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Sunday morning

It was like waking up on a Sunday morning, the clouds around the small plane were like an ocean of duvet. We flew up and out of the top of the billows like we were climbing a mountain of marshmallows.

Light came bursting in to the cock pit, changing from the foggy groggy haze that was Los Angeles with its yellow hue of a hot September sun and smog spewing from the freeways. We climbed, the droplets of condensation and the roar of the engine outside my cushioned headset were the only indication that we were moving through the interior of the thick marine layer.

We, in our little plane, had this beautiful morning sun all to ourselves. I could hear my own voice on the intercom, just over the drone of the little propeller that sowed us into the air, keeping us afloat just above the bulbous mounds of little fluffy clouds; like a raft in Caribbean sea, heaven below us and nothing but the thickest blue above.

There was hardly enough room in the back for me and my drawing board. (You can see it in the bottom left corner…)

We flew over deserts that looked like the pattern on a Seventies sofa, mountains that looked like wolves teeth and rivers that looked like ink spills. Whole cities that looked like you could reach out and brush your fingers over the roofs and rolling meadows that you could stroke.

By a stoke of luck we saw Michael Light’s aerial photos at the Nevada Museum of Art while we were in Reno and I have a new idol in Maynard Dixon. We never even made it to the air show.

Plein air sans brush

All I could hear was the crunch of my boots on the parched cracked dust, crystallized into place by a pattering of rain earlier that month. There was what passed for a river up ahead eking a trickle out of the sand, snaking past an outcrop of rocks. I could make out the barest sliver of shade clinging to the edge of the red rocks, hiding a cool blue spot that would be perfect for painting.

My spot looked like a set dressing of a 1950’s western; the type of place an old and wizened cowboy with steel blue eyes and skin as rough as rocks might take his young son to survey the roaming cattle. The smell of snakes and burning sage wafted up at my painting kit; balancing tenuously on the three points of the weather worn granite.

It was my clumsy knee that knocked my paint brush out from its wallowing hole in the pea green brush pot. It tumbled down between the boulders. I could just make it out at the bottom, almost lost. The same thing happened to me once in Africa but it was a baboon that stole the brush when I wasn’t looking and he ate it so I never got it back. I had to use a tooth brush for the rest of the time I was there.

I was dammed if I was going to lose my favorite brush, I removed my now burned and numb butt from the hot rock that I had been sitting on for an hour and climbed down. But as I stretched my hand down toward my plump maroon paintbrush, with its bristles caked in beads of sand and a blanket of fine dust, it was just out of reach. From above it had looked like a relatively easy valley that it had dropped into. But now, as I tenuously extended my hand down into the crevice, hoping that I wasn’t about to be perforated by a grumpy rattlesnake rudely awoken from its afternoon nap, I realized how close to lost the brush was. I couldn’t reach it.

I convinced myself that it was too hot for the snakes. To make sure that they weren’t tempted by my juicy fat hand descending past their resting place, I jumped up and down on the rocks and made loud clapping sounds to scare them away. Then I dove head first into the crevice.

I was now upside-down, my belly resting on the downward slope of a very uncomfortable rock, my arms outstretched into the crevasse. I was armed with two other paintbrushes, positioned like chopsticks, grabbing at my big fat brush. It was an ungainly sight.

After much grunting, moaning and a cramp in my right hand, I was triumphant and got the brush back.

Surfing opossum

So in my studio, after a few days of painting, the smell of turpentine, bees wax, linseed oil and Dammar varnish permeates the whole house. I had these paintings laying flat on the floor to dry, shut the door, turned on the fan, and left a slight crack in the window to drain out the fumes.

The next day I checked on the drying and the paint swirls. There were little flecks of paint in the lip of a curling, braking wave.

Did I do that?

I didn’t remember making those marks and on closer inspection, they were not the shape of any brushes that I had used. And they were in the middle of a flowing brush mark that I did not want to cover.

As I was removing the marks, just like a CSI agent, I stopped. I realized that they were little foot prints. One going one way and a second set going the other.

I think an opossum went surfing on my wave.

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