The Artist

Show news!

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I just received notice that my painting “Thompson’s Gazelle” has been accepted for “Art and the Animal Kingdom XIII” at the Bennington Center for the Arts. This is the third year in a row that I have gotten into this show, plus twice into their “American Artists Abroad” exhibition. John Seerey-Lester, who I have studied with a number of times over the past ten years and who knows African wildlife very well, to say the least, was the guest juror, so that makes this one quite special. You can see the painting on my Feb. 26 post.

ART TALK

So, here’s one example of the kind of reference I got at the San Francisco Zoo this past weekend. Just about filled a 1Gb memory card with the antics of these two sisters, who were orphaned up in Montana and have found a home in San Francisco. They played up a storm in the water for about ten minutes. I wasn’t sure what would happen shooting through the thick glass, but other than a slight cool cast, they’re not bad. Upon review, as expected, no one of the photos I took is quite what I’m envisioning, but parts of them are excellent.

The gorillas were very active, as were the penguins. Got some kangaroos in mid-hop. Big cats pretty much flaked out. It was amazing to look at the enclosure walls closest to the public and realize that Tatiana, the Siberian tiger, was able to go straight up and over one. Now there’s more concrete wall, glass and heavy cyclone fencing secured with cables. Signs everywhere with shushing lips and others with the prohibition about teasing or harassing the animals and a phone number to call to report any such activity. Quite a few times, I heard parents quieting down their children. In general, it seemed quieter and more polite even on a busy weekend, which made the zoo a pleasanter place to be, really. Nicer for the animals too.

On the Road again and Calf Update

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It looks like all’s well that ends well this time. He is one lucky little calf.

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Times-Standard 03/29/2008, Page A08
 Norman's owner comes forward

 Donna Tam

 THE
 TIMES- STANDARD

  The story of Norman the calf is on its way to a happy ending.
   Norman's owner came forward yesterday and was more than happy to
sign the calf over to the county, ensuring the calf 's eligibility
to be adopted, said Animal Control Officer Jim Norton.
   The little male dairy calf changed his fate when he got out of the
back of truck on its way to the auction, and was found on Highway 101
on Wednesday.
   "Usually when they have a dayold  bull calf, they ship him off to
meat factory,  said Norton, who
 has experience raising cattle. Male calves are not valuable to dairy
ranchers unless the rancher needs a replacement for a bull, because
they don't produce milk, Norton said.
   Since the owner's trailer was broken, Norman was being
transported  in a vehicle that wasn't set up for transporting
livestock.
   " It happens,  Norton said. " That doesn't always work, some
things like to jump.
   Norton said livestock officers will be visiting potential homes
this week to make sure Norman's new owners have the resources

The story continues on the back page, but this is the gist of it.

I’ll be driving down to San Francisco tomorrow for the Grand National Rodeo and Horse Show. I was invited to participate in the art show and shipped five paintings of Mongolian horse subjects down to the Cow Palace last week. Looking forward to seeing the show, meeting some of the other artists and carrying my conservati0n message to a new audience. I’m looking forward to American horse people’s reaction to images of Mongolian horses, both wild and domestic. I’ll also do some sketching at the zoo and hook up with nature art colleague, Andrew Denman for that on Saturday morning. Then Andrew will be my guest for the big opening reception and award ceremony at the art show. We can then wander around and check out the scene. There are supposed to be Tennessee Walking Horses, which I’ve never see live before.

The Elk, part two

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ANIMAL STUFF

Went over to the shelter for my usual Wednesday afternoon gig yesterday. Almost didn’t go because I was feeling kind of tired. But working with the animals and getting out on my feet usually energizes me, so off I went.

And was dragooned by a kennel attendant about 10 seconds after I walked in to “help with an animal”. Dog or cat, I asked. Neither, she said. Hummm, I thought. We entered a small outdoor enclosure and there lying on the floor covered up with towels was a jersey bull calf, who had been brought in two hours earlier. He was a newborn, so new that his umbilical cord was still wet when he arrived. He was also pretty scrapped up. They don’t know yet if he was dumped (being a male of a dairy cow breed means you are of very limited use) or fell off a truck, but they needed to get some food in him immediately. So Kathy held the calf, I held the bottle of colostrum and with some sweet talk and stroking, I got him to start sucking at the nipple. Now, mind you, the only reason I ever wanted to go to the fair as a kid was to see the animals, but I’ve hardly ever even petted a cow and here I was getting to help save this (not-so-little) guy’s life. Deep satisfaction doesn’t begin to describe how I felt.

