back on the tuesday schedule. what a treat!
not much new this week. not that i can write about anyway, or not that would be interesting to write about. the inveterate gossip in me is always tempted to really go for it and do some serious dishing but then i think about it for two more seconds and realize that this really isn’t the venue. unfortunately.
i think this is why people start writing fiction.
we’re well past the last lingering heat of the summer and the first dustings of snow are starting to appear in the instagram stories of the local northwest-themed influencer accounts i follow on instagram. the final phase of a project at work has been hovering over my head for the past few weeks but by the end of the week, i’ll be finished with it and the horizon will open back up again. i’m wondering if i can get one more camping trip in before it gets too frigid. i’m wondering if it’s time to start looking for cross country skis.
the season is turning and it’s almost time to care about new and different things for a while. it’s almost time to decide what you want to set down.
let’s get into it.
1. painting
on half a whim i drove up the gorge a little ways this weekend to do a short little segment of a hike. the rest of it continues up to 2600 ish feet and ends at the top of a mountain, but there’s a very interesting waterfall about halfway along that’s a great place to stop and turn around.
as usual when i’m in the tall wet woods we have here in the pacific northwest, i was simultaneously thinking about all the damp layers of rich green all around me, and how difficult i’ve always found it to compose an interesting painting of something like that.
part of it is the complexity: there’s a lot going on, and when you’re in the woods it’s hard to decide what’s worth focusing on and what you can edit out without losing the magic. it’s so riotous in there, out there, that you can lose a sense of depth. the usual tricks of perspective, layering, and distance that i lean on so heavily when i’m painting mountains and valleys don’t really apply when putting together something so close and dense. have i said “dense” enough?
so this week i started from a couple reference photos i took and decided to use some hacks, some cheats, some shortcuts, and see how that turned out.
very basic composition layout. the plan was to rely more on tones and atmospheric effects than compositional elements but you do need some place to start.
laying in a tonal gradient. when you look at a picture, there’s really not much difference in contrast and tone throughout the photo, but that’s what i’m setting out to cheat around in this piece.
blocking in some highlights and the water. i am still not amazing at painting rock shapes outside of a very narrow band of shapes. maybe it would be fun to do a few pages of studies for next week.
knocking the greens down with some grays.
throwing some moss in. there’s a lot of moss. i put the moss all on one layer so i could adjust the tones and hues of just the moss without impacting anything below it.
when we move to the next image you’ll see a lot more detail and “figuring out” of the rock shapes. especially in the foreground. keep your eye open for that.
and of course, some foreground vegetation in which i really pushed the contrast between dark dark shadows and bright saturated leaves. the final image has a tonal wash over it as usual.
i think this is a medium success. it still ended up pretty riotous, with a similar level of visual complexity throughout maybe more of the piece than i wanted. but it sort of worked.
2. poem
“ghost poem” - fall 2021
one day, maybe
you’ll realize you’ve quietly spoken to everyone you care about
— everyone who’s left
and you’ve put things into the places where they can rest
for awhile
gathering some dust around their edges, and on their tops
you’ve signed all your letters and sealed up all your envelopes
and you’ve taken your last loaf of bread out of the oven
maybe on that day
you can fold up your quilts, slip your feet into your boots
and be out the door, into the woods
just in time to catch the sunrise
3. christmas feast
i’m still cooking less. i still don’t have a kitchen island. i’m still getting used to the best way to move around my new apartment, and i’m still working on rebalancing food experiments with this ongoing work project.
so i didn’t really try anything new this week.
instead, what i did was go onto google photos and search “food” in the search bar and scroll back through hundreds of photos of food until i arrived at a point in my personal history before i had started writing this little newsletter. just to see what was back there that might have been interesting. and here we are.
growing up we were mostly a presents on christmas day family. some people are presents on christmas eve, i think, although that seems strange. and of course some people are not involved in any kind of christmas festivities for one reason or another. christmas eve was usually some flavor of family time. for a lot of my childhood, we’d get reasonably dressed up and pile into the car and drive about ten minutes up the hill to a christmas eve party hosted by the parents of some friends of my parents, who generally took christmas a little more seriously than our little nuclear family did.
at some point, though, and i don’t really remember when, we stopped going to that party. i think there may have been a health situation involved with one of the hosts. or maybe my parents stopped getting invited. i think at least one of them reads this. maybe they can clarify.
