The Baboon Congress

Pastels and Pixels

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Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

I am an addict without a support group.

Clouds. I am addicted to clouds. Not ICloud or Dropbox or Mozy. No, the things up there in real space, not in etherspace. The white, gray, blue, pink, purple, yellow, orange things. The puffy, stringy, tiered, tumbling, feathery things. The spring, fall, summer, winter things. The gay, brooding, ominous, exhilarating, majestic, mysterious things.

I got this addiction when I started pastels. Delightful and fulfilling it is to paint clouds in pastel. You layer on the dust, push it around, coloring your fingertips. If it goes right, which it often does for clouds, in a few minutes you have the top portion of the painting completed. Wise you are to make the sky the major portion of the painting.

Then came, sorry to say, the digital camera. I can shoot and shoot clouds and pick out the best. At least the theory was to pick out the best. Pretty soon I was keeping all the pictures, printing most of them, on the premise that any view of clouds might work in one picture or another. First I had a file called “Clouds.” Then I had files labeling clouds by colors, forms, moods, seasons.

Just when I thought I was getting control of my addiction, we went to Seattle, which is Sin City for the cloud addict.

We went to Seattle Center, site of the Space Needle, beneath which lies the Experience Music Project. I did not see its broken guitar architecture. I saw how it reflects clouds.
We went 5400 feet up to Paradise on Mt. Rainier. After I took 57 pictures of the clouds, I needed heavy detox.

It must be on our genes.

What’s in your genes?

89 thoughts on “Pastels and Pixels”

    1. I’m glad that you had to do it, Steve. That’s an old fave.
      However, I didn’t think that any of the cloud pictures in the video could begin to compete with Clyde’s pix. I love the one with the pink building (or was that a pink sky against a neutral building?). With as large a library as you described, Clyde, I imagine that it must have been a huge challenge to narrow it down to only 6.

      I guess volunteering must be in my genes. I helped at a memorial service reception last night, In a few minutes, i’m off to spend a day at a Habitat for Humanity Women build and tomorrow I will substitute usher at church. Staying busy must be in my genes, too. A Contra dance, Brave New Workshop and Bloomington Symphony will round out the weekend. (it’s a very round weekend).

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  2. Good morning. Clyde, maybe you should join Cloud Addicts Anonymous. Very good cloud pictures and story to go with them. When I move to the The Cities I will miss having the wide open view of the sky and the clouds that we have now due to living in a small rural town.

    When i was young I had a big interest in nature, especially snakes, bugs, and pond life. Over time gardening replaced nature study as my top interest or addiction. Apparently I am programed to be a gardener. In some ways I am more a plant collector than a gardener. My gardening activities include maintaining a fairly large collection of garden seeds and perennial plants. I do have an interest in other aspects of gardening to go along with my plant collecting addiction. My interest in gardening took a big leap forward when I learned about seed saving and started saving seeds.

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    1. what are you going to do with your perennial collection when you move to the city? are you abel to fill the corners of the yards with groups of your collection? i had the house i had lived in for 20 years turn into rental property and the renters didnt like my worthles plants. they wanted plastic cheests under stone. i put my foot down but they found a way to get rid a large percentage of them. gues it wasnt in their genes.

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      1. Some of the perennials will be moved including the rare top set onions which are perennials. Some of the ornamentals will not be moved because there is no good spot for them at our new place. I will leave most of them for the new residents who will probably get rid of at least some of them. I have let many of the ornamentals grow in a disorganized fashion that I doubt would work for most home owners.

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      2. tim, I’m stumped. What are “plastic cheests under stone”? I’m befuddled by a lack of sleep here and can’t figure out that one. I thought of plastic chests under stone, but that doesn’t make sense to me either.

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        2. yep those black plastic rolls of plastic people put down to keep from having unwanted weeds grow in the rocks that landscape between their onnamental shrubs. . the true maniacs go out with leafblowers on reverse and suck the dirt out of the rocks as not to have stuff gorwin in the dirt that blows into the rocks.

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  4. what a wonderful way to start the weekend clyde thank you.
    clouds…how nice. to find such pleasure in something so accessable. your genes to ours. i’ll bet i begin noticing clouds more regularly and appreciating them a little more. i have a cousin who is an abstract painter but he uses nature as the subject fo r his work and the thing he enjoys is the color pallet in the field he is near at the moment. he pointed out all the different colors of green in the spring as the trees are coming into bloom in the spring. the celery green of the willows the neon green ans the buds open and the leaves are jumping out of the branches, the deep emerald as the shine and wax dance in the breeze. and then there are the bushes grasses and fields. i have been apprecaiting those subltle little surroundings for years since he pointed them out.
    genes…i guess for me it may be telling a story i seem to have some way of telling some story with a punchline to accompany any situation. there is always a tie in if you think about it and the little stories are so wonderful. i feel the same way about music. i can always find something to go along with my mood or i can create the mood by whipping out the tunes. it works both ways. and colors. and geeze i love colors. the greens in the spring time. the blues in the shadows on a sunny day. the reds whereever you may find them. the tubes of paint that can take you anywhere. the pastels clyde has discovered, do you use hair spray to lock it in clyde. that cheap aqua net stuff is great. then the paper touching paper thing is reduced to almost no dust off.
    a weekend of blogging. it must be in the genes

