Still at the End of the Rainbow

I apologize for my lack of recent updates. Real life and the outside world came knocking on my door in a big and bad way last week. It makes sense that I couldn't stay in this dream reality of mine forever. That said, I am back to the studio again and things are as good as they could be. I have been here for two weeks now and still have four more left.

Walking out onto the playa.

I am enamored by the landscape and the constantly changing weather conditions. Whenever the rain and/or wind dies down, many of the residents can be seen hurrying outside, walking out into the playa (the empty lake bed) or hiking up the adjacent hills. This is because the window of nice weather may be brief and followed by another stretch of day after day of rain. So this is how I can explain that the first time I walked out into the playa, it was extremely windy and muddy. It is a virtually flat expanse, and the further I walked, the stronger the wind gusted against my angled body. I found that I could literally lean back and the wind would keep me on my feet. At one point, I was pelted with a wall of flying pebbles. I later found out that I had walked out into the playa during the strongest wind storm Summer Lake has had in several decades. The wind here was recorded at 45 miles per hour and down at Paisley, the adjacent town, the winds picked up to 85 miles per hour.

My muddy boots.

A week later, I went on a more pleasant hike with Shelby and Maria up to the hills overlooking the playa. It has been fascinating watching the playa slowly fill up with pale, icy blue water. From the vantage point of the hills, we could see what was once empty when we arrived is now maybe a quarter of the way filled. The trail wove through the site of a large forest fire. We walked through the graveyard of fallen down trees, some of which were scorched black and in contrast , others were smooth and white like bones bleached out by the sun. It was hauntingly beautiful and I hope to go back with my camera and sketchbook.

On hike up hill. It's tough to understand the perspective of this photo. The path leads to the edge of the hill and the sand and water are hundreds of feet below. This is the water filling the lakebed.

Shelby and Maria.

Like In Wyoming, we are constantly surrounded by wildlife. Here I have seen my first muskrat swimming in the pond, which is simulateously cute and gross. The other day someone saw the neighbor's cat, Lefty, trotting across the lawn with a large dead rabbit in its mouth. In my house, I continue to kill mice at an alarming rate, so much that my house has been dubbed La Maison de Rodents. As an act of desperation, I enlisted Lefty to hunt down the offenders. At night, we can frequently hear packs of coyotes howling. They sound like hysterical women. I learned that some Native American cultures thought of the coyote as the trickster because it could make itself sound like a group of coyotes. The first time I heard them as I tried to fall asleep, I thought there was a woman outside wailing.

I went to the bird preservation area 30 minutes down the road from here where I saw hawks and hundreds of geese. Strangely enough, the preserve also allows hunting and there are funny signs indicating what you can and can't shoot. There was also a wonderful old barn where a gigantic horned owl rested in the eaves.

Ok to shoot.

We are really quite isolated here at Playa. It took a three hour round-trip drive just to buy groceries and chains for my tires. Today, Shelby and I drove for over forty minutes to get lattes and then drank them greedily like drug addicts shouting out "mmmm" and "oh this is sooo good!". The other residents and the three people who work at Playa are our only company. I feel lucky that the people here have been really nice, interesting and easy to get along with. We have started having movie nights projected on the big screen. It's all women except for one man - so we first watched French Kiss circa early 1990's which the chef at Playa gave us her copy on VHS and urged us to watch. For the duration of the movie, Meg Ryan pouts and overacts while Kevin Kline speaks in a comical exaggerated French accent.  This was followed a few nights later by Dancer in the Dark, a Lars Van Trier movie that is on the opposite end of the spectrum from French Kiss. This movie rips your heart out of your chest and then stomps on it. It is fun being here - it feeds my nostalgia for wanting to return to college. I love living within a stone's throw from friends and being able to walk next door to have dinner with someone. 

In the studio, I finally feel like I may be grabbing onto ideas worth keeping. Sometimes it takes a leap of faith, making all of these weird things that I'm not sure amount to anything. One of the main things I have been trying to explore has been finding  new ways of combining the landscape with the figure. Hopefully I can share an image of this soon, but my latest experiment has been casting resin clouds onto the figure. From all of my landscape photos, you can see how I shifted from using mountains to clouds.

On the left, a thick low fog is spilling down the hills...strange and beautiful.

Sometimes in the morning I wake up and the clouds are so beautiful that I sketch them.

The clouds over my house, Liz's and Shelby's.