Along the Way
Movers and Shakers
A quick trip to the southerlies of California brought me to this vista in search of a similar but different scene I’d painted for a friend a few years earlier. Apparently after some flood damage their place needed extensive work done and movers were hired to take all the necessary belongings out and store them while the work was completed. Not everything made it back though, the painting was “lost” along the way. Good taste, shady movers… that’s all I have to say about that. That original painting was also one that I never got a really good photograph of, so it’s double hard to see it go like that. But that’s neither here nor there.
Well it is here, this is the spot I chose for the replacement painting of the one gone missing. It’s right in front of one of those Sotheby’s mczillionaire ocean front homes. A realtor was showing it while I painted. I wasn’t much in the mood to talk to them, though I sensed the group behind me chatting and watching while I ignored them and sang badly. After they’d left the realtor came back and interrupted me to chat with a bit more intention. Turns out the couple buying that house wanted the painting. Now my friend who I was doing this for wouldn’t have minded if I sold this one and painted another, but in my mind I’d been wrestling with this painting for Pancho, not for some yahoo investor couple that would just as likely call the police if I walked up to paint near their house in the future. I told the realtor it wasn’t for sale. It wasn’t.
Some might say I should have offered it at some inflated price because of, you know, oceanfront zillionaires and all, but I wouldn’t anyway. I ask what I ask because it is fair. Games are for kids. I love what I do too much to play chutes and ladders with my livelihood. That game was never any fun anyway.
Just Past the Ice Cream Truck
Right before heading down on this trip I started hearing about these epic poppy blooms and being a color junkie I ended up juggling my plans around to get to see this bloom in person.
I thought I’d meet up with my friend Wade Koniakowsky and go paint this place with him. Neither of us quite anticipated the madness of humanity here. Getting off the freeway to orange cones and sirens and traffic cops I knew this might be a little hectic. Deep breaths, and in moment of clarity I didn’t even try to park close, I just turned the other way and drove down the road until I was out of the madness and parked on the empty shoulder to wait for Wade.
But he was taking forever and I was impatient so I walked the mile up to the trailhead to check things out. I found two food trucks and an ice cream truck and mass confusion everywhere. The ice cream truck man seemed unhappy, which really bummed me out because ice cream is the opposite of unhappy. The mass confusion on the other hand seemed thrilled to be there.
I found a couple of other painters and chatted while waiting for Wade, who finally arrived and parked by my van, so I walked the mile back to meet him, let him borrow a pack to haul his paint gear and together we walked back under the freeway, past the traffic cops, into the mass confusion, past the ice cream truck and joined the procession of souls seeking the color orange.
Not too far in, and we found this bend in the trail and it seemed suitable to both of us, so we set up and basically chatted with strangers non stop for the next two hours while we painted.
All worth it. I don’t care how cynical and jaded we can get after seeing nonstop images of these blooms and hearing how overrun with people it can get. Sure, people can be a bummer, but I didn’t go here to see them, or even to get away from them. I came here for the color orange, in an intensity that nature rarely produces. Overwhelming. And wonderful. And never disappointing.
Headwinds
This is the last painting I recall painting along our local coastline before the summer road trip season kicked in. I had recently rebuilt my painting kit to be lighter and fit on a smaller pack with the ability to carry multiple freshly painted still-wet stretched canvases hands-free on a single outing. This was the maiden voyage for the new setup. It performed quite well and has since been trail-tested (and off-trail-tested) all over California, from the border fence at Tijuana, to the Smith river on the Oregon border- hiking through terrain that would a have been a nightmare with my old giant rig and no way to safely carry a wet canvas, let alone 4 at a time.
This coast is so beautiful here in Humboldt, I sometimes wonder why I bother to leave it at all and why don’t I just paint here all the time? It really boils down to a lifelong passion for exploring the California coast. After all, that’s what brought me here in the first place. I’ve never had more fun in my life than in these recent years taking the time to put myself out there in the fringe places and walking off into the mist and returning not just with paintings, but with experiences of new places and the joy of revisiting old favorites. Still though, when it’s time to leave here and hit the road it’s like plowing forward into a mighty headwind. You have to really want it. The easy path is to just stay and paint these vistas here and keep it easy and sleep in a real bed without wondering about a cop tapping on the window of the van in the middle of the night.
