Lights All Askew in the Heavens

I've mentioned before that my paintings rely heavily on photographs, combining imagery from different periods of my life. This fall it occurred to me to worry that I might run out of photographic sources--so I gave myself an assignment: to attend a minimum of one event a month that's outside of the scope of my normal day-to-day, with the express intent to document it.

So when my friends Alex and Mary visited in October, I brought the camera along when we visited the Earthships community near Taos...

In November, Lauren and I helped slaughter turkeys for Thanksgiving at our friend Kat's communal farm, Sunflower River...

At the cusp of the new year, Hilary and I drove up to Ghost Ranch for the snow...

And last week, we went to check out a place along the Rio Grande where the bosque had been cleared and burned (near another choice location, the glass fields)...

I'm pleased to have adhered to this so far, and I've gotten a lot of good visual fodder--but while the recent string of landscapes is going to make for very useful sets, I think I'm going to need to go on more character-scouting expeditions in order to people them. As such, my goal within the next couple of weeks is to attend a human-centric event...preferably one where said humans wear strange costumes of their choosing. I'm eager to see what I can find! (SciFi convention, anyone?)