I had to share this. It’s a genuine petroglyph, carved into Navajo Sandstone in Dry Fork Canyon, Utah. We visited the site on a tour with the Museum of the West last year. There are dozens of these wonderful Barrier Canyon era figures in the area. They were done in the Archaic Period and are very old.

Find out more about them here:

http://www.thefurtrapper.com/Fremont_rock_art.htm

Somebody bought a copy of this postcard today. Highway 141 is an amazing drive. It starts not far from Grand Junction and travels through spectacular canyons to Gateway, and then beyond, to Nucla, Naturita, and points south.

The photo on the card was taken at Gateway. A pioneer ranch cabin sits beside the curving road with a magnificent butte, The Palisade, looming in the distance.

The Gateway Canyons Resort is located near this spot. The resort includes two fantastic restaurants as well as facilities for events, getaways, and all-season adventures. If you love automotive history, don’t miss one of the best auto museums anywhere. It is on the property.

In the 90s, I joined a small group of artists at a nature center on Mt. Washington near downtown Los Angeles. There was a little farmhouse with a kitchen and a small barn that had been donated to the city. The artists were a fascinating group. One had done artwork for NASA and, during the time I know him, flew to Amsterdam to see the Vermeer exhibit. He did gem-like miniature portraits in oil and had organized the group. He also arranged for the space. Another was a prominent just-retired television producer with an outrageous sense of humor and a free-wheeling drawing style. A third was a glamorous Russian painter with an exquisite home in The Hills. Other members came and went. One of these was an artist who drew Pasadena nightclub patrons in bistre on vellum. We met periodically, and I don’t remember exactly how often. I think it was every other week. We each posed for a three hour session. If we could convince friends or relatives to take our turn, that was fine, too. In this picture, you see the couch we sat on. The stuffed owl belonged to the nature center.

I call this group of drawings my Elyria Park Series. Most of them are pastels on Canson Mi Tientes paper. I liked the rough, textured side in mid-tones. You can see others on Zazzle. I have some on Red Bubble, too.

Sold a copy of this snowy mailbox image on BigStock today. I guess I’m not the only one who’s having trouble inserting pictures into posts here on WordPress. It just started recently. Sorry about the inconvenience of having to click on the link to see what I’m talking about here. I hope they fix the problem, or at least explain soon.

It’s still relatively warm today, and we will probably go for a walk before the football games and cooking begin. We don’t have cable, and we don’t get FOX up here. The local signal is too weak, so poor Alden will miss the morning game. As for the cooking, it isn’t much. I will put our turkey breast in its oven bag this afternoon and we’ll enjoy the scent upstairs as I write.

I would be discouraged by my paltry progress on my novel, but it has been a good month. I have the whole thing plotted out. I know what it’s about, so I know where to begin. That means I will have to redo the first chapter, but I know how to do that. The characters are shaping up and the conflict has defined itself and expanded. I’m hoping to make more progress today. The book is up to a little more than 21,000 words now. I plan to have it finished by the end of December. Okay, I’m not going to “win” NaNoWriMo, but on Thanksgiving, I am giving thanks for this wonderful month of community and support.

Yesterday, I signed up for the January conference in New York. I’m looking forward to attending with my daughter. We had so much fun last year. You can see some of the pictures I took of Manhattan in the snow on Zazzle. I changed most of them to black and white and added a little grain. I took them with a point and shoot I can carry in my pocket. The advantage was great, walking around in Midtown, tourist that I am, without my big SLRs. The disadvantage was color noise and fringing. I really love the way the black and white worked, anyway. It captured the feel of the winter city.

I have fallen in love with a new kind of art material. (This happens to me often.) It is called Yupo. It isn’t really paper. It’s actually a kind of thin white plastic. I love it for watercolor abstracts. I can wet it completely or selectively, and then let one or two colors run where they will. I let it dry, use a wet sponge to wipe off the passages I don’t like, and then add more. It is a very spontaneous and joyous way to work.

In a way, it is like writing a first draft of a novel during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). You can let the material take you wherever it wants to go, and then, later, go back and rework the parts that don’t fit.

The link leads to a vibrant piece I did in almost pure chartreuse. I sold a copy of its digital image on Shutterstock today. My dad, a California Scene Painter and amazing watercolor craftsman, would roll over in his grave. He hated that color as much as I loved its outlandish French name.  If you want to see more of this series, they are all on Shutterstock. Some of the originals are available on Absolute Arts.

I sold a copy of this print on Zazzle today. It was taken near Duck Pond Park in the Ridges neighborhood of Grand Junction, Colorado. It was one of those pretty snows we often get in late March or April when the first green leaves, and sometimes blossoms are on the trees. The white fluff sits lightly on swelling boughs like grace, while cotton-like clouds drift in sweet blue skies.

