Easter Morning Thoughts

"Sunrise in the Judean Wilderness," 5 x 7 acrylic on canvas panel

Easter morning thoughts. Silence. Simplicity. Grief. Hope. Judea. Desert. Light not darkness. 

Palette knives.

Desert star--8 days to Christmas

"Desert Star," 5 x 7 watercolor Christmas greeting card

Desert dwellers know the stars.

It's no accident that much of astronomy as we know it began in the desert.

Muslim inhabitants of north Africa and the Middle East  followed the stars--in cold clear nights where they became beacons...and science.

Go to the desert southwest of New Mexico and see how the Anasazi at Chaco Canyon, and elsewhere, studied the stars... .

Our urban world has lost the stars, through light pollution, through indifference and technology...but

We've also lost magic, and a sense of eternity, and humility, and spirituality.

That's why the fabled star of the New Testament's Middle Eastern skies matters...a signal more important today that there is much more to life than our materialistic, self-centered so-called "universe."

Desert Dawn--When peace like a river--study in pastel colors

"Desert Dawn," 5 x 7 watercolor, 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press paper

"Desert Dawn rise up early and lift your song,
From the breathe of life that rises...."
        --The String Cheese Incident

Pastel colors time, early morning, late evening, when changes bring soft hues to the desert, a sometimes harsh landscape of rigid lines and colors.
In the words of the old Gospel song, it's "when peace like a river attendeth my soul...."
Softness, beauty in the midst, in the need, of the often harsh deserts of life.
This I find in watercolor, in memories of the far horizons, of never-ending, always varied colors...a place of rescue, of solace when most needed.

Heat and cheat

"Desert Heat," 7 1/2" x 7 1/2"

"The world is too much with us... ." Wordsworth must have been both poet and prophet, I thought, looking back on this week personally, and the materialistic world that consumes "civilization."
It's more a case of too much going on, or at least that's my excuse for not painting a watercolor yesterday. "Furry things," 
was yesterday's challenge prompt for World Watercolor Month. 
Today the prompt was "Monochromatic." 
It's going to be 100 plus degrees tomorrow, as Oklahoma slides into the sweltering heat of summer. 
That's partially responsible for today's painting, featuring essentially one color, oozing the start of another blistering day, "Desert  Heat," on a piece of 140 lb. Indian rough paper I bought once.

"Lookit those birds!" 5' x 7"

The cheat part? Since I missed painting for the first day this month, to occupied to repaint two furry critters who have adopted me, I pulled this former painting out of a frame by our fireplace. Sophie and Snoops, looking out the window at birds. 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press paper. 
Tomorrow, the prompt is "Relaxing." Don't know yet. 

Desert dreams

"Evening Star," 8 x 10 watercolor, 140 lb. d'Arches cold press paper

Desert dreams

Desert Sunset, 11" by 14" watercolor, 300 lb. d'Arches coldpress

When you grow up in an arid country, a land of dry air, the light and land can overpower your senses. 
Your world is full of vast skies and sharp-edged landscapes, undiluted by humidity. Scarce moisture arrives only in spurts, from clouds as dramatic as the land  underneath, quickly changing its rugged contours. Then the intense sun and wind return to the work of ages, sculpting the desert.
Many consider the desert as "god-forsaken," but when you live there, it becomes part of you, just like the weathered wrinkles on your face and hands.
In studying watercolor, I find many books and teachers come from humidity-rich locales, and they are souls of those worlds as I am of the Southwest and Great Plains. As a lover of skies, I still learn from them in painting atmosphere, but I'm more at home, in life and with a palette, with my desert dreams. 

Time, for Ed Abbey

"Desert Time"--5 by 8 watercolor, handmade Indian paper

Poetry makes time travel possible.
Long ago a favorite university student, friend and fellow desert lover introduced me to Ed Abbey, whose abrasive writing in novels and essays--Monkey Wrench Gang, Desert Solitaire--of the Southwest inspired the radical environmental EarthFirst! movement. You may have seen an old black and white Kirk Douglas-Walter Matthau movie, Lonely Are the Brave, (1962) filmed in Albuquerque and the Sandias. It's based on Abbey's book, The Last Cowboy. Douglas said it was his favorite film.
Ed, in many ways a modern Thoreau, died in 1989 at age 62 and is buried in the remote Arizona desert. 
I think I've read most of  his sometimes tortured works, but again picked up Earth Apples, the collection of poetry and philosophies, seeking inspiration for an urge to paint.
In "Essay on Time," he asks, "Are there not several modes of time?" and then writes of eight such kinds of time.
Here's number six:
            "desert time: the stillnesses
             and music of sky and rock,
             the movement of wind on sand" 
I could have painted number four, but that's later:
           "the time of poetry, the time
            of music, the time of love."

African outpost of slavery, 120 on the blog

Map from CIA

A new reader clicked on this blog this week, marking the 120th country to have had readers. I'm astounded, especially since the reader is from Mauritania, the 18th African country on my list.
But when I started looking up facts on this country, I found that it is the "last outpost of slavery" in the world, and that as many as 600,000 people (up to 20 percent of the population of 3.2 million) may be slaves.
That is just hard to imagine. Of course the military government, that overthrew the first elected leader in 2008, denies it, but recent articles by CNN, BBC, the US State Department, and others say differently. It is also cited for other human rights violations including child labor and female mutilation.

Nouachott, with the Atlantic in the background

The capital, on the Atlantic coast, is Nouachott, "the city of dunes, or wind," has an estimated population of about a million. Less than one percent of the country's land is arable, and if other African countries' experience is typical, discovery of oil will only help the rich.
It's a poor Sahara land on the northwest coast of Africa, mostly desert, and most of the people living on less than $2 a day. But it is a new oil country and made news this week for agreeing to sell electricity to Senegal.
The country gained independence from France in 1960, (the U.S. was the first to recognize it)and officially abolished slavery in 1981. But it wasn't a crime to own slaves until 2007, and only one slave owner has been fined. The population is about 30 percent Arab-Berber, 30 percent black and the rest mixed. The north is largely Arab and the south black, and ironically in this African country, many of the slaves are black for white masters.

The overriding color of Mauritania is sand, on the earth and in the sky. The country is larger than Texas and New Mexico combined.
The flag of green for Islam and gold for the sand, carries the crescent and star of Islam, which is the religion of almost 100 percent of the population. I can imagine the reader of this blog surviving in a sad, harsh land. I hope you find it interesting. 
My trip to neighboring Mali a few years ago introduced me to the region, but Mali is a democracy. Poor, yes, but the people were hard working and friendly. I am amazed and learned much.

The desert, a road to peace

My Aunt Lillian in Kansas, sent me this great article in the National Catholic Reporter about New Mexico and peace. The author is a Jesuit priest and has it right.

http://ncronline.org/blogs/on-the-road-to-peace