eric135

An imagined night sky, inspired by a recent episode of Gary Spetz: Painting Wild Places, on PBS. I used to try to replicate his paintings but they are simply too advanced for my skills, and I end up spending a lot of time basically mixing mud.  So now I watch the show (sometimes 2 or 3 times, much to roomie's chagrin). Then I use some of his ideas either in a similar work or an entirely different idea altogether.

Gary Spetz is very inspiring, and he does consistently encourage the viewer that they do have the skills for such advanced paintings. His presentation is very calm, relaxed and confident. And the soundtracks he uses on his show are beautiful new age guitar which seems to set the mood for a few hours of watercolor. The one real downside for me is that I don't have very good drawing skills, and the first step of his painting is to cover all of the preserved white with making fluid. So let's say his canvas is about 24in x 36in, he covers about 1/4 to 1/3 of that with masking fluid and so he pretty much loses me at that step.

Preservation of white is one of those weird features of watercolor art that I find very challenging. I mean, if an oil or acrylic painter wants to have, say, white clouds, white snow, a white dress, a white house, s/he pulls out the white paint and puts it in, whether it be in the beginning, middle or end of the painting. In watercolor, the color white is simply the preserved white of untouched paper, so you have to plan it all well in advance. This plus the inherent unpredictability of watercolor ink can lead to problems (but I love unpredicted surprises as colors wash into one another, bleed about, mix into new colors (or not). My watercolor paintings never come out the way I plan them, which is as much a frustration as it is an inspiration.

Two boys at the beach

From a photograph taken of two of my nephews, Jack and Tyler. We're at Nags Head Beach, North Carolina, in August 2008.

President Barack Obama

Wow that sounds pretty damn good, doesn't it?

I took the day off to watch the Inauguration, and I'm glad I did. Once again, I was struck by the sense of living history. The sight of such a huge crowd assembled to witness the event was amazing. I think if I still lived in Virginia, I would have tried to get to DC to see it all in person.

Star Trek Exhibit @ Arizona Science Center

 

Last weekend, we went to Star Trek The Exhibition at the Arizona Science Center, celebrating roomie's perpetual 25th birthday.

• The cost of admission was $20/adult, which included admission for the enter Science Center.
• Sadly, no cameras or cell phones were permitted, even though they had a full-size replica of the Enterprise-D bridge and you could sit in the Captain's, First Officer's and Counselor's chairs. I was going to try to sneak a cell phone pic but they had folks watching every room to be sure no pics were taken. I personally think they should have either let folks take pictures in the chairs, or even have a photographer take pictures that you could purchase.
• There were a lot of interesting artifacts, including lots of costumes and props. I could easily remember the episode of every costume except one.
• Oddly, there was a wall with photos of Shatner, Nimoy and Nichols, but no Koenig or Takei. We noticed there were definite spaces where they could have easily fit, so space was not an issue.
• They had a lot of models of the Star Trek ships (Enterprises 1701, 1701-A B C D E NX, Voyager, Deep Space Nine) but they were not actual models that could have been used in motion capture. They were all metalic and looked like plastic casts.
• There were several TV monitors that showed what looked like clips from various documentaries and possibly DVD tracks.
• There was one large/long wall that had the entire Star Trek time line with all of the shows integrated into it.
• They did have Captain Kirk's chair. There was a sign not to sit on it, and it had ropes around it, and I personally would have jumped them both but there were guards posted (well not really "guards" per se, more like folks that could have worked at Geek Squad, but we still didn't chance it).
• They had a replica of the Enterprise-D's sick bay.

All in all it was a really good day. Not only did we get me out of the apartment into the sunlight, we got the chance to explore downtown, had lunch at the Rainforest Cafe, took a look at the new (well, new to me at least) IKEA store in Tempe, and then had dinner at the Marie Calendars.

Planet of the Apes 40th Anniversary Collection

 

Planet of the Apes 40th Anniversary Collection

Happy New Year! We spent most of the night listening to our college-age neighbors test fire a jet engine (that's my guess, no way anything that ear-splitting loud is music).

Well after the ball dropped, I watched some of the Planet of the Apes marathon on TV. Roomie gave me the 40th Anniversary Blu-ray disc set for Christmas.

I remember watching these movies back in the 70's with my parents. It's not what I would think they would have liked but I remember how much we liked the movies when they first aired on TV.

The scene that I remember most was in the second movie, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, where Zera gets shot in the back and her newborn baby is shot half a dozen times.

One detail I missed when I was a kid was that Roddy McDowell was playing different roles. Back then, I just thought that was one long-lived chimpanzee.

That's also where I thought of myself more of an orangutan, and gods how I hated the damned gorillas in my junior high school.

Yeah, we orangutans were picked on a lot by those gorillas, even though we did most of their homework, and let them cheat off our test papers.

Frakkin' gorillas.