If you can help, please follow this link to the American Red Cross. Other organizations are mobilizing locally as well. Thanks for anything you can do.

Dozens of pairs of breeding woodstorks on a little grove in the water hazard at the 16th hole on the course at Spring Island, South Carolina. Drawn through a scope between the green and the sand trap. Watercolor wash over pencil on Stillman & Birn 8 1/2″ x 11″ Alpha Series hardbound book with mechanical pencil. On the pillow: European robin.

I am Artist in Residence this week at Spring Island Trust in Okatie, SC, drawing and painting birds and sunlit landscapes with palmettos and broad marshes, alligators, live oaks dripping Spanish moss. Wonderful wading birds: tricolored herons, little blues, greens, yellow and black crowned night herons, great blues, great egrets, snowy egrets, wood storks, purple gallinules, and clapper rails. This morning: red-cockaded woodpeckers and Bachman’s sparrows, hopefully.

Nothing cuter or weirder than a nest full of baby anhingas. Heads no wider than long necks resemble nozzles on fire hoses. Pink faces on cream-colored plush, and black pin-feathers wing and tail. Mechanical pencil on Stillman & Birn Alpha Series 8 1/2″ x 11″ sketchbook, drawn through a scope at the rookery on the 16th hole. Golf course designed by Arnold Palmer.

There are peculiar island squirrels here, too- fox squirrels with solid black or charcoal gray coats capped by bright white noses. The squirrels are unusually big and floppy, as though  muscles weren’t fastened properly. They don’t sit up bright, alert and curious, but stand up flat-footed and meerkat-like for a slow look around. The island effect or just old-fashioned rampant inbreeding may have something to do with it.

Oyster beds exposed to the air at low tide. I sketched to the delightful sounds of bivalve pops, like the clacking of meaty tongues. Watercolor over mechanical pencil on Stillman & Birn Alpha Series hardbound 8 1/2″ x 11″ sketchbook.

I’m on the road from now until June 15th; unless someone disrobes and I draw them, birds will replace nude humans. Next week: Panama’s Barro Colorado Island, and maybe even a real live motmot.

Happy Friday.

Step one: rise up and roll with it.  A Roller Derby skater in Oklahoma City, who knows a whole lot about resilience, poses for 3 minutes. 6B pencil on newsprint 17″ x 14″

Making art from destruction is a good exercise in catharsis. People do it everyday. The form it takes depends on the physical or emotional or even metaphorical destruction involved. Sometimes all three parts get whipped up together in a single twisting strand.

Looking up: Oklahoma City’s Poison Okies roller derby queen on the model stand. 3 minute pose, 17″ x 14″ 6B pencil on Newsprint.

Today is the third anniversary of our survival of a destructive EF4 tornado. There are a number of after-effects of that event, on any number of levels. One of them is that I don’t like revisiting it much. But when the National Weather Center announced its first Weather Art Biennale, I couldn’t not enter it. And there was only one thing I could paint.

Anatomy of a junk pile: “Rise”, painted from an image taken with my iphone on leaving the storm shelter, and the canvas itself was retrieved from the rubble. This was the guest room: old brass bed askew, unmade, the blue flannel sheet draped over the glass patio door, that ugly brown shag carpet mercifully stripped from the floor. The washer and dryer to the right- that’s what the rear of a Maytag looks like.  There’s a dead leaf, wallboard dust and fiberglass fluff salad sealed under a sheet of clear acrylic on the back of the canvas; the framer preserved it all for posterity.

I’m honored that my entry, “Rise”, is not only in the Biennale, but it’s the featured painting in Southwest Art Magazine’s show preview:

We wanted to see the weather depicted not just as a beautiful natural phenomenon, but also something that affects man’s experience of the world.—Alan Atkinson, curator, National Weather Center Biennale

It’s an odd but cathartic feeling to paint that appalling image on canvas (a canvas extracted from the rubble). The updraft of colored paper commemorates artworks gone with the storm, but also, in my own way, a rising sense of whimsy, and a little movement up, out, and onward.

Happy Friday.

Experimenting with materials #143. Trial run with Winsor & Newton Artisan water mixable oil paint on Arches oil primed paper, 15″ x 22″. Not a happy medium for me, sorry to say. 3 hour pose.

In my manic getting-ready-to-travel-and-paint mode, I drop a lot of balls and wonder where I left my head, but you can expect packing to commence at least three weeks ahead. I try out equipment, repair and modify, build, work out the kinks and the suitcase layout. I have two art travels upcoming: a residency at a nature reserve in South Carolina called the Spring Island Trust, and then three weeks in the tropical rainforest of Barro Colorado Island, Panama. They’re both islands, rich in flora and fauna, and both look suspiciously like paradise from my perch here high atop the old Oklahoma homestead.

