What Summer Might Bring

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, we had a second baby girl.

Julia holding Grace on her birthday

Then she grew. And got smart. And ambitious about her future.

We had an interesting discussion tonight at the dinner table (prompted by her) about summer programs that she could apply for in the gap between her junior and senior high school years. She is looking at a bunch of medical science programs that would be relevant to her interest in neuro-pharmacology (whatever that is...). Assuming these summer programs happen, of course.

Field Major Grace

There are programs of related relevance in Philadelphia (Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania), Washington DC (Georgetown University) among others. Somewhere in the discussion, she ruled out the University of Pennsylvania's summer program because she told us that their program was too expensive. I'm not sure of the context in which she reached that conclusion, other than that a perceived sizable amount of money is a perceived sizable amount of money.

Which I have been thinking about in the hours since...

I was able to go to a world-class liberal arts college in part because I was able to get accepted to that school, but just as (or maybe more) importantly because my parents and grandparents lifted me up and gave me the opportunity to do so. I will never forget how fortunate I was to have that door opened for me. Being able to get accepted to a school doesn't mean much if you can't afford to actually go there, or if you do but then spend the next few decades saddled with crippling student loan debt....

Which I guess brings me back around to my original thought. It's Grace's job to aim for the stars. It's our job to build a rocket to help her get there.

Now I have to go Google neuro-pharmacology...

Failing is OK

I've been working lots of hours this week, and I got to the end of the day and wanted to paint something to relax. So I sat down with a blank 8 by 10 canvas panel, no particular thought in my head, and...proved that perhaps you need to have some sort of plan before simply starting to throw paint around. After perhaps 20 or 30 minutes of wasting some paint and a panel, I did something that I haven't done in months - I threw the panel in the trash, cleaned the two brushes I had been using, and walked away.

And that's OK. I was impatient, unprepared, mentally in a worn out state, and the outcome was predictable enough. But I tried. Better luck tomorrow.

Lastly, a random picture from the past: Leo, Ted and Dave hiking Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Unit, summer of 2011.

TRNP North Unit, 2011

Maybe I should paint this...

Farm Road

I'm doing pretty well at trying to paint at least a little bit of something every day.

Today's painting is a simple rendition of a farm road, done in about an hour and a half, on an 11 by 14 inch canvas panel using about 6 or 7 colors of Charvin oil paints (not a standard primary or split-primary palette - just some "landscapey" colors).

Farm Road (oils, 11 by 14 canvas panel)

The point of this exercise was to choose a very limited number of colors to work with, and see what I could come up with. Having bought too many colors, it is good practice to try to paint something without using a whole host of colors. Owning all the colors is one thing, using too many of them in one painting is another...

All things considered, I like it a lot. And it was a good learning experience.

A Weekend of Happy Cooking

Amp and I spent some of this weekend doing something that we both enjoy, given the time to do so... Having a glass of wine (or two or three) while cooking together. This weekend, we made an Ina Garten Eggplant Parmesan recipe (from FoodTV) on Saturday and a Jacques Pepin Boeuf Bourguignonne (beef stew) recipe on Sunday.

Ina Garten's take on Eggplant Parm was not the classic Italian American fried mozzarella cheese fest, which we thought might be a nice change of pace (I make one of those cheese heavy versions, and it is good, but has a lot of cheese and a lot of frying). This recipe is three layers of pre-roasted eggplant, marinara, fresh mozzarella, goat cheese and parmesan, and fresh basil. We are converts to the oven roasting of veggies...

Layers of goodness

A crispy panko bread crumb and garlic topping is the last step (along with Ryder cleaning Amp's fingers...)

Ready for the oven

The recipe was easy if a little fiddly (time consuming), but gave a lighter and more eggplant-based end result than the version I have been making for years now. The kids agreed that this was the better version, and I have to agree. It was more about the eggplant and less about the cheese and sauce. Not that it wasn't plenty rich enough... The goat cheese gave a nice unexpected tanginess, and the panko topping gave a really nice crunch.

