High Tea

Malaysia was such a surprise. We crossed from Singapore via bus into a torrential downpour, as if the heavens had opened up, and then spent two days at the port city of Malacca. From there we journeyed north into the mountains to the Cameron Highlands. The high elevations were a welcome cool that we’d not experienced since reaching southeast Asia several weeks before. It felt like we’d been transported into a glorious hidden realm with lush, shadowy, deep forests and rolling tea fields as far as the eye could see. These are the vast tea plantations established by the English and taken over by the Malaysians. They look like endless meticulously manicured gardens that create patterns across the landscape, providing a verdant palate for play of light and shadow. Dave took picture after picture, but still I think we failed to capture this resplendent sight. And if the visual wasn’t enough the tea was perhaps the best we’ve ever experienced.

Tea and scones and me

High Tea

Watercolor on paper

5.5″ X 4.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase

Heliconias

We lingered a long while in the Singapore Bontanic Garden. It’s hot and extremely humid there but I remember enjoying myself there more than a lot of our wanderings in the heat. There were places of shade, and it was such an oasis of wonder.

This image is of heliconias, one of my favorite exotic flowers, that grow hanging down and form pods in a charming symetrical chain. The intertwined large leaves of luscious green superimposed against lily pads from a small pond give them even more mystery.

Heliconias

Watercolor on paper

4.5″ X 5.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase

Lotus In Relief

My last two posts have been about things up on houses and their surrounding walls. Today I’m back on the ground and have been thinking of Singapore. Maybe it’s the dull darkness of today brought on by the rain storms that makes me dream of sun and heat that enveloped us in the island state of Singapore. Specifically, I remember the botanic gardens with its exotic plants, cool ponds, and meandering paths. We spent half a day there relaxing and exclaiming over the strange new plants we saw.

I felt like doing flowers or something from that experience today so I sought out the photos we’d taken. There among them was a fantastically colored close up of lotus flowers and their pads floating on one of the ponds. The water is an unbelievable purplish blue that causes the lily pads to stand out in stark relief. The white lotus is almost electric as a brilliant beacon among the saturated colors. I closed in even further on it from the original photo and to make it more dominant and the composition simpler. The colors are the thing, and I’m happy to remember Singapore that way.

Lotus In Relief

Watercolor on paper

5.5″ X 4.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase

Living Gargoyles

Everyone in San Miguel, and other villages in Mexico as well, seems to have roof dogs. Most houses have flat roofs which serve as terraces and a place for clothes lines to dry your clothes. They also are a convenient place to keep your dogs that gets them outside and doesn’t require a fence. Some dogs just peer over the side and watch you as you walk by. Others bark and snarl and threaten to leap on your head. We’ve been intimidated by a few roof dogs in our explorations of San Miguel. For a while I carried dog biscuits to throw at them and other stray dogs we’d see around town. They tend to be less threatening if you feed them.

To me the roof dogs always seemed like living gargoyles, strange in their stance and perspective above you. Many of them I felt sad for because they seemed to long for attention. In any case, they came to be representative of a part of the culture where we lived, and I came to expect them.

The painting today is a pair of roof dogs that we saw in Granada, Spain, not San Miguel. Isn’t it strange that the Mexican motherland also has this tradition? Maybe it’s something about having flat roofs. These guys and a buddy of theirs I didn’t paint weren’t terribly intimidating. They looked like old pals and the sentries of their domain. So we felt more at home there in Granada with this familiar sight and Spanish floating through the air.

Living Gargoyles

Watercolor on paper

4.5″ X 5.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase

Wall Hen

As you can see, I’m not done with chickens yet. This one is a funny little girl Dave and I saw in a back yard on one of our walks in San Miguel when we were exploring the city early during our time there. She seemed to be patrolling the back fence of her owners’ property, or maybe she just wanted to see beyond her little walled in world.  From this pose she hopped onto the clothes line strung across at about the same height and became a tightrope walker. You may not be able to tell from the painting but she’s a special breed, though I don’t know what kind. She has a puffy little topknotch on her crown.

Birds in general are on my mind since I found this morning, with my studio window open, that I’m hearing them more clearly. A female cardinal got my attention with her clear ringing song as I read my morning email. She sounded like a bell to me, but when I looked out the window I saw her flitting among the sycamore branches. She’s more clear and different than I heard before.

Wall Hen

Watercolor on paper

5.5″ X 4.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase

Pecking

I had a keen interest in the roosters we saw in southeast Asia on our world trip. They were everywhere in Bali and Malaysia, and I loved their colors. The ones that particularly got my attention had iridescent blue green feathers with reddish accents like the one in my painting. I found them irresistible.

