It is not every day that you get to paint a portrait of a movie star.

She has appeared in about 200 films and television shows, including such diverse works as Petticoat Junction, Little House on the Prairie, The Apple Dumpling Gangs Rides Again, Back to the Future III and the Oscar wining High Noon and Unforgiven. I had come to the Gold Country in the Sierra Foothills to capture her likeness in my sketch book.

Her name is Sierra and her number is 3. She lives in a historic roundhouse in Jamestown in the State Historic Park, Railtown 1897. Yes she is a steam engine, a Mogul 2-6-0,  built in 1891 in Patterson, New Jersey. She was recently rebuilt and still pulls passengers on Saturdays from April to October.

Sierra No. 3, in her star part in High Noon (1952). A star part, as explained by Orson Welles, about his role as Harry Lime in the classic The Third Man (1949), is a part where all the characters talk about you for an hour and when you finally appear, everyone thinks you did an amazing job. This is the part that No. 3 plays in High Noon. Everyone in the town of Hadleyville waits for the noon time train with fear and anxiety because it contains the outlaw coming to meter out revenge on the town and the Marshall, responsible for his imprisonment. Clearly No. 3 should have picked up Best Supporting Actor to Gary Cooper’s Best Actor Academy Award.

Sierra No. 3 looks just as good in color in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992). This film in which Eastwood starred and directed, picked up four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood. Unforgiven is only the third western to win Best Picture. While the majority of the film was shot in Alberta, Canada, Eastwood came back to his native state to film the train scenes at Jamestown.

No. 3 and the infamous Petticoat Junction water tower, sans petticoats. This show did not win the Academy Award or an Emmy, as far as the sketcher knows.

In the final week of my summer vacation I headed to the eastern Sierras to an area where I have many great memories: Mammoth Lakes.

My parents spent their honeymoon here in the late 1960’s and we later celebrated my brother’s 1st birthday at this altitude. Mammoth has grown since then and the ski resort is not longer run by it’s founder Dave McCoy (who celebrates his 100th birthday this month), but by a large corporation that’s slowly turning Mammoth into Anywhere U.S.A.

I headed out to a Mammoth staple that has not changed too much in 100,000 years, the basalt column’s of Devils Postpile. I found a nice perch to sketch from and as I sketched each vertical column I lost sense of time, such is the case when your “drawing from the right side of the brain”.

In between lapses of focus I jotted down two questions I overheard at the Postpile: “Did somebody make this?” and “Are those big French fries?” Luckily these questions came from children and not adults. You never know what you might hear from folks on vacation.

After the sketch and painting I head down to the banks of the he Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River. Here I found a creature that I expected to find on such a rough and rugged stretch of water: the American dipper. This was John Muir’s favorite bird. In The Mountains of California (1894), Muir describes the dipper this way:

He is the mountain streams’ own darling, the humming-bird of blooming waters, loving rocky ripple-slopes and sheets of foam as a bee loves flowers, as a lark loves sunshine and meadows. Among all the mountain birds, none has cheered me so much in my lonely wanderings, —none so unfailingly.

After spending sometime with the dipper, I headed downstream through the burnt snags, the remains of the Rainbow Fire (1992). I did my last sketch at the base of Rainbow Falls. I worked a loose sketch with my Noodler’s Ahab and painted the scene with the waters of the San Joaquin. The mist from the 101 foot falls surrounded me as a few souls braved the cold waters.

 

 

Rainbow Falls, Devils Postpile National Monument.

 

 

Journal page from 2009, based on the final paragraph of Ibuse’s classic Black Rain.

Linocut print based on Ibuse’s Black Rain.

Bodie was the first place I ever saw real, honest-to-goodness,  tumbleweed tumble. 

This ghost town, located between Bridgeport and Mono Lake in the eastern Sierras, provides a window into a once booming gold mining town. At it’s height, Bodie had a population of 10,000 and became known as a remote and wicked town boasting 65 saloons. One young girl  whose family was moving to Bodie, wrote in her diary, “Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.”

I was not here at 7 AM just to watch the tumbleweed tumble.  I was here to get an easy life bird: greater sage grouse. You just had to wake up early, when the mountain temperature hovers around 40 degrees. I headed south from Bridgeport and then headed east to Bodie. The town opens to the public at nine. As I neared the front entrance, four sage grouse crossed the road. Bingo, a  flock of life birds!