Half demolished...

Sunday was for Jacques' beef stew. I adore Jacques Pepin, and would consider him one of the two or three greatest influences in my love of food and cooking. I probably have more of his cookbooks than any other author, and I treasure them all. Especially my copy of Chez Jacques, which has a "Happy Cooking" signature plate.

Chez Jacques

"Happy Cooking!" Indeed.

"Happy Cooking"

This was the target we were aiming for (and I think we came very close!).

Boeuf Bourguignonne

Early stages - Beef, onions and garlic.

Beef Stew stage 1

Middle stages - Add a full bottle of good red wine (a reserve Spanish Rioja in this case).

Beef Stew ready for the oven

The end result - Adding separately cooked pearl onions, carrots and crimini mushrooms, along with lardons of cooked salt pork (basically little batons cut from a big chunk of bacon).

Finished Stew

This is definitely a weekend recipe (as was the Ina Garten one), but well worth the effort. It was rich and decadent. The cooking liquid in the "ready for the oven" picture above is no water, no stock, just an entire bottle of good quality ready wine. Yum.... 

We don't always have the time to spend on a pair of 3-hour dinners, but this weekend we did. One small benefit of 1 year of Covid19 stay-at-home time I suppose you could say.

Stay safe. Be well. And try to find any small silver linings you can from this time we are forced to spend staying at home.

Painting in Layers

So this was going to be a post about painting oils in layers, with a look at a fairly dramatic improvement between a simple painting done in one sitting and then the improvement made several weeks later when revisiting the painting and adding a second layer.

Which would have been great, except for the fact that I was apparently so underwhelmed by the initial painting that I never bothered to take a picture of it.

Which makes the before-and-after just an "after." So here's the after:

Cart Path (oils, 9 by 12 stretched canvas)

What I would say about the one-layer original painting is that it was simple and dull. The greens of the tree line in the distance were too similar in tone to the trees in the left foreground. The cart path had become too greenish considering that the whole painting is green. The stream didn't exist, and the flower patch in the lower right foreground was just some grassy vertical stripes of similarly toned green (it wasn't a flower patch). Again, too monochromatic, given that this wasn't a tonalist painting. Tonalism and "bleh" aren't the same thing.

The original painting was a simple study loosely copying an Isaac Levitan work. It was basic. Looking at it with a critical eye, in order to be a "painting" and not a study sketch, it would need something to add interest and to balance out the composition. The monochromatic green issue would need to be mitigated a bit as well.

Without being able to see the before and after, the changes made in the second layer were as follows. A small stream was added in the lower right quadrant to add interest and balance out the weight of darker values that were concentrated in the upper left. The distant tree line, always intended to be in brighter light, was highlighted with lighter greens, while remaining a little less saturated (in other words, they are a paler whitish-green rather than a highly saturated yellowy-green). This brightens the tree line up while keeping it pushed into the distance. The dark mass of shaded trees on the left were detailed a bit by adding some blue sky holes along the top edge and punching some light yellow-green highlights through the midsection on the mid-right edge of the tree cluster. This hopefully gives the impression that there is sky through the trees, and you can also get a peek at the sun-washed grassy fields through the trees. The patch of tall grass in the lower right corner was turned into a flower patch by adding clumps of yellowish-white.

The intent of all of this was to create a more complex composition, with a number of different areas of focus to draw the eye. The brightened-up cart path should lead the eye up and back to the point where it vanishes into the darker gap in the distant tree line. The stream should capture interest (people like water!), and the flower patch should pull the eye down and to the right with its little pops of brightness in an otherwise still mostly green painting. Lastly, the bright area of sunlit grass in the left midground should make the viewer's eye want to go up and around the patch of trees on the left, so as to see what is hiding around that corner...

The end result of all this is that this little 9 by 12 painting has gone from one where every time I look at it I think "something's missing" to one where I look at it and say "it's not perfect but I like it." And that's worth a lot.

