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Articles on travel

Groundhog day-ends today: That little voice may just be holding you back from life

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Half the battle of overcoming a problem is realizing that there is a problem. When the ailment is so intangible you can barely define it, than it becomes the norm and we are unaware of its control over us. If you haven’t figured it out by the large definition I have included, the problem is apprehension and it can become an epidemic without us even realizing our illness.
I call it a disease I have only recently discovered and identified. It stops us from doing activities that are out of our comfort zone. It is an ancient instinctual response that probably allowed our species to live long enough to reproduce, so there is a reason for it and there are some redeeming qualities that assist in keeping us safe and out of bad situations. It becomes a problem when our comfort becomes a habit that keeps us from doing much of anything but our constant run on the treadmill-okay I know how a hamster feels now.
It all started a week or so ago. Work can be quite intense at times and often the first thought of the beginning of the day is how quickly I can get home-unfortunately a dentist appointment means a long evening and the inability to do what I would normally do after a day’s work-go home and unwind. Again, most people would not be excited about a dental appointment but instead of having that feeling of anxiety about the end of the day, I was determined to find something positive about it-my son and I spent a lot of time together, we had dinner out, visited my in-laws and had great conversation with my son. After making the best of what most would deem a lousy end of a day-I started questioning my original feelings of apprehension.
The next day, there was a happy hour and again, instead of looking forward to something new after work I was uncomfortable with the fact that the event was this day-as if tomorrow would have been better. I began to realize that the feeling exists in so many aspects of our lives-it’s not so strange and out of the ordinary to realize but this feeling is what keeps us running on the treadmill and describing our days as a virtual groundhog day. I decided to dissect this feeling instead of avoiding it and after a wonderful happy hour, I realized this feeling was a constant in my life.
Why do people ask you to go get a drink and for some reason you need to get home, the problem is for what? What is that thing you are needing to get home for and you never quite figure it out only that you need to do what you always do and what seems comfortable. So in the spirit of changing this process, I joined a gym and with that process I hired a trainer. Every morning since I have had this feeling in my mind-wait a minute,  you don’t workout-this isn’t your thing. You keep getting this question in your mind and that very intangible question is apprehension.
Just realizing how much this unwelcome trap that keeps us from truly living outside our own comfort has actually made the voice less silent and more tangible. I realize the fact that the doubt and question follows me through every aspect of my life and the more we face that feeling head on , the weaker its strength grows.
So what’s next? Skydiving?  A great long hike somewhere in the mountains, I believe realizing this unwelcome hitchhiker named apprehension makes its hold on our lives less strong and I can only imagine the great things that lie ahead that will ignore the voice that insists on going home and staying on that same day-Ground Hog day is over for me-I’m just saying…. 


Articles on travel

in between stage

Rockwall Pond-2014

Rockwall Pond Study 2

I am in another one of those moments of block, both in writing, painting, everything. It’s one of those frustrating creative times where you walk around in circles. literally, as if there is something on the tip of your brush or pen and yet nothing comes. I have been pushing pastels around, pushing paint here and there and yet nothing materializes.

I believe as horrible as this in-between time can be it is a foreshadowing of things to come. I think that both in the inspiration stage and the processing stage there is a period of fermentation when the skills and knowledge of the subject do not equal the intent. I have seen images literally materialize over the course of a year or even as much as twenty years. Every part of the process is equally important.

Instead of stressing and feeling the lack of productivity as a stumbling block I choose to look at it as a interim between creative highs. Getting back to pastels instead of oils gives me the immediacy of sketching without a specific outcome, I believe this allows the creative vision to grow out of the block naturally instead of succumbing to the awkwardness of pushing around paint. These images are all in-between stages of pastels that haven’t completely gelled.

I have created these images mostly from memory which is why the details are a bit softer and less specific, another aspect is the medium, pastels tend to be a bit more free form and less detailed. I am in the process of doing a series of ten very small pastel studies that may or may not turn into actual finished paintings.

