Karl's Carlsbad Art

Last night, as I was driving back into the park after a quick trip into the city of Carlsbad, I saw a huge herd of barbary sheep. It is hard to see them in this photo, but there was more than 100 animals packed together in this brushy area. The barbary sheep are not native to this area. They were introduced in the 1950s, I think from the Barbary coast of Africa. They have thrived here; but unfortunately, they have pushed out the native bighorn sheep.


When I woke up this morning, there was only around 50 feet of visibility. The fog was packed in thickly. This was the view from my patio. It rained all day. Sometimes it was just a drizzle and sometimes it was a downpour. They called this a monsoon here. 


I am so grateful that Carlsbad NP has such a great studio area for me to work in. At other national parks the past two summers, I was always painting outdoors on a trail somewhere – – so this set up is awesome!

As I am nearing the end of my residence here, I counted up the works I have created in the past nine days. I counted 27! I decided that I needed to title my paintings, so I went ahead and wrote something on the back of many of them. 

Two days ago, I had a conversation with a young girl visitor. She was probably in kindergarten. I asked her if she was an artist and she told me that she does finger painting. That made me remember my kindergarten days using tempera paints for finger painting. This thought inspired me to revisit my youth, and yesterday I attempted two works of finger painting acrylic on canvas. I think these are both 12" square. They needed to dry overnight, which is why I am showing them today. Here I am beginning the first canvas.


This first one turned out better than I expected. It's an abstract landscape. Somehow, I can see some Van Gogh influence here!


The second finger painting image is somewhat of a disappointment. It's too dark. I was hoping for some sort of cavernesque image, but that didn't happen. I may end up painting over this canvas.


At the end of the day yesterday, I had a bunch of leftover acrylic paint on my pallette, so I used it to paint these two 5"x7" greeting cards. They needed to dry overnight, which is why I'm showing them today. 



Next, I made this image of bubbles using acrylic paint and some different-sized round jar/bottle caps. This is just a whimsical piece on 12" x 16" canvas board.


Yesterday I started the background of this 12" x 12" acrylic on canvas image. Today I started adding the cactus in the foreground. Tomorrow, I'll add some cactus flowers and do some other tweaking.


It was otherwise, a typical day. I had a lot of great conversations with passing guests, which is equally as entertaining as my painting.











Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

June 24 -- I set up my "studio"

Image
 This morning, I watched the sunrise from the front porch of my casita. Then, a soaking rain shower dampened the next few hours. One of the park rangers set up a spectacular studio for the artists-in-residence this season. This morning I settled in to this studio space. This space is located in the visitor center along a corridor between the ticket-selling area and the cavern entrance/elevator. Consequently, I am quite visible here. A significant number of visitors engaged me in conversation today. One of my favorite conversations today was with a precocious young girl who might have been eight or 10 years old. She asked me, "What is an artist in residence?" It was such a simple question that I had never even thought about that before.  I got warmed up by doing three watercolor sketches today. One of the rangers caught this camel spider. If you Google it, you will learn that it's not really a spider, but related to both spiders and scorpions. And then driving home after w...
Read more

June 23 -- Arriving at Carlsbad Caverns National Park

Image
 After a day's drive west from my home in Dallas, across the Permian basin, I arrived at Carlsbad Caverns National Park.  I was welcomed by the Rangers, oriented to the park's resources and issued a volunteer uniform! I have a ranger shirt and an official namebadge too. I was escorted to my provided lodging: a 1902's era casita built by the CCC (civilian Conservation Corps). It has 3-foot thick stone walls and will be a comfortable "home-away-from-home". From my porch, I can see across to the visitors center. The natural entrance to the caverns is right behind this building.   One of the big draws at Carlsbad is the "BAT FLIGHT", where at sunset, around 400,000 mexican freetail bats fly out of the cavern mouth to go on thier nightly feed. I walked down to the amphitheater above the mouth of the cavern and, on que, at 7:30 PM, the bats began voluminously flying out. It is really spectacular. It lasted only around 15 minutes, but the volume of bats was imp...
Read more