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Pleine Aire Desert

Painting in the desert is, ahem, interesting. First there's the finding of the view:

Jef Gunn, the instructor, swore that this was the easy landscape to paint.

We dutifully listened.

--June

Kiger Gorge

Kiger Gorge on Steen's Mountain, half in shadow

-- Jer

News from the Outback

Jer and I have just spent four days in the back of the eastern Oregon outback, in Diamond, Oregon, population 5. More deer and coyotes and rattlesnakes than people, for sure. Cows, too, for that matter.

I'm supposed to be painting in oils, under the tutelage of Jef Gunn, a Pacific Northwest College of Art professor. Here's some of the landscape that presented itself as we wandered around Diamond.

This is the Diamond Hotel, eight rooms, mostly with baths down the hall. Terrific food, wonderful staff. Amazing find in this wilderness.

Jef promised us "easy" views the  first day but insisted that we get up at the crack of dawn to get the best  light for painting. It's been a long time since I viewed the light of the rising sun, but this is what it looked like at 6 a.m. or so.

He was right about the light. -- June

Roadcut Near Diamond

-- Jer

Kansas Home

I was looking for a photo for Jer, who was working on a Wikipedia article on Emporia, Kansas, when I was overcome with nostalgia.

These are a few of the pictures that made me a bit homesick.

The cardinal has a most distinctive song, one that evokes the Great Plains for me. These were photos taken in March, when it was sparer even than it is in August. -- June

Millstones

For a short time, millstones like the ones above were cut from native rock on Gabriola Island, B.C. Friends on Gabriola took us to see these rejects, lying in an abandoned quarry in the woods near the ferry dock. We also visited another Gabriola site to see water-filled holes (below) left in the ground by the millstone cutting. -- Jer

The Ponderosa Pine

We'll be traveling through a ponderosa pine forest soon. They may be my favorite trees (except for all the others, of course).

My favorite among the favorites is one that stands alone, surrounded by juniper and sage brush, along the John Day River.

-- June

Red House

Our immediate neighbors, John and Jen, across the street on S.E. 14th Avenue, have been having their house painted. We think the new color scheme is wonderful. -- Jer

Pizza to Go

What has a pile of Hot Lips Pizza boxes to do with art? Well, first of all the boxes were free (thanks, guys!) Secondly, I am going off to an oil painting class, an intensive workshop in which we are expected to produce two small paintings a day, plus maybe a bigger one over the four days.

If you find that a bit breath-taking, imagine the difficulty of transporting nine wet oil canvases in Jer's Honda Civic from the outback of the outback, (Diamond, Oregon -- near Steen's Mountain and Frenchglen and the Alvord Desert) -- first to Ashland, where we will recover from the desert and get some culture at the Shakespeare Festival, and then back north to Portland. A long way with the insidious oil paint lurking, ready to smear on clothes and car seats.

Hence,  the pizza boxes:

You can read the story through the photos. I did get tired of sawing cardboard and door skin after three boxes and decided the last two panels could each have its own box. The silver box (shown above) was part of the original plan. It holds six canvas-covered panels just fine. However, the generous proportions of the masonite panels were too much, by about 1/16 of an inch. So along with the five pizza boxes, I'm taking the canvas-covered one, too, in the elegant silver container. The white box on top is another pizza box with small panels for preliminary studies. And the big Daniel Smith box at back holds a 22 x 28" stretched canvas, which I like better than masonite as a painting surface. But, I couldn't find the right sized boxes for more canvases, so Hot Lips Pizza, rigged using Jer's nifty hand saw, had to do it. -- June

Mentor Headlands II

Jay Hoffman sent us two photos from his recent visit to the Mentor Headlands on Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio. This is the second of the two. -- Jer