Hunting is about getting drunk and cruising the back roads at night with a spotlight. It is about getting drunk, sitting in a blind by the side of the road, putting out bait, and waiting for deer. When they come, you take the heads, if they are bucks, maybe a steak or two, and leave the rest. It is about shooting animals, wounding them, and going back to the truck for another bottle of whiskey and a bag of pork rinds, because who wants to follow the damn things; that would entail walking. It is about wounding and torturing animals because it is fun; because it displays one’s masculinity and superiority. These practices were not the exception, they were the norm. I am aware that there are a few hunters who engage in the activity legally and are perhaps sober, who subscribe to some sort of ethics. Even fish and game department statistics bear out this gruesome picture, and they are the nation’s primary proponents of hunting; it pays their salaries.

End diatribe.

I was supposed to be reviewing mountain lion books. I was pondering why mountain lion books are primarily about people and deer books are more concerned with deer. There is a simple answer: we are fascinated with pumas in a way that we are not with deer, because pumas have been known to kill and eat us. The fact that we are much more likely to be killed by dogs (dogs kill approximately 24 people a year in the U.S., as opposed to 50 human deaths in the past hundred years in the U.S and Canada attributed to mountain lions), lightning, automobiles, and each other is irrelevant.

We are hard-wired to respond to large predators, we have exterminated nearly all of them on the continent, and the few that remain are potent symbols that light up our reptilian brains and collective unconscious with a thousand-watt jolt. We love to tell and to hear stories that confirm their existence. They confirm that maybe there is something left of nature, something we have as yet been unable to destroy. A kernel of our own nature, our own wildness.

In The Beast in the Garden, David Baron tells a story of cougars and humans in Boulder, Colorado in the 1980s and early ‘90s. It reads like a thriller, with mountain lions prowling on the edges of the city and growing in numbers, a menacing tabula rasa onto which human fear, anxiety, vulnerability, and superiority is inscribed.

Baron takes the perspective of indignant residents of Boulder’s mountain canyons, transplants from faraway cities, without acknowledging his biases. He cites, as evidence of the increasing mountain lion population, a log kept by two Boulder residents, of cougar sightings solicited from Boulder citizens, a notoriously unreliable tool of estimating wildlife populations. The main offense committed by the decidedly evil pumas is the killing of pet dogs kept in outdoor pens at night by canyon residents. That the trauma of pet death could have been avoided by educating newcomers to the benefits of keeping their dogs inside in mountain lion country is lost on him.

In my own city, Santa Fe, some humans built a house a couple of years ago in a scenic canyon with a year-round running stream, a wildlife oasis. A canyon where I enjoyed the sighting of my 5th mountain lion. These humans left their old, infirm dog outside at night, a backlit MacDonald’s sign for hungry cougars, and they called Fish and Game when a cougar killed the dog. Fish and Game spent our tax dollars on a professional cougar killer and his pack of hounds, who dispatched an old male cougar within hours. This is the sort of response that Baron is lobbying for throughout The Beast in the Garden. I would much rather have seen the Animal Control folks cite the humans for pet neglect.

With shaky science, much gothic scene-setting, like “the city had entered a cougar plague,” and cougars doing a lot of “lurking in the shadows,” Baron appeals to the pathos of human fear. The funny thing is that the cougar plague that he spends most of the book setting the stage for never happened. One human was, regretably, killed by a cougar, in 1991, a sad story that was apparently the raison d’etre for the book, but after that, the lions faded “inexplicably” back into Boulder’s canyons, forests, and network of abandoned gold mines. Perhaps some people started keeping their pets indoors.

If you want to learn something about pumas and cultural anthropology, read Chris Bolgiano’s Mountain Lion: An Unnatural History of Pumas and People. With none of the exaggerations, appeals to pathos, and anthropocentrism that Baron employs, Bolgiano traces the cultural history of cougars and humans in North America. It is a good read; at times tragic, at times entertaining, insightful throughout. Cougars have not fared well against human guns, traps, and cruelty. The first few chapters are hard to read, if one has any compassion for animals. Bolgiano’s studied observations on the puma as evolving repository of human anxiety, fear, myth, and romanticism make this book a fascinating and worthwhile read.

