Cain's Lake

I am almost finished with this one. Just a lot of tidying up to do.  I understand why artists hire assistants now!  And I keep thinking that I need to add a labyrinth or arabesque to the lime green. Who knows?

The official title of this is:  "Cain's Lake:  The Mystery of the Lost Lagoon (Eason and Papa John Discover the Fabled Flower of Pure Gold."

!!!!

Great News: Lori is Back in the Saddle!

This was me on Hotwire yesterday up in Everson. Out first official show in I dont know how long. Hot but fun.  Hotwire loved it but I wouldn't let him go as fast as he wanted.  If I did I think I would have been a human lawn dart.   Now I have to get back in shape so we can go faster!

Charles New Book is a Wonderful Thing

Charles's latest book, Lucca & Malphi, is now available on Amazon and it is a stunning work of imagination.

Here's how he describes it:

 "Lucca & Malphi is a story about true love, the re-emergence of the gods in our daily lives, the re-birth of the oracles and the re-affirmation of our collective belief in the mystery of discovery.
The cause and effect of Lucca and Malphi is that when we listen to this story we hope to live our lives as if we are always falling in love and truly falling in love is the best effect we can cause or least it seems that way to the author."

You can find it here. 


(EDITOR:  p.s.  Just in case, don't let the introduction put you off.)

Amir and Inela's Anniversary

Inela writes: 

Ah, that Amir's job, this is just another special day stolen from us because of super ideas by owner of that company, huh.

How are you? How is everyone? Grandchildren?

Parenting? Amir goes to work, and I am the everything else in the house :).  In the fall Amir start with school again and me my accounting agency :).

...and I have one news..Mak speaks english a lot, so you will understand him probably better then me :), go to sport and swimming too.

Kisses and hugs

At the Impromptu Solstice Picnic

OR
Happy Solstice from the Multiverse!

Sally and Spencer get a new pup at the Puppy Fair.

Solstice

Happy Solstice from the Cosmos

(and the mint)

Muse

I kinda like the flat, minimal look of this.  Kyra says it looks like my old style . . .

Spencer's Shelf

Spencer and I hung up a new shelf in his Fremont townhouse entryway.  He salvaged the thick wood plank from a burn pile in Winthrop, then sanded and sanded it.  We visited Stoneway Hardware and came up with the "industrial style" coat hangars below it.  First to go on it was that dog!

i.e.

Last Saturday, I went to the inaugural opening of the new "i.e." gallery in Edison.  It is located in the smaller gallery room of the old Edison Eye, tastefully renovated by none-other-than "Eliot and co."!  Good food, a fair crowd,  som interesting work on the walls.  We shall see....

Winthrop

Another cross-post from Lynne's site haiku

Phew

Lashing thunderstorm,
stinky tree of heaven smell,
close all the windows.

--Lynne


(Click here.)

Sunny Afternoon on the Lake

Heading out in the canoe

Eason wears a water lily pad as a stylish hat

This is JUST GORGEOUS:  the Lost Lagoon!

Lori Writes: Johnny build it

John built the first fish friendly floating irrigation pump for the Skagit River. It has been a dream of John Roozen for over 27 years. They launched it yesterday and it functions better than they ever expected. Pretty cool! John has built some fish friendly irrigation pumps that sink with an approach velocity that doesn't build sediment or hurt the fry. This is the first floating and it will irrigate from west MV to laconner.

(Ed.  That's John Wolden, Lori's hubbie!!. . . .What a great idea, great job!!!)

A Couple More Small Pieces

Orphee

Untitled Arabesque (Me)

Just for fun.

New Skills

Eason learns paddle-boarding on Lake Pearrygin in Winthrop

Journeys

The Edison Granary

Setting up before the talks

Julia, starting introductions and talk

Anna, showing a timeline on Haiti

Christine

Food, before, during, after . . .

We had a great time at the "Journeys" slideshow yesterday.   Julia's talk about Bosnia was especially fantastic. She was followed by Anna, speaking about Haiti, and Christine, presenting her two-month pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago.  Both very enjoyable presentations.   About 60 people or so showed up.  When restoration is complete, the Granary will be a great resource for the arty town of Edison.

Journey's: Today is the Day

In Edison this afternoon, Julia and two other ladies will be giving slideshow presentations at the Granary, an old structure under renovation into a public space. The Camino, a pilgrimage across Northern Spain: Christine Wardenburg-Skinner Haiti, development in rural Haiti: Anna Ferdinand Srebrenica, peace march in Bosnia: Julia Hurd This event has had some good publicity and should be pretty well-attended and fun!

