New Mexico painting

This is one of the small paintings I did in New Mexico, of the chamisa in a dry riverbed. I'm back in the land of 100 percent humidity and coqui frogs, another world.

Earthquake

Last night around 7 pm while we comfortably eating a pasta dinner in front of the tv we felt this big shaking, which, when you live 6 miles from an active lava flow makes things a little more exciting. Here is a photo from the government site about our 4.2 magnitude quake. See the star, I live about a quarter inch (in map terms) north of the star, along the coast. The quake was really nothing dramatic, not like the quake last year where the epicenter was a hundred miles away on the Kona coast. That one was worthy of CNN coming to inspect the damage and I loved that people could send their photos to the news network.

Painting in New Mexico

When I met up with Arthur and Roger in New Mexico the first thing we did was go up to the vistas to paint the changing colors... It was just starting to turn and we found the best vantage point for the three of us to paint from. Unremarkably there were many others with the same idea of going up to see the aspens. But remarkably we made front page news in the local paper, undoubtedly a slow news day. The photographer's image was actually more interesting than my feeble first painting in New Mexico.

Fire in San Diego

http://www.signonsandiego.com/firemap/

Because I have family in San Diego, I'm posting this link to a map of the fires there... if you click on the cameras they have photos. Amazingly the one shot of the helicopter over Poway looks like the lava fires here (burning the forests at this moment and coming towards our little Pahoa Town, only 15 minutes from my house).

My brother's family evacuated to my mom's place in Clairemont.

Back from the mainland

I have to apologize for not being up on my blogging... I was on the mainland where I met up with Arthur and Roger in Santa Fe, NM. I actually started the trip by going to Tucson to visit my pal David Gilmore who has a fab blog (http://www.nineteenthparallel.com/lava) (he used to do radio stories for NPR) and just wrote a book about life and building here in Puna. Sadly, Puna sucked the life out of him and he ran away back to Arizona where he happily rides his bike to get around town and tinkles the ivory on his awesome grand piano. Because he didn't have a car he so thoughtfully got a bike for me to ride as well. So in 95 degree heat we rode just about 15 miles a day my two days there. He can be my disignated personal trainer. On that fateful second day we rode uphill in that heat to what was described to me only as an artist's gallery. Something I'm always interested in. He didn't tell me who's. It turns out I'm quite familiar with this artist whom I would call the Walter Keene of the Southwest: Degrazia... c'mon, you know his work too... someone must've said something to the artist because partway through his museum he started putting in the dots for eyeballs on his little figures. I actually like his non eyeball work better. Anyways, he also built a church for the community and of course had to paint the walls with his unique vision.




..thankfully, the ride home was downhill.