By far the best cougar encounter story I’ve read is a chapter in Craig Child’s most recent book The Animal Dialogues. Childs lays bare his own biases, emotions, and mythologizing, while drawing the reader inexorably in to his impeccably drawn backcountry universe and inside his head. Childs’s cougar story could only be his. It is the logical extension of his persona, his awareness, and his unsentimental and total absorption in the natural world. The man describes dancing with a cougar that is likely intent on eating him. Whether it is true or not—and I believe that it is--I don’t care. Like all of the narratives in this book, it’s one you can’t put down. I read the whole volume in a night.

It’s still snowing, it’s sticking, and my skis are calling my name.

Mountain lion encounters

2010-02-02T11:06:00.000-08:00

I've met seven mountain lions in the wild. They are also called cougars, puma, panthers, wildcats, and catamounts, among other monikers. I prefer mountain lion, puma, and cougar, which I use interchangeably. I recall each encounter pretty well. The first was 35 years ago, and the most recent was last fall. All but one were near my Santa Fe home, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (depicted in the last post). The first was in southern Colorado, growling across a high-altitude chasm. I was a young, foolish cougar neophyte from the Northeast. It didn’t occur to me that it could have jumped that crevice as easily as I could skip a stream, had it so desired. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid.

I must be lucky, or smell funny, to have encountered so many of them, when others who spend more time in the backcountry have seen none. I've a habit--as readers know-- of following and observing deer, the cougar's favorite food. But that doesn't explain the seven encounters. I was not tracking or observing deer when any of the lion encounters occurred. I think and dream about them frequently. I read in the Mountain Gazette last week that a Colorado Division of Wildlife officer, summoned after a cougar sighting, left a home-owner with the parting words “Most people who see them change forever” (Stew Mosberg, Letter to the Editor, quoting Agent Dorsey). I’ve been thinking about that.

I’ve changed forever seven times. That actually sounds about right. Each sighting has unearthed a new dimension of my dreams, poetry, painting, consciousness; my imagination, which is purring along in overdrive all of the time even without external stimuli. The puma is as potent a symbol of masculinity as it is femininity. It is a hundred pound (give or take) killing machine that can take down prey several times its size. It succeeds in 90% of attempted deer kills when it is able to conceal itself within 30 feet, researchers say. It kills by stealth. That’s feminine. It meows. I’ve never heard it, but I believe those who have. When in estrous, it screams and cries and wails like a grieving woman. Its movement is equal parts muscle, sinew, and, grace; it is a cat. Every time I’ve seen a cougar, it has made me feel intensely alive. It has brought dreams of a mountain lion bursting violently into my house to reveal herself as a heartsick mother searching for lost kittens. It has colored my paintings, inspired poetry, doubled me over with laughter at the absurdity of trying to outrun my station on the food chain, made me feel lucky, terrified, and hyper-aware.

I’ve no cougar photos to post here. I read in Chris Bolgiano’s Mountain Lion: An Unnatural History of Pumas and People, that nearly every published cougar photo was taken by a paying client on a hunt moments before the cat was treed by hounds and shot to death. A few, says Bolgiano, might have been snapped on the more recently popular photo hunts, on which professional hunting guides tree cougars with hounds for the benefit of photographer-clients.

My encounters with pumas were sufficiently visceral to preclude photography, even if I had had a camera in my hand when they occurred. Each one elicited the electrical adrenaline pin pricks of fight-or-flight and shut down all mental processes. No doubt I would be a better Buddhist (less cognitive, more aware) if I had a cougar in my field of vision every minute. Which reminds me of a line from the Flannery O’Connor story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” Having just murdered the obnoxious grandmother whom O’Connor makes you want silent by the end of the story, The Misfit remarks, “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

My intention today was to review some books about mountain lions and people that I’ve read in the past few weeks, as promised in my last post. That will have to wait until a future post, as will my stories of cougar sightings. I’ll close with a poem I wrote five years ago.