In Bellingham at the Naked Bicycle Ride and Art Walk

Charles is Writing a New Story

Johnie Blue and the Bee Lolita's

Part One:  Caper in downtown Tokyo

1.        Detective story set in present day inner city Tokyo and Johnie Blue is a woman detective and she is a voluptuous girl who is all business and Johnie Blue has a lot of experience in the detective business and no kidding she is some kind of woman detective and she is very selective with her clients and Johnie Blue knows how to bring the deal home.''

2.        Johnie's last case involved a retired Japanese Mafiosi Who was caught up in some sobering details and Johnie is congratulating herself after solving this case and she goes into some detail about the case in her mind and she elaborately tells the story of the case back to herself from memory while sitting in her apartment on very expensive furniture and Johnie finds this very satisfying and she checks her bank account and the money from the Mafiosi is in her bank account and Johnie is feeling delicious about Johnie's family were once proud samurai knights and I forgot to tell you that Johnie is very skilled in samurai fighting skills and really you wouldn't want to start a fight with Johnie because she will more than likely take you down with some hold or another.  And Johnie can make a drunk man sober when she waves her samurai sword through the air and Johnie's real good with numchucks as well.

3.        And Johnie Blue came to Tokyo and she became a Beautiful Woman Detective and she learned to use her samurai skills as a detective and she gained skills to be the next generation master samurai in her family tradition.

4.        In the downtown Toyko train station there is a situation where the Bee Lolita's and Johnie Blue join forces and they vanquish some bad people and Johnie Blue and the Bee Lolita's are constantly fighting off trouble while defending the rights of the young people to meet together and share their ideas and believe in something

Lynne Writes: Homage to Issa's Cuckoo

This is cross-posted from Lynne's blog (without her permission, I might add).  She has been writing a haiku a day for some time now.  Check it out, click on Uli Day Quintessential Quilting


Homage to Issa's Cuckoo

Cardinal's sharp call,
Repeats, repeats, repeats, - then
comes a great, long, pause.

Maroon

This year I have rediscovered some Napthamide Maroon that I had on my paint table, a delightful color that makes gorgeous washes and is strong and bold in masstone also.  I fell in love. 

Unfortunately, my jar of paint was pretty old and the acrylic had kinda tarred up and it was difficult to get it in paintable condition, despite adding flow agent, water, and medium and mooshing it all about with my palette knife.

So I decided to buy some more . . .

EXCEPT I couldn't find it anywhere.  On the web, I looked at Blick Art supplies and Amazon and did a general search.  I called local stores, Dakota Arts, Tri-Dee, Michaels.  I even double-checked the pronunciation of "Napthamide."  Nobody had any. 

I kept searching the web and found the answer: 

it hasn't been made since 1997
when the single supplier went out of business!!! 

My poor, poor, old paint!!

My Maroon was a single-pigment color but I found advice on a mixture that was supposed to approximate the color:

"11 parts Quinacridone Violet
12 parts Quinacridone Burnt Orange
2.0 parts Dioxazine Purple

This makes a great replacement for the undertone and washes. Reduce the Quinacridone Burnt. Orange to 11 parts and add 0.7 parts Carbon Black to create the masstone."

OK........

Lately, I found a "permanent maroon," also a mixture of pigments, that is somewhat similar.

But it's just not the same,
you know?

Charles and Melanie

Just a shot of Charles and Melanie looking great this past Memorial Day at an "ABC farm to table in a cool hip Chelsea neighborhood kind of way"

Charles Writes: "Trouble in Candy-Land" Part Two

How Did That Happen

My Life Here in Candy-Land wasn't always like this.  I think there were a couple of days when the Woodcocks first moved into the Moon Stone Development that were filled with harmony and bliss but then we met the orthodox neighbors and subsequently found out they were a little different from us and at first I over-looked the oddness around me and even though I had read about co-housing and I knew a little about it I was not prepared for the in-depth reality of the cohousing arrangement but really I couldn't really begin to believe that my neighbors actually took this idea of co-housing very seriously and they have rules and regulations on how to talk to each other and protocol for behavior in their relationships and really who, on the out-side, would ever believe that co-housing is taken seriously by the co-housers and it did seem to me that these people were educated and all but I guess I never thought about what might have happened to their heads when they were done with the education part of their life and grew up and lived in the world and I guess they all figured out that life was a lot tougher than they thought and maybe we should band together with some other crazy people here and share our crazy skills with them and we can all build more crazy together and that is how the orthodox co-ho's all more or less landed here I believe, if I am not mistaken, but then again I could very well be mistaken.