One of the animal control officers has extensive experience with cattle, both dairy and beef and also lives near the shelter, so he has volunteered to take care of him and make sure he eats. The calf also made the front page of the local newspaper this morning. I’ll post updates as I find out more and a photo if I can get one.

ART TALK

So, back to the *#@*!^ elk. Upon further review, something was seriously not right and I spent most of Tuesday and part of Wednesday fixing it. The drawing of the head was out a mile and the neck was too short, plus a few minor, quickly fixed problems with the hind end. I’ve now repainted the head, oh, I don’t know, six or so times. One of the challenges when faced with something like this is to do what needs to be done and still end up with something that doesn’t look labored.

Over at Julie Chapman’s blog, there is a comment thread discussing a common phenomena in art in which the artists who are competent professionals agonize and tear their hair out and artists who aren’t very good always seem to be pleased with what they’ve done, oblivious to the problems in their work and impervious to any criticism. I’m definitely in the “agonize” column. Just ask my husband.

One theory I have is that, as according to Buddhism, people don’t like to be uncomfortable. They move toward pleasurable things and cling to them and away from unpleasant or uncomfortable things. It’s hard to just be with whatever is going on without getting caught up in it one way or another. Really seriously creating art that is good, whatever the media, means living with frustration, mental exhaustion and doubt, none of which is particularly comfortable. Any dedicated artist reading this knows what it feels like when you’ve busted your butt all day and finally your mind just hits the wall and slides down to the floor. Then you know it’s quittin’ time.

But all that can be avoided if one takes the position that everything is fine, just fine. And, if you don’t get into juried shows or organizations, hey, it’s all subjective and they don’t know what they are talking about anyway. Letting go of that means that you have to take responsibility for your art and its shortcomings and, to improve, you have to be willing to do what it takes. And that’s one big thing that separates the amateurs from the professionals. You do what it takes to get it right. No excuses or rationalizations.

I remember when I made the conscious decision to pursue oil painting (and drop illustration, graphic design, etc.) and see just how good I could get. I realized that I had to face the possibility that I would give it everything I had and that, in the end, through an inability to exercise correct choices or judgement, that I would only ever be a mediocre painter. That thought made me sick inside. But I couldn’t turn away, so I accepted the challenge. None of this has ever come easily to me, so one thing I know how to do is hang in there and struggle through. Which brings us back to that bloody elk, part two-

cow-elk2.jpg

There’s still LOTS to do. The modeling of the head needs work to describe the structure. I’ll probably do a pencil drawing to work it out better, so I can lay the paint in with confidence.

And, here’s one of my newest finished paintings, called “Mutual Curiosity”. When I was at Ikh Nartiin Chuluu, I spent two days out in the reserve walking around alone with a GPS, looking for argali so I could do behavioral observations. The trick was that I had to find them, without them seeing me, in order to do the observations. It wasn’t easy. This big old ram spotted me pretty quickly, but he let me follow him around for about twenty minutes. He was very thin, but had a huge, heavy horns. I filled him out a little. It was spring, so he had made it through the winter of 2005. I wondered as I did the painting if he made to 2007.

mutual-curiousity.jpg

I also wanted to show the amazing environment that the argali of Ikh Nart live in. I compressed the scene a little from the photograph, but all those weird formations are within yards of each other.

Latest news!

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I have been a member of Artists for Conservation (formerly The Worldwide Nature Artists Group) for quite a few years now. Two years ago, they instituted a recognition program called “The Conservation Artist Award”. One artist a month is chosen, which qualifies one for the Simon Combes Award at the end of the year. And (drum roll!) I’ve been chosen as the artist for March! Go to http://www.natureartists.com and you’ll see a box on the right hand side with my picture. It’s really an honor since the organization is now approaching 500 members.

Also, today I got my acceptance letter for the Marin Art Festival, so I’ll be at The Civic Center Lagoon, Mill Valley, June 14-15. I’m really excited to have gotten in on my first try. I’ll be publishing my full festival and show schedule as soon as all the info rolls in.

ART TALK

I recently had the privilege of doing a portrait of Cosimo, a Holsteiner imported from Germany for Grand Prix jumping events. He had some leg and foot problems, as it turned out, but with time and care it looks like he is back on track. His owner said that she would probably only really be seeing him in the arena, so she wanted a painting of him relaxing during his “down” time. Knowing that she grew up on a ranch in Ventura county, I couldn’t resist letting inspiration from the early California landscape painters take over. For Cosimo himself, I spent 90 minutes sketching and photographing him in an exercise paddock last spring.

cosimo.jpg

The interesting parts of painting Cosimo were the getting the shape around his eye right, since it really gave him a distinctive expression, and the top of his shoulders (withers, I guess, to be technically accurate), which were huge in comparison to other horses I have seen. I’ve never done a horse portrait before and spent a lot of time doing preliminary drawings and even a small study in oil to make sure that I captured an accurate likeness of a head that, in the finished painting, is less than 2″ long. I enjoyed getting that glossy sheen on his coat, too.