The Easy Path

Riding my bike
up Mt. Shirley this morning
deer tracks everywhere

By the light of last night’s disintegrating moon
they had taken the path
I now traveled

Trailing them
all the way to the top
a mountain lion

Ascending in the quiet morning
I felt their fear
their restlessness

Near the top the lion caught them
Hoof prints in all directions
Front hooves splayed out
The mark of a dragged carcass

I stopped
thinking
of tracking what remained of the kill
to the place a lion would hide it
half covered with leaves and pine needles
while following its thirst or resting nearby
before going back for the legs
the face
having first opened the chest surgically
with one-inch retractable razors
carving a bowl
empty of heart
lungs, liver

I headed instead up the path traveled
by my own kind
the easy path

Weather prayers answered

2010-01-25T13:03:00.000-08:00

In the last post, I was wishing and praying for more snow. The weather deities responded generously. Three storms hit us with snow, rain, and hail. When the clouds lifted I snapped this shot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Click on it to check out the enlarged version.

I've been reading books on mountain lions and will review two of them in my next post. I'd like to hear from others who have had encounters with mountin lions in the wild.

Downhill bounding, bobcats, and a prayer for snow

2010-01-11T11:51:00.000-08:00

It’s that tough time of winter—the freeze and thaw cycle is in effect, and we haven’t had new snow for awhile. It’s an icy world out there in the forests. When I get out in the backcountry less, I find it a challenge to make art. I am not a believer in making excuses for not practicing one’s profession, though, so I am making art all the same. I plan on working on some watercolors of ravens and bluebirds today, but who knows what may happen when the brush is in the hand.

This photo, looking west to the Jemez Mountains from the top of Picacho, indicates how bereft of snow the south and west slopes are.

The snow is hanging on a little longer at higher elevations and on north-facing slopes, as this second photo shows. When I shot this, I was about to bound down the spiny ridge at right center. Thompson Peak is the backdrop.

Thanks to a marvelous little product called the YakTrax traction device, which is essentially snow chains for running shoes, I am still out there running. I’ve been enjoying running up Picacho, getting warm on the steep ascent, and then bounding downhill off-trail, into Bear Canyon. Downhill bounding in snow is one of my favorite activities. The socks get a little wet, so I save it for the end of my run.

I continue to encounter bobcat tracks and scat everywhere, as well as the occasional retreating bobcat, and I conclude that bobcats are doing well indeed in my little corner of the Santa Fe National Forest. I am concerned for the deer I’ve come to know in the area, however. I am sure that they are not happy at the proliferation of their bobcat neighbors. May we all coexist with the least possible suffering.

Tent Rocks

2009-12-30T12:31:00.000-08:00

I went hiking at Tent Rocks National Monument, at Cochiti Pueblo, NM, with my sister and my three daughters. The 1.75 mile hike offers a great deal of visual bang for the energy expenditure. It's a stroll in the park that proceeds through a narrow canyon to a ridge top with 360° mountain views. The striations in the rocks, their feminine forms, produced by waves when this desert was an ocean, and their resemblance to giant figures with tiny heads, makes the place a visual wonderland. It was excellent inspiration for my continued work on the Big Dream series of paintings.

Wild Turkeys

2009-12-16T13:12:00.000-08:00

There is light snow here. It’s getting old and icy. The backcountry skiing was surprisingly good last week, despite the dearth of snow. I hope more is on the way. I enjoyed a beautiful run this morning. I started out in the red brush pictured above and ran up a ridge. I was a bit distracted by thoughts. Thus, it seemed that out of nowhere a great rush of noise erupted, as though something very large was springing out of the brush. I thought it was the mountain lion that I know lives up there. But no. One never hears the mountain lion coming. It was a flock of wild turkeys, taking flight. They left some lovely feathers in the snow in their wake.

