The Churn

I had hoped to have a snowy winter in England. Being from the San Francisco Bay Area, snow is something you have to make an effort to get to. It’s not that it’s terribly far away, it’s just never on your front porch. We used to get driven out to play in the snow as kids every once in awhile, en route to Reno. A bit over a year ago I happened to be in Louisville for an event. It started snowing hard enough that my flight home was cancelled and I had to stay another night. I stood there watching the snow and it occurred to me that I’d never actually seen snowfall before that. I’d only ever seen already-fallen snow. I stood there and like an idiot stuck my tongue out to catch some.

Well it did snow a number of times in England, which was great. unfortunately it never seemed to stick, melting upon contact even after a few hours of it. So I never got the snowscape I hoped for, that I was looking forward to painting en plein-air.

The other problem is that England really is as cloudy as its reputation makes it out to be. That’s never good for lighting even if I like hiding from the sun otherwise. So one sunny day we went for a walk just outside our village. There runs the River Churn, though it is really more of a rivulet at this point. Eventually it joins the Thames. It’s a pleasant little stream that winds its way around the hills. There wasn’t much particularly winter about it though, so I picked a spot with a nice barren tree and got to work.

This was another occasion where it was really cold out and the wind was blowing hard. Once again my fingers were freezing. Another feature of the weather out there was that the clouds tend to move very quickly due to the constant strong winds. What started out as a sunny day very quickly turned into a patchy clouds day, and before long into mostly cloudy, destroying the light.

The board I used was a leftover piece of Ampersand Claybord. I bought it when I was experimenting with Ampersand boards. Since that experimentation their “Hardbord” line has become my standard support, over which I glue paper. I love it. I’d forgotten how hard it was to paint straight onto clayboard though. Within seconds of laying down a passage of oil paint, the absorbent surface would suck the oil down and your strokes were stuck, you could no longer blend. If you used too much turp on your brush and ran it over a passage that had sunken in like I’m describing, it would obliterate the paint; with the oil mostly gone the pigment wasn’t really stuck together with anything, so the thinner carried it away like a damp rag on a dusty surface. So I was fighting my medium and the weather. Finally I gave up, snapped some photos and went home.

The board sat for a long time as I worked on projects. I rubbed some walnut alkyd all over the surface with my fingers, which sunk in. When that dried I did it maybe two more times until the clay surface was saturated, at which point the paint would stick to the surface and handle like oils should. Maybe 2 months later I had some time and proceeded to finish the painting in the studio using a tighter style more like my illustration. Finally, I had this:

8x16” oils on clayboard

remembering that i forget

back in high school and into college i was a voracious reader. i still read a decent amount but not nearly at the rate i used to, and not the same sorts of things, by-and-large. i was also the sort who would keep everything i read, on shelves. so i had tons of paperback and hardcover novels and the like sitting there. i wasn’t going to re-read most of them ever so eventually i took them all to the used book store, got my 30 cents credit or whatever for the entire lot, and cleared the space out. after grabbing some more books.

what surprised me was looking at the books, all in boxes just prior to the great trade-in, and realizing as i looked over them that i had almost no clue what most of them were about anymore. what a frightening revelation. i’d pick up a novel, look over the cover and could, if i was lucky, tell you the main characters’ names. for some books i could tell you a general plot-point but no characters. or maybe the theme. where did all that information go? certainly there were some memorable books whose details i could remember quite well. but it was shocking to see that much information slip away from my conscious reach.

i say conscious reach because if i flipped open most of those books and just started reading, it would unlock the file cabinet in my brain and release the memories. but until then, many of those books were in forgotten rooms in my head, full of cobwebs. i assume that many good things were retained in a more suffused way—the way streams join but you can’t tell what water came from which tributary when it all becomes the winding thames. language, thoughts, emotions—surely these have been subtly shaped by all i’ve read. but the facts, they’ve been filed away. some of them, they were never filed to begin with. the words passed before my eyes, the details remained long enough to finish the book and were subsequently tossed like so many post-its when finished, and my mind didn’t complain.

since then i’ve estimated that i actively retain only about 5-10% of everything i read. it’s a worthwhile thing to identify and know for me. it means that i need to digest that much more information if i want to retain it long-term.

numbers

12/24/2005: the date i started jogging again after a 7 month break. before the break i was jogging, max, 2 miles per session as i had only run for 1.5 months at that time.

1: the number of miles i started with in december, roughly 5.5 months ago.

36: the average temperature, fahrenheit, for most of my runs.

20: the average wind speed, in mph. helpful at your back, but it always seemed to turn to oppose me.

5/6/06: date of my last run in england.

4.25: miles run on each run by the above date.

8: miles run on my last run day above.

10: minutes per mile over the 8 miles. not great, not terrible.

i have never in my life run more than maybe 3 miles, and that was when i was running back in ’93. so getting to 4.25 miles as an average run was quite an accomplishment for me, especially given the slight slopes along the path i ran on. when i started i had the crazy idea of being able to run the 8 miles from our village of north cerney to the town of cirencester along a 2-lane country road called “the white way” by the time i left england. given i’d never run more than 3 miles, this was a pretty dumb goal. but somehow, i met it. i ran about 3 times a week and built up my distance every other week or so. i ran in the rain. i ran with sleet stinging my face as it was blown head-on at me riding those 20mph winds. i ran in shorts, a sweatshirt, and a beanie and looked like a moron when i ran at 32F.

by the end i was running just over half the full goal-distance on a regular basis. a fellow i used to work with who ran races told me that you should be able to push your body to twice your training distance even if you hadn’t trained at that longer distance. so, trusting that piece of advice i went for it anyway, prepared to walk much of the way home. but that final run went fine. a capri sun in my pocket helped. i was pretty sore the next day but had scheduled a few days of rest before figuring out my next running goal, in new environs.

on the road again

living in and out of suitcases and cardboard boxes is not fun. what you do in between unpacking and then repacking is the fun part. but moving, nope, nothing fun there. but the packing has begun again. this means no blog for this week. besides this entry, which means there is a blog this week, which means i'm making no sense. but you know what i mean, no content. nothing substantial, no links to other places, no pictures with captions.

which is funny, considering there is a folder called "unused blogs" on my computer that has a good dozen or so entries mostly or fully typed up already. i write or expand on entries when thoughts come to me and save them up for the weekly post, figuring that when busy weeks come i'll have less to do to get a post up. but moving weeks are beyond busy in most cases. at the moment these are just word files. they haven't had links added and most require some. they don't have pictures formatted for them and many require some. and that often takes as much time as just writing.

because of the move, and because my internet situation is always up in the air for awhile upon arrival, it's entirely possible that i may be silent next week, in which case that'll be a real week with a post unlike this one which is becoming substantial as i type.

i've got another landscape painting to post on, posts on competition and camaraderie among illustrators, stuff about historical illustration, drawing in public... there's another spam roundup and even an update on my someday coming book (don't get excited, little has happened). all kinds of stuff, and that's just what's already sitting waiting to be turned into a real post!

so, i seem to have filled up enough lines of text to have made my intro paragraph meaningless, but also to keep me from feeling like i shirked my duty in getting something up. voila, a post.

oh yeah, and here's a link. i rule.