These are horrific images, but people need to see them. We must get off our dependence to oil or it will ultimately kill us and the planet. For a preview, here’s what it’s doing to the birds of the Gulf Coast-
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/caught_in_the_oil.html
I was at Ikh Nartiin Chuluu Nature Reserve in Sept. of 2008. While sitting outside my ger, a small herd of local horses came wandering by. It was early evening and some of them were feeling frisky, like this stallion. I loved the quality of light on his reddish coat. The background shows some of the fantastic rock formations at Ikh Nart, which provide habitat for argali sheep and Siberian ibex.
Here’s the step and step creation of this painting:
In the United States today, it is Memorial Day, when we honor those who have died defending our country. There will be ceremonies, services and gatherings all over America in commemoration.
I read recently that the Mongolian army has, for a number of years, held military exercises and served as UN Peacekeepers alongside American soldiers. I hope that the relationship has been beneficial for both. One article, with some great photos, described how the Mongolian contingent in one country invited the Americans to celebrate Naadam with them. It was pretty obvious that a good time was had by all.
So I would like to extend my thoughts not only to the Americans soldiers that we remember today, but also the Mongolians who have given their lives for their country, with wishes for peace and strong friendship between our countries for many years to come.
I thought that I would start to share some of what I’ve learned over 13 years of painting in oil and almost seven years of picture-making as an illustrator through a new on-going series, Improve Your Paintings!. We’ll start today with…
USE A MIRROR
There really isn’t a better or faster way to check your drawing or composition for accuracy. Almost any decent mirror will work. I happened to have an old full-length mirror that I found for $15 at a yard sale many years ago. I mounted it onto my old easel, which lets me roll it to different positions and also out of the way.
A mirror is particularly useful when you have to get two sides of something that are similar to match up and need an “extra eye” to evaluate it. Do those butterfly wings match? Are the eyes of that wolf lined up properly?
It is also very valuable for checking the overall drawing. Do all the parts fit together accurately in that 3/4 view of the mountain lion’s head? Have you compensated correctly for the foreshortening and flattening effect in an image of a bighorn sheep, also in a 3/4 view? Is the body of that horse too big for the head or vice versa? In the example below, I’ve used my mirror to get a fresh look at the relative value pattern between the horses in the foreground and the background landscape.
Do you use a mirror? If so, what do you find it most useful for?
(And yes, you’re getting a sneak preview of my newest painting, “Mongol Horse #5-Afternoon Romp”. It’s almost done and I’ll post it next Friday)
Coming up soon! North Coast Open Studios. I’ll be doing Weekend 2, June 12-13.
Mongolia gets very little rain and most of what does fall comes in the summer. After the brutal winter zud (a drought year followed by an extremely cold winter with heavy snowfall) that hammered the country these past months, a year of good rainfall would be a blessing, indeed.
Being a herding culture, the Mongols have always depended on rain to grow the grass they need for their animals. The rainy season is short, so I suspect that as wonderful as a Mongolian summer is, it’s also a time for some anxiety.
In 2008, rain came late, at the end of August. My husband and I were at Ikh Nartiin Chuluu Nature Reserve. We arrived on a beautiful evening. It started to rain at around 3am and didn’t stop for 18 hours (we counted). But we had perfect weather for the rest of the trip.
In 2009, on my Artists for Conservation Flag Expedition, it was definitely the rainy season, even though there wasn’t enough to break the drought.
Here’s a few of my favorite “boroo” photos. (Note: “Boroo” is pronounced more like “baurau”, with a rolled “r”.)
Rain has, so to speak, seeped into the culture to the point where it’s a leitmotif in many of the music videos I’ve watched and clearly has romantic connotations. Sometimes it seems like there has been an informal competition between groups and singers to see who can work the most rain into their video.
Here is one from Javhlan. Imagine this singer with an absolutely glorious voice, standing in the woods singing as the crew poured “rain” onto him. I’ll bet he only needed one take.
And, taking it even further, is A Capella’s “Boroo”. Hope it was a warm evening.
Finally, instead of a set-piece like the previous two, Guys 666, who normally seem to be hard rappers, did this video, also called “Boroo”, that tells a story, albeit not an entirely happy one.