Wild turkeys make all sorts of noises I couldn’t hope to imitate, let alone describe. Usually, I see them before they take off, and the noise isn’t so astonishing. They are large and ungainly. I saw what may have been the same flock often last winter, in the same area. I marveled at their continued existence, since it seemed to take them considerably longer to get off the ground than it would take a predator to spring. I always encountered them near the same ridgetop, the high point in the area. Awkward as they seem on the ground, in flight they are a beautiful sight. On a good downdraft, they soar without even a flap of a wing for what seems like hundreds of yards. They became accustomed to me last winter, and, after awhile, they stopped expending the huge amount of energy it takes them to take to the air. Instead, they ambled off, eyeing me pensively, looking slightly annoyed, and going about their business of seed-eating.

The coloring of wild turkeys found its way into my paintings last winter, and it probably will again now. I am still working on my Big Dream series of oil paintings that incorporate deer bones, and on the occasional watercolor. Another series has been in my head for months now. It will employ enlarged topographical maps printed, transferred, or adhered onto canvas and painted over. I want to make visual the way in which I get to know backcountry terrain by traversing it again and again with my body. For now, it’s time to turn my body toward the studio and get to work. I’ve got a show, with an energetic bunch of young artists, coming up at the Factory on 5th in Albuquerque. I’ll be hanging out there this Saturday, 19 December, from 1:00-6:00.

Here’s a parting shot of the frozen Santa Fe River, from the ridgetop I reached this morning, with Thompson Peak looming large in the morning light.

New work

2009-12-01T10:52:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed another great run up Picacho in a little bit of snow this morning. The deer are in their rutting season, which means that the bucks are running themselves ragged. Lots of new deer tracks in the snow, mostly bucks (they drag their hooves slightly, which shows up only in snowy tracks). All of the deer in the area went into hiding for several weeks when a mountain lion made its presence known, and I missed seeing them. I haven't seen new lion tracks in a week or more, and I hope it has moved on. All of the deer bones and hair I used in the artwork above were gathered from a single site, just outside a mountain lion's denning area, not far from Picacho.

The exposed deer bones recreate the feelings of discovery and impermanence that arise when I come across bones and other reminders of the daily survival struggles of wildlife. These paintings are tableaus of the marks and signs that represent what we can know about wildlife. The rest is imagination. This morning I came across the marks of a bobcat tracking deer. They don't usually do this, because adult deer are too formidable a prey for them. There was a single spot of blood in the snow. It did not come from the bobcat's paw, nor was there any sign of a kill. It held but did not divulge a narrative.

Now—must get back to the studio.

Texas Road Trip

2009-11-16T15:02:00.000-08:00

I just returned from a road trip to Dallas. I wanted to check out the art scene there & look up a few friends along the way. It was 20° here in Santa Fe this morning. Finally, some season-appropriate weather. We received only a few flakes from the storm that hit Colorado, our ski basin a few inches. This morning I ran up Picacho and shot the photo below.

I followed a bobcat’s tracks all the way up. It skipped the bends in the disused trail & opted for the most efficient route, as predators always do. I was trying to burn as many calories as I could stand, and the cat was trying to conserve as many calories as possible.

The plains between here and Dallas are a landscape transformed by human appetite.

There were beef cattle and feed lots, fields of wind turbines (not to be confused with the old prototype windmill above), grasslands grazed to the bone, and perhaps not as many oil wells as there used to be. The preferred site for wind turbine fields seems to be mesa tops. When environmentalists advocated for wind power a decade ago, I don’t think they had in mind the grids of sonic booming, bird and wildlife-killing monoliths that are now more common than cotton fields and cattle in West Texas. Why and how they are killing wildlife other than the obviously unfortunate birds who are sucked in is not yet understood. As long as we continue to consume electricity at our present rate, however, we can’t really complain about wind turbines. At least they are not coal-fired or nuclear plants.

The road to Dallas is populated by few people, many decaying industrial forms and abandoned structures, and a collection of small towns that seem to be hanging on by the skin of their teeth. When I lived for four years in West Texas, I hated the place, largely because there was no public land, which made me feel like a rat in a cage, and because it is overrun with Republicans and fundamentalists.

On my first trip back in ten years, I was struck by the beauty of the expansive vistas and disintegrating human-built structures. They seeded themselves in my creative imagination and have already begun blossoming.