Dream CASA
Don’t Fight It
Morning Gems
Much like with many of my paintings, there are no humans visible in this piece. To be fair, that’s not much of a stretch here as sunrise on this part of the coast is often a cold and lonely affair. But just because humans aren’t visible, doesn’t mean they aren’t part of these paintings. For me the landscape itself is a very human story, and if you’ve actually read my musings over the years, you may have gathered that just under the surface, my artwork is really exploring, celebrating, and honoring our human connection to these places I paint. The scattered ashes of loved ones, the wedding vows still hanging on the silent air, the reckless abandon of youth, the adrenaline surges of lifethreatening miscalculations regarding the immense power of natural forces… all of these and more are intertwined in our reactions to places that we know. Each of us brings a different set of memories, a different set of connection points to each place I’ve painted.
This painting perhaps more than most celebrates the uniqueness of each of our lives more than any other I’ve done. It does this through metaphor, the gravel on the beach, each of these bodies of rock are different, each unique, each beautiful in its own way, each reminiscent of yet another miracle of life living in these bodies of flesh and bone that we call our own, crafted from the elements of earth itself.
And some, if you look closely, seem to glow with their own light. It’s only the light of the sun passing through them of course, but it is their rare gift of clarity that allows the light to fill them and flow through for all to see. We cherish them and hold them near to our hearts.
And we’ll never forget the morning we found them, nor the night we lost them.
Beyond the Shadow of Doubt
Sticks and Stones
I had painted this same scene a few months prior, but only focused on the rock stack and ignored the view of the sweeping beach as it arcs its way around this bend in the coast. In the middle of painting this one, a tricky situation arose. My nose just started bleeding randomly. Maybe a bit dehydrated? It happens every few years and always unexpectedly. I saw drops of blood on the palette and had to act fast and dig up a clean paint rag (an old cloth diaper, they are the best) from my pack and hold it to my nose. There’s a chance this painting contains my actual DNA now. Kinda weird. Sorry if it grosses anyone out. It’s just life. And a reminder that our bodies are made of flesh and blood. Fragile like an ecosystem. Eventually unstable like an eroded cliff. We all fall back to the sea, eventually. On this particular day, I did not fall back to the sea though, hopefully my time is a long way off. But it was an awkward way to paint- holding an old cloth diaper to my bleeding face, while sorting out the colors of sand and water, sticks and stones…
Dividing the Rest
A fine line
Divides the pursuit
Of overwhelming joy
From sheer
And loathsome
Irresponsibility
The high tide line
Divides
The rest
Consider us divided
And
Conquered
Even the Spaniards
On the tall ships
Know…
Both victory
And defeat
Taste better
With a dash of salt
And lime
Book of Etiquette
Who wrote this book of etiquette?
All of the pages are blank
As though the ink has spilled right off the paper
Leaving us to write our own rules with pencils
And skin
And burning eyes
After reading from cover to cover we are left
Just as we were before
Somewhat crude
And still rather unrefined
Our Good Fortune
Even though she was royalty
We continued to stare
At the lines
Around
Her blue eyes
And at the
Shape of her
Trembling
Lips
That encircled
Her delicate mouth
Meeting her was
Our good fortune
She showed us grace
And mercy
We did not
Earn
Little did we know then
Just how good
The Queen would be to us
Or just how difficult
Fortune can be
For those
Who have received it
The Mountains Never Forget
The hills are burning
And we breathe the smoke
Of their exhalation
Second hand exposure
To long forgotten memories
The mountains never forget
Bigger Than It Looks
Hovering over the water
Weightless over the face of the deep
The storm rides silently off to the hills
To darken the eyes of the cattle
And drown out the country music
The light that remains
Clear and unfiltered
Falling from above
Reveals an orchestra of liquid geometry
At once carnal
Yet also divine
Each note the offspring
Of a passing storm
With the laws of fluid dynamics
We’re drawn to the symphony
The melodies ring beyond the hall
To the cliffs high above
Calling us to a quick dip in the sea before dark
But once inside the concert hall
We’re swept away in a mass movement
Of salty sweat and black leather
Nearly drowning in the mosh pit
Bruised, bloody, and broken
From there we glimpse the orchestra more clearly
Four awkward teenagers
And a mountain of noise
Who allowed these kids to take the stage?