Coming up soon is North Coast Open Studios the weekend of June 12-13 and, the following weekend, June 19-20, the Marin Art Festival. I’ll have framed paintings, prints and cards at both events, plus a variety of small, unframed affordable original oil paintings. I’ve been doing new ones in between working on larger paintings and it’s a nice way to take a break from the more complex pieces.
I generally do these in two sittings, plus maybe one more short one for final tweaking and try to keep them fairly loose and simple.
Coming up: a new on-going series on how to improve your paintings, based on all the mistakes and false starts I’ve made over the fifteen years I’ve been painting in oil. So it will be a looong series. ;0)
Today I thought I would share how I’m studying to learn Mongolian. I had two years of German in high school and before that, had had some private lessons in Japanese before a trip that my mom and I took with two other couples to Japan in 1968 when I was fourteen. That’s pretty much the extent of my foreign language experience. (Trying to teach myself Welsh was a non-starter and I don’t know that learning to read the Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English counts)
Before my second trip to Mongolia in 2006, I decided that I both wanted and needed to learn at least a little of the language since I was going to be traveling on my own for over three weeks with only Mongolian guides and drivers. The guides, at least, speak decent English, but I was going to be finding my way around Ulaanbaatar on my own part of the time.
I advertised in our local news/art/culture weekly for a Mongolian tutor (in rural Humboldt County, California?) and, guess what, I got a phone call within two days. Seems a woman from Mongolia, who had met and married an American guy who was there serving in the Peace Corps, was at a party with her husband and a number of people asked them if they had seen the ad.
It turns out that she had only been in this country for a couple of months, so her English was still very uncertain. He called me and we set up a meeting between her and I. It went well and we were able to get together about a half dozen times before I left. Even better, we’ve stayed in touch and become friends with them.
She drilled me in basic pronunciation, got me going with some basic vocabulary and taught me necessary phrases like “hello”, “thank you” and “I’m from California”. Her husband contributed a word to use if someone hassled me- “Yasambay!” (sic), which means “What are you doing?”, the idea being that the person would be so shocked at hearing Mongolian from a non-Mongol that he/she would immediately stop whatever they were doing. As it happens, I’ve had no occasion to say it so far.
That tutoring, plus a copy of the Lonely Planet phrase guide for Mongolian is what I had until last year.
After sitting mute, and depending on a translator, during my three days of meetings with the herder women in July of 2009, I decided that it was time to get serious. While I was in Ulaanbaatar I bought Mongolian-English and English-Mongolian dictionaries.
When I got home I started to comb the web for a language program and found one from Transparent Language. (None of the other major foreign language companies offer Mongolian as far as I can tell). It is based on word lists that are viewed on “cards”. Each word is in Mongolian Cyrillic and and a transliteration into the Latin alphabet. One can also listen to a male native Mongolian speaker and repeat back each word. It even lets you slow down the speaker so you can hear the word better. There are a variety of other activities like typing out the words and some simple games.
I had also bought a small stack of music CDs and rapidly realized that I could use them, too. The perfect two-fer, listen to cool pop and rock music and study Mongolian at the same time.
But I was still struggling to get anywhere. As it turns out, my husband had to learn Russian when he joined the Air Force (and if I say any more, I’ll have to kill you). He told me the first thing he and his classmates had to do was memorize the Russian alphabet overnight. He suggested that I back up and learn the Mongolian cyrillic alphabet. I managed that in a few evenings and suddenly it got a little easier.
I’d started to “collect” words, writing them on a pad of paper. That reached its limit of practicality pretty quickly. I bought a copy of Bento, the consumer-level database program for the Mac and created my own word list, which is divided into categories like English, Mongolian, part of speech and subject (animal, food, furniture, etc.). I can sort my list by any of them, which is very useful and why I bought a database. It will be on my laptop, which travels with me, but I’m also going to print it out in each category to have handy in the car or when I’m walking around.
Recently, a commenter on another post told me about Anki, a downloadable program that generates “cards” with whatever content one wants like, say, Mongolian words. This is the same model the Transparent Language package, Byki Deluxe, uses, but those are pre-set. I’ve downloaded Anki, which is free, but haven’t had time to mess with it.
Then a French Facebook friend (say that fast three times) told me about PowerWord, which includes Mongolian as one of their offerings. So, for $8.99, I now have a Mongolian language program on my iPhone, too. It is also based on word lists, like Byki, but so far I think I like the way it’s organized better. It also has a spoken component, this time with a female voice.
