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!

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

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

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

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

 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

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.