All posts by jjartist
I worked on the treatment for the movie during the first 12 hours of the trip until I felt like I was beginning to hate the story, so I just put it away. I slept most of the way from LAX to Kauai. Almost all of my anxiety melted away as soon as I felt the tropical breezes. It was fairly warm but the air was moving so nicely and I felt good. And everyone I’ve encountered so far has confirmed my belief in the aloha spirit of the people here. The cab drive told me his favorite beach for camping (which is one that is on my list of three sites at which I’ll be staying), and gave me a gift of a local alternative to saying “Aloha.” I guess he liked me! I’m checked in to the Kauai Palms Motel which has internet wireless access, so I’m getting some internet work done this morning before heading out to get my rental car.
The hotel is actually quite nice. Air-conditioned, quiet and friendly. And close to the airport! I was too tired and disoriented last night to do much film work, but I did get a very nice rest.
I’ve started on the first leg of my journey. Luckily got an aisle seat next to an exit do it’s almost as roomy as first class. I decided to work on a treatment of the script on the flight and have already run into a problem on page three. So I’m blogging while I mull it over.
I’m all caught up in preparing for my seven weeks in Kauai, which involves not only making sure I’ve packed all I need, but also taking care of things I have to do before I leave. For example: I’m providing some music at a wedding tomorrow and still have some rehearsing to do before then. My car needs the brake bled after having changed the Master cylinder. And so forth. Most of the details about the venture can be found at my site Kauaithemovie.net site or my IndieGoGo site. The video below is a brief introduction and can be found at both of those sites. When I’m in Kauai I’ll be posting to this page regularly. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPc-yAkWKwc]
In the near future…as soon as I can figure it out…I’ll be posting to this blog from my phone. This blog will become one of my main ways of keeping interested parties up to date on my movie script project in Hawaii this summer.
I’ve been derelict in the extreme regarding this blog of late, in good measure because of the attention I redirected to my trip to Australia. I’m sure a “good blogger” just keeps blogging in spite of all distractions and perhaps one day I will become that ” good blogger.” But in the meantime, I do have a few pictures from my time “Down Under.” We left on a Sunday and returned on a Friday and in between lost and gained a day as we crossed and recrossed the International Date Line somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean. We stayed in or near a small town called Handorf, which in in South Australia in the hills behind Adelaide. The whole region is sub-tropcial and is well suited to vineyards, of which there are many.
Wine Country
Roses abound in the region, perhaps partly because they are planted among the grapes to warn of possible disease…the grapes show signs of distress before the grapes do. 
Another aspect of the landscape which struck me is the vast number and variety of Eucalyptus trees, which the locals call “Gum Trees.” With their white trunks and peeling brown bark they really stand out against the other trees and shrubs and the leaves have a characteristic silouette and movement.
This is all I have to offer this morning. I’ll have more images and chat tomorrow.
I skipped drawing this week to make a bunch of oatmeal bowls. I’ve started a new website called myoatmealbowl.com, and I don’t have any ware to sell. I’m expecting to put a few items up for sale soon and maybe in a couple of weeks or a month I’ll have some regular items available. If you check out the website, please take the short questionaire on the “contact” page. In the meantime here are a few pictures I photographed recently of some drawings from years gone by. Both of these are Conti drawings on paper, actually cropped
down from full figure drawings. The painting below is of my VW Van that I used as my rolling studio apartment in in the late seventies. The van was named ‘Faith’ and it seemed sometimes that faith was all that kept it rolling. But keep on rolling it did until a tired and slightly
intoxicated bar waitress cut across the parking lot at a diagonal on a foggy night after the disco had closed and crashed into me. And spilled my drink, I might add. It was technically totalled but I managed to keep it rolling for a few months more till I left for San Francisco. I sold the van to a friend and put the engine in a little red VW beetle and headed west. Which reminds me…here’s a picture of San Franciso from El Cerrito.
Here we are back to Friday after Thursday and another watercolor to view. I’m making plans to go to the new Gauguin show in DC next week. Couple of us artist fellows on a day trip. I saw a big Gauguin show about twenty years ago and apparently this one has a different focus. We’ll see. In the meantime here’s a sequence of the figure study I did last night. I took a slightly different approach by building it up with very faint washes. It worked pretty well and I’ll probably work this way more often.
The whole page was washed with a very pale yellow. To get the paper wet and to take away the stark whiteness of the page. This picture shows lots of shadows created by the multiple ceiling lights passing my body as I leaned over the painting to take the picture. The shadows are kind of interesting, too. I think. This was full sized sheet of Arches paper. I covered the whole sheet with a pretty large brush and did the drawing with a medium sized sable brush…dipping into a small bowl of tinted water.
I was pretty happy with the way things were going at this point. I put the bench the model was resting on in using more or less the true colors. The background is still just yellow…the shadows in the photo are creating the illusion of some subtle color washes. Nice idea but that. not what was happening. I ended up placing the figure a bit low on the page, which isn’t terrible, but I’d have prefered it to have been half an inch higher. I sort of skipped ahead to this final version. I ended up using some dark lines to draw in some of the features. Notice the background is now created with some actual painted washes rather than random shadows. I had a great time painting in the background. It’s all fun!
When this old world is getting me down I know place to go that’s trouble proof…Up on the roof. Well, even artists have to make roof repairs sometimes when the high winds blow away flashing and tear the roofing materials. A major landmark in Annapolis, the Hammond Harwood house suffered major roof damage in these winds, so I feel lucky to have gotten off so lightly. So here are a few pictures from my adventure. An adventure that I would rather not have taken for: In the words of Danny Glover in the movie Lethal Weapon, “I’m getting to old for this shit.”
These are the two views: Up and Down Either direction can be a little tricky. I like the view from up on the roof. It reminds me of all the years I spent painting houses…I’d be up on a ladder two or three stories up and have a grand view of the town. And being up so high with so little to support one can be just a little exhilarating. Then I saw the damage. A bit of torn roofing and a bit of flashing blown away in the valley.
These two shots taken from the top of the second ladder. Went back and got some repair materials . I found the missing piece of flashing out on the street last night, which let me know that I had one of my chores set out for me today. As I said..not too bad.
I wore some old sweat clothes so all I got roofing tar on was my hands and not too much of that. Roof patching cement is pretty messy stuff. I’ve been doing this sort of thing since I was 17 or so and I’m only just a little neater than I was then…I’ve only done limited work as a roofer. I did work for a roofer for a while in San Francisco. And finally a view of my neighbor and his dad surveying a project of their own.
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