From a selfish standpoint, writing this blog entry helps me prove to myself that I am developing a better eye with regards to being able to critically and effectively review and assess what I am looking at in my own work. There remains the issue of ability to execute versus intent, but that is just practice.

The most important lesson though, I think, is the affirmation that there is nothing magical or heroic in being able to create a finished oil painting in one sitting (alla prima) wet-on-wet. Oils with their long drying time are still intended to be painted in layers. The first layer of this was nothing special. It was left aside for weeks, drying thoroughly in that time, before I decided to come back and try to "fix" it. I will admit to painting the stream in several short sittings while tweaking it and trying to get it right, effectively painting wet-on-wet in a second layer while the first layer remained dry and stable underneath.

Live and learn. Or live and reinforce what you know but perhaps don't completely believe yet. The outcome is what matters and not the process in getting there. In one layer this was a boring monotone sketch. With thoughtful assessment and rework, it has become something that I am kinda proud of.

So, note to self: paint oils in layers because it works.

Lastly...A running joke in our house with regards specifically to modern art is "I could do that" with a response of "yeah, but you didn't."

My art isn't great. I freely admit that. I am still on the steep initial part of the learning curve, and I aspire to be better. But at least I did it.

Paint Every Day

Easier said than done, but I am trying. Yesterday I wanted to paint something with pinks and purples in the sky. Today I wanted to paint something with reds and browns in the land.

So I ended up with this simple desert landscape, reminiscent of the American southwest. More or less. [touched up a bit the next day]

Desert Vista (oils, 11 by 14 canvas panel)

It is fair to say that I am going through a phase where I am just playing with colors. I have been enamored with the (embarrassingly large) selection of Charvin Fine Oils I have acquired over the last month or so, and doing simple sketches like this serves several purposes. First, they do provide me the impetus to paint something every day. Second, they remove the pressure of sitting down to do "a painting" when I can try to trick myself into believing that I am just doing "a practice sketch." That might sound silly, but it works. This is just a practice sketch which I knocked out in about an hour. Which also happens to be an OK little painting.

Charvin colors in this one that I really like include Savanah, Naples Yellow, and Tropical Green (in the lower sky).

All beginner oil painting books and online tutorials would recommend that you start with either a primary palette (red, blue, yellow and white) or a split primary palette (a warm and cool red, a warm and cool blue and a warm and cool yellow, plus white). My collector-mentality OCD doesn't let me get past wanting ALL the colors. So...I adapt to the reality of me. I am going to buy all the colors (or at least most of them), so I might as well take them for a test drive...

There is something to be said for being self-aware, and accepting the reality of what you are. I will buy too many colors. I should learn to use them.

Palette Exercise #1

It's time for bed, and I thought I would try something fun. I looked at the remnants of paint on my palette and asked myself "I wonder what I could paint with that?"

I pulled out my iPhone and set the timer to 7 minutes. Nothing like a hard deadline.

6 minutes and 43 seconds later I had this.

Palette Exercise #1 (11 by 14, oils on canvas panel)

Interesting... Childlike but interesting.

PS - Colors left on the palette, if anyone cares, were mainly French blue, Sap green, Yellow ochre, Burnt umber, Burnt sienna, French red deep, Warm gray, Tropical green and Meadow green. There was also the tiniest touch of white along with whatever mixing puddles were left on the palette in small quantities. All colors were Charvin Fine Oils.

Dirty disorganized palette

This was fun, and while the outcome isn't all that great, it was a valuable exercise in trying to loosen up and let go. I have trouble doing that. Maybe in the future I will lay out a standard palette of colors and set a deadline to complete a small sketch in 15 or 20 minutes. Or pull 6 or 7 random tubes of paint out of a box and have to use whatever I get. I can see some utility in mixing some short exercise like this into my routine.

Painting Workspace

So as not to find myself stuck in the basement while painting, I have commandeered (with approval) one end of the dining room table.

