updating adobe with rajeev in new delhi / watercolor 88 /  by Philip Tarlow

12:44 PM: just off the phone with rajeev, an adobe employee who was giving me support from his location in new delhi. it’s currently 12:15am there, and 95F!! by 6pm, the temperature will climb to 120F!!! with 50% humidity. this coming tuesday, the high will reach 124 F. as he said, you can’t really go outside.

that said, he was very helpful, and now i’m back up and running with adobe photoshop, bridge & lightroom, all of which i use a lot to adjust my photos.

WATERCOLOR 88 stage 1

before making the call, i started watercolor 88, and did some work on it while we were on hold, waiting for stuff to load.

i’m at that point where my rhythm was interrupted and am hesitant to go back into it, although i do feel it needs more work. i certainly have enough of these watercolors to choose from for the carbondale show in august. i could spend the rest of my afternoon organizing images for my next zoom with brian at carbondale arts, and talking with his people at the frame shop in carbondale to arrange framing for the final selection.

watercolor 87 /  by Philip Tarlow

watercolot 87 at 6pm

6:10 PM: i had to return to the studioto strategize with adobe about how to update adobe cloud so that it’s compatible with the latest apple os. i’ve been working with the 2004 version of adobe bridge, so it’s about time! i had to go over to the studio again after having come back to the house, in order to begin the adobe cloud update on my iMac. so of couse i did a bit more work on the watercolor, sine i was there and on hold forever.

watercolor 87 stage 1

4:15 PM: we took our trail walk this morning. as we started out, it was 38F, which is way below normal for this time of year. but it started warming up quickly, and our walk was dleightful, except for the fact that, after pointing out a head high tree trunk stradling the trail to mikela, i smashed straight into it myself, and fell to the ground. i’m ok, albeit a bit rattled.

i upgraded to the latest apple os: catalina, and learned after the fact that adobe bridge no longer works with that os, and i have to contact adobe to figure out what to do. so i’m using my macbook air to adjust the photos and enter this post.

i started watercolor 87, but didn’t have time to complete it. so i’m calling what you see here stage 1, which i’ll continue working on tomorrow.

watercolor 86 /  by Philip Tarlow

2:31 PM:today started out with snow at about 4am and the temperature hovering just below freezing. not at all unheard of here in crestone/baca. curently it’s 53F and probably won’t get much warmer. tomorrow it will start warming back up to normal levels: lower to mid 70’s. but when we leave the house at 6:30 tomorrow, it will be about 38F and we’ll have warm jackets.

watercolor 86 at 2:30pm

today i made a new small format watercolor: watercolor 86, 10 x 13". something is brewing, which hasn’t quite matured yet, but there are elements, like my use of blues, greens and greys that are developing. branches appear increasingly as negative white spaces, and water is hinted at with bold green or blue strokes with mottled white spots equaling frothiness. the central siena rock shape is one i had misgivings about from the moment it emerged. so i may make a variation on this one tomorrow, minus that rock.

(daily kos article)watercolor 85 / From Nina Simone to Buffalo Springfield (and beyond): When music becomes an anthem for a movement, a daily kos article /  by Philip Tarlow

1:49 PM: today i launched straight into watercolor 85. it’s 13 x 20” and is a variation of the theme of watercolors 35 and 65 (below, left and right respectively). the giveaway is the horizontal log traversing the entire composition, which is a tricky element in the composition, in the sense that it’s difficult to keep it from stopping the eye 3/4 of the way up. what prevents that from happening, in this case, is the strong log on the bottom left and the dark area just beneath the horizontal log, on the right.

nina simone

From Nina Simone to Buffalo Springfield (and beyond): When music becomes an anthem for a movement (a daily kos article)

this is a link to the article, which has many links to songs of protest over time:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/6/7/1950162/-From-Nina-Simone-to-Buffalo-Springfield-and-beyond-When-music-becomes-an-anthem-for-a-movement

before and after our trail walk / hozier / watercolor 84 /  by Philip Tarlow

yesterday morning we watched the hozier video, jackboot jump. WATCH IT! it’s as if he made it for us, now.

watercolor 84 10 x 13”

3:54 PM: after making a ridiculously bad one in the larger 13 x 20 format, i did this 10 x 13” watercolor 84.

i like how that little red mark in the middle left nails that whole area, and the playfulness of the greens in the upper regions. the browns just beneath that happened at the last moment, and it’s hard to imagine this watercolor without those marks and that color. all in all, it’s a joyful statement, perhaps influenced by our magnificent and long morning trail walk.

by the way, the wind has been gusting to 40 mph all day, making it a delightfully cool one.

6:20 AM: so i didn’t get to start watercolor 84 yesterday because of an important 2 hour call. we had some good thunderstorms yesterday, with occasional hail and this morning is windy & cool; great hiking weather.

i’m going to get my boots on and get ready for our trail walk , which this morning will be a full hour up the trail, starting at 8,400 ft. and going up to 9,400 ft. on a steep, rocky, gorgeous trail!

i’ll resume blogging when we’re back my friends.

just back from our very exciting trail walk; exciting because we reached the falls, at 9,750 ft about 1 1/2 hours after starting out at 8,400 ft.

AND, my new salomon quest 4D 3 GTX boots passed the test with flying colors. they are everything the stellar reviews claim, plus they are the first boots i’ve worn on our treks that didn’t trigger my mortons neuroma pain in the ball of my foot! if you’re looking for excellent hiking boots, look no further.