This is an older painting as I’m still getting back into my schedule. I’m preparing for a show here locally at the Mentor House Gallery to open October 9th so that and other things left unattended during my recent absences have been gaining my attention. Hopefully I’ll have a new painting tomorrow.

Pecking

Watercolor on paper

6.75″ X 5″

$50

Contact me for purchase

Wide Load

The title is appropriate since I’m back at painting daily after a long absence of about three weeks. I’m happy to report that all went well with my surgery and I’m thrilled to have new processors on both ears. They’re working very well, but lots of work on my part is ahead to get my brain recognizing words and sounds from my left ear as well as my right ear which was implanted originally in 2000. With a CI it’s more your brain than anything that does the work since the ear is bypssed altogether.

I chose this image and started the drawing before I left for Chicago weeks ago. It’s been sitting unfinished on my drafting table all this time waiting my return both physically and mentally. This is a scene from our village of Alcocer during harvest time. Corn is a staple of Mexico, not only for grinding corn into meal for tortillas but also for the fodder that the stalks provide for feed for the animals during the long dry season when food in the pastures is scarce. The local farmers, like this elderly gentleman, take their donkeys to the corn fields and load them to overflowing with harvested stalks to be stored in their paddock. I admire both of their patience as seen in their unhurried gate and body language.

Wide Load

Watercolor on paper

4.5″ X 5.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase

Fall Fodder

More images from Mexico, this time a familiar scene in the Fall going to Alcocer where our house is in Mexico. The 2.5 mile road starts at the bypass around San Miguel at the southeast corner of the city and gradually ascends to the village, curving through fields of grass and corn. It’s a typical cobblestone affair that you learn to drive about 30 miles per hour lest you jar your fillings loose. Speed tends to even out the bumpiness.  Around October the farmers, our neighbors, harvest the corn and then make piles of fodder from the cornstalks that will eventually become food for their livestock during the winter months. It’s not the cold and snow they put up this larder for, but rather the long dry season which is just beginning at that time and that will last until mid-June.

I love these stacks dotting the Fall fields. Just like Monet’s haystacks they reflect the waning light as the sun recedes in the west, making a wonderful canvas of changing color. It’s an old fashioned scene that we don’t see in the states. The cones of cornstalks are painstakingly gathered and shaped by hand, groups of people arriving in the fields early in the morning and working through the day each day until everything is gathered. Then in the days ahead the farmers will load their mules and wagons with enormous loads from the stacks to transport to their property in preparation for the coming months. It’s like stepping back in time to see the Fall harvest.

Fall Fodder

Watercolor on paper

4.5″ X 5.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase

Flowers On The Wall

Like yesterday, this is mostly a direct painting without a preliminary drawing. I did put in a few lines to designate the chimney as well as the general location of the flowers. But it was just that, a few lines, nothing to tell me where every petal or leaf was. I find that this approach works best for me when trying to do an array of flowers like this. You want the mind to fill in the blanks, giving the viewer just enough information to get the idea of the flowers you’re painting.

Bougainvilleas grown in wild abandon in San Miguel and all of Mexico for as far as I can tell. They are in great profusion during the rainy season, and I find their brilliance almost unimaginable against the bright blue sky. It truly is azur, no other word for it, and certainly not the kind of blue I ever see in the north. The light that makes these colors possible is indescribable.

Flower on the Wall

Watercolor on paper

4.5″ X 5.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase

Street Music

I sometimes like to paint directly without preliminary drawing. It forces me to work more quickly without thinking so much and to be looser in my technique. I always have to kind of steel myself for possible failure, but I’ve done some of these before so I’ve gotten more used to flying without a net. With a packed schedule today I didn’t have a lot of time for fussing and so when I chose my photo I decided I just needed to do it, be damned.

The result is today’s painting and a fair effort, if I do say so myself. The guy with the bass would have been nicer a bit to the right so that everything was in the picture, but that’s what happens when you go at it as I did today. You commit with the brush and deal with whatever comes. That meant that my bass player lost a bit of his instrument. The figures in the back are believable though I’m still working to improve that kind of figured work. Background people are really hard to do convincingly and at the same time look fluid and natural. Still workin’ on it.

The two guys in the foreground are street musicians in a little town not far from San Miguel. The one on the right has an accordian, though you really can’t see much of it. People freely play on the street for a little money, ride buses with their guitars to serenade the passengers, and then there’s the ever present mariachis. You come to expect a little background music with your day in Mexico.

Street Music

Watercolor on paper

5.5″ X 4.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase