Showing posts with label Patagonia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patagonia. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Recipe for a Vicarious Desert Experience

The monsoon has taken a break here in Arizona. We're getting temperatures of 107 to 109 degrees (41.6 to 42.7 Celsius). It's brutally hot. For those of you unaccustomed to these extremes, I have a way for you to simulate the desert in the height of summer heat from the comfort of your own home:

Melinda's Tangy Summer Salsa
or Oh, Yeah, It's a Dry Heat Fajita

Preheat oven to 300 degrees (148.8 Celsius).
Wait ten minutes.
Open oven door.
Lean in, placing arms one third of the way into said oven, taking care not to touch any metal baking racks.
Hold still, with face at the edge of heat, and count to fifteen.
When you feel a kind of stinging/burning sensation on your arms and face...scream bloody hell and...
Remove pained limbs, and transformed countenance, and splash with cold water.
Dry with a soft towel.
Fix a soothing libation of your choice and,
Give thanks that you are in a cooler climate.

Patagonia Shadow (6" x 8") oil on art board.



Monday, June 15, 2009

Shook Up, Show Up, Make a Mark

So I'm sitting here on a Sunday afternoon, pleasantly and lazily enjoying the company of my family, listening to Tucson's community radio, KXCI, cogitating on the 36" x 36" canvas that is pale and hungry, begging for paint only twenty-two feet away in the studio, when I hear sounds next door, like someone's there. Sure, I freaked out because the woman who had been evicted had come back to forage for things...again. Why would I notice? This woman is a sociopath, the common, garden variety kind that stalked, threatened and tormented my family and me for the last eight years. Panic. What to do? This is the moment that I realize how art not only created the world, but also saves it (and, me), when things get a bit dicey. I was reminded of a really funny cartoon that Mr. Artyfice has on his office wall. Donning my artist's beret and my painterly smock that says "Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere," I leapt into the studio with a mighty purpose, mixing and sloshing paint like a maniac: First, a four inch brush to lay down a layer of blue; Then, a combination of swashbuckling palette knife action for the sky and the hill below; Ending with a gentler swish and a smear for clouds hugging land. Two hours later, we have two more clouds over Patagonia. I've included the small, 8" x 8" study previously posted. Whew! I could write a book about sociopaths...Oh, wait, someone already has: The Sociopath Next Door, by Martha Stout.