The flock walked or flew across the road and then headed into town. After 30 minutes, the flock took flight and headed up hill and out of town. They must have sensed the hordes of tourists, that was about to descend on this lonely, abandoned town.

Once the town opened I sketched the two story school house. The first Bodie school house was burned down by a “juvenile delinquent”.

The Bodie Methodist Church steeple and it’s California gull weather vane.

As if to earn it’s wicked credentials, the church’s Ten Commandments, painted on oilcloth, was stolen. I guess the thief or theives, glossed over Commandment Number 8:, “Thou shall not steal”.

 

“Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men;

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain pen.”

-Pretty Boy Floyd,

Woody Guthrie. 

A new month and a new toy: Noodler’s Ahab Standard Flex pen ($18.50).

In the past I have worked with nibs that required frequent dipping into ink (think Shakespeare composing a sonnet). I have always loved their expressive lines caused by the amount of pressure applied to the nib. The downside is that you have to continually recharge the nib which requires an open inkwell. This approach does not lend itself to field sketching. I think of the many times I’ve dropped a pen, pencil, or journal and dropping a 3 ounce open container of jet-black India Ink would be catastrophic.

Into this dilemma comes the Ahab flex pen.  With this fountain pen, the ink is contained in the barrel. This pen sucks up ink like a hummingbird drinking nectar.  I filled up the reservoir with black ink and now I needed a subject for a field test sketch.

Enter the Women’s World Cup Final, the United States vs Japan and a pizza/brew pub on Clement.

I first needed an anchor (not the beer) for the spread and a pint of pale ale did the trick. Sketching with the Ahab is a dream, it is expressive, free flowing, and I didn’t run out of ink. This pen really is three pens in one, depending on how much pressure you apply. No pressure: thin line, lots of pressure: thick line.

I look forward to many more sketches with my new toy!

A portrait of my new pen (not done with the Ahab Flex).

 

No trip to Boston would be complete without a journey across the Charles River to Cambridge (“our fair city”) and American’s oldest university:  Harvard (1636). What drew me to Harvard was the Natural History Museum. This museum was founded 362 years after the university in 1998 and was created out of three different research museums: the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Harvard Mineralogical and Geological Museum, and the Harvard University Herbaria. With the price of admission you got three museums in one which also included the Peabody Museum of Native Americans.

I had come to sketch the superlatives, oddities, and extinctions of the animal world, and they were many specimens on display in the museum’s vast collections.

The Superlatives:

The wandering albatross has the distinction of having the largest wingspan in the bird world. It’s wingspan can reach 11ft 6in.

The largest falcon species is the gyrfalcon.

The smallest wren is the winter wren, which also sings one of the fastest songs in the bird world.

The capybara is the world’s largest rodent.

 

The Oddities:

The duck-billed platypus is an Australian mammal that is poisonous and lays eggs (one of only five monotremes that currently exist).

The Coelacanth, an ancient fish that was once thought to be extinct, until it was rediscovered on December 22, 1938, off the east coast of South Africa.

Extinctions:

The beautiful passenger pigeon was once the most numerous bird in North America but is was hunted to extinction. The last living bird,”Martha”, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.

The ivory-billed woodpecker is very close to being extinct with rare sightings in the southern swamps and Cuba.

The Thylacine or Tasmanian tiger once lived in Australia and Tasmania but the last individual died in the Hobart Zoo on September 7, 1936. Mysterious sightings are still reported.

Moas were large flightless birds endemic to New Zealand. The nine species of Moa were hunted to extinction by the Māori.  All Moas were extinct by the 15th century.

The Dodo has become the poster bird for island extinction. The dodo was endemic to the island of  Mauritius and was first encounter by Dutch sailors in 1598. The last report of a live dodo was in 1662. Why the dodo became extinct is unknown, with over hunting, habitat destruction and the introduction of nonnative species being leading causes.

 

I just spent seven days in one of the most historic cities in the United States. A city that birthed a revolution, and a nation. A city that is now full of contrasts. That city is Boston, Massachusetts.