It is here that we learned this law of the sea-
It’s always bigger
Than it looks from above
When our Day Arrives
By day they theorize, philosophize, and lay their eyes
On this predicament
From old lawn chairs
Behind a makeshift barrier of plastic tape
By night they await the higher tide
Under the spotlight
Searching for answers
But generating none
Once a proud vessel
Named for nobility
Now on the rocks without the gin
Or perhaps because of it if the wind spoke truly
Each morning brings a new revelation
Coffee and binoculars the psychoactive agents
Of this daily vision quest
She is a solar eclipse
Her shining brightness now darkened
By the lesser light
Shucked like an oyster
Removed from her shell of open water
She now sits waiting for the ocean to swallow her hull
The heiress watches on
A mix of rage and longing
As she carves an homage of color
To the one she once knew
All the while they watched this maiden work
And no one said a word
It is no different with you or I
While our voyages may end differently
Still every voyage must end
And we can only hope there is
A daughter by our side
To mourn and remember us when our day arrives
MOURNING AND REMEMBRANCE
That poem is a true story. The boat that got stuck on the rocks here was still stuck on the day of a solar eclipse, and over a meal of oysters with an artist friend in the area, Colleen Gnos, I learned that the boat used to belong to her grandfather and was originally named after her brother. I told her I was thinking of painting it before they managed to get it out of there, and convinced her to come with me the next day and we stood on the bluff and painted while the captains came and went. I suppose I could have just written this plainly right off the bat, but the whole thing was too poetic to merely leave at that.
-Entry on August 24, 2017
Washed Away
We came to this mountain in search of gold
We’ll leave with pockets full of solitude
We speak to the wind
We are here now
Everything else is gone
The cars and houses
The monies and the media
The interconnected web of information that
Ties us all together
None of that can truly exist at all
We know because we’ve listened to the quiet
That raged so loud our ears bled
We know because we’ve stood on the edge
And peered over
And seen everything we ever held on to
Smashed against the rocks
And washed away
Only to be returned as the treasures of
Small children on the outgoing tide
Dream on, dreamer, but when you awake
You’ll find nothing here
And that will be all that you need
Our Father
Our father
Kept us moving
Even though
We stopped a bit too often
To read the signs
And ponder
Their meanings
When it was time to move on
We would often
Have to push with all of our might
Barefoot
On the rough pavement
Our father
Drove a Volkswagon
The Choir
Sunday morning.
Somewhere under a cathedral ceiling the choir is singing an old song.
Out here under the open sky the choir sings the oldest song.
Somewhere under a cathedral ceiling, a choir is singing a new song.
Out here under the open sky, the choir sings the newest song.
The angels sing softly on the wind, they roar like thunder on the water.
They’ve sung from the beginning.
Unceasing.
They’re still singing now.
They’ll sing until the end.
Maybe even longer.
I worship out here with color, because I usually sing out of key.
When I am finished, I will go sing badly in the cathedral.
I enjoy those songs too.
Or perhaps I won’t sing at all, but I may still hum along.
But one thing is certain- on this Sunday I will go at night
Because the morning
Is full of light.