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    1. I am a color addict. I have been since my days with an ice cream bucket full of color crayons. I spent a lot of time as a kid exploring the differences between raw umber and raw sienna and burnt sienna, between blue-purple and purple-blue. Then when I got to college, my professors fed that addiction by giving me assignments like observing and sketching a sunset over time so I could recreate the colors with light on a cyclorama (clouds make for better sunsets – more colors) and creating an all-white still life with one colored item that we then painted (so you could see the subtle differences of color and undertone in the whites). It hasn’t gotten any better as I have aged – the differing greens in a lawn can totally draw me in, the stark whites of winter after a fresh snow, the lush reds and oranges of fall…makes my husband nuts when I’m trying to pick a color for something in the house since he doesn’t see the difference between the slightly bluer green vs the slightly browner one. Poor man – doesn’t know what he’s missing out on.

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  5. Thanks, Clyde, for the pix and the thought. You have picked a lovely addiction.

    What is in my genes, obviously enough, is storytelling. I got it from my father. I passed it along to my daughter (and now my grandson). It is a fascination, a habit (both good and bad), a delightful pastime, an affirmation of values and a way of perceiving the world.

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  6. Great photos. Among your compatriots in addiction is no less than Alfred Stieglitz himself:
    http://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/artwork/Stieglitz-Equivalent_Series1.htm

    If I had to ascribe a single, constant impulse to myself, I think it would be the genetically predisposed tendency to be unconvinced by arguments, no matter how traditionally or widely accepted, that seem to me not to be rational or substantial. Many aspects of the culture entail a leap of faith at their core. I am often unwilling to make that leap.

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    2. My first gut response to all arguments–ads, political, cultural–is to believe the opposite, a trait I heard in my mother my whole childhood. Nurture or nature?

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        1. wp gets uppity if you sign in and out of the account. they are ok if you leave it as one and only one wp idetity but try switching around and hang on for the fun

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        1. OT – Bill, have you seen the exhibit of old photos of Russian Jews at the Russian Museum? It’s worth seeing.

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  7. Thank you for the kind words all. Yesterday afternoon I got to thinking about Fearless Leader’s birthday, wondering if he had a guest blog in the queue. I rushed this to be done in case he did not. And that’s how it worked out.
    A general comment: in this day and age you can do wonderful things with the various photo revision programs, bit I only adjusted one of these. I brought the clouds out a bit more on the skyline pix from Kerry Park. My wife used her digital camera and took several nice pix. I should have known she had a brain issue in Seattle (I was suspicious) because all of her pictures were tilted and always to the left, which is easy to fix.
    Lisa: the EMP building has many skins (It is supposed to look like a smashed guitar from above, up the Needle.) This corner of the building has a prismatic quality. It is by itself gray but in that light it made the clouds pink. I have other pix where the sky is purple or just gray-blue. It was hard to pick a few (I made it only 6). Paradise was amazing: high meadow behind us up the mountain itself, the grand old lodge and its interior log construction, but the mountain range in front of us was the best. Clouds kept tearing through, changing the scene every 2-3 minutes. It was hard to chose from Kerry Park–the skyline or the sun beams filtering through heavy higher clouds across the distant grays onto the steel blue ocean generating a silver pond of light a mile or so out.
    tim: there are many fixatives much better than hair spray and not that pricier. But there are problems in fixatives. For me it is the propellant itself, to which I am very reactive. The art issue is that the fixatives change the colors, darken most slightly. Nor do they work all that well at holding the dust in place. The workable fixatives do serve a purpose, giving more tooth when you overload the paper. I use the workable fixative every so often. I spray outside and then leave the picture in the garage for 1/2 day.
    Bill: Stieglitz was an painter first, then a photographer. I think he thought about pix as references for painting some. Ansel Adams, the best of them all for me, seldom shot only clouds as near as I can tell, but he did know how to use clouds, did he not.

