Weather prayers answered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.