Painting outdoors again!

 Our dog Hugo is settling in nicely. We have taken him to a puppy manners class once, and his next class is tomorrow night. 

Heather surprised me this Saturday with the perfect date proposal; that we go to a park where I paint outdoors while she runs with the dog. I felt like Nabokov, who was known to ride in the back seat of a station wagon while his wife drove. They were interested in America's varieties of butterflies and they would travel to see them. Nabokov in the back would work on his books. Hugo and Heather frolicking around, I got back into the swing of painting outdoors; something that is so enrapturing yet moot feeling while you're not in it- like meditation. I had fun and made a painting of a field of clumpy grasses on a sunny but cold winter day. 

The next day I went out too; this time just Hugo and I and it was a much more overcast day, and I sat an made another painting- this time of a similar field but with a foreground birdhouse as the subject, with an echoing birdhouse in the distance too. Indeed I was reminding myself of Andrew Wyeth a little with this composition, but I didn't let it bother me too much. 

The night of the second painting, I went out to the graveyard, since Hugo was displaying that he had plenty more energy, and I took my acrylic gouache paints along- a faster and cleaner medium- and made another painting- one of tombstones and trees and columns. I took that painting home but didn't like it very much. Maybe the pleinair thing had seen its use for me then. I got sick that night from the turpentine smell in the house, which still persists; and I put the paintings in a closet to try to have a better night tonight. 

Hugo is a good painting dog companion. Unwittingly I have been informally training him by taking him out to paint plein air. The first time he was entertained by Heather, the second time he split his time between entertaining himself looking for birds and annoying me a little by stepping in paint, and eating a little bit of it, then licking himself to get it off his tongue (I tried to keep him out of it, okay?), staining his white fur permanent rose; (what was I thinking painting an overcast day with that color anyway?). My palette that day was permanent rose, titanium white, yellow ochre, pthalo blue, and black- a very 'fast' palette. 

The third painting session in the graveyard went well with the acrylic paints, even though I didn't like the painting. 

Today I worked for the Amish, helping the barn builders with updating their website. After work, I came home and knew I had to get a painting done lest I lose the streak.  I also feel hot to work on my website after I optimize and hook up the Amish one all day. So I worked on my site a little, then Hugo made it clear he needed to run, so I took the failed acrylic painting back to the graveyard this time with oil paints, and did another failed attempt. Tonight was much cloudier and the sky was orange due to city lights. the painting flipped from a cold scheme to a warm, and my blast over only half covered the surface resulting in a half cold half warm monstrosity. The thing I am writing on about though is that Hugo was a pretty good dog except he started DIGGING in the graveyard at night when I was painting. He was close, so I could stop him, and we were at least on a trail instead of atop a gravesite, but Jesus Pete!

The good thing is when he wasn't digging, he would sit neatly next to me and wait, then, bored, would spring back into a full run out and away in a big exploratory circle, before coming back to my side to sit by me again. "Why are we sitting quiet?" he seemed to wonder, then I think he totally got it- "we're hunting!"

We Got A dog and it seems like we’re living Seven times faster.

 Been a while. 

Heather and I moved out to Lancaster, PA, which is out in the country kind of. It’s an old town, about as old as Philadelphia, and that it did not take off like philly did makes it a bastion kind of. IDK, I’m a little conflicted about how we’re at once out in the country, yet our front door, street level apartment is in kind of a ghetto. It’s a little hoody because of the broken windows and trash everywhere. There’s chicken bones around and not much greenery. 

Heather and I bought a dog, but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

I did some brick pointing work in Philly and finished a mural I’d been working on for Jon, and also some drywall work, and regrettably I also did some logistics work doing phone organizing for dispatching tow trucks. That was a handful of long days and nights; no sleep basically, and I have yet to get paid for it.

She quit her job to come out here. I weened off of my freelance clients with a few thousand in savings. We grocery shopped and nestled in. Her job stopped all at once when one morning she learned that her roommate had worked with someone that had tested positive for COVID-19, so she packed a quick bag and left her classroom of seven year olds, and came out to live at the apartment I’d arranged for us both. I proposed to her on a boardwalk in a swampy section of a park in Cape Cod probably two weeks prior. The rings were made by one of our mutual friends out in Texas who was a silversmith. Unemployed, we developed a regimen of cleaning and fixing up the new place. 

A couple months in to this routine and we ended up getting a dog, but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

I went on Craigslist and found some job leads. I almost had one doing construction but my schedule with the moving was still a little erratic. We bought Heather a car, which was a little Honda Fit bursting with personality. I insured it in my name, and still feel a little underleveraged as a result. Heather went the more professional route and went on indeed.com, where she found a job talking care of elderly Mennonites with Alzheimer’s and dementia in an assisted living home. I’m very very very proud of her for seeking out this work. She is in the middle of some preliminary medical tests (for TB, immunizations, etc.) to clear for the job she will begin on the 7th of this month. 

I found a job on craigslist titled ‘Driver/Carpenter needed’, which turned out to be an Amish barn building company. Groffdale Barns it was called. I interviewed in person with Moses and Jake, a father and son, and filled out a resume form by hand in their office. I’d had a dream of this interview about a few days before it happened, and my vision was not far off, and tied in with the office style of my uncle’s, who owned and managed a lumber yard. I got a call a few days later, (the Amish have been really proactive I’ve found, because there is a lot of work to be done, and they can use the help they can get), and agreed to meet them at 4am to drive a crew down to Virginia. We finished the construction of a pole barn that had been started the prior weekend. I drove the large truck towing a forty foot trailer loaded with barn siding. I had no qualifications, but the barn company instilled a ton of trust in me anyways. I want to go back to doing it. It was very intense and I assert that I was difficult to live with upon my return from the two day trip; whose itinerary was a strict sun up to sun down work arrangement- very fun. we finished the barn and what I think I learned was that there’s no need for pleases and thank you’s on the job site, just shout the measurements you need, your partner will cut them and hand them to you, and just nail it in and on to the next and so on. Lunches and dinners with the Amish were quiet. Perhaps it was me, guiding the quietness, but I thought this silence was an interesting part of the work, and I’ve always subscribed to the say less philosophy. So I came home a little off I suppose. 