Night Spirit, West Texas / watercolor / 8 x 10 inches

84 South / watercolor / 8x 10 inches

I am fairly bursting with the desire to get back to some big oil paintings. As soon as I finish matting a stack of watercolors that will accompany me to a museum show in Indianapolis in 2.5 weeks. . .

We spent a night with our friend Bruno and his fabulous cat Hermes in Ransom Canyon, an oasis near Lubbock that is home to a steel house built by the recently deceased Robert Bruno (name similarity coincidental). It juts out like a hawk’s eye over the suburban landscape of the canyon.

The Dallas are scene may be small, but it is vibrant. I visited only galleries that show contemporary abstract work, and I spoke with some energetic and friendly people. Nearly all of the artwork was organic in design, content, and often media. Things were growing in these paintings and sculptures. Artists were overlaying topo maps with personal visual mythologies (something I do from time to time) and creating sculptural forms that spoke of plant life and undersea worlds.

The standout was a piece at Dunn and Brown Contemporary comprised of plant material molded into human skull forms hung in a grid, with a map identifying the plant material (rose petals, mustard seeds, etc.) each skull was made of. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the artist’s name & couldn’t find it on their website. Galleries of interest include HCG, Craighead Green, Conduit, and DeCorazon. In this steel and concrete desert, galleries are selling, and presumably collectors are buying, portals through which viewers may touch down itno nature and psyche (which are one and the same). Returning via the feedlots and oil fields, I found this reassuring.

As we reentered New Mexico, a storm front blew in from the north.

Morning Run

2009-11-06T14:58:00.000-08:00

Out running this morning, I was contemplating what sort of consciousness trees, rocks, mountains, and streams possess. I've no doubt they do. Many ancient and contemporary thinkers have taken this one on. I recently read that contemporary physics has now figured out that rocks have consciousness. Mountains are aggregates of rocks. Every mountain seems to have a personality and consciousness of its own. Yesterday, I was grieving for mountains that are subject to the corporate mining practice of mountain top removal. Today I'm celebrating whole mountains. Here's a little photo essay of my run. I run in a different place every day. This route is one of my favorites.

Heading up. I always like to go up, especially at the beginning. Pond and beaver dam at center.

Sandia Mountains, 60 miles south, in background.

Thompson Peak, Santa Fe River

Thompson Peak, looming large & ghostly in the early morning light.

Atalaya Mountain. The ashes of my parents are up there! Hi Mom & Dad.

360-degree mountains. Looking west: the Jemez.

East/southeast: Picacho Peak.

Thompson Peak again. It's the mountain I'm standing on top of in the photo at the top of this blog. I love it because it's hard to get to & out of the way.

Down off the ridge now & running along a stream on the valley floor. This rock is huge, and a bear moved it looking for tasty bugs to eat. Hello bears!

A small animal abode. I'll learn what kind of animal when I run by this tree in the snow (soon, I hope) and see its tracks.

One of my favorite pieces of naturally ocurring rock art. A painting waiting to happen.

Stream bed. Right now it's a trickle, but in the spring it's a raging waterfall. On the south-facing hill above it, a man has been living in the open air for years, with minimal possessions--not even a tent. He's the only person I ever see out here. I think about his grit & love of solitude. He's chosen a nice spot.

Almost back to my starting point. Chamisa in the foreground, piñon in the back. Three ponderosa pines.

Deer tracks beneath an apple tree that appears to have seeded itself and grown wild. It's a magnet for deer, bears, and everything smaller.

Almost back to the field where I started, and where I saw a bobcat last week and a doe and fawn all summer. Picacho peak behind the cottonwoods in their fall colors.

Ravens, Red-Tailed Hawks, & Coyote Sightings

2009-11-01T21:17:00.000-08:00

We are enjoying a warm spell. Blue skies, gentle temperatures, and soft warm autumn light. I took two eight year old girls hiking, to a frozen waterfall on Two Doe Mountain. I like to name mountains that are not named on maps. My paintings are sort of like that—visual descriptions of unnamed territory, or maps of places on maps that I have intentionally not visited.