And the Mrs. and I have made some great friends here at Moon Stone and there are friends here representing the solid cottage industries of knitting and spinning and wool dying and weaving and these friends have become very good friends for Mrs. Woodcock.  And we have friends who are Buddhists and Anarchists and teachers of college religion classes and teachers of high school students and sailors and a Reichian therapist who lives somewhere nearby and this therapist has a little old lady inside of him who is desperate to get out And these are the people who live on the edges of co-housing within the compound and I guess that's where I am going to live as well within this co-housing thing and we all get along pretty fine and we have had some great times and good food and good laughs and its wonderful to live so close to people you can kind of identify with in this crazy mixed-up place called Moonstone and in this place that is my place.  And like I said, "How did this happen?" 

Continue reading.  Click here.

Paintings

D. in Wig

Fish World Gnosis #6

Fish World Gnosis #7

Can't quite get these finished, for some reason . . . time to keep moving . . .

Charles Writes: more "Trouble in Candy-Land"

And one of my all time favorite players at moonstone is a beaten down old socialist named Sven Wantsom and Sven thinks he is Che Guevara's cousin or something and he is deceptively intelligent and he is a lanky lurchy type of Scandinavian guy and he espouses platitudes of racial equality and he regales against white people and their privileged attitudes and I believe that how Sven makes his money now is by beeing a slum landlord or something like that somewhere near Detroit and Sven would be a bigger player at Moon Stone except he only lives here in the warm weather and he spends most of his time living the high life in Mexico where as he says, "life is cheap." 

And once again, as in the past with my relationships here at moonstone with the people there-in, I made an effort to get to know Sven in the our collective past together because Sven was a neighbor and I like neighbors for the most part or at least I did until I moved into the orthodox section of candy-land you know my neighborhood and I did make an attempt to bee friendly with Sven and overlook Sven's bombastic self-centered socialist ways that just start to flatter Sven when he talks above the noise of the crowd and I even told him straight up that he would get to heaven easier because he grew these vibrant and lustful yellow hollyhocks just down the street from me and I was in love with the yellow hollyhocks and I told Sven every time I saw him that he was a chosen one of the gods because of these Yellow Hollyhocks but I guess Sven wasn't listening because when he caught wind of the Woodcocks wanting to build out a bedroom at #17 Sven sent the most eviscerating emails a person could ever imagine, all the way from his Mexican hacienda, about the Woodcocks and how we were such lousy neighbors and we didn't deserve to have our architectural review passed because J.P. himself was a rotten person who didn't mind speaking his mind about the reality around him and therefore Sven wanted the Woodcocks punished for being such lousy people and really why doesn't Candy-Land just make the Woodcocks suffer for being so lousy. 

Continue reading.  Click here.

Charles Writes: more "Trouble in Candy-Land: Mona Controna"

Mona Controna

First of all there is the crown ice-princess of candy-land Mona Controna and Mona is always super busy, out in the front of her home, loading up materials and supplies and provisions in a hand cart in order to trot off well supplied to her nature loving classes with crazy forest people and she is off somewhere because the princess has a primal urge to teach the willing how to live off the bounty of the forest and she teaches people how to eat bugs and ferns and hopefully not each other and she wants to make her students comfortable in the depths of nature and personally, and besides the point, the depths of nature make me feel very uncomfortable.  And Mona dresses like she just got off the set of Grizzly Adams and she wears these misshapen wool pullover sweaters in the winter and long dresses in the summer that look like they came from some prairie lifestyle catalog and Mona dries deerskin on her front porch and she makes such a huge effort to appear to really care about others and truly and under-cover she is really the Machiavellian princess of candy-land and Mona is always plotting how to use the advantage of the many over the unsuspecting few and for her own benefit, of course, and if you aren't wary of her every move, or is that weary of her every move, and oh yes you will find yourself with the short end of the walking stick when you are friends with Mona and spending time with Mona you can begin to wonder how did this happen to me.  And as Mona would say herself she likes to facilitate the needs of the community and move the agenda along except truly what she is doing is manipulating the needs of the community to her personal advantage and really Mona is the force behind the throne of the evil queen and probably the super hero king as well and Mona is a believer in the candy-land way because Candy-Land really works for Mona . . .

Continue reading.  Click here.

To make things a little more explicit, I have decided to change the name of the series I have been painting this Spring from "Fish World" to "Fish World Gnosis."

Palette

My favorite colors at the moment: Pthalamide Maroon, Indian Yellow, Quinacridone Violet, Quinacridone Red-Orange, Lime Green, Turquoise, Cobalt Blue, Pyrrole Orange. And of course Hansa Yellow.

Charles Begins the Painting Season

Chaz:  "I am pooped painting is a lot of physical work."

A John Cage Anecdote

A woman once wrote to Cage, asking about the story that the Buddha died of mushroom poisoning.
Cage mused on this a bit, then replied:  "It is the function of mushrooms to rid the world of old rubbish. 
The Buddha died a natural death."

