I was surprised and pleased today to stumble across an image of my Land Arts field journal, on the website for the Nevada Art Museum.

The Center for Art + Environment is installing an exhibition of "Selections from the Archive," and a photograph of one of the journal's spreads appears as the posterchild for the show on the CA+E exhibitions page; and on the page for the Selections exhibit, it appears alongside a conceptual sketch from Lita Albuquerque's Antarctic project South Pole Stellar Axis Installation.

The show will run from May 14th - June 17th, in the CA+E Gallery, so if you happen to be in Reno next month, stop by and check it out!

(...and let me know how it is!)

Farewell to Hull!

It has a good home now in the respectable collection of someone I admire.

And I have some monies!

Okay! Painting and more painting.

Guess what! There's snow involved.

...which I'm really enjoying.

....aaaaaaand will continue to enjoy for at least another week's worth of work.

Plans for travel to Australia keep on keeping on. A couple of weeks ago, my cohorts and I purchased plane tickets, and last week, we made reservations for hostels in which we'll stay between and around field outings. Both of those steps, one would think, would feel like concrete confirmations of the trip. But somehow it still didn't feel quite real--

--Until my trip journal arrived in the mail!

Isn't it a gorgeous thing? It's actually bigger than the 8"x10" described by its highly-skilled maker, Benjamin Castro (in reality it's closer to 9"x12"). I gasped when I picked it up for the first time, letting my brain accept the realization that it is not going to easily slide into my little flash day pack at all (much less with my gouache travel box). I set it on the bathroom scale and the needle hovered at around five pounds.

It is tremendously exciting, though, that the items responsible for that weight are some 250 lovely, quality pieces of watercolor paper, ready to be scrawled and painted and drawn and reflected all over.

It's an almost-irresistible temptation to start filling it up now. But I think I'll sublimate the urge into building a little travel bag that will hold both it and my plein-air kit.

Violin update!

After the pieces were glued together for the back, I cut out a rough shape, using the ribcage as a guide; then routed around it and started gouging in from there.

Then, following a set of arching guides I made for myself,

--I continued to shape and refine the belly. The next step will be to scribe around its edge, in preparation for the purfling.

My next solo show, in October, seems a long way away, but by now I know better than to get too comfortable with that distance.

It'll be at Austin College (in Sherman, TX). I'm very familiar with the school, as I received my undergraduate degree there, once upon a time--but not nearly as familiar with the Dennis Gallery, part of the Betsy Forster Complex (named after its generous donor), which sprung up a couple of years after I graduated.

My unfamiliarity with the space means that it's hard to know how much work is needed to appropriately fill, but not crowd, it. Having been provided with the space's floorplan certainly helps...

 

...but only so much. I don't always think spatially, and it's hard for me to really get a sense of the space. So I used a piece of matboard to make a maquette of the gallery.

Half an inch = 2 feet. A little crude, but when I printed out mini-paintings and placed them in the "room," it was believable, in terms of intervals and proportion; and gave me a better idea of how the high ceilings, wide open space, and impressive spans of unbroken white wall, will allow the paintings to breathe.

And okay, I'll admit, it was also a little fun to make. (Regardless of whether you prefer dollhouses or model planes, who doesn't appreciate an interactive miniature?)

I tried out a few different arrangements, moving the paintings from wall to wall and varying the spaces between them--and established to my satisfaction that the number of pieces I'm scheduled to finish by September will be sufficient to fill the room.

Then I thought it might be useful to be able to anticipate how the space would feel with the addition of a few extra guests. Because I am four years old.

Maybe you have been wondering: does Cedra still make paintings?

YES, I do, albeit a little more haltingly than usual this last couple of weeks; but I'm motivated all afresh to pick up the pace. Here's the beginning of my current effort. It's something like 24" x 30".

(Again, for scale)

That top third will be woods/thicket. The bottom (currently still white) will be snow-covered, with only bluish shadows (and a single, smallish figure) adding information.

That's where it stands presently! More soon.

Yesterday, my friend Xuan Chen invited me to come along with her and a few friends on a hike in Ceja Pelon, in the badlands near Cuba, looking for petrified wood. It was a nice rambling day, and we saw several beautifully preserved fossils, and views of some pretty strange and remarkable country.

I'm trying to get more practice with descriptive mark-making, and quick but expressive landscape studies, so I worked this one up in ink.

I then made copies of it on heavy paper and went at it with two approaches: one with a brown wash (thinking of Rembrandt)....

...and the other with more developed color.