Mighty Vole Hunts Ubiquitous Cactus Fruit

What a mouthful this title is! Just for fun, I thought I'd paint from my imagination and see what developed. This one is painted on a Dick Blick Artist's Board, 16" x 20," with Winsor & Newton Artisan (water miscible) paints.

I've been absolutely enamored of prickly pear fruit this summer and have spent days boiling and processing the fruits we collected last month. We drove out to the desert northwest of Tucson and collected four large buckets full of the tunas. We tapped our buckets with large tongs to alert any rattlesnakes, and we kept our eyes to the ground for scurrying scorpions. I can't tell you how fun it was...truly. I felt a connection to the earth as we harvested a little bit of its bounty.

So, I guess I'm the little desert vole seeking fruit that will last through the winter.

Painting Texas Canyon, Arizona Rest Stop

My approach this last week was to try for some more layering and scraping, but after slathering on paint in a most haphazard, cavalier way, I decided to stop here and take a rest. 

When we traveled to New Mexico this summer, we stopped at one of the last Arizona rest stops before the long haul to Lordsburg, NM, called Texas Canyon. Sorry, I can't for the life of me tell you why it's named Texas Canyon. This is oil on artist's board, 12" x 12." 

More water damage at home,. This time it happened to our adobe walls. It's so much fun seeing the studios, homes and nature at other artists' blogs, that I thought you might enjoy seeing my environment. The following shows our home back in the early 1970s (called Home Sweet Home) before all of the additions, and the next photo is the same view today. The small window in today's photo corresponds to the window in the 1970s house. The edge of my studio (the red wall) is on the left. Over the years, soil and dips in the soil have built up around the perimeter. Water has begun to puddle along the other side of this little adobe. As I walked to the kitchen the other day, I saw a chunk of plaster on the floor and a small mound of sand flow out like sand in an hour glass. Yikes. You can see a close up showing the adobe bricks behind the old lime plaster. Now we'll have to work on patching this with the retrieved dirt, sand and some cactus pad juice for glue. What's with all of this water lately?! We had a major monsoon storm yesterday and we were outside with shovels re-directing water away from the house while it was pouring. Kinda fun!

A Scrape, A Spritz and a Happy Result

Working today on an artists' board (from Dick Blick art materials), I again (!) failed to check the back of the panel for the built in hang hole. Yikes. Of course, I had a nagging thought two hours after I had painted the image. That old axiom about the preciousness of one's work reminded me that it was okay to scrape off the paint and begin again. As I did so, I enjoyed the process half way through and documented how this looks. This view shows the hill scraped away and the sky still in place. Then, I spritzed the painting with a spray bottle of water (I use water miscible oils) and loved that effect, too. Didn't take a photo of it, but I will be experimenting with this in the future and I'll share anything I learn. Here is the result, after I flipped the panel and re-painted the image with palette knife and brush. This is a 9" x 12," artists' panel (Pink Sky New Mexico). Wish these panels were a bit more affordable because they are really wonderful to work on.