Wisconsin at the end of winter-sketch from 2006
Articles on travel

Getting There: How far is too far? Road Trip Part 1

A view from a room at the inn-early mornin Montgomery Bell State Park

The annual spring break trip went off well if not for some lessons learned along the way.
Three things occurred to me on this trip, there is such a thing as too far, there can be too many plans in too little time and eventually a teenager emerges from your eager travel companion. It was a bit of a growing pain for both of us, I must admit.
So how far is too far? After two days of driving seven and half hours each day, I decided twenty hours round trip is the farthest to drive-this way if I you decide to make it in one day you can-the extra five hours makes it too long to make in one day for my preference, I’m sure other lovers of the road would probably disagree. We spent two days getting to the first area we were going to stay, granted we did go through some beautiful country and we did have lots of time to bond and take in the road.
In the Ouchita National Forest we got to see an Alligator farm, the Little Rock Zoo and some amazing lakes and forests, we missed the waterfall hikes I had planned because time was just not available. We had another four hours after we spent the day at the zoo and the alligator farm to get to Montgomery Bell State Park, I’m feeling fatigued and my son decides its time to put on his headphones and zone out-it’s going to be a long ride. Near Memphis we were trying to get to Charles Vergos’ Rendezvous  barbecue but ended up getting in too late so next idea is Fried Chicken.
We have added food places to our list of places to explore and my son really picked well.
First food stop-Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken. It was one of those places that a crowd starts at the door and everyone sitting seemed like they were confident they were in the best place for an amazing meal. The atmosphere is relaxed and extremely comfortable, elbow-to-elbow with locals and the people were just so friendly. I met people from Dallas as well as people from around Memphis-we were seated next to a group of guys celebrating a bachelor party who apologized in advance for the chaos that was surely to ensue. The company and the atmosphere was alive, excited and I haven’t even mentioned the food yet. It delivered just as expected. You can order a few pieces or a half chicken, simple menu and just amazing taste. The coating is light but so flavorful and well worth the indulgence. You can tell when you have been to an amazing place to eat because it becomes part of the story, you remember it and the atmosphere of the whole exploration becomes flavored with the food and the place you found.
It was a long ride with a full stomach to Montgomery Bell State Park and lots of good conversation. I asked them if there were woods around when I booked a room at the park and they said the place is surrounded by the woods and they weren’t lying. We saw our first herd of deer cross the road and after weaving through the heavily forested road we were ready for a good night sleep. We woke to a beautiful view from our window, a misty lake surrounded by forest, a place we both would love to explore again but now we had six hours to get to Nashville and than to Dale Hollow lake-it was going to be a long day of driving.
The next food place my son found was the Pancake Pantry near Nashville, when you arrive,  there is a line out the front door that continues to grow, you know you’ve found another place for locals and tourists that have found a food paradise. So how special can pancakes be? It’s flour, water, a griddle and than whatever you add to flavor it, I stand corrected. Again, elbow to elbow to college kids and people from all over the country that have made a pilgrimage back to where they once lived, one thing about a place like this, you stand in line and learn about people, you gather stories from all over the country and suddenly strangers for a moment become friends. I ordered the Carribean- an amazing mix of coconut, pecans and banana goodness-he ordered the blueberry pancakes and I have never tasted pancakes the same, the lightness and the perfection of the fruit was something we will be talking about for a long time.
On to Dale Hollow Lake,
The spillway at the lake at Montgomery Bell State Park

Articles on travel

Last Moments

Perfecting that moment,
linens clean and curtains drawn
sunlight streaming through open slats in screen
perfecting the minutes
the indifference of the ticking of the small hand
the body recalls
remembering all the moments in light
now just a blink in a shadow
daylight
remembering a youthful glow
now gray and hollow
realization of the body is only a shell
just a jar that contains
only labeled with a face, a name,
to fill some shady grave
doctors put away your tools
there’s nothing you can save
the soul moves in there like a flame
dances across horizons bleak
when the body is silent
it’s the only thing that speaks
it carries the sunlight
the warm glow of youth
carries it into the darkness
and avoids the holes
we foolish youth investigate
doctors put all your tools away
there’s nothing here you can save…..