This is the pencil underdrawing for the previous- you can see how the shapes and expression on her face changed as the paint went over the lines, and it became a painting. Graphite on Arches oil primed paper, 15″ x 22″

For Spring Island I’ll keep it fairly simple: a box of pastels and sanded paper to take in  wide green marshlands and big blue skies. A scope on a tripod, a pair of binoculars and  sketchbook for wood storks, ospreys, if all goes well, prothonotary warblers in a cypress swamp.

For Barro Colorado Island I have this crazy yen to haul oil paints into the rainforest and paint light-dappled forest interiors on big sheets of paper with a large brush. A bus ride to Panama City for turpentine may be essential-and fun- it’s become a hoppin’ place (see today’s New York Times for a look into the Panama City boom). But I loved its seedy pre-boom grime and the surreal shopping weirdness of the infamous downtown variety store, Machetazos), since I don’t want to pack turpentine. But to cover the bases I bought a starter set of Winsor & Newton water-mixable oils, testing them out them at our regular figure session this morning. My review? Meh. Not great, not bad, just meh.

I do a small pencil sketch before committing to big expensive paper. Stillman & Birn 8 1/2 X 11″ Gamma Series sketchbook.

I struggled with them, to tell you the truth. The bristle brushes dragged on the textured paper. I couldn’t get a point on the rounds or use the fine chisel edges of the flats, and the filberts? They splayed. The only brush that worked well was a soft synthetic filbert, the only arrow left in the quiver. And with the paint thinned down to a wash, the oil-primed paper buckled. Has anyone else tried these with better success than I had?

I’m glad I tried them out. Experiments are ever good. The set is small and I can take it along for a backup, but look for me in boomtown Panama City, on the bus.

But then I’ll have to devise an ingenious way to bring those oily paintings home with me. I’m doing R&D on that right now. Let me get back to you.

Fountain in Audubon Park, New Orleans, alive with strolling dog walkers, bicyclists and roller bladers out to catch a breeze on a warm April afternoon. One shirtless denizen biked hands-free, head thrown back, singing show tunes. The fountain is flanked by bronze babies riding on turtle back, playing a sly joke on the thirsty passer-by, because right below each turtle’s tail is drinking-water fountain. If you lean in for a slurp, you appear to be kissing the turtle’s bottom.

On Magazine Street over margaritas and sherry-soaked scallop tacos, a New Orleans friend put it this way: “we are drinking people with a parading problem”.

He was talking about his relatively local wheelbarrow parade, but he might have meant the city itself. It’s a town that loves to dance in its streets.

Birds of Audubon Park: mallards, wood ducks, muscovies, egrets and green herons, lots of cormorants and eastern gray squirrels coexist with an ongoing parade of humanity.

Old-time cartoon houses look like they’re about to pull their big round boots out of the foundation and dance down the block.

Our friends are among the many who lost their home to flood waters after Hurricane Katrina. They embody strength and resilience, like the oaks of Audubon Park, and fill their lives with joy and work and meaning. And parades.

Giant live oaks unroll long branches onto the grass. Audubon Park’s trees embody strength, time and resilience. This one lost some bark, maybe with the help of Katrina, but looks otherwise hearty and hale. The resurrection ferns surely brought it good luck.

Fine and private places: New Orleans’ coy little courtyard gardens entice and forbid from behind iron spikes.

A streetcar named St. Charles rumbles uptown. Drawn between stops.

Lafayette Cemetery # 1. Magnolias flourish, and so do ferns and other overgrowth. Our tour guide from the Save Our Cemeteries Society bemoaned the decrepit condition of older, abandoned tombs: dissolving marble, fallen away plaques, resurrection ferns and wispy wildflowers filling cracks. That’s the way I’d want it, though- a slow dissolve to mossy stones and chipmunks, and bird’s nests. My kind of tomb.

Lafayette Cemetary #1

Don Vappie and his Creole Jazz Serenaders blew out all the stops in the People’s Health Economy Hall Tent. Not so easy to sketch when you’re doing the folding chair boogie.

Black Eagles, Shawee and Big Chief Kevin Goodman & the Flaming Arrows parade through the fairgrounds at JazzFest.

In a weekend of highlights, here’s a good one: a parade of the Mardi Gras Indians at Jazzfest- taken on my iphone. Let the good times roll!