Dining Room Studio

The table is covered with a plastic-coated disposable table cloth and my end has a few thicknesses of canvas house painter's tarp. My table easel is a homemade contraption with the main part being a 24 inch square piece of thin plywood with a small shelf in front. This is heavy and rock-solid, and can probably hold a canvas far larger than I would choose to attempt to paint on. I know it holds a 16 by 20 inch canvas without budging.

There are some brushes and paints on the table, as well as a gray-tinted glass palette to the right. The palette is only 9 by 12 inches, and it hasn't taken me long to realize that I need a larger version of the same palette. A 9 by 12 palette sounds fairly big but it's not.

Anytime that I note that a picture has been taken in bad light, the yellowish dim light at night on this table easel is what I am taking about (see my post from earlier tonight on the little painting that can be seen here). When I take a better picture elsewhere in daylight, the results are far better.

The Sentinel Oak

Having finished, or mostly finished, a few paintings recently, I wanted to start something new. I've been out to the Brandywine River near home recently taking a few photos of the river in the dreary gray of winter, with snow on the ground, but I am...fearful...I guess you could say, of trying to paint these scenes.

The Brandywine in Winter

In lieu of diving into one of those, I decided to do a quick painting focused on one color (or color group). That being purples and pinks (and grays).

This is the result. It is an 8 by 10 inch canvas panel, in oils, painted in approximately one hour before dinner. [Photo taken in bad artificial light...]

The Sentinel Oak at Sunrise (8x10, oils on canvas panel)

Comments from Amp, Grace and my sister in law were that it was sad, eerie, ominous and kinda spooky.

I wouldn't, or couldn't, argue with any of these. I'm not sure they align with what my intent was, but perhaps the best thing that can be said about a piece of art is that it invokes an emotional response. If this quick little oil sketch made anyone feel anything, then I should be pleased.

And I like the painting.

One thing I have promised myself is that I will continue to paint in whatever style or subject matter appeals to me in the moment. In this particular moment, at about 3:30pm on a Sunday afternoon, I felt representational and symbolic and not realistic and literal.

So this is what happens. And I'm happy about it.

Across the River

Complete, or at least complete enough.

Across the River (oils, 11 by 14)

I do feel like I am getting closer to where I want to be, and I am starting to find my way...

Painting Progress

On the 15th of February, 2020, almost exactly one year ago, I painted my first-ever painting in oils. Something I have been wanting to do perhaps my whole adult life.

The painting, a Bob Ross inspired mountain scene, was painted without the proper tools, any knowledge of what I was doing, and it was a mess. And I say this with great fondness. It was my first painting. There is a bit of atmospheric perspective between the near and distant mountains...and that's about all the good that can be said about it. Which is fine.

Bob Ross?? (Bob would deny this...)

I went looking for it today, but I think I threw it away a few months ago in a fit of frustration that it was a bad painting, while cleaning up in the basement. Sigh. I'm stupid sometimes. Perhaps more often than I'd like to admit.

I only post this picture again in the hopes that I can look back on the past year and reflect on all that I have learned, which is a lot. I have a very long way to go to be able to create the paintings that I can see so perfectly clearly in my head. But I find it encouraging and energizing to think that I have progressed from that first painting to some of what I have been working on recently.

It's a journey, and I am enjoying it.

Across The River, In Process

To any family or close friends that have been to our family's summer house on the Sassafras River, the general theme of this should be familiar.

In order to fit it onto a standard ratio rectangular canvas (11 by 14 in this case) and not a long flat panorama canvas (11 by 22 or similar), I have had to squeeze this into a view more compressed than exists in reality. The old Decker farm (of Black and Decker fame) would be farther off to the left, and the house on the bluff at right would be further off to the right, with the intermediate trees-and-bluff section being much broader.

So, it's a rough representation, and done from memory. It seems my digital picture library is mostly devoid of pictures from the River, and I am too lazy to dig out the big box of actual printed pictures that is in the basement somewhere. I hope.