Articles on travel

Artist’s Changing Perception: The Illusive Portrait

There is a great distortion between what you see creatively and what often is reality. I learned this most profoundly just recently while doing a portrait of a friends’ daughter, the reason I chose the photo to create was first its delicate beauty but even more it begged to be painted because it seemed like a photograph of an Andrew Wyeth painting. I painted it differently than I have in the past, portraits have always been a struggle for me but this time I tried it smaller and with less detail and hoped it would be easier.
I didn’t sketch it like I have in the past; I blocked it out in paint and adjusted the image by eye. It is amazing how the face very slowly grows, as you get closer, farther away than closer again. The first images seemed almost cartoonish and pasty. I watched the ghostly face grow out of a dark backdrop and the closer I felt to succeeding the farther the actual success seemed to be. This feeling of creative blindness seems to run through all of my works but never more dramatic than this portrait.
First I am amazed to see how realistic the image looks and the appearance gets very clear that I have succeeded and so quickly, that is until I send it for feedback or show someone that has not looked at it for the last few hours. The comments were less than encouraging: “scary eyes”, “ghostly”, “If I were the customer I would be insulted”, as much as it hurts to hear, it was true-she looked nothing like the photograph. As much as the image seemed to appear during the painting process the reality of getting away from the painting was a bit intimidating. I went back to the drawing board, I would see her eyes staring from the painting for a moment than I would realize how bad the progress was getting and the time I seemed to be wasting. The good thing about this process is that the artist gets to refine the image and look at it again and again and realize how being too close to any painting brings about a loss of clarity in the creation.
There have been several times and several hours of working where I felt like I was getting somewhere great only to realize afterwards I had made it even worse. The great thing about this process is the honing of the skill of seeing, even if I fail over and over again I continue to refine my vision and break through the loss of clarity, I believe that working on this portrait will help with all of my paintings in the discipline of seeing what you see and not just what the brain thinks or decides it sees. There is a short hand of seeing things much like how the brain can decipher text that is jumbled, we see the image and capture what we think we see, we cut corners on the reality and fill in the blanks.
The brain is overwhelmed with details so we tend to skip the reality of details that would truly capture what we see.
During the teaching process I have helped the student focus by putting a mask over all but a small portion of a picture to copy, this allows the student to concentrate on detail and reality of what they see and the brain has less ability to fill in the blanks and the proportion and scale gives way to the true perception of a scene. I have also heard about people turning an image upside down to copy what they see instead of what the brain wants to capture instinctively.
In the end, I would not say I captured even a portion of the beauty of the original nor the drama of the Andrew Wyeth painting but in the end I believe I have honed my skills for seeing. I will do more portraits and plan on continuing to perfect them, I have already turned down several commissions because portraits are not my specialty although in the future it may not be the case, I believe in leaving everything up to growing and developing as an artist and as the eye perfects what it sees and argues with the brain for what is reality, in the end the artist will create reality out of the skewed perception he or she struggles with.


Articles on travel

How perspective and scale can prolong your life?

On a road trip in Arkansas, my son got his first lesson in scale and perspective and how it relates to photography. The reason people see an amazing scene and the pictures later seems  flat and unattractive is because space must be shown to the viewer or that great expansive scene becomes a flat image on a 2 dimensional plane

This is only a theory I have, that time has many different textures, which allows ones perception to differ from another’s. So how does this relate to scale and perspective? When a painter paints a landscape on a flat plane there is no information for the brain to decipher the space and therefore the artist must show cues of scale and perspective to explain how a two dimensional image has a three-dimensional space. In reality we see a scene and our brains realize by the differences and the fact that we are used to living in a three-dimensional world that there is depth and space ahead of us but on the canvas we don’t have that privilege. In California I visited a cave that distorts this reality, it is the moaning cavern and is California’s largest public cave chamber, you look up from the bottom and would think the space is twenty feet and yet the height of the statue of liberty could be fit in the space, this is because there is no markers to allow the brain to decipher the space and allow the brain to explain its scale.
So how does a cave and painting have to do with time, I think this is the same process. I have always thought the reason a night seems to fly by is because the brain has no way to decipher the distance of time and therefore it seems that it does not exist much like the space that we try to decipher, the space of time must be measured by the feeling of its space. If you do one thing all day it seems that the day passes by, even though through the function of that period, it may seem to drag on. It is because after the fact the brain has no way of scale for the passing of time, in contrast if you do many short periods of activity during a day the brain has the scale of multiple periods of time and therefore it seems the space of time has been stretched longer.
I strongly believe that if the brain is given cues to describe time as many different short streams the brain can fathom hours and days that seem long as opposed to how quickly time seems to fly. The reason I think time goes faster as we get older is because we don’t see and hang on to the details of day-to-day like we do when we are very young. Routine and taking the things we see for granted allows time to pass without the awe and wonder of seeing things for the first time. I am experimenting with filling my life up with as many experiences and bits of time to enjoy the scale of life well lived and as much as I can possibly envision in the shortest amount of time, I will keep you up to date with progress.
So how do you measure time and have you experienced differences in the feeling of short and long periods of time-explain how it feels different by the difference in activities.