Of course, the best and fastest way to learn will be immersion in the language once I get to Mongolia. But I hope I’ve “primed the pump” for rapid progress with the study that I’m doing before departure.
Comments and corrections welcome!
The Society of Animal Artists, of which I am a Signature member, has recently started a blog. On it you will find news about the Society, workshop and event listings by the members and a calendar of Society events. Check it out and let me know what you think!
We also now have a fan page on Facebook. You don’t have to join Facebook to visit us. And I invite you to visit our new website, too! It has information about our organization, exhibitions and how to become a member of the premier animal art organization.
Why Did The Elk Cross The Road Dept.
We went for a drive last weekend to find a spot from which to watch the sun set. The clouds rolled in, so that was kind of a bust, but at the Stone Lagoon Schoolhouse campground, which is right off the highway, a large herd of Roosevelt elk were working their way through the almost-empty RV section. We circled around on the campground road and ended up perfectly positioned for me to get some nice elk reference.
This is about twenty minutes north of our house. There are often elk hanging around the campground, sometimes picturesquely situated in front of the old schoolhouse.
Oh, Honey, Look What The Cat Brought In Dept.
We think of it as semi-regular episodes of Animal Planet. This time, a very alive little shrew was left on an area rug in the living room where we couldn’t miss it. I picked it up in a paper towel and got a couple quick pics before turning it loose outside. Their metabolism runs really fast, so they can’t go long without food and don’t do well under stress.
It’s the last installment of my six part series. This week it’s going to be what I haven’t done yet. Of course, it’s an endless list, even for one country, because there’s always something new crossing one’s radar. But I wrote down the first six thoughts that came to mind and found that I do have a good list of things that I really do want to do or see and that are reasonably achievable.
Not having done them yet, I don’t have images. But I’ll share some which I took on previous trips that are related and also have inspired my list.
1. Gallop on a horse across the countryside– I am not a rider, but I’ve always wanted to do this (maybe it was all the western movies I watched as a kid). I looked into it once and the riding teacher I spoke with said six weeks of lessons at least to get to that point. Needless to say that didn’t happen. But in Mongolia…..I trust the horses and the horsemen, so maybe it’s possible. We’ll see.
2. Attend the Yak Festival– Now really, who could resist that? Not me, that’s for sure. My current understanding is that it was started by a dairy company and is held around the first weekend in August, which means I can probably go this year! According to the Wikipedia entry for “Yak Racing” the activities include “…yak racing and showing, wild stallion and yak rodeo riding, milking contests and other traditional Naadam events of horse racing, wrestling and archery.”
3. See Burkhan Khaldun– This is the sacred mountain where Chinggis Khan dedicated himself to Tenger, the Sky, went to pray and, on a few occasions, hide from enemies. It is still an important place in Mongol culture. I don’t know if non-Mongols are allowed or welcome onto the mountain, but I would like to see it.
4. Take a lesson in writing the ancient Mongol vertical script– Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I worked as a sign painter, graphic designer and calligrapher. I’ve always loved lettering and type. I spent a lot of time learning to letter with a sign painting quill (brush), along with pen and ink. “Oriental” brush lettering never particularly attracted me, however. Then I went to Mongolia and saw the vertical script, which Chinggis Khan adopted from the Uighar people because he realized that he couldn’t run his empire without a writing system. As you can see below, it’s still in use today, 800 years later. And it’s stunningly beautiful.
5. See Tsam Dancing– Today it’s a Buddhist ritual of relatively recent (late 18th century) origin, but it has it’s roots in ancient shamanistic beliefs. Basically an exorcism ritual, it has a set “cast of characters”. The fantastic costumes and masks must be seen to be believed. Fortunately, many of them are on display at the Chojin Lama Museum in Ulaanbaatar. When I saw them the first time, I was captivated without having a clue about what they were for. To see them in use would be wonderful. For a fuller explanation, go here.
6. Hike in snow leopard habitat-Which is a lot more realistic than saying “see a wild snow leopard”. There are between 500 and 1000 snow leopards in Mongolia, according to the Snow Leopard Trust. Their habitat covers over 100,000 sq. km, so obviously the odds of seeing one are really slim to none. But one can get out into the mountains where they live.
Susan Fox, American Artist 