June is my birth month and June of 2021 has been good to me. It was a blitz month for painting, a blitz being the opposite of a slump, where there is so much happening that I can barely keep track of my own activity.
I was walking up to Wonderland Lake to paint and I met another painter on the road. We talked for a bit about watercolors and gouache, and I mentioned how much I love June because of how much light is outside. It is so nice to have the sun set at times like 8:20 PM, as opposed to winter when the sun sets more like 5:30 pm. It feels like each day is just packed to the brim, like time has expanded and I can go outside and paint for three more hours than I usually would be able to.
El Dorado Canyon is a great place to paint, hike, climb, or take photos. Every direction you turn is another amazing thing to see or do. At this point in time, I’d recommend going during the week - the photo above was taken on a weekday trip. Trying to go on the weekend means an early day to get parking, one would have to arrive long before 8 or 9 am, given how many people I saw there during the first week of June!
For most of June I was able to get out at least 3 of 7 days each week and paint plein air around Boulder. The plein air paintings aren’t always the best paintings I do, what is most important is that I get out there and make them. If anything, hiking around with a 13 pound easel gets me some good exercise, and there are parts of Colorado that can always be counted on to be transcendentally beautiful.
On June 13th I took my easel up Chautauqua Park trails in Boulder and was able to hit the sunset at just the right time. I could not believe my incredible luck with getting this vista.
I had been wandering around Chautauqua for about an hour before finally getting to this spot. This particular spot isn’t too hard to get to from the trailhead, only, I seemed to have taken the long way and approached it from the other side, not the trailhead side.
I lucked out and saw the most incredible sunset I’d seen for all of 2021.
I move pretty slowly with the easel. It’s just a few ounces shy of a lucky 13 pounds, and it’s big, so I plod. Occasionally I will have a nimble display where I cross a river with it or navigate up or down some rocks with it, otherwise I plod. Sometimes I have multiple water bottles in my backpack, which adds a few more pounds to my traveling weight total, and then I start moving even more slowly. This is totally fine, because the slower I move, the more I notice. The more I can look around the terrain and find a good painting spot.
Sometimes I will go running and scout out places to paint. The only problem with this is that I forget how long it takes to get to a painting spot, like this waterfall in Gregory Canyon. The first day I located the waterfall, I ran to it to scope it out. When I came back with my easel and backpack, I’d forgotten how far in it was, and found myself plodding up a bunch of rocks that I’d previously leaped up.
Another great location to hike or paint or both is Red Rocks Trail in Boulder, not to be mistaken for the Red Rocks Ampitheatre area, one of the trailheads for this area the Sunshine Canyon trailhead, right off of Mapleton avenue in Boulder.
Painting rock formations involved a lot of drawing for me, a lot of tracing a thin brush along the canvas to get the edges of the rocks pinned down in a way that I wanted. I love painting like this. Some painters try to avoid lines or the act of drawing, which is great. For me, I try to draw when I paint, as much as possible.
Before making this painting, I’ve never painted ‘below’ a subject either, where I was looking up at it. I’ve painted and drawn models on slightly elevated pedestals, yet I’ve never craned my head up at something that towered over me to try and paint. This was interesting to do, and worthwhile.
After hiking up on Mount Sanitas on June 25th, I saw these red rocks from a distance while on the Mount Sanitas trail, and decided that I wanted to figure out how to get to these rocks and paint them. I was able to make it to the rocks on June 27th and on June 28th.
The Red Rocks of the Red Rocks Trail are at the top left of this photo, as viewed from the Mount Sanitas trail.
This is how art ends up, often. Taking action and going out to paint will result in one painting, and usually, it will result in another idea. At it’s best, art gathers momentum like a snowball, like gravity - one idea leads to another idea, one expedition leads to another expedition, and on and on.
That’s not to say I haven’t run into art slumps before. If making art at its best is a snowball, an art slump is like a snowfield with no slope to it, just falling snow and no shape. It’s hard to see progress in a white field. It’s hard to go anywhere and know what to do.
In Colorado you almost can’t go wrong, just pick a road and go, and you’ll run into something gorgeous. I grew up here and went to school in Boulder, yet it took some traveling around the States, living in different cities, and traveling around the entire world for me to realize just how beautiful and special this place is.