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    1. yes he did.i dint know anything about ansel until i discovered him at b dalton one day in 1971 or 2 when i set up a meet and as usual i set it up in the bookstore so i wouldnt be stuck twiddling my fingers for 20 minutes waiting for someone to show up. on that day i started in the art books and began with a. i never made it to b. ansel blew me away. i had never seen anything so powerful in my life as the way he framed the world in his lens. i was staring dumbstruck as my friend came up laughing at how submersed i was in this oversized coffee table book they had for 70 bucks r something unattainable. i told him i had never heard of this guy before and he told me he had and on we went with our lives. one of my biggest regrets is that i almost bought a fistfull of ansel adams prints for 500 a piece before he died. i had a friend in the business who said that it would be a good investment and encouraged me to go for it but i spent that money on something else and didnt think about it again until i saw an exhibit after ansel died an realized that his prints were selling atthat time for a lot more and i would never be able to afford them. missed my shot.
      for your fixative issue i bet the oil sprayer i bought at crate and barrel for 10 bucks would work now that i am thinking about it. put a little something in there mixed with water or whatever and pump up the sprayer by hand 20 or 30 pumps to do what the aerosol cans do except without any aerosol. works good on olive oil should be fine on other liquids too

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      1. tim, Fixatives: There are water-based versions. They do not spray evenly and easily run, blotch the pastels. Several are on the market. I have two and gave up on them. The others get negative reviews. It is not a big deal. I only rarely use the workable. Otherwise, I just let them be. I gather the current great pastelists will not use them at all. Monet and Degas’s pastels have survived very well for more than a century behind glass. They did not know of fixatives.

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        1. yes that is true. its away frustrating to have just want you want, try to preserve it and alter it to the point you wish you hadnt. you and edgar and claude are good enough for me. i love your pastels. keep up the good work.
          have you tried working really big like monet did when the waterlillies needed to be viewed from 40 feet away to be recognized? reverse fine motor skills. push the pastels around and do skies and vegitation on a scale as big as you can handle.

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        2. I do not think either used pastel for any thing large. Aren’t all the water lilies oils? Large is not in the physical means of my arms or my apartment, not to mention skill.

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        3. no i think you are right they painted them like the paintings on the ceilings of the churches in italy wher the fingernail is this size of a volkswagon doen wioth large sweeping strokes. but i thought it might be interesting to try pastels big (except fort the cost) just to loosen up the fcus. your gnarled hands may enjoy sweeping instead of fine tuned minutia as an option. ive always wanted to have a canvas 12 feet by 18 feet and a ladder or scaffolding to go to when i am ready to apply the next inspired strokes. in my dreams….

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  8. Teaching. Even without being a classroom teacher, I find myself drawn to teaching. Volunteering in Daughter’s classroom to help kids learn about the wonders of music (I get to reprise an earlier lesson on Copland’s “Rodeo” – into the school I shall go in my tutu and cowboy hat), pairing with another silly soul to bring bible stories to life for 6-7 year olds (coming up this fall: “Baby Moses CSI: What Got Left Out?”), taking the time to explain something to my co-workers so they understand the whole concept and not just an individual task (I had a friend come by yesterday and ask for more explanation about how our system picks up and the feeds forward a particular date field – she already had the raw information from someone else, but needed more…said, “I like having you explain things, you explain it in a way that makes sense in my head.”). All my years of doing theater, the most fun were the gigs where I worked with kids and students so I was teaching while I designed and built the sets. My mom’s parents were both teachers, my aunt was a math teacher for several years, my mom has been a teacher, my brother in his way has been a teacher as well – he and I seem to be the generation of teaching without being a classroom teacher for a living. Just can’t escape it.

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    1. ill bet you are good anna. i did the music class thing for years and loved it too. its fun to get to explain things until they make sense. im still working on a few.

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  9. From Mom, I got the ability to hear music and (if it’s not too complicated) play it back on piano, guitar (chords), or recorder. From my dad I got the ability to listen to people, and curiosity about their stories.

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  10. I’m like Jacque. Cooking and gardening. I’ve noticed that when any combination of my sisters, me, and my mother are together, our conversation naturally gravitates towards cooking and recipes and gardening and plants. If we are on a walk, we point out and talk about various plants. It was brought home to me that this is not normal for everyone when I was in Seattle. When my host and I were out for a walk, I stopped to look at and talk about some plant that was really cool and not like any plant in Minnesota – he just kept walking.

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      1. It took a minute to sink in – oh, yeah, he’s not “one of us,” so it’s not necessarily normal to stop and look at and talk about plants. Or sit and read cookbooks and discuss the recipes.

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    2. I did shoot vegetation, too. I kept 454 pix (will trash some later). I had to buy an external hard drive to keep all my new and older pix, which I was needing anyway. There is a park up by Kerry Park which is lush, not Midwestern at all. A little place up among million dollar homes. We went out to Shohomish and Snosqualmie Falls [are either of those right?) in passing storms. Wonderful shots of trees and clouds in the storms. Clouds in the trees at the falls.