12:41 PM: about to start work on watercolor 84. will post pics as they become available

hiking; then and now / starting watercolor 84 /  by Philip Tarlow

11:06 am: soon after mikela and i met, in the mid ‘80’s, we started going on hiking trips to northern california. now we hike up the trail every other day. we get as much, if not more pleasure from these hikes today as we did then. BELOW: left-1985 right- 5/31/2020

11:10 AM: i’m about to start work on watercolor 84 and will post pics when available later in the afternoon.

no new watercolors today / dinner, wine and desert with dear friends /  by Philip Tarlow

6:30 PM: today in the studio was devoted to logistics. i didn’t have the energy to paint; i was mentally preparing for a zoom i had at 3 regarding my august show in carbondale & i knew immediately afterwards we had our jour fixé with dear friends, always a delight. i made brownies, we brought non- dairy chocolate fudge ice cream and they added raspberries to the mix, which looked like this.

leaf shadows

this morning we took our trail walk. as we descended, we walked past a rock i had noticed on several previous walks which, at this hour of the morning, had some striking leaf shadows on it. i took a few steps back and said: today is the day i’l photograph these beautiful shadows, which i proceeded to do.

i told the story to our friends just now as we were eating and drinking together. i showed them this photo, which i hadn’t really looked at. nothing unusual. and just now, as i posted it here, i saw 2 rocks, one of which, in the background, had the leaf shadows i was so excited about. the one in the foreground however….what are those black leaf shaped marks? they look too dark to be shadows. what else could they possibly be? i don’t get it! i’ll have to study them more carefully. the ones on the rock in the background have the distinct look of shadows. but the one in the foreground? it’s a mystery. they are simply too dark for shadows, and the texture of the rock doesn’t show through, as it does in the background rock. now those look like shadows should, right? my painters eye is confused, and i can’t wait to get back to that spot on our sunday walk. until then, it will remain a mystery.

BELOW: on the left, the rock i saw & thought i was photographing. and on the right the mysteriou rock with the impossibly dark shadows. the lighting conditions are exactly the same.

watercolor 83, more work on watercolor 82 / new brushes, watercolors /  by Philip Tarlow

watercolor 83 at 3pm

3:15 PM: toady, after the work i did this morning on watercolor 82, i started watercolor 83. it’s more along the lines of some earlier ones, such as watercolor 45. i have some questions regarding the distribution of white spaces, but am too tired to deal with it right now. in half an hour, we’re each making an hour and a quarter of calls supporting candidates for our local elections, so i have to get moving.

10:52 AM: our new early morning trail walk time has resulted in us getting up about 4:30 am every day now. so i get to work earlier and conk out earlier as well.

yesterday i received some new materials i had ordered from blick: 2 watercolor brushes and 3 half pans of watercolors. i had ordered 11 plus tubes of white gouache colors, but the rest are on back order, so i’ll have to wait on those.

watercolor 82 13 x 20”, at 10:30am today

no sooner had i opened them than i tested them out, continuing work on watercolor 82. after bringing it over to the house yesterday, i realized it needed more work. the way i had divided the composition into 9 square-ish boxes was far too obvious and resulted in a fragmented look. looking at it just now, i think it still needs more work to create smooth transitions. not too smooth, as that would defeat the purpose of joining 9 diverse images into one harmonious painting. it seems much further along in that direction, but i think i’ll do a bit more, while starting watercolor 83, for which i made a preliminary drawing yesterday afternoon.

watercolor 82 /  by Philip Tarlow

watercolor 82 13 x 20”

1:30 PM: on our morning trail walk, i was getting signals for a new direction. it involves dividing the composition into a number of square/rectangular boxes. each contains elements from one of the images i’ve been using for the watercolor series. each box, for convenience sake, bears a number corresponding to the number i wrote on the individual creek image it’s based upon. once i begin filling in the individual boxes, cross pollination begins taking place, so that elements from one box may overlap or bleed into an adjacent one. it’s a work in progress, but this is the first iteration.

the viewers eye then makes his/her own sense of the entire image. although it derives from, in this case 9 discreet images, an endless number of connections can be made, creating a kind of moveable composition determined by form, line and color. a rock morph into a bird; a branch into a worm…

SITE-6-2-20 cactus flower.jpg

yesterday afternoon, i noticed the first cactus blossom of the season. our little cacti bloom every june, and the blossoms last only a few days or maybe a week. this one showed up just outside the entryway to our house. there were 3 of them, each with a bee in it’s center, enjoying the nectar.

watercolor 80-81, next steps /  by Philip Tarlow

watercolor 81 at 1pm

watercolor 80 at 1pm

1:26 PM: i worked on both watercolors today, going from one to the other. the green happened last minute.

watercolor 80 at 10am today

10:13 am: we were up at 4:30, prepared to leave for our trail walk at 6:30. it rained, and we postponed till tomorrow. yesterday by the way we set a new record for the date of .4 inches of rain. the snowpack up on the peaks, on the other hand, is at a record low, with a record low snowfall for the month of april, which is usually a heavy snow month. records are falling everywhere!

after gazing at watercolor 80 last night and this morning, we both felt it needed more work. so i went all or nothing on it but cannot yet determine whether the result is all or nothing!

so now i’m going to continue work on watercolor 81 and see what happens.