The raven in the photograph above posed, talking to me, on the roof of Evergreen Lodge in Hyde State Park, where we began our hike. A few seconds later, I snapped this shot.

The only sound better than a raven’s lecture is the noise of its wings beating overhead. No other bird flies with that rhythmic, beating, breathy sound. I'd like to reproduce the essence of that sound in a painting. I've a feeling that the image above will appear in a painting soon. Ravens and trees, particularly aspen and ponderosa pine, have been commanding my attention of late.

Last weekend, as we were driving down our street, my kids and I saw an ascending red-tailed hawk drop a large rodent to its death. In the flash of a second, the rodent fell with the autumn leaves kicked up by a sudden gust of wind. Our brains were a little slower. It took us a moment to process what we’d seen.

I found the skeletal remains of two deer in the forest last week. I’ve noticed a lot of coyote tracks in that area recently. I wondered whether coyote predation on the deer was increasing or my ability to spot bones on the forest floor was improving. Thursday night, over beer & pizza, I was telling a friend that I hadn’t seen a coyote in months, though I know they are numerous in my neighborhood. Friday morning we saw two, as I was driving Carmen to school, in an open brushy area on my street. They paused briefly and looked us over. They looked big and healthy. I though of my fat, white, brain damaged cat, and hoped she had heeded my advice to stay in the fenced back yard. Reminders that nature is red in tooth in claw, and life brief and precious, abound. It’s a theme that surfaces in many of my paintings.

Bobcats & Mountain Lions: Living With Predators

2009-10-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

I went for a run this morning in the rugged hills northeast of Santa Fe. Gnarly and dry as these hills look, they conceal narrow canyons with running streams like the one I photographed above.

There is snow on the mountains, and more on the way. I was looking for signs this morning that the mule deer are making their way down to their winter territory. I saw only a few fresh tracks. At the end of my run, just across the street from the Randall Davey Audubon Center & Sanctuary, I saw a bobcat leaping above the two-foot high grasses; all four paws off the ground, four legs stretched straight out.

I have seen only two other bobcats, both of them within a couple of miles of the Audubon Center, one dead, the other disappearing into heavy brush. This one, floating above the grasses, with autumn foliage in the background, was stunningly beautiful. Now I know why I haven't seen the doe and fawn, who have been hanging out in the same bushy area all summer, in a month. A bobcat has moved in.

I saw a mountain lion, my 7th, in the same area a month ago. It exploded out from its place of concealment a few yards away from me and was gone almost before I realized what it was. I guessed that it might have been a youth. It was not as large as the others I have seen, and I doubt that a mature mountain lion would have betrayed its hiding place only to run off in apparent confusion.

When I see these beautiful predators, I feel conflicted. I feel fear for the deer I've gotten to know in the area, and I know that the predators need to be there in order for the deer herds to stay healthy. I'm glad there are places where big predators still roam. I’m glad that I live in one of those places.

First Snow

2009-10-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

Rain for almost 20 hours, and now snow. The only thing better than rain here in the high alpine desert is snow. Carmen and I have declared the first snow an annual holiday. She’s at school today enjoying hot chocolate & pumpkin carving with her fabulous teacher. Here’s a poem I wrote six years ago on the occasion of the first snow. It makes for great light in my studio.

First Snow

The first snow coming in from the West
extinguishes the lights of the city

We can’t see further than across the street
Carmen worries that our city won’t return
I wish it wouldn’t
We can’t see the coyotes padding softly
on their nightly mission
the bears up in the watershed, agitated by hunger
stupefied by the urge toward sleep
We can’t hear traffic sirens the band down at El Farol

Here in the cradle of the storm
There’s nothing but snow and wind
A wavelike rhythm, now to the East now to the West
and breath

Silver light, cloud-refracted
beams in through water-laced glass
I lie in bed trying to recall the last time I lay in love’s embrace
I recall the last four years’ first snows
where I was, what I drank, ate, nature of conversation, with whom, quality of light, nature of snow
Do I miss the embrace I can’t remember
the touch that left less
of an impression upon my skin than the texture and water content of snow?