He isn’t what I would consider a pretty or beautiful horse, like an arabian, but even during the short time I had with him, I got a sense of a horse with quiet dignity and strength of mind. Not someone you’d joke around with. He apparently has a solid competitive drive too, which he’ll need.

The background elements include an oak tree, a sycamore, California poppies and a sprinkling of lupine, which are all plants the client grew up with. The quail were added for fun and to provide a narrative element.

The original is a 16″x20″ oil on canvas on board. My client is very pleased, which, of course, makes me very happy!

Hot off the easel

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I usually have 4-6 paintings going at any one time for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s attention span (short), sometimes I’ve gone as far as I can for the day, sometimes I’m stuck and sometimes I just feel like starting something new. One thing I have found is when I’m interested in painting a species I haven’t done before is that I like to do a head study first to start to learn what the animal looks like. So that was the rather mundane motivation for this painting of a young Thompson’s gazelle that I photographed in Kenya. The horns were the most challenging part because I don’t like to dink and dork around with tight rendering but I had to understand the structure well enough to lay in shapes in the right hue and value so that it is drawn correctly.

I often start with a charcoal or carbon pencil drawing on bristol before I do a painting or even just felt tip pen sketches in a sketchbook.

grants-gazelle.jpg

Yesterday was quite a weather day. I did my third rescue transport in the morning. Ten five week old puppies, a pit/Am. bulldog mix and a 5 mo. old border collie puppy over to Willow Creek, which is about 40 minutes east of here. It was really, really, really windy at the shelter and I have to admit I was wondering what it was going be like going over 2800+ ft. Barry Summit in a Volkswagen Eurovan. There is one short stretch where the road is out in the open on the west side of the mountain, totally exposed. I was to meet up with two guys who live in Willow Creek who were going to take all the dogs on to Redding. The transport coordinator and I decided that if I couldn’t get over the mountain safely and didn’t show up by 10 am, that the men would drive west (in their nice solid Escalade) and look for me down in the valley. As it happened, it was pretty breezy at the summit, but no problem. As soon as I was on the other side though, I was in driving rain. Made the hand-off, went back over the hill, did some grocery shopping at the coop in Arcata and was home by noon. Within an hour all hell broke loose weather-wise. Howling wind, horizontal rain for the rest of the day. Lit a fire in the fireplace, kicked back and in the evening watched Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova win the Best Song Oscar for “Falling Slowly” from the movie “Once”, one of my all-time favorites. Check it out!

Aperture and a Few Favorite Photos

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In between trying to get a number of paintings done, I’ve spent one full day of each of the last two weekends importing my images into Aperture, the digital photo manager that I had pre-installed on the iMac. I think I’m almost halfway there. All of Kenya 2004, Mongolia 2005 and 2006, two trips to Wyoming and one to Montana are in, plus some personal stuff and photos of paintings. The two trips to Mongolia come to 5,792 total. Kenya 2004, the art workshop safari with Simon Combes and nine other artists, totals 5,116. Wyoming, which includes Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, the areas around Jackson and Dubois totals 3,824. Can you imagine how much paper and ink it would have needed if those had been prints? Or plastic, paper and ink if they were slides? And how much shelf space I’d need. So far, it’s all on the iMac’s hard drive, which will be backed up to our Buffalo Terastations.

Digital is by far the most environmentally friendly way to acquire and store images and music. I’m ready for movie downloads to our tv anytime now.

elephant-and-vehicle.jpg Samburu 2004

Aperture’s image organization system is based on projects, albums and folders. Half the battle was understanding how I would want to find things well enough to set up the essential system before I started importing. I finally went with projects based on location. Images can only be in one project, but can be in multiple albums. So, I’ve done the initial imports into country projects that have specific location albums in them. Therefore, the Mongolia project has albums for Hustai National Park 2005, Hustai National Park, 2006, Khomiin Tal 2006 and so on. I had realized when I was still working with IMatch on the PC that I needed to be able to not only go to a specific location, but also when I’d been there, so this time every location name also includes the year. The next step will be to copy all the animals into specific species albums, along with various landscape features like rocks and trees, time of day like sunsets, and weather features like clouds. Everything will be batch keyworded and have appropriate metadata added. Maybe by the end of baseball season.

