The second Merida street scene is finished. I don't anticipate going back to tweak anything, although this is possible. When it's dry and framed, it will hang with the first street scene I finished almost a year ago.

I'm working on some ideas tomorrow for another piece to start soon.


My corner of the kitchen for painting. Decent light, and next to the new gas fireplace stove, nice on a 15 degree day (like yesterday).

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Got the wheels done yesterday - a few hours for this task. Tomorrow, I'll finish all the remaining details and see how things look.

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"People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election."
Otto von Bismarck

I received an odd forwarded email the other day that purported to reveal all sorts of inflammatory stuff about Barak Obama. It darkly suggested that he might be some sort of radical Muslim agent, among other things. The email claimed credibility by virtue of the fact that it had been checked at the prominent Internet fraud clearing-house, snopes.com. "...it is factual. Check for yourself.", the message began.

I did. I went to snopes, and found that assertions in the email had been examined and refuted. Exact language from the email was there, statements or insinuations discredited as false or misleading, paragraph by paragraph, line by line.

There is a piece from the Washington Post that attempts to explain the source and motivation for rumors like those contained in the email.

The pervasiveness of misinformation that seems to precede elections undermines our trust in civil society, and belies our reverence for democratic process rooted in truthfulness.

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About four hours today working on the street scene, just trying to get the car going. I experienced a lot of those "What's the point of THIS?" moments along the way. I notice that increasingly, I ask myself the same question when I see the art of others, or hear some music on the radio, or observe some horrid TV swill on the monitors at the gym. Or news of politics, business, social commentary, etc., etc...

While my occasional discontent with how things have ended up so far for us here in Fort Collins has not abated, I find myself calmer and more able to accept that (as everything) this situation is temporary. All things are possible. I look at the blog of Jonna and Mimi and see how they are bulding their dream home in Merida, and experiencing such a rich diversity of Mexican life, and it reminds me that there are abundant opportunities for a non-Colorado life.

I really DO appreciate all that we have here - the nice house, the cute town with all its diversions, the proximity to Wyoming and the ranch - but - this just isn't the destination. The journey doesn't stop here. I sort of wish it did, because the prospect of change and uncertatinty are troubling for a guy like me who has grown sort of timid in the face of an increasingly chaotic world. But eventually, like the monster that visits the Buddhist monk and is not tamed until it is invited to stay for tea, the time will come following this period of increasingly calm abiding when change will be embraced, and lose its fearful countenance.

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Tonight I went to the drawing session in Old Town that rthe artist co-op sponsors every Thursday. The result above (second of two drawings in about an hour and a half) is unusual for me in that I did not need to haul out an eraser the entire time spent on it. One enjoyable new element is the use of some darker paper and a light pencl for highlights - more fun than just dark-on-white drawing.

This is actually sort of a fun exercise, as there are other artists present, including a couple of retired teachers. Eventually I may try painting from life in this compressed timeframe.


A very sweet abuelita from El Salvador who is in my ESL class. She always stands up when I call on her, because that is the way classrooms were when she was a schoolgirl - to show respect for the maestro.

Earlier in the day, I taught my first English as a Second Language (ESL) class to some Mexican and Central American immigrants. It wasn't as scary as I anticipated - actually it was sort of fun. And I think it will be more of an opportunity for me to learn Spanish than I expected.

When I last worked at the food bank yesterday, one of the other volunteers told me she was asked by an acquaintance if we checked to be sure our clients were not illegal immigrants, implying that their hunger wasn't sufficient qualification for our services. Hearing this made me wonder how much the rhetoric of politicians runing on anti-immigrant platforms is responsible for such cruelty and selfishness.

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Worked for a few hours yesterday despite being extremely depressed. Completed the two doors on the left, the electric meter, and a few odds and ends.

Today it snowed a bit, and it's 15 degrees outside at mid-day. Got a pot of soup on the stove, and we're looking at stuff about Mexico living on the Internet...

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I subscribe to a quote of the day from Albert Einstein. In the one below I received yesterday, I wondered why he left out work, but I guess in his case science was work.

"One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires".

-Albert Einstein

Guess I need to work on my art more