{"id":470,"date":"2007-11-23T10:15:02","date_gmt":"2007-11-23T18:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/23\/castle-rock-painting-davenport-thanksgiving\/"},"modified":"2007-11-23T10:15:02","modified_gmt":"2007-11-23T18:15:02","slug":"castle-rock-painting-davenport-thanksgiving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/23\/castle-rock-painting-davenport-thanksgiving\/","title":{"rendered":"Castle Rock Painting, Davenport Thanksgiving"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I hiked up to the ridge above Castle Rock this week, carrying my paints and a canvas on my back. It was the first time I\u2019ve been out in the woods in nearly two months. It felt so good. The wintry air cool and fresh. My muscles happy to be alive.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Looking for something to paint, I was struck by the low afternoon sun gilding the mossy edges of this tree.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Really I\u2019d meant to paint one of the weird tafoni <\/a>rocks there, but these glowing trees felt right, also the light was good, also there was a nice place to sit.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The receding lines of hills are pretty, and fairly easy to represent, you always see Sunday painters doing pictures of these. Back layers blue, middle layers green, front layers brownish.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

An alien in the form of a manzanita or madrone trunk. Would be great to see a sped-up version of one of these trees running along the ridge.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It gets dark so freaking early this time of year. It\u2019s night by 5. So why did they move the time back an hour? In my humble opinion, the two-times-per-year discontinuity in time-keeping called \u201cDaylight Savings\u201d\u009d is a deliberate move by our plastic industrialist rulers to dirempt our natural connection to the rhythms of nature. \u201cThey\u201d\u009d want us to see Gaia as a mere machine which \u201cthey\u201d\u009d control.<\/p>\n

Why doesn\u2019t anyone ever run for president on an important issue like the abolition of daylight savings time? When I was a boy in Kentucky, there was vigorous debate about the pols monkeying with \u201cGod\u2019s time,\u201d\u009d and daylight savings time was administered on a county by county basis, with counties swinging back and forth from year to year…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ah, soft Edenic valleys. Looking past the ridge, I could see Monterey bay. I got a first compositional layer done on my picture, \u201cMossy Trees,\u201d\u009d and need to work on it some more at home.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I got a lot of paint on myself. The only other people in the park were younger people with mounds of equipment for climbing on the rocks. They looked suspicious of me in my paint-stained Army-style overcoat. Such a thin line between a painter and a bum.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This cute little mandarin orange flew off our tree and landed on our porch railing. Sunny Californee!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On Thanksgiving, we went down to Four Mile Beach in Cruz, and then we went to the Davenport Cliffs.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

These days I’m torn on whether or not to put SF things into landscapes. On the one hand I want to be able to do a landscape that stands on its own, on the other, it’s kind of fun to put in a tiny monster or UFO, like I did with “Davenport Cliffs.” “Lexington Reservoir” is a different kind of compromise; the birds LOOK kind of alien without actually being science-fictional. “The Talking Pitchfork” is yet another way of merging SF and landscape, here the alien being (a pitchfork) is the main element rather than a decoration. I\u2019m not sure what I\u2019ll do with \u201cMossy Trees.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Glen says it would be a mistake to always put in an SF icon into every picture, he says that would be \u201cBlue Dog art,\u201d\u009d like that guy in Santa Fe (?) who sticks a \u201cWhere\u2019s Waldo\u201d\u009d type Blue Dog into every canvas he paints.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Love the view down off the lip of the Davenport Cliff.<\/p>\n

Thinking about that painting while standing here, I\u2019m running into the downside of trying to sell pictures: worrying about what\u2019s commercial. I figure I can make \u201cMossy Trees\u201d\u009d so hallucinatory that it doesn\u2019t need a saucer. Speaking of selling pictures, I\u2019ll have posters of my newer pictures online soon, and I put up a price list <\/a>for a limited selection of them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yadda, yadda, yadda. Never mind that stuff, Ru, look at the gulls and green light through the breaking wave!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I found a terrific kelp \u201cwhip\u201d\u009d at the beach and it followed me home. It has a float at the fat end, a long tapering stalk, and at the thin tip a \u201choldfast\u201d\u009d that would have held it to the bottom. When alive, there\u2019s ribbon-like leaves branching off the top of the float. I love these things. Tentacles!<\/p>\n

Maybe a tentacle coming in the side of the frame in “Mossy Trees”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hiked up to the ridge above Castle Rock this week, carrying my paints and a canvas on my back. It was the first time I\u2019ve been out in the woods in nearly two months. It felt so good. The wintry air cool and fresh. My muscles happy to be alive. Looking for something to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}