The best part about being an artist is being able to see the deep preciousness of life, no matter where you are. Yet, wow, Colorado makes it all so easy.
I did get some digital art in as well in June, but not a ton. Whenever it was nice outside, it was just too tempting to go outside and hike. I couldn’t stay indoors or do iPad work when it was so nice out.
Reading/Watching/Playing
Reading:
In June I finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness after finding a copy in a Little Free Library. This book was very good and well written. I thought the strangest part about it was that it is about a guy who lives thousands of years in the future, who studies an alien planet, yet he still does not understand women very well. I think this has to be the point of the book.
What’s also odd about this book is that it must have been outrageously progressive at the time, yet it has several regressive moments in terms of women’s equality. Maybe I am being too harsh. More than anything, this book proved to me that whatever seems outrageously progressive as far as women’s rights and gender equality in our present moment will be old hat in the future. On a long enough timescale, everything revolutionary becomes routine. This is a comforting thought because it tells me ultimately to not stress out, and I can stick to my beliefs in women as equals without feeling like a total loner. I have to remember that this book was written when women couldn’t buy furniture without a husband’s account information. When I think of this, the book is a lot shinier in my imagination.
There are so many moments in sci-fi fiction of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s where it is patently clear that women aren’t viewed as people. It makes loving scifi a bit harder, and is also compoundingly depressing because in visions of a dynamic future, women are still kind of less-than. It would be like reading a book about space aliens in the year 3335 and people are still racist about something that happened in the 1980s. Fortunately we’ve already surpassed some of that in 2021, not all of it, but some.
In June I also read some books about Bitcoin, it was interesting to learn about this.
Watching:
On June 26th (my birthday!) I was lucky to see Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, offered as a screening at the Boulder International Film Festival. It’s an ironic coincidence that the titles of these blogs are Sketchbook Confessionals, and in many ways Kitchen Confidential was confessional writing as well. What I liked about the movie was that it reminded everyone that Anthony Bourdain was first and foremost a writer, in addition to being a chef, and it was his writing that was so compelling to everyone around him. I’d recommend seeing this film if you get a chance on the festival circuit or any way possible if you’ve liked or seen anything of Anthony Bourdain’s work.
Playing:
I recently got back into Magic the Gathering after getting the Quantum Quandrix Commander Deck on a lark. After adding in a couple upgraded cards, I think I stumbled upon an infinite combo with Doubling Season, Adrix and Nev, and Helm of the Host. I started to do the math on this and realized it gets exponential pretty quickly. I also have to appreciate the art in the Quantum Quandrix deck, the fractal-based cards and ideas are just so very pretty.
I’m still playing Dungeons and Dragons with some lovely people online. Arlina has reached level 5, we’ve finished a second campaign arc, and we’ve almost been playing for about a year now over zoom and hangouts calls. It’s been a fun thing to play, especially since it’s a full homebrew campaign.
When I’m tired from hiking or running and there’s no Magic or DnD to be done, I’ll still fire up a round of Elder Scrolls Online. Averle is now about level 620.
Fitness:
Since June 1 is my no-alcohol anniversary date, I wrote a blog about my thoughts on the past year and how I quit, what I was thinking about, and how it affected me in terms of health.
Overall things are going great with not drinking, I hardly think about it at all. I keep busy with running and art and playing games if I have spare time.
In June I reeled back some of my running and was able to find a place to run indoors on a treadmill, which helps with some of the dry heat of the summer. I didn’t have a lot of exciting, big running feats, though I did build a ton of strength by carrying the easel uphill and across fields around Boulder.
The hardest trail to carry the easel on was the Mt. Sanitas trail, it had a huge uphill and I had to focus on not slipping on the rocks. I moved so slowly during this hike that a butterfly ended up landing on me.
It’s fun to do these hikes because I combine two of my favorite things: exercise and art. It’s not as easy as it seems to look. When I review my own photos, the hikes look so carefree, yet there isn’t an easy way to express all the plodding and grunting it takes to get to some of these locations.
Until next time! Thanks for reading my blog!