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Marmot at National Museum of Wildlife Art (He’s real.)

I bought an after-market book on Aperture with a DVD tutorial that I’m working my way through. I got a handle on importing and dove in because my images look so completely stunning on the glossy 24″ iMac monitor that I needed to start working from it immediately. I’ve been cruising through a bunch of my photos this afternoon, especially all my argali reference from Mongolia, and I can honestly say that for the first time I can really see what my 6mb Nikon D70’s can do. Wow.

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Local herder and I at Ikh Nartiin Chuluu Nature Reserve, Mongolia

My paintings are going to take a big step forward. John Banovich, who I was fortunate enough to have a workshop with, told us that “you are only as good as your reference”. That is so, so true. I can’t even believe that I ever thought that 4×6 or even 5×7 prints would give me a good result. I now have the equivalent of huge transparencies that I can work from in daylight.

Hope to post some new paintings by late next week. Heading down to San Francisco for the weekend and taking along a blue heeler from the shelter who needs to go to rescue. Next entry I’ll tell the story of my first transport two weeks ago. Super short version-four dogs, ten hours driving.

The Big Conversion (Gulp)

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Well, I’m finally doing it. After using IBM-based PCs for almost 15 years, I got a spiffy new iMac with the 24″ monitor a couple of weeks ago. It was a no-brainer once I decided that there was nothing to do but suck it up and re-catalog my 8,000+ images. All my music CDs are done- over 400 of those. Eight football games and a few week night hours of The Weather Channel and Animal Planet later.

I’d been toying with the thought of doing this for awhile, but the clincher was when my husband, who has over 40 years experience with computers, stated that he was “scared” of working with my PC-based image management software, IMatch. That got my attention. It turns out that while the program does what I need quite nicely, it’s a nightmare under the hood for a variety of reasons I won’t bore you with since I have a tenuous grasp on the technical problems myself.

First impressions? I feel like I just traded in a Model T Ford for a 2008 Ferrari. Microsoft should be afraid, very afraid.

I’ll be re-cataloging my images using the Apple product Aperture. I had it pre-installed and, after the machine had arrived, learned of the existence of Lightroom, the Adobe product. Aperture seems to put more emphasis on organizing images anyway, which is what I really need it for. I can use Photoshop (upgrade time) for tweaking.

Needless to say, I can hardly wait to start painting and drawing from the phenomenal glossy iMac monitor. It’s as much more luminous than the Planar flat screen I’ve been using as the Planar is from the prints I used to use.

In the interests of simplicity and consistency, I was planning to replace my beloved IBM X31 with a MacBook Pro. But wait, Steve Jobs just announced the Air ultra thin notebook. Whew, that was close. Glad I didn’t have the money right away. Clearly, in the Apple world, it’s crazy to buy anything significant after about October in any given year.

In other news, I got an email a few weeks ago from someone in Germany who had been on my website and saw the photos of Mongolian herder’s dogs I have there. Berit Kaier is a member of a non-profit dedicated to the preservation of these dogs, called Tibetan mastiffs, and is putting together a brochure about the dogs. She was hoping that I would give them permission to use some of my images. Of course I said “yes”. Here is what I sent her-
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Photographed from train, spring 2005

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Western Mongolia, fall 2006


Mongol Dog Gobi

Gobi Desert, fall 2006


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Near Hustai National Park, spring 2005; the basket is for gathering dung to use as fuel

The dogs have a reputation for being “protective”. In fact, the traditional greeting when approaching a ger (Mongolian for “yurt”) is “Hold the dogs!”. The only aggressive one I’ve encountered so far was the mother of the puppies, above, and the woman did have to hold her while we went into the ger. Otherwise, they’ve kept an eye on us or even seemed friendly. Since I hadn’t had a rabies vaccine, I had to resist any temptation to pet them, just in case.

The purebred version is threatened by inbreeding with other types of dogs that have been introduced into Mongolia, like the German Shepherds the Russians abandoned when they left Mongolia in 1991. I saw what looked like purebred shepherds living the feral life around Ulaanbaatar and I have seen quite a few dogs that obviously have shepherd in them- prick ears and the black saddle.

The herder’s dogs stay near the ger and, I have the impression, get scraps when an animal is slaughtered or they fend for themselves. In the reserve where I did the Mongolian Argali Earthwatch project, the researchers were surprised and somewhat dismayed to find that one of the major causes of argali mortality was predation by the mastiff dogs.The next trip to Mongolia is planned for September of this year. Along with everything else I want to see, I hope to find out more about the dogs and get a lot more photos of them. I think that they would make interesting subjects.