Anyway, this is a simple Stage 1 of an "Across The River" painting. There are many rivers in the world, but to us there is only one The River. Basic color blocking is in place, with details to follow.

Across the River (oils, 11 by 14 canvas panel, in process)

This took an hour. Which I only mention because I am consciously making the effort to paint quickly and not fuss over the details...

Stage 2 will require finishing the clouds, detailing the grassy areas to make them less monochrome, highlighting of the foreground wooded sections to saturate the greens and make them pop, cleaning up the few buildings, and maybe highlighting the waves in the foreground to get them closer to that Sassafras brownish-green color. 

At the end it will need a red channel marker buoy somewhere in the middle...

Two Finished Paintings

After a few minor touchups I would now consider these done. I'm happy with both of them, and photographing them in natural daylight helps immensely.

Once the painting had dried, I went back and tidied up the smaller bluff on the left, and added proper hints of trees high on the large bluff to better match the original picture, and to break up the longer horizontal lines. 

Near Scottsbluff (oils, 11 by 14 panel)

The bottom of the next one didn't look right, so I scrubbed out some of the mass of bushes and vegetation along the bottom edge and added grassy areas instead. Lastly, the building needed to lose a window and have its roof angled to better seem to be pointing toward the water.

Across a River (oils, 12 by 16 panel)

I still have a very long way to go to be able to better execute what I am trying to paint, but I feel like my eye is getting better, as far as being able to critique my own work goes. For a good part of my first year of painting (which is coming up in a few days, I think), I could look at one my paintings and know that it didn't look right. Now I can usually tell specifically what doesn't look right, and why. 

Crossing the Rubicon

If you have an issue with a work that is going to bother you, make the bold choice. Cross the Rubicon and leave yourself no other option than to fix it.

As I wrote in the prior blog post, the painting I wasn't satisfied with was sitting on my improvised table easel a mere 20 feet from where I sat.

So after some repeated tweaking of the wording on the prior post, I wandered into the dining room (a pandemic-never-used-room that now serves as my main painting studio), and scratched out the parts of the painting that I said I couldn't really live with, and I sketched in an under-painting to replace what I didn't like.

This doesn't commit me to being satisfied with the new sketches, but it does commit me to not settling for what I knew didn't look or feel right.

So here is what I will be working from to try to finish this work:

Phase 5 - Fix the Foreground...

For better or worse, I have a few thoughts on what to do with the foreground.

Whatever the end result, the thought process was sound.

Postscript - I'm not sure I'm going to touch this again. It may be one of my favorites of anything I have done since I started painting a year ago...

Across a River

My next effort in oils is an impressionist landscape of a view across a river. It is loosely based on a work by Alfred Sisley (Riverbank near Saint-Mammes, 1884), but is also inspired by my 1985 trip to Europe and the vineyards on the banks of the Rhine. It is on a very cheap Daler and Rowney 12" by 16" canvas panel, using mainly Charvin Fine Oils and a few Gamblin colors mixed in (all "student grade" paints). I'm using a variety of brushes, mainly cheaper brushes from Michael's and/or Jerry's Artarama. I am also using Chelsea Classical Studio's "Lean" and "Fat" mediums to thin my paint and make them flow better. Lean mediums are for first layers and fat mediums are for final layers.

As I have probably said before, I like many styles of painting and often find myself imitating whatever I have seen last. Which, I guess, I don't apologize for. Some of these efforts are better than others, some of them are more satisfying than others, and all of them probably get me closer to developing my own style of painting. It's a journey, not a destination.

Anyway, the plan for this painting was to sketch out the composition, and then paint it from top to bottom. Each stage would be a background layer of base color followed by a more detailed overlay.

The first picture below is a thin sketch in burnt sienna, followed by a Royal Blue layer in the sky. I then went over the base sky with various darkened and lightened brush strokes using French Blue and Titanium White. The distant hills were then roughed in with a variety of grays and blues (Payne's Gray, Volcano Gray, etc). At this early stage, the top two "bands" of the painting are basically done, while the lower half hasn't even been started.