anyway, for some reason we started a new little tradition just among the five of us. each of us got to choose one appetizer, and those five appetizers plus some clam chowder formed the christmas eve dinner. appetizer dinner, we called it. popular choices were smoked salmon dip, shrimp and cocktail sauce, and as much mild salsa from the now-sadly-closed La Mex restaurant as we could get our hands on. you could drink that stuff with a mug. best salsa i’ve ever had, hands down, still, to this day. and yes i’ve been to texas. yes i’ve been to california.
last year i did not go home for christmas, for the first time in quite a long time. probably for the first time since i was sixteen and an exchange student living in belgium. and also for the first time, i was vegan.
so i made my own appetizer dinner, to eat by myself in my little one bedroom apartment on the west side of the river in portland oregon while we all played jack box games together as a family on FaceTime. i made all my favorite vegan junk food and tried some new vegan junk food that i’d never tried before, too. it was great. i think i made it through maybe one-third of it. to the best of my recollection, here is what i made (and i have since written about some of these things, i think):
vegan california rolls
tempura fried vegan california rolls
smoked salmon dip (i cheated a little bit, but it was salmon from my sister who caught and smoked it herself. and i used vegan cream cheese.)
chips and salsa (family salsa recipe. maybe the third or fourth best salsa i’ve ever had. not even close to La Mex levels unfortunately.)
chips and onion dip
homemade “chicken” tenders with three or four different glazes
tempura veggies
in hindsight, truly a disgusting quantity of food. but hey, it’s christmas. and it was 2020. two great excuses in my opinion.
4. what are the rules
it’s another week where i don’t have a fourth segment i have been thinking about for days, or have been excited to write about, or have been curious about and looking forward to writing about in order to figure out what exactly i actually do think.
i had something in my head when i woke up this morning but then a car honked and i got up to get a glass of water and i forgot it. there’s a shadow of it still in there, some kind of glimmer. a popcorn kernel husk wedged right above my gumline. mentally speaking.
so here are some things i have been thinking about these past few weeks. some rules i’m wondering about. some of them seem to exist. some of them i’m not sure. some of them i think we all maybe think about a little differently.
you go through life bouncing off of things. and some things stick.
can you quit your job right before a big deadline? can you quit your job and leap out into the unknown, realistically, and burn through your little pile of savings and catch a rope in time to keep yourself from becoming truly embarrassed? can you leap out into the unknown in your early thirties, and by the time you are in your mid thirties is it too late or would it be a shorter leap, would your legs be stronger?
do you have to leap out into the unknown or can you stride confidently? can you stride unconfidently? can you tiptoe out there, out into the unknown, can you quit your job confidently and then tiptoe out there?
what would it actually cost to live in new york? does anyone actually pay rent there? what would you work on, out there in new york, what would you spend your time doing in order to pay your rent (which may not be necessary?) what would you spend 40 hours per week drawing, would you ever draw the outside of a building again? do the walls connect to the ceilings out there? do the windows meet the floor? and could you survive the winter in chicago, and could you survive the summer?
how long should you wait until you know something won’t work? can you still trust your gut if your gut has led you to this, and are your friends right that you should be more patient when you’ve been living with your gut all your life at this point? can you say it in a text message at this point or are we past that? can you handle saying it in person?
how cool is it, really, to date a friend’s ex? how cool, realistically, would everyone be in that situation, and how cool, realistically, would everyone be if you just got one round of drinks, okay maybe two, and that was it? and could you be happy with someone who lives three hundred miles away, or three thousand? could you be happy with anyone, ever again? and how many marriages can you orbit in a lifetime, and when can you tell the stories of the times those orbits wobbled? and how long should you wait before it’s been long enough, and how long should you wait before you’ve waited too long?
and is it too late to have a six-pack, at least once in your life, at least for one week or three weeks or three months, okay, at least for one summer, can you give me one summer? is it too late to get really into cross country skiing, i mean really into it, i guess you’d be driving up there every weekend and maybe on some weeknights too, i guess you’d be buying spandex and goggles, i guess you’d be buying two pairs of skis?
and what kinds of letters should you be saving? and what kinds of letters should you be writing more of?
and when are you going to open your refrigerator for the last time ever?
okay well, i think that will do it for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.