I knew that Boston would provide many sketching opportunities and I was never without my sketching kit. On this trip I used much sepia, quinacridone gold, and olive green to color the historic statues and monuments of “The Cradle of Liberty”. Washington, Franklin, Revere,  Sam Adams, Poe and a duck with her ducklings.

Early one morning I walked from my hotel on Washington Street the five blocks to Boston Public Garden. First opened in 1869 (relatively new by Boston standards) the lagoon was added two years later followed by swan boats in 1877. The lagoon (and perhaps the swan boats) attracted ducks and more ducks. This inspired Robert McClokey to illustrate and write the Caldecott award winning children’s book Make Way For Ducklings (1941). This classic has sold over two million copies and is a staple in any primary classroom. In 1987,  a Nancy Schön sculpture was installed in the garden. I sketched this sculpture before the hordes of children arrived, who, over the years, have worn the duck heads from bronze to gold.

On another morning I walked down Washington Street to sketch Boston’s oldest standing public building, the Old State House (1713). In my mind, no other building represents the contrast of old and new that this brick building that is now dwarfed by glassy skyscrapers. It was the center of British government and on March 7, 1770, the Boston Massacre occurred in front of the east facade. The Declaration of Independence was first read in Boston from the balcony of the Old State House on July 18, 1776. This early American history is contrasted by the subway station in the basement on the eastern side of the building. The Declaration of Independence is still read from the balcony every Fourth of July.

A spread from two other statues of Boston: Sam Adams and Edgar Allan Poe. The Adams statue stands boldly in front of Faneuil Hall. Adams was a son of the Revolution and a signer of The Declaration of Independence.  Faneuil Hall has hosted speeches as diverse as Frederick Douglass and JFK. The Poe statue stands in Edgar Allan Poe Square near Boston Common and features a raven and a tell-tale heart. At first, the statue seems out of place because Poe is more closely associated with Baltimore than Boston. The master of the macabre was born in Boston on January 19, 1809 to his actor parents while there were on tour. He may have been named after a character in King Lear, a play they were performing in 1809. The two statues are contrasted by time and style. The Adams statue was erected in 1880, but the Poe statue is modern and was unveiled in October of 2014.

This year, in 2015, the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) celebrates it’s 50th birthday.

I graduated from The City on the Hill in 1995, not with a degree in Art but in Literature with a pathway of Pre and Early Modern Studies in Literature. What does this degree really mean? And “what is pre and early modern studies?” you might ask. Well it’s just the study of dead white, and sometimes blind, poets: Milton, Donne, Marlowe, and of course Shakespeare.

The first time I encountered the Bard was an old leather bound copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works that was kept in a cabinet in the front room of my childhood home (it was a wedding gift for my parents). I would occasionally thumb through the onion-skin pages of tiny words, arranged in two narrow columns. I never read the words but I somehow thought that this must be some sort of sacred text that came out from time to time during some of my parents many cocktail parties (this was the 70’s after all), not that anyone would open the book but it sat on the coffee table, looking cryptic and important. To one of the valley’s engineers, it might have even appeared to be an over-sized coaster.

I later encountered Shakespeare in high school, reading Romeo and Juliet and watching a grainy VHS copy of the  iconic Zeffiirelli production. I was hooked! From there I made a pilgrimage to Ashland and it’s Shakespeare Festival.

And then, when attending UC Santa Cruz, while taking a Shakespeare course, I saw my first Shakespeare Santa Cruz production. It was The Merry Wives of Windsor, re-imaged in a 1970’s trailer park, and it all somehow worked. The text was not altered but the setting and concept was very, well, Santa Cruz. Since that time I have seen many Shakespeare Santa Cruz productions until it’s last season in 2013 (it’s 32nd season), a victim of state budget cuts to the universities.

The beautiful campus has provided many sketching opportunities and the sketch above was completed on one recent Sunday, June morning, while seated on stage, looking out to the Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen. My only audience was a feeding doe and her spotted fawn.

A sketch done from another hike on the UCSC campus and Porter College, formerly College Five. My hiking companion had attended College Five in the early 1970’s. To the left, and out of frame was the the Porter Darkroom Guild, where I spend many hours learning how to print black and white prints.

A detail from one of the most interesting colleges from an architectural standpoint, Kresge College. When I was there, it was rumored that a college course in Japan was taught, just about the architectural innovations of this college.