Like Carmen misses the city she can’t see

Years ago my Spanish teacher translated “to miss”
echar de menos
“to be struck by the lack of”

I’m struck by the lack of an embrace I can’t recall
by the years between me and a caress that conveyed
not ownership nor need nor desire, but something else

The storm moves East
The city returns intermittently
Ice crystals whip the streetlamp’s now softened haze
Carmen, in dinosaur pajamas, breathes deeply

Between warm sheets the urge toward sleep
stupefies with the softness of cloudlight
Who could embrace me like all of this?

A question, struck by the lack of an answer

Running off-piste

2009-10-19T11:14:00.000-07:00

I painted this watercolor a month or so ago. Title: Above Sunflower Falls: Fawn Nursery, 12 x 9 inches. I've been running all summer in an area occupied by a group of does and their fawns. Now the time is approaching when the bucks rejoin the doe and yearling groups and they head to lower ground. October is the gentlest month, and it's been a warm one here in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This morning I ran up Picacho and saw a doe and her fawn. The fawns have reached a good size in this gentle autumn, and there is still plenty for them to eat. Picacho's summit is at 8,577 feet. It's a steep but accessible and short climb, 49 minutes up and 26 minutes down, if you run slowly, like I do.

I took a little-used, half-hidden trail. I usually avoid trails, perhaps because I’ve been shot at three times over the years by strangers while running on trails. That’s life in America, where everyone is armed to the teeth and proud of it. Fortunately for me, all of my assailants had bad aim and/or were drunk, and I was never hit. Armed drunks aside, I prefer finding my way off-piste. I like to use map and compass, sight lines and intuition. There is much to be said for aimless wandering. People who study deer report that their movements are unpredictable, as though they decide from one moment to the next where they are going. If you don’t know where you are going, neither does the mountain lion or drunken hunter. Aimless wandering cuts down on thinking and fosters a different kind of consciousness.

Pregnant Atop Picacho, 2001

Animal architecture

2009-10-18T19:42:00.000-07:00

The being whose abode I photographed (above) is probably less than four inches tall. In the forest, art is everywhere. One could, of course, say that about any place. Robert Rauschenberg said that anyone who walks around the block and can't find the materials to create a work of art lacks imagination. Animals exercise discriminating imagination in the design and construction of their homes, be they squatters or builders. They construct places and objects of great beauty, like the sphere I described in my last post. Yet many humans refuse to acknowledge animal consicousness or emotion. As though we are not animals ourselves.

Animal homes often appear in my paintings. When I was a kid, my two favorite books were Alice in Wonderland, about a kid who falls into an animal home, and My Side of the Mountain, about a kid who runs away to live in a hollow tree. Hmm . . . something is going on there about tunnels and dark inviting spaces. I recently reread the latter & found it as compelling as I did then. My eight-year old daughter thought it was boring because it's about a boy. Try explaining to an 8 year old that gender is immaterial. Of course she is right; gender is one of the most traded upon currencies in capitalist culture.

Pick of the day: Check out Heiko Mueller's paintings at http://www.heikomueller.de/, or at one of my favorite galleries, Jack Fischer Gallery, in San Francisco http://www.jackfischergallery.com/shows.htm. I am particularly drawn to, you guessed it, Mueller's Bambi Chronicles series. Mueller's work is the sort of imagery you might see on earthen walls while falling down a rabbit hole.

The sphere & the creative process

2009-10-18T15:23:00.000-07:00

I was running through a lovely forest last week, when I came upon a bear's resting place. It was a cozy little spot that a mother & a young bear seemed to have been frequenting, judging from the chewed up food containers from the campground 1/2 a mile away, the scat, tracks, etc. In the middle of this bear nest was a spherical object, a little bigger than a basketball, delicately woven from grasses. It was a perfect sphere. Out of curiosity, I gently opened it up and looked inside. Nothing there. It was not one of the balls that mountain lions use to mark their territory. These are roughly basketball size, made mostly of pine needles, stink like cat pee, and often contain very large cat scat. I wondered how, if the sphere was a nest, it had fallen from one of the surrounding towering pines and landed intact, undisturbed. It was not a squirrel's stick-nest. Its maker had carefully chosen soft grasses of a single type and size.