I asked for more time off than on with the Amish, and they called me just to drive them around after that, which was good. I stayed on Craigslist a little and found a snow shoveling job for $27 and hour, and I jumped at it. My hours were 12am to 4pm next day. I weaseled my way in with the boss, Fred, and hopped job sites with him. His wife does the billing and he likes to hunt. I noticed a bloodhound dog on his phone screen, and we bonded over the ownership of dogs. 

Heather and I somewhere in the enlightened stupor of unemployment got really involved in looking for a dog companion. We filled out (mostly Heather did) a bunch of applications to shelters fo specific rescue dogs, but the shelters all had long waits, or they didn’t get back to us at all, and or they wanted to call our landlords and get references to back us up that we were good people, incomes, socials, everything. Are there dogs that need homes or what? Is this some boutique process? Anyway, contrast this to when we actually were ready to pull the trigger, and we began looking up puppy sellers. Heather found a batch of German Shorthair Pointers and zombielike one morning (that night I had a dream of not being ready, so when I woke up I thought to say no, but couldn’t bring up the words, so in the morning I just took up an attitude like ‘we shall see’), we went and bought a dog. There were two left and we got the one who was a thinker. Little philosopher pup. He was a almost four months old, so we got a $400 discount, making his total about $900 out of $1300. He’s a good guy. He came with the name Gus, and immediately (I was terrified) I tried to alert Heather with the amount of exercise these GSPs need. We took him straight to a park!

Gus became Hugo within a couple days. We changed his name to Hugo, which is the name of my late grandfather, my mom’s mom’s second husband. 

My grandpa Hugo was a Dutch man, master craftsman, master model train artist. 

The new dog is our wonder child. He’s changed our lives so much, in that we have more purpose and we go to all these different parks and trails all the time now. He’s our excuse to explore and I think my studio work is in the beginning stages of responding to the data I’m being exposed to through our outings. 

That might be about it. We’re working on him, and working on our selves, and our relationship. We went to Florida and back this Christmas. Heather got to meet my family including Donna and Ricky, Pam, Cami, Joshua, mom, dad, and Grammy. Grammy expressed that it might be her last Christmas, and I knew I wasn’t going to find another partner like Heather, and that this would really be it, so we went down. My car is now in poor shape, and we spent some money on hotels in order to do some nice trails in Georgia and Virginia on the way back up. 

I got a few phone calls down in Florida. One from the Amish wanting me to drive for their lawn care business three days a week- they said I didn’t even have to work, just drive. I think I want to do this becasue the Amish work on such beautiful properties, and my dilemma is that I don’t pleinair paint when I’m out on those types of scenes. Another was from Fred about payment. I helped Fred a couple more times on a Parking garage which he’s in the business of restoring. My complex that I have no business being on some of these work sites is fading. Entry level workers who aren’t wastiods are hard to come by. Fred wants me part time, and so do the Amish landscapers. The barn builders said they would take me anytime because they were thrilled with my work with them too. I’m just trying to find that balance where I can work without damaging my body so I can paint and live a long painting life. Secretly I think there’s always time, and painting time is always time stolen. So I’m trying to figure out which job to get in with, and if I can balance any; plus the new dog means we’ll either have to do daycare or figure something out for separation anxiety, or I don’t know, because Heather will soon start a pretty full time thing. All in all I’m happy, and I’m glad I took the steps I did in my life, to be comfortable with making the decisions that fulfill me.

My thinking on my painting is that all of my half-baked stuff needs to come to a more full realization than the made-for-market stuff I’ve pumped out in the past year or so. The day job makes it so that I can live while I work on these to their fullest. The fact is I didn’t bridge the gap yet, the gap I imagined crossable with a good portfolio, the door to a gallery representation where I just paint and be sold. I’m chronically at step one, albeit with a small collector base which I don’t wish to mobilize too often. 

I’m working on some pain staking acrylic compositions on panel from pencil drawings that are finding their way towards completion. I hate blending, so my goal is to work them until there is no choice but to either blend, or to which their hard edges subdivide in their half tones yielding a soft edge, real or perceived. Oil glazing in a final stage would be ideal, as would a very flat and graphic painting. Before the goop squad of oil painters, there was a thin technique that was so professional- just the image. 

I’ve got a bunch of collages in the works, though I largely ignore them because they were so much work just to get them where they are- and they’re unmarketable and there’s hundreds of them. 

My digital paintings have some hope, and the actually get done. Knowing how to finish paintings is a blessing, but knowing you can postpone a finish in exchange for the hope of transcendence is alluring too. Anyway, I feel that I still need to get over the unique artist stuff so I can make responsible paintings that say something, like those of Thomas Hart Benton, or all those unnamed outdoors art illustrators that do the paintings of fish underwater, or pointing dogs, or bucks. 

So that’s the project at hand, and we’re working towards it. 

Ps, I want to write a book about my art education. I would like to draw from Maggie Nelson’s argonauts format, along with some Eric Hoffer Working and Thinking, some Ham on Rye I suppose, and some Fun Home/ graphic novel stuff. Lots to chew on. My earliest biggest influence is still Jim Woodring.