Early - Sketch and Sky and Distant Mountains

The next picture (taken without an intermediate step or two), has the far bank of the river roughed in with pale earth tones, and then "detailed" with a variety of darker and lighter brush strokes, trying not to stray too far in tone (saturation) or value (light/dark) from the base layer. Since this is in the distance, I don't want any of the colors to be overly saturated. The one intentional deviation from this is the darker pops of color representing trees and clumps of bushes as well as the brighter whites and reds hinting at a village on the right edge of the painting.

Also in this stage (of picture taking, at least), I have roughed in the colors of the river and near shore. I use these rough-ins as a base over which to scatter lighter and darker brush strokes, hoping to achieve that "impressionist" effect, and bring in the hints of other colors that I see (or imagine).

I always need to keep reminding myself that oil painting, or most painting I suppose, is about layers. Build the painting up...

Middle - Far Bank, River and Near Shore

The third picture shows the darkening and detailing of the river itself, as well as the detailing of the near bank. A wooden building has been blocked in. The far bank of the river has been cleaned up and highlighted better so it stands out a little more.

Late Middle - River Detail, Near Bank Detail

At this point, I was happy enough with the painting, but had a few issues as I got near the end.

The river (as represented in the prior picture) was blended near both banks, but was made up of choppy highlight brush strokes in the middle. I toned down the middle, roughed up the edges a bit, and generally tried to even out the brush stroke effect. This was successful, I think. The trees on the far bank needed some cleaning up. And the building on the near shore needed a bit of detail, but not too much.

End - Close to Finished (maybe?)

All of which brings this painting to the "almost done" stage.

Studying this last picture and the painting itself is an interesting exercise. The painting is much more vibrant and alive in person, which I attribute to taking most of my pictures inside at night in artificial light.

So... it's time for an honest critique of the work, given that it is not "done done" and can still be tweaked...

The near-bank shoreline is weird and bothers me in places. Between pictures 3 and 4 I already tried to bring the right side of the near shoreline down, and brought it below the roofline of the cabin. This was partly successful but needed to go further: the little "bump" of shoreline just left of the building needs to come down to a cleaner line.

Similarly, the point of land at lower left seems odd to me. This needs to be cleaned up, since it looks like a little cliff hanging over the water. It was supposed to be a sand bar. This needs to be smoothed out. I will probably end up bringing the whole near-side bank down and straightening it out, eliminating the turnback that I am not satisfied with.

With some work left to do, I like this one quite a bit. So does Amp, and so does my sister-in-law. That's worth something. A lot, actually.

As far as effort goes, I started this yesterday (Sunday) and put a total of about 60-90 minutes into it, getting to somewhere between pictures 1 and 2 (basically, picture 2 but with nothing below the far bank of the river done at all). I put another 60 minutes or so into it this evening, for a total thus far of about 2.5 hours. I always find it difficult to quantify how much time I have actually invested in a painting, since I seem to do most of my painting in 10-15 minute bursts. That being said, I'm happy with what I have gotten out of this time...

Final comment... I can't stress enough how freeing it has been to start painting with large tubes of good quality but reasonably priced paints, and good quality but ridiculously low priced canvas panels. It's a simple thing that has gotten me over the fear of wasting more expensive paints on a more expensive surface. Squeeze out big blobs of paint and let it fly. What's the worst that can happen.......

Sunset Over Water

I love water. Painting it scares me and I am not very good at it yet. So I might as well practice.

In about 45 minutes tonight, I painted this in oils on an 8" by 10" canvas panel. Colors were a very limited palette. Charvin colors used were French Blue (the dark), Royal Blue (the light), Titanium White, Volcano Gray, French Red Deep and Medium French Yellow. I also used a tiny bit of Gamblin's Alizarin Crimson and lots of Payne's Gray.