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      1. That’s it! Thanks. I am glad that the clouds didn’t dump 43 inches of snow on us like they did to Lead, SD yesterday.. We just got an inch. Freeze warning for us tonight, though. That is because the clouds have abandoned us and left us with clear skies.

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  14. This is only partially OTT. An excellent site for all kinds of information is MinnPost. Their environmental writer, Ron Meador, is pretty good. He just posted to say he’d visited his mother. She has kept the very first environmental article he ever wrote. When little Ronnie Meador, then six, was in school he wrote a well-received paper about autumn. “I Am an Oak” concludes with the memorable line: “Every year when autumn comes, my leaves turn brown. And then my nuts fall off.”

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        1. wen i see old pictures of joni it shows me how far we have all come. she is so young and fresh and her songs blossom right before your ears. i remember how odd i thought her phrasing was. the way she broke up her sentences and where she took her breaths and changes her octaves. like barbara streisands nose you dont realize its there after just a second. the sound is so much a part of the soul of the planet i have to listen hard to hear what i was noticing back then in the later version the the velvet sounds of the voice and the mournful tones of the words give me a different picture of the life shes seen from both sides now. it sounds like two different lives. in fact it is. today is the 43rd anniversary of janis joplin (oct4) death. think of the difference between she and joni, the difference between then and now. i look at joni singing the song and wonder how she looked playing the coffee houses in grenich vilage in the 60’s, likely not much like her on camera presence. and she has matured into such a wonderful grand dame of the biz. i wonder how janis would be today. both sides now of janis and joni would be very different. o.t. but it seemed appropriate to bring to the discussion. i was having it with myself and losing the argument so i thought id bring it to the trail

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        2. I know no one asked for this version of the song, but this rendition by Dave van Ronk, Joni claimed was her favorite:

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  16. Greetings my friends! I have missed you all greatly. I’ve been working a temp job fulltime, which I hope they will hire me on. Evenings I have spent in karate training hard for my Black Belt which will happen very soon. On Saturday, October 12 starting at noon in the Minneapolis Convention Center will be an exciting day of karate and getting my official Black Belt. It is free and open to public, so anyone is welcome to come and enjoy the show.

    Clyde, those are awesome pix and a very nice blog. It’s good to see you on active on the Trail.

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  17. OT – I can’t get sound the last few days in Word Press, but I can hear stuff on Facebook… wonder what’s up.

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  19. My genes? Well. today I canned 20 pints of a Swedish raspberry nectar base, made a huge batch of Italian poultry/beef broth, and have a pear kuchen baking in the oven. I guess it is no surprise that one of my maternal great grandmothers was a professional cook in Hamburg in the 1890’s.

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    1. On Friday morning I ran into an old woman at the Signal Hill’s Farmers’ Market. I overheard her asking a vendor if he had any rhubarb, he told her he didn’t. I volunteered that I had plenty of rhubarb still growing in the garden and that I didn’t live that far away. I offered it to her if she wanted to follow me home. She did, and I harvested the remaining rhubarb for her. She told me she makes great rhubarb muffins that her son loves, and that she had checked with every grower at the market, and nobody had any. Her name is Kay and the she’s 83 years old, her husband died 12 years ago. She had just returned from a trip to Switzerland and Italy with her sister in September. She has a son who works at the prison in Stillwater. She got a job as a cashier with 3M at the age of 50 after the bank she had worked for for years merged with a larger bank and she was fired.

      Today I went art crawling, and when I returned home Hans said: “You just missed your old friend Kay. She left about 10 minutes ago.” I asked if she had brought me a muffin, he said no, she brought you 3 glasses of canned pears. There was also a card from her thanking me for the rhubarb and letting me know she’d won first prize at the State Fair this year with those canned pears from her own tree. That’s what’s in my genes, collecting old people. I love them! They are so willing to tell their stories, and I love listening to them. Can you believe having the spirit and energy to be participating in a competition at the State Fair at 83? I just know I haven’t seen or heard the last of Kay, at least I hope I haven’t.

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  20. Embedded deeply in my genes is a survival instinct that compels me to eat bread when the weather grows cold and the days grow shorter.

    Loaves and loaves of marble rye
    Sourdough rising to the sky.
    Limpa, naan and boule to buy,
    I’ve looked at bread that way.

    But now that bread is gluten-free
    It has no great appeal for me.
    What did you say this is – chickpea?
    I think it tastes like clay.

    I’ve tasted bread of both kinds now,
    Potato starch is wrong somehow.
    You can’t make brioche gluten-free.
    It simply wasn’t meant
    To be.

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