Bears in October are on a singularly-focused mission to bulk up for winter. Otherwise, I might speculate that the sphere was bear art. I didn’t have a camera that day, so I didn’t photograph it. Nor did I remove it. It seemed carefully placed where it lay.

I woke up in the middle of the night with the sphere at the luminous center of my imagination. I remained awake and focused on the image for hours. It arranged itself as a symbol in various layouts in various paintings in my mind. I wonder if other people are discovering grass spheres in other forests, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets Blair Witch . . . .

Controlled Burns, Deer, and Art

2009-10-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

The Forest Service started an 850-acre "controlled burn" ten days ago, near an area I've frequented this summer. All of the wildlife within a mile disappeared, which of course is not surprising. I did a reconnaissance run while it was still smoking, about 1/2 mile from the burn, in an area that a group of does I've been observing have been using as a fawn nursery, and the place was deadly quiet. Not a bird, rabbit, or squirrel. Then came the rains, and life returned. Two days ago, I found the does, nervous, but apparently healthy, back in the old habitat. Today a large raven followed me, its wings beating like a heavy breath, its vocabulary impressive.

There may be some logic to controlled burns. Since people build their houses deeper and deeper in the forest, and citizens demand that every forest fire be put out immediately, fire no longer serves its natural function of wildlife habitat rejuvenation. Enter the controlled burn. Ostensibly, these are about preventing big fires, not habitat renewal. Ostensibly, they are controlled. As we learned from the Cerro Grande and other fires; in reality, they are capricious. And the Forest Service has a knack for starting them in high winds. Fires do create new habitat, but here in the high alpine desert, it is slow in coming. After the Cerro Grande Fire, the Forest Service seed-bombed, and the burned out forests sprouted with new grasses, herbs, and brush. More commonly, here in the Santa Fe watershed, the Forest Service burns and slashes, leaving behind a blackened landscape that looks pretty much dead for years. Eventuallly, new growth comes.

It's not so much the aftermath of fires that's been on my mind this week; it is the Forest Service's methods. They start fires by dropping incendiary devices (i.e., bombs) from planes. Lots of them. If you're a deer, or, worse yet, something slower-moving, this is akin to stealth jets targeting your living room. You don't have a chance. The Forest Service's protocol, as reported in my hometown paper this week, is to burn the perimeter first, trapping every living thing that can't jump or fly through a swath of fire. The apparently unharmed deer I saw after the fire were either the lucky ones or the ones who had not been inside the perimiter when the air raid began.

I was very happy to see them alive and trotting; to hear the forest, half a mile from the burn, alive and chattering, to hear the raven's wings beating. I'd like to see the Forest Service change their methods, if not their motivations. If they are going to simulate a forest fire, let them do it like a single lightning strike, not like the firebombing of Gaza. Give the forest's inhabitants a fighting chance to live to forage the new habitat.

When I returned from my run in the rain two days ago, I immediately sat down and created three new watercolors. Watercolors are good for stormy October skies and wet leaves. Those 8 days without seeing a deer were long. Not because they were 8 days; that's not unusual, but because I didn't know where the deer were. During that week-plus-a-day, I ran for hours through the mountains without that familiar feeling that the deer were nearby, watching me. I wondered, did the does and fawns get out, did they run up, down, west, east? I tried to think like they would think, knowing that they wouldn't think; they would act. On my run in the rain, I stopped thinking, and I intuited the does' location, a few hundred yards from where I had seen them before the fire. Just before I found them, my mind tried thinking again. The thought was, "they wouldn't be down at the bottom of a box canyon at this time of day." I ignored it and kept going on intuition, and I ran right to them.

The does ran; I stopped. They stopped. We stood that way, as usual, for a long time. I moved; they trotted off. I trotted off, and I came upon a most intriguing spherical object that will no doubt be reproduced in some form in a future painting. More about that later.

Picks of the day: Check out the work of Josh Keyes and James Lavadour, innovative painters concerned with deer (Keyes), and forest fires (Keyes and Lavadour).