Sunset Over Water, 8 by 10, in oils

As with virtually everything that I do, there are parts of it that I like and parts of it that I don't.  

There are a few things I know I will touch up when the paint has dried somewhat, specifically cleaning, brightening and concentrating the sun's vanishing point. Painting wet on wet with white and yellow onto blues and darker colors will give you green mud, and I needed to force myself to put down the brushes before I did too much of this. Look closely and you will see that I did just a little of this...and then had the good sense to stop.

When I come back to it I will also be able to add some brighter foreground wave highlights. From the viewer's perspective, the brighter highlights should be in a triangle with a vanishing point directly in front of the sun's location - everything off to the sides of that should fade away. As of now, the foreground wave highlights are off-centered to the right, and from a physics standpoint this makes no sense. If you drew a line from the sun's brightest point directly toward the viewer (the front), that's where the brightest bits should be. And I will also darken the left side of the land mass (it's OK that the right and top edge is lighted but the bulk of the lower and left side would fade into deep shadow). And the sky around the land mass is a little weird.

Which I guess brings me to a final point. There is something to be said for creating a painting up to a certain stage, and then stepping back (literally and figuratively) and critiquing your own work. My typical painting experience, and this one followed that pattern exactly is: (1) paint the painting. (2) step back and tell myself "that's awful". (3) Come back and look at the painting again, even just 20 or 30 minutes later and say "that's kinda OK after all." (4) Then I take a picture for posting here and try to critique the work objectively. I think that other than the part where I am overly hard on myself, that's probably a good progression to work through. In other words, I guess I should only do steps #1 and #4 - paint and then objectively critique.

On a positive note, I do think I have a pretty good eye for critiquing my own work. Which gives hope for the future. I know what I am striving for; I just need to figure out how to get there.

At the moment I set down my brushes on this one, Grace walked into the dining room (where I paint), looked at it, and said "that's pretty Dad, I like it." I responded with something along the lines of "meh...it's pretty terrible." She rolled her eyes, shook her head, and as she left the room, said "you're way too hard on yourself - I think it's nice."

She's right and I'm wrong. I've been painting for a little less than a year. It's not a masterpiece. But it's nice.

And maybe next time I'll do just a tiny bit better. That's the hope anyway.

Idiopathic Epilepsy

...or, what the vet thinks Ryder has.

On October 2 of last year, Ryder had what looked like a seizure of some sort. It was terrifying, with us never having seen anything like it. At that point, Ryder would have been about 4.5 years old.

Amp and I were in the kitchen, and we heard a loud thump from the direction of the family room. We looked over and saw Ryder getting back to his feet from a prone position. We chuckled and thought he must have wiped out coming down the nearby stairs too fast.

Then we noticed he was shaking bit. We thought he scared himself. Then we saw that he was having trouble standing, and he looked like he was going to fall over walking toward us.

Sleeping baby

We went to him, and Grace came running. She sat next to him on the floor and held him, and told us that he was going to fall down if she didn't hold him up.

Amp scooped him up and sat on the couch with him, holding him and comforting him. He promptly threw up all over her lap. He was quivering and shaking, and I'm probably putting my feelings onto him, but he seemed scared.

The quivering and shaking was not severe, and only lasted 3 or 4 minutes before subsiding, but those few minutes seemed like an eternity. When he was done shaking he cuddled into Amp's lap (he's not normally a lap dog), and let her hold him for 15 or 20 minutes. He was as docile as we've ever seen him. At the end of the 15 or 20 minutes, he stood up, jumped off the couch, and trotted off toward the kitchen like nothing had ever happened.

Helping cook

While this was going on, I gave a panicky call to the vet, who said bring him over as soon as you can.

So we did.

They checked him with a thorough physical exam and a bunch of basic blood work. Everything came back fine. His heart and lungs sounded great. His reflexes were good. His lab work was perfect. If you didn't know what had just happened, he was acting and looking perfectly normal.