Wistful

'cuz our Wisteria apparently has the creeping white fungus of death . . .

Charles Writes: Borges in Candy-Land!

    You know, when you first meet my neighbor Borges you wouldn't expect he would bee a bomb making kind of guy and he is a compact sort of guy and he gets around town on his own two feet and that's kind of cool but after a couple of weeks of watching him furiously walk around town and all around your neighborhood carrying multiple re-usable bags and these bags are always filled with recycling treasures and found trashy treasures and Borges really works at this collecting of his and sometimes you'll find him inside of our roll-on recycling dumpster as well.  And At first I was a bit worried about Borges when I first found himself inside the dumpster and I was worried because I knew what would make me crazy enough in this life to find myself inside of a dumpster and I was worried that these terrible things had happened to Borges and no it wasn't anything like that at all for Borges you know and he was perfectly happy to be up to his chest in the dumpster surrounded by paper and cardboard and some of my neighbors have told me they have also seen his back side showing up in the dumpsters behind some of the finest happening restaurants in town and his back was right out in the open for them and for everyone else as well to see and all my friends just laughed about this. 

And I was ok with Borges manic collecting until one day while I watched Borges . . .

Continue reading.  Click here.

Or Perhaps, Plotting a Coup . . .

Charles relaxing now that Spring has finally hit Michigan.

Chaz Sends News from his Buddy: Living In The Remote Midwest

Hello JP Woodcock here:

Well, as you might remember, back some time ago in the not so distant past, and you might remember how it was back then that I was sent to the United States by the great mini-hall of economics in my hometown of Nottingham, England or Snotingham as our critics used to call it and the great mini-hall sent me over the pond to the mid-west part of the American republic back then and they employed me to report back to them on the presidential election of 2012 in a mini-economical sort of way and they sent me out here to write about the mood of the mid-west part of the country politically now and out here and yes it struck me at that time that one could positively begin to imagine that a national election on this large of a scale and in this great nation of America would make things better and you would certainly expect that this big of an election effort would reflect a positive difference afterwards to the citizens, you know, once the election was concluded and really for god's sake you would expect that there would be some small satisfaction for the people of the US especially after all of the money that was spent by everyone for everything that you could ever imagine in an American election sort of way and you would think that after all of this time and effort and money spent that the outcome of the election would make some sort of positive difference in a country as wonderful as the United States and it seems that that didn't really seem to have happened and the same old faces and some new old faces seem to be perfectly satisfied in America to only be making things seem even worse than they really are in America and truly all of this negativity and beeing disgruntled seems to be representative, politically of course, of all these Americans that I live amongst and all of this disunity in America seems to be representative of the dissatisfying difference all Americans seem to want to enjoy or not to enjoy in their country right now and this dissatisfaction is felt by all the people and bee they the people on the right or people beeing to the left kind of people or just people who are just right up the middle of all this crazy we live with and what is it that all these people really want any way, you know, out in this crazy world we live in.  And it seems to me as your mini-economist type of reporter that the next coming presidential election, in the great old US, in the next year will only make things seem even more apparently worse or at least as worse as the politicians want us all to believe that things are bad and getting worse and in this regard and also in the aftermath of this coming election when it does happens in that not so distant now in that not so distant future and after this next election I hope all Americans are ready to suffer even more dissatisfaction among the factions and I hope Americans are ready for that. 

And I certainly am not prepared for this inevitability of more dissatisfaction but I am a foreigner in this land and this is my excuse and I feel a bit strange in this land and I hope to be a stranger here no more someday in the future because I am working my way back to my real home in Nottingham and I want to bee home once again at the great hall of mini-economics and with any luck that will happen and what I am really saying right now is that I just hope for the best, politically speaking of course, for all of us in America now and in the future down the road kind of way and that is what I am truly saying to you and really what I want to share with you right now is this hope for the best and maybe I want to really share this hope with the gods as well if they are in the right kind of mood to be sharing with me and if they really do care to hear from me . . .

Read the remainder of this piece on NuArty.  Click here.

King!

A quick visit to Seattle's famous Pike Place Market with Julia's older brother Irwin, who is visiting for a few days.  And a stop at the fish stall.  King Salmon, King of Fish!!!

Fish World 5

Fish World 5

Studio in Springtime

Studio in situ

Catch Up -- Springtime Weekend

Julia and I visit the Great Alger Plant Sale and Swap

Eliot and Eason pose before a small portion of the woord we split and stacked.
Eason was a huge help, working hard to get the wood out of the Company van.
A cozy Autumn and Winter by the fire are in the future at the Bayview Hurd's.