Thank You, Dr. Estes

The Guerrilla Painter and I watch the news, sometimes more than I'd prefer. Of course, it's good to know what's going on, but lately things just seem to keep going over the top. It was good to be reminded recently of these words of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes:

"One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair — thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.

I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate."

This is from her essay Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times, which was written shortly after 9/11.

Paintings: Jim Biggers and Mary B. White

We're finally getting around to hanging ten of Jim Biggers' landscape paintings here in the show-room. They make an impressive grouping since they average 20" each (plus the frame). We don't know if they are plein air or not. They depict various locations on Phantom Canyon Ranch, some from high vantage points and others down in the canyon. They were done in 1984.

In addition, there are three large plein air acrylic paintings by .Mary B. White, who is an old friend and former schoolmate of the Guerrilla Painter.

Come and see them Monday-Friday at 3121 Kintzley Court, LaPorte, Colorado, 9-4:30 Mountain Time. We are at the south end of the west building

Bob Dylan, Plein Air Painter

This website has the 2010 edition of Bob Dylan's Drawn Blank paintings, and it seems like they (at least the drawings) were done outdoors. Some of the earlier collections (2008-9) also included outdoor scenes. He's been drawing, sketching and painting since the 70s, as a practice to "relax and refocus a restless mind".

“The first exhibition I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was of Gauguin paintings and I found I could stand in front of any one of them for as long as I'd sit at the movies, yet not get tired on my feet. I'd lose all sense of time. It was an intriguing thing.”

Re-view

As I was driving out to the county road a few days ago, I went over the cattle guard and drove past a shrub rose I had planted several years ago. It was in bloom, and I'd been enjoying seeing it there for more than a week. As I drove by, I was wondering if it would be worth a closer look or not. Maybe the blooms were starting to fade and fall off, maybe there wasn't much there to see.

Sometimes you think you know what your surroundings look like, so there's no point in looking again...

I decided to give a half-hearted glance and was stunned to see a bright Western Tanager. Wow! I'd never seen one before (except on the cover of my Western Birds book), so it completely took my breath away.

It reminded me of the time we'd been watching for the mountain lion. One night, the dog had been barking, but every time I checked on the lambs, they seemed unconcerned. Finally we went to bed. The dog barked again, and I thought, "Oh, well, might as well check on them one more time, I guess..." That's when we saw him attacking a lamb and were able to shoot him.

I guess you never really know unless you keep looking.

Eugene Boudin on NPR

What a fun story on NPR this morning about Eugene Boudin (1824-1898). He began life as a sailor and is famous for his beach and harbor scenes, full of light and scudding clouds. One of the earliest Impressionist painters, he taught Monet to paint outdoors.

Cholla, the Painting Horse

It's not easy if you have hooves instead of hands. I guess he enjoys the challenge...

Here is his website. He is a Quarter Horse/Mustang who lives in New Mexico. In 2004, after he watched his owner paint the corral fence, she offered him a paintbrush and he's been painting ever since.

Alexander King and Doc Reser

One of the many things I love about the Guerrilla Painter is that he has miles of old books lined up on shelves everywhere. In one of them that came to our attention recently, there is a description of a plein air painter that really made an impression on me.

The book, written by Alexander King and published in 1963, is entitled Is There Life After Birth?

King lived from 1900-1965 and was an illustrator, painter, art editor (for Vanity Fair and Life magazines) and raconteur.

In the last chapter of this book, he recalls the summer he spent living in Haiti in the mid-thirties, in a large house in a mountain village not far from Port au Prince. He ponders whether any of the people he had come to know there, while obviously living comfortably, were truly happy. He eventually decided that there were a few who were. One of them was Doc Reser, originally a member of the United States occupation forces who had stayed on to become chief supervisor of the native insane asylum. His sense of fulfillment came from befriending his staff and patients, who were on the bottom rung of status-conscious Haitian society. He did what he could for them, and he knew it made a big difference in their lives.

"When I first caught sight of him he had just discovered the pleasures of painting. Since he had no art materials of any kind, he used to distill his colors out of flowers and roots, and his first brush had been contrived out of a swatch of his own hair, which he had fastened onto a kitchen match.

"There was a totally leafless tree out in the back yard of the asylum, and, as if by common agreement, the skinny, permanently molting chickens in the whole dreary neighborhood used to come to roost in it. It was a truly weird sight to see all that bankrupt poultry covering every branch and twig of that dead cottonwood tree, and the day I happened to drop by, Doc was sitting just a little distance away, doing a painting of this apocalyptic manifestation.

"As I watched him I could see almost tangible emanations of pure joy radiating from his pink countenance, which was puckered into folds of amiable concentration. His huge, freckled hand held his tiny brush in creative hesitancy above the piece of cardboard he had propped up against a convenient stone, and as I looked at him I was convinced that Adam, on that first day, in that first garden, could have known no greater happiness than this."