The vet's opinion, especially given that he was a middle-aged beagle, was idiopathic epilepsy. Her advice was to keep an eye on him, see if it happened again, and stay in touch.

On December 2 (two months to the day) he had an almost-identical episode. Brief. Not severe. Completely back to normal after 15 or 20 minutes of cuddling.

We didn't panic and reported in to the vet. She said one more of these and we should discuss next steps.

Christmas snacks!

This afternoon at about 3:00pm, almost exactly two months (again) from the last one, Ryder had his third almost-identical episode. I was on a work call, and Grace was a trooper. No panic. Scooped him up and sat on the couch and held him steady. Talked to him and soothed him. And it passed, almost exactly like the others had.

Amp got home from work shortly after, and we took him to the vet an hour later. All tests were the same as after the first episode; physically he was great. A preliminary diagnosis of Idiopathic Epilepsy was made. We discussed next steps (all virtual as they examined Ryder in the office and talked to us on the phone in the parking lot). The most reasonable next step is to put Ryder on a drug called Zonisamide, which is a "primary anti-convulsant". It is the best first choice, being well-tolerated with a minimum of side effects. One dose with the morning meal. One dose with the evening meal. Two doses every day. Which means that Ryder will now be taking more prescription medications that the rest of us combined. By a daily score of Ryder 2 versus everybody else zero.

The girls' first question, after "is he OK?", was "what are we going to do, Dad?"

I think they are worried about the cost of treatments, and whether that cost (or cost avoidance) would win out over Ryder...

We are going to do what the vet recommends, of course.

I never ever ever ever ever wanted a dog. I made that abundantly clear. But now we have a dog and I love him with all my heart. According to Lilo and Stitch, Ohana means family, and family means no-one left behind. So we do what we need to do and hope for the best.

If this doesn't work, we'll try the next thing. And the next. Until we run out of nexts.

Ryder is one of us now.

 

Custer State Park, South Dakota

Next up in my Dakota series of painting efforts will be something roughly based on the photo below. This scene is typical of the gently rolling grassland hills that dominate the southern part of the park.

Custer State Park, July 31, 2011

This scene doesn't make for the greatest painting composition, so after I painted a first effort at this, I sat back, looked at it, and knew something was missing. On the one hand, what I had done was a pretty faithful representation of the picture. But on the other hand, faithfully reproducing a photo doesn't always make for the best painting.

So I went back to the photos from the rest of this particular hike, and found this:

Custer State Park, flowers in the valley

To make a more interesting composition, I added some of these lavender and yellow flowers in the foreground. And added another clump of trees in the right mid-ground to balance the trees in the left distance. The new trees are only roughed in, and will require some additional work, as they are closer to the foreground and won't end up quite as...vague.

After the first batch of changes (bad lighting)

This might not be a faithful copy of the original photo, but it does capture the essence of this hike and the landscape of the park, and makes for a far more interesting painting composition. There is a lesson to be learned here...

Something still didn't seem quite right though, mainly in the lower left part of the composition. So I added the first rough-in of a clump of bushes running down the swale between the hills. Better I think.

Second batch of changes (better lighting)

The newer trees and bushes still need work, but it seems to be getting closer to a better painting.

That being said, I'm also reaching the point where I need to wrap this up and move on to the next one...

Finishing up Scottsbluff

In the interests of moving on to the next painting, I think this will be the end of this one (cough cough).

Near Scottsbluff, Nebraska, July 2011

The bluff on the right still needs some work, so when this dries I will probably not be able to resist the temptation to revisit it, but who knows... Yeah, OK, I know. I look at the geologic stratification lines and they are too regular, so something will need to be done to break them up a little. But that is a story for another day.

In the meantime, at least the picture is taken with a good color balance, and is a good representation of what the painting actually looks like.

As for what comes next, I have been going through the hundreds of pictures taken on the Dakotas trip in 2011, and the number of these good quality pictures that could be turned into a sketch or painting is dozens at least. So be prepared to see some Dakotas paintings in the near future.