She Will Not Be Moved
Out from her
Slumber
Eyes blinking
At the newly minted greens
Of a silver spring day
The forest is full
Of dollars
But she is hungry
For the fish
That used to swim
Up the river
Today
She will
Stand still on the old
Logging road
And even though
The whole earth shakes
On this day
She will not be moved
Rabbit Trails From the Sky
As the old roads evolved into flight paths
We considered the implications
Of exploring
Rabbit trails
From the sky
And determined
For all the expansive visions
That pass through an elevated state of mind
There are other paths that are still better
Traveled on foot
Where you can hear the
Crunch of gravel
And feel your blood move faster
With every uphill step
And be reminded
That nothing worthwhile comes easily
But for now
Just sit back and enjoy the views
We’ll be landing soon enough
And besides
Here comes the flight attendant
With snacks
Grandmother Rock
They sit motionless, watching passively, not engaged in the passage of time like you or I, yet not outside of it either. We travel the world searching for new experiences, new understandings of what it is to be alive. They watch us come and go and always return again to their steady gaze. Changed, yet somehow always the same.
They have no need for comings and goings, yet they do not mock us. They know better. They have seen enough to know that our days are short, and our nights long.
They’ve seen our births. They’ve seen our joys, our fears, our love, and our tears. They’ve seen us wed, and they’ve seen our blood shed by hate, by sorrow, by intoxication, by miscalculation. They’ve seen our recreation, our red tape, our revolutions. They’ve seen our wars, our battles, our nobles, our scoundrels. They’ve seen us die. They’ve seen our burials, our burning bodies, our ashes scattered amongst them.
This is their secret: knowing without any effort that if they wait a little longer they will see it all.
If you are still, and you can hear the silence between the rumbling oceans, you just might even hear them sing.
Each has a different voice- one loud, one soft, one strong, one deep, one high, one low, and one with the voice of our Grandmother.
Heaven and Waffles
We’ve spent long days here
North of the river
We’ve spent
Our last two dimes
On
Heaven
And waffles
And a good night’s sleep
Sheltered
From the falling snow
Until the storm blew over
And now we ourselves
Are spent
Worn out
Like the two
Ragged
Dog blankets
In the back of the van
One more look at the ocean
Before we head home
And two things
Become clear
We’re not going home tonight
And
We’re gonna smell like dog
In the morning
Solid Gold
They took one last look at the river
And longed for another time
Saddened by the parade of motorhomes and meth
Stretching from the ends of the earth to right here and right now
They refused to join the neon funeral procession
They took their stand
And to this day they remain
Still
And beautiful
And made of solid gold
All That Still Remains
Cerebral flapjacks cooking on the whiskey bar
Artificial roller coaster couldn’t beat the bumper car
Creepers in the bushes, don’t look now
It ain’t no good
Sanitize it, light the wick
Then give ‘em all your food
Paint the cave and take a bath
But what about the money?
Stick parade, children laugh, hiding from the sun
Drink the water, drink the brine
Eat the fish and honey
Leave a tip and exit quick
As soon as all the eatin’s done
Sun and wind, electric eels, out drying on a line
The pizza burned the house down
And blamed it on the wine
Our feet are wet with old concrete
The Romans laid to last through time
We checked the clock, the time ran out
They said they didn’t mind
How about the ancient ones
Still soaking in the past?
The love they made, the things they said
None of which would last
They wrote their names upon the walls
Like flowers through the cracks
They killed the sky, they drowned the moon
They wrote them loud and fast
Look around, make no sound
What is it we have gained?
This is it, there’s nothing more
This is all that still remains
Southern Vista
This was painted months before the somewhat recent fatal bluff collapse incident. You can see the warning on the beach here, that circle of boulders isn’t some hippy stonehenge setup, it’s the remainders of a previous collapse. The sand and soil has washed away, leaving just this ring as a reminder of the footprint these bluff collapses can leave. A sobering thought. But it’s a beautiful coast, and this southern view from one of the stairway’s landings was a joy to settle in with for an afternoon.
But the best part of this one for me (and also having nothing at all to do with the painting or the place), was unlike most of my trips to SD area, my wife came along for the ride, so instead of finishing this and scrounging some dry bread and salami and warm beer from the back of the van after finishing this painting, I got to kiss her beautiful sweaty face after her long jog on the beach while I painted. The multi-million dollar homes on the coast here are nice and grand, but it’s the simple things that truly make a man rich.