Articles on travel

A Road Trip Mimics Life


In our lives we experience cycles from the excitement of youth seeking happiness to the wisdom of age searching for purpose, so how does this relate to a road trip? I feel like a vacation is a small snapshot of our lives and the emotions and feelings we get mimic, on a small scale, how life changes and develops over time.
When we are planning for the trip, there is the feeling of hope and excitement. As in youth, we tend to dream big and create this amazing fantasy where even a short period of time will make up for all the time we worked hard to afford the costs of the trip. We make plans, we add places to the vacation and activities that don’t necessarily coincide with the actual reality of time or the lack there of.
I feel like half the fun of traveling is the planning, learning about new places and making reservations is all part of the experience. I like the anticipation almost as much as the actual experience. As time passes in the planning process we start to realize the costs and the reality that we have probably allotted enough money for half the experiences and have arranged two weeks of adventures into a weeks worth of time.
So goes youth, we grow into our lives, the realities we redefine and the truth that we learn as we get closer to the actual life we have planned. This is why the teen years are so turbulent, it’s like planning to dive off a ten-foot diving board only to realize it is a cliff that is one hundred foot above treacherous rocks. This is the point in the vacation where you get out on the road and all the questions start to occur; did I forget anything? Did I bring enough cash? Have I planned too much? There is an excitement at this point but there is still that feeling of stress as the miles pass by and we get further and further away from our safe and stable lives.
When we arrive at our destination there is a mix of panic, the flat tire, running out of gas, the credit card that gets declined or the hotel that has misplaced our reservation, it always seems that in the midst of the road trip something goes wrong. We are at the mercy of the road, we feel our lack of planning and the truth of the vacation we have planned, we start to adjust the time we spend, what we are able to do and what we need to plan for another trip. This is life and the reality of the path we chose, both the peaks and the valleys. This time I would equate with our post graduation and the experience we have with building our careers and raising our families, it is as frightening and stressful as it is filled with passion and fulfillment.
With age, we realize the actual truth of the road trip; it’s reliving the points of time, the restaurants you’ve been to and the things you’ve seen. Suddenly the fears and insecurities of being out on the road turn into the confidence of miles driven. I experience a clarity of mind, routine loses its weight on what seems possible, even as the vacation ends you are planning the next place to go, to experience life, the great highs and the insecurities of the lows. The ride home is the wisdom of looking back on our lives and realizing what we have accomplished and perhaps what we might have changed if given the chance.
In the final miles, we long for the routine we worked so hard to get away from and miss the pets we left or the comfortable beds we’ve abandoned. It is a feeling of full circle and yet at the same time whether it be sadness and regret or fulfillment and passion we have made our trip what it was but unlike our lives we can go and do it all over again the next time we have a chance to road trip.

Articles on travel

A Road Trip Mimics Life

In our lives we experience cycles from the excitement of youth seeking happiness to the wisdom of age searching for purpose, so how does this relate to a road trip? I feel like a vacation is a small snapshot of our lives and the emotions and feelings we get mimic, on a small scale, how life changes and develops over time.
When we are planning for the trip, there is the feeling of hope and excitement. As in youth, we tend to dream big and create this amazing fantasy where even a short period of time will make up for all the time we worked hard to afford the costs of the trip. We make plans, we add places to the vacation and activities that don’t necessarily coincide with the actual reality of time or the lack there of.
I feel like half the fun of traveling is the planning, learning about new places and making reservations is all part of the experience. I like the anticipation almost as much as the actual experience. As time passes in the planning process we start to realize the costs and the reality that we have probably allotted enough money for half the experiences and have arranged two weeks of adventures into a weeks worth of time.
So goes youth, we grow into our lives, the realities we redefine and the truth that we learn as we get closer to the actual life we have planned. This is why the teen years are so turbulent, it’s like planning to dive off a ten-foot diving board only to realize it is a cliff that is one hundred foot above treacherous rocks. This is the point in the vacation where you get out on the road and all the questions start to occur; did I forget anything? Did I bring enough cash? Have I planned too much? There is an excitement at this point but there is still that feeling of stress as the miles pass by and we get further and further away from our safe and stable lives.
When we arrive at our destination there is a mix of panic, the flat tire, running out of gas, the credit card that gets declined or the hotel that has misplaced our reservation, it always seems that in the midst of the road trip something goes wrong. We are at the mercy of the road, we feel our lack of planning and the truth of the vacation we have planned, we start to adjust the time we spend, what we are able to do and what we need to plan for another trip. This is life and the reality of the path we chose, both the peaks and the valleys. This time I would equate with our post graduation and the experience we have with building our careers and raising our families, it is as frightening and stressful as it is filled with passion and fulfillment.
With age, we realize the actual truth of the road trip; it’s reliving the points of time, the restaurants you’ve been to and the things you’ve seen. Suddenly the fears and insecurities of being out on the road turn into the confidence of miles driven. I experience a clarity of mind, routine loses its weight on what seems possible, even as the vacation ends you are planning the next place to go, to experience life, the great highs and the insecurities of the lows. The ride home is the wisdom of looking back on our lives and realizing what we have accomplished and perhaps what we might have changed if given the chance.
In the final miles, we long for the routine we worked so hard to get away from and miss the pets we left or the comfortable beds we’ve abandoned. It is a feeling of full circle and yet at the same time whether it be sadness and regret or fulfillment and passion we have made our trip what it was but unlike our lives we can go and do it all over again the next time we have a chance to road trip.