gotta love him

A true iconoclast; Tom Waits has long been a favorite of mine........

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOrG1r3S6ZA

optics

Ken spent nine days on the Western interior area of Alaska on a aerial survey that is conducted every year. Along with another companion, they look at bug damage and forest changes. (Ken's specialty is bugs.....and most notably the spruce bark beetle.) Here are some fabulous shots that he took. (I might add that Ken has gotten really good with the camera! Am I bias or what or is he hanging out with the right people?)

They camp out on these remote places and Ken calls me from a satellite phone in the mornings. He has been conducting these surveys for over thirty years! They had a close call with a brown bear one evening who stood on his hind legs but quickly sped off.

This is one of my favorites.......Of course a mighty fine camera works miracles too.

This could be a Magritte painting.

my girlfriend

Back from the studio, I thought I would do something relaxing and write about Blue, a wonderful friend and companion, who is pictured on the left. (And painting and doing art is more romantic in theory..... making a career out of it is another story!) So I felt compelled to add to my post and take a break from tediousness. Blue (her nickname is the Beast) is a massive dog - 120 pounds and high maintenance, but she has grown into a mature young female/(bitch?) - well mannered most of the time and lovable. It has taken me a long time to train her (more tediousness) and getting her to stay around the yard is questionable. I dislike tethers and we don't have a fenced in property. At the moment, she is completely laid out from a rigorous walk we had this morning over at Hilltop......not to mention the nice mound of dirt she leaves on the floor every time she gets up to move to another part of the house to sleep......

PS - Check out those paws!

around town

A group shot of performance artists/friends at Ray's Vietnamese Restaurant in Spenard (and a good place to try out......) We try to meet weekly for lunch to celebrate life.

This is a chalk drawing done on a sidewalk at a festival in Eagle River. The media is a watercolor chalk. Sponsors buy a square and volunteers do a design. I drew one of my masterpieces - (ha, ha) to help support the UAA booth. The last time I drew on a side walk was back in Jersey, playing hop scotch while I was in my single digits!

Joel is one of my summer class students. He is wearing a logo he designed as part of a class assignment. His design is called bolt action beaver - a name of his local band.

Our front yard Himalayan Poppies........

movement

It is hard for me to float; to let ideas/concepts arrive to my creative process. Sometimes, it just doesn't happen. I fret that I am not doing anything constructive with my life and then I throw myself into a worse tizzy. Someone once told me, "you've got to keep moving." I think that applies with everything you do - the mental and physical; pushing the boundaries of the static. And maybe it is good to stand still, to think, to be patient, to absorb, to perceive, to meditate, to hear indiscriminate sounds, to appreciate or to just be in one place; to become immersed with simple living.

adieu

I was happy to finish the biography A Dangerous Liaison - Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Carole Seymour-Jones. The read was dense and historical but what held it together was their amorous escapades, polygamist lifestyle, exploited lovers and gossips. As original thinkers though, Beauvoir and Sartre broke through the conventions of bourgeois society and created their own sexual revolution - making the most liberal of liberals seem ah so tame - oh la la! Sartre's ongoing passionate and committed quest to explain our existence led to me despairing at times. (I was long introduced to his works by a progressive high school French teacher.) Beauvoir, the feminist, has important things to say - most notably her work - The Second Sex would be worth reading and investigating at another time.

light

The other day I was thinking how much I needed the sun, to feel it, to avoid it, to have it creep up on me and wrap me in it's warmth, to have it be there every time I looked up through the windows of my home opening to a dazzling sky and green trees. It is important for me to observe this light source and during a sunny day, I have little right to complain. The sun perks me up, lightens my perspective on life and being. It gets me going. There is no time for me to mope and everything sparkles. It represents an abundance of goodness and it is a day that I don't want to waste.