A year in books--Life ain't booked up yet

What have you read this year?

My goal has been a book a month, and while some months seem to elapse without one, others are crammed in. Some are short, some are long (Harry Potter, and Roads to Oz), and there are variations.

So far, this year, I've pretty well made my goal, pretty much in chronological order starting in January:

1. The Shack
2. Lincoln on Leadership
3. Landscapes of New Mexico
   
4. Roads to Quoz
   
5. Okeefe and Adams
6. Good Omens
7. A New Earth
8. The Worst Hard Time
9. Poems from Dry Creek
10.  Cezanne's Composition
11. Turner to Cezanne
12. The Dutch Italianates
13. The Good War
14. Teaching with the Brain in Mind
15. Old Friend from Far Away
16. Art and Fear
17. The Rhino Ranch
    
18. The Associate
19. The Lost Symbol (to be finished soon)
    

You can tell I prefer non-fiction. Nothing like good journalism.

Our bookshelves are full of books we've read and treasure...including stacks of them around the house on the brick hearth near the fireplace, in baskets in different rooms. My art books occupy two shelves in my studio.   I've got a small collection of signed first editions, and all of Tony Hillerman and Harry Potter first editions. I carry The Art Spirit in my car so that I can just open it and read a little if I'm stalled somewhere or waiting on someone or something. Whitman is beside the bed--my textbook from long ago at Central State where I was an English major (before I repented).

My books are marked up too--with phrases and words underlined...good description, original thoughts, strong imagery. Like from The Cruelest Journey: "Our journeys choose us, not we them."

My wife reads more than I do...she has stacks of books by the bed on the table and floor that seem never-ending, as she reads several at once, usually every night before dozing off. She's got gobs of cookbooks scattered in kitchen cabinets, on top of the microwave and around the kitchen--the two most recent from Cafe Paschal in Santa Fe, and Low Country Cooking with 82 Queen in Charleston. When we go somewhere, we come home with cookbooks. We rarely read the same books.

It's no wonder we like bookstores, and especially McMurtry's Booked Up  bookstore in Archer City, a half million used books in a town of 1,200--site of his Last Picture Show journey that ends five books later with this year's Rhino Ranch. We were there in March on spring break--coming back from a vacation in Fort Wort--and both came home with musty, delightful purchases. I drink my Sunday morning New York Times coffee from a mug I bought there, with the Booked Up logo, a pig standing on a book, on the side. And Susan demands the Book Review first.

Education is never complete, is it? Life ain't booked up, yet.

What I am learning from watercolor--metaphor and more

Anasazi sky--watercolor

• You can't control everything
• Being uptight negates creativity, art
• Light is much better than dark
• Diagonals command attention
• Paintings is problem solving and solving those problems takes your mind off your other problems
• All paintings are illusions--quiit worrying about the details and go for the illusion
• That does not mean a lack of planning...planning composition and values give  the freedom to be creative
• don't use black
• Too much darkness kills
• matting and framing matters
  
• Contrast, of light and dark, of colors, gives the most impact in painting and in life and in writing
• paint and write what you know...what you know deep inside
• a painting is not a photograph
• You get to mess with reaility
• Less is more
• Change colors often
• Start over
• But in starting over, don't try to duplicate, just correct mistakes
• Don't fiddle
• Have fun
  

Thanksgiving

Why I'm thankful today. My oldest son, Sgt Vance Clark, USAF, has been home from Iran for almost two years now. He requested a UCO flag to go up in the Baghdad mess hall, and UCO sent it to him. Soldiers are still eating in this mess hall, wishing they were home for the holidays. Many will never come home.

I'm thankful for all of them, and all my children and family. To all those men and women throughout the world who are remembering times with their families, snap a salute today, and say a prayer for their return.

Taos, metaphor and magic

Taos Pueblo casts a spell over everyone who visits northern New Mexico, especially artists. I have drawings my Dad did there 70 years ago, and most famous american artists have tried their hand at it. I'm no exception.

What is it with the multi-storied adobe that has become an icon, inhabited for hundreds of years before the white man discovered it? It sits at the based of Taos Mountain, a holy place where no white man can go. People live there, with no running water, and in other more modern houses at the pueblo. They constantly repair the adobe with fresh mud and bricks, so its actual contours change slightly every year. The Indians make the most of the crowds of tourists, charing entry fees, and fees for each camera. You must ask and pay to take individuals' photos. You should. When you are there you are guests in a foreign country...the Constitution of the United States does not apply there. These people and their culture and laws pre-date it, and I expect that they will be here after the United States is history.

Most believe that the pueblo Indians are the descendants of the Anasazi who disappeared about 1,000 years ago from settlements on the Colorado Plateau west of Taos. If so, then they were the first immigrants. The Spanish and the gringos were only the more recent.

These walls saw Coronado in 1540, and Kit Carson 300 years later. I believe the magic of Taos is part of its value as metaphor for the rest of us who in the terms of the old Gospel song, "This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through." Taos teaches us how fleeting we are in time, and perhaps by visiting and painting it, we become part of its existence.

High Lonesome

The Great Plains, first called The Great American Desert, because they're so open, so vast. Today you can zoom across them at 75 miles per hour in less than a day, but if you were walking, if you were in a horse-drawn wagon, the trip took weeks from the eastern cross timbers to the Rocky Mountains--more than 500 miles. We've lost that sense of space and slow time, and thus the value of place and companions.

I grew up spanning the Great Plains and value the far horizons, the open skies, the few people. A reverse migration is underway and much of the area is becoming more and more lonely as people leave looking for work and a future. Several years ago a couple of authors raised a controversy when recommending that we turn much of the Great Plains back into a huge buffalo reserve. It's not so far fetched, especially when the aquifers dry up and drought returns, making the energy crisis look as trivial as the blowing tumbleweeds.

Then only the hardy will remain in the Great Empty...inspiring more thoughts for another Christmas card...High Lonesome