One of the pictures from my walk around the botanical garden here in town. Up at the potting shed, this wooden platform holds containers to be filled with dirt and plants to be nurtured before being planted or sold at the weekly Sunday sales. This is a flower fallen off a nearby tree – don’t ask me what the name of the tree is! – and I thought it was so lovely against the grain of the wood.
After coming home from the botanical garden yesterday, I inspected my own small garden. This is a pink rose with a heavenly scent – but I like it better in B&W as far being a photo!
Today I finally got out to the botanical garden! The sweet scents – all these flowers and trees in bloom – hard to believe. Peaceful, tranquil. I took lots of pictures of the plants, which will come later. As always, though, I love to go up to the potting shed and nursery area to snoop around and see what is going on there. Wheel barrows sometimes, other times rocks. Today it seemed that pots and containers were on parade.
Containers and bins for dirt and leaves as well as new plants waiting to be sold or added to the garden. Storage shed to the left, nursery to the right.
Sketch!
These past few weeks have been crazy and the craziness continues until the end of May. Two more weeks. Visits hither and thither to do the things needing doing, none of which are especially exciting. Too many things to do means little time to really focus on anything except the easier stuff. So, ink and watercolor and quick sketches from past visits to Summerland and Malibu Creek State Park.
Summerland is a little community in Santa Barbara County, between Carpinteria and Montecito, both south of Santa Barbara. A number of old houses, clapboard, and new, climb up the hill east of the 101 and west, above the Pacific, is a park with a path to the beach below. I have always loved this area, and this section of the California coast is always a pleasure any time of year. The cliffs sequester beach-goers from civilization which can be gotten to readily. In the fog it is rather eerie, but in the sunshine or June Gloom, it is quite lovely.
Malibu Creek State Park holds a number of fond memories, one being with a very good friend on photo safaris. It is about 15 miles south of me, in a canyon which winds through the Santa Monica Mountains and into the coastal town of Malibu. The park is a bit of a treasure as Malibu Creek winds through it and the canyon widens and narrows and branches off in various areas.
The ruggedness of the California mountains always amazes me – as do mountains in general. I grew up in the Midwest farm country where gentle hills are the norm, as are trees and endless green in the summer.
The same for beaches – I never saw the ocean until we moved to New Jersey and my family went to the beach just weeks after a major hurricane. Beach houses were upside down and wrecked. I was terrified of the waves, but my father, having grown up in Fort Lauderdale, swam in and out of the crashing waves like a dolphin. The rest of the family built sand castles and waded in the shallows.
And now, on to a visit to the vet as the gardener arrives and I get the house decluttered so the cleaners can have an easy time. Yeah, gardener? Cleaners? I have no McMansion here, but these tasks would never get done by us if we ever want to have a life. Luxury for us so we can do other forms of drudgery!
And the weekend cannot arrive soon enough.
A couple of months ago I took an oil painting class with a very good teacher at the local adult school. He won’t be back until fall, sadly, but I do have another class I am attending and which is also taught by another good teacher.
This cat is one of the assignments we had in the class, a photo provided by him to copy. For me, it was a challenge, but more than anything I wanted to use colors to provide contrast in color and value. This is not something I do easily, but I did accomplish it! Part of it was I just was not going to let the subject matter trap me into copying the photo completely.
I finished this cat up last week – it’s in oil and has been drying – and could get the shape of the cat’s nose when the new teacher reminded me that using a negative shape to create a positive one helps a lot!
And so it does – my chin and nose area were more along the lines of the proportions seen in Egyptian statues of Anubis and Bastet – a narrow mandibular area, and one a bit elongated.
I will say that I am really pleased with this painting. There are a few tweaks I need to do to clean up a couple of areas, but that is something done in a couple of minutes. Painting an animal is something I have never done, and it really was intimidating. Doing it helped me appreciate just the different brushes I could use, such as a rather beat up bristle to create a sense of fur, and a soft, pointed one to create the whiskers. Patience is also becoming more comfortable than not, and this lets me take time to work on this painting at the right time. I also work on other paintings, too, while this one or that one awaits my talents.
16 x 20 (or 11 x 14?) cotton canvas on board, oil paints.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 