Each time of year here is pure magic. This morning, we walked around a lake near Fruita, about ten miles from our home. Flocks of geese and several species of ducks were resting out near the middle under a warm November sun. They reminded me of myself on trips from Los Angeles, stopping over in motels to recharge, or, in the midst of a large creative project to, well, go buy stuff for Thanksgiving.

Yesterday, while taking a break from my writing, I uploaded some pictures I took this fall. This one was shot on a spectacular October day. Alden and I drove across what locals call “the Stinkin’ Desert” to Delta, where we ate breakfast in our favorite truck-stop style cafe. I like my poached eggs really hard. I know that’s weird, folks, but they got it just right. This was an auspicious beginning.

The sun was shining and it was quite warm in the valley, so we were afraid the recent mountain snow had all melted away. There was, as it turned out, no cause for fear. As you can see, the snow up near the Grand Mesa Visitor Center was absolutely gorgeous.

Now, of course, the autumn leaves you see on the aspens in the background are long gone. Down here in Grand Junction, the skies are leaden. It is perfect weather for processing and reflection. That’s the way the creative process, works, after all, at least for me. I take in new experiences like a glutton, swallowing them whole while they are available, and then, in times like this, after the fall colors and before the stunning silences of winter, I make them my own.

Sold a copy of this print on canvas today. I painted the original from a sketch I did on a scrap of paper I had in my purse. We were at a concert of the Grand Junction Symphony. I did the painting as a demonstration of how to use a sketch at a workshop for kids at the Western Colorado Center for the Arts. The style is spontaneous and expressive. Though painted just a few years ago, it represents a return to my early figurative expressionist style. Paintings in this style were shown and sold in California under the name Gene Armstrong from Holly Wood’s (not kidding) gallery in Montecito and elsewhere. I often worked from small sketches. I enjoyed sketching people at produce markets, the beach, Stearn’s Wharf in Santa Barbara, the charming Miramar Hotel in Montecito, and on bus stops. Those paintings were done before I spent years in life drawing groups, so recent expressionist figurative works like this one are different.

I have to explain that this piece, Walnut Canyon #2, is actually “rock art.” It is based on some terrible, and I do mean terrible, drugstore prints of photos I took in Walnut Canyon near Flagstaff, Arizona in 1988, soon after a bad case of writer’s block had led me to turn to painting. (It’s a long sad story–my poor family–but I digress.) Anyway, I went to some galleries in Scottsdale to see what they carried and on the way back, I stopped in Flagstaff. I visited Walnut Canyon late in the afternoon, and it was as if I had lived there once. I climbed down the hundreds of stairs to the rock peninsula jutting into the white sandstone and sat in one of the shelters cut into the rock by people, long vanished, the Spanish called Sinequa (without water) because there was no water in the stream. I watched two large birds, which I looked up later and found to be vultures, swing back and forth down the canyon with the light shining golden through their almost motionless wings. Then, I stood up and took some Kodacolor shots.

When I got home and had them printed, I was very disappointed. The photos were overexposed and blue. I couldn’t forget the experience, though, and did three large acrylics on canvas (about 3′ x 3′) based on the pictures. When we moved to Colorado, I took the paintings off their bars and rolled them up. For a while, I taught classes at the local art center here. There was a show for staff, and I pulled them out. They still were not quite right. I restretched them and reworked them with transparent acrylic glazes. This work is not worth a quarter of a million dollars, LOL, but it is probably worth a lot more than the cards and other small things I have been spending my time on lately, to say nothing of the novel I should be working on right now. Still, for all the artists out there with many interests, I thought it would be fun to share this little story. If you are interested, you can see the Walnut Canyon Series on Saachi.com, Absolutearts.com (the three original paintings are available only through this site), Redbubble.com, and, of course, at Zazzle. I have set up prints, cards, and other items there. If somebody ever buys the originals, I will take all the prints and products down. (Wishes and horses and all of that).

After I finish my novel, I plan to do another series of “rock art” works. I have some large blank canvases that would work well for paintings of the White Rocks area near South Broadway here in Grand Junction and the Saddlehorn area in the Colorado National Monument. Watch for the first ones here and at Absolutearts early next year. Sighs. I don’t know where art is going or whether I will ever sell any of these paintings. At this point, it probably doesn’t matter. What matters is the “problem” (a term my art teacher dad used for assignments he gave his students) of their creation.

Now, back to writing.

walnut canyon2 magnet from Zazzle.com.

Sold a copy of this image from Big Stock today. It was one of the first I ever uploaded to a Microstock site. It was taken with an early Nikon digital camera on a trip with a friend to Yellowstone. We drove through part of Grand Teton National Park on the way. It was absolutely spectacular. I would love to go back some summer.

Grand Tetons Stock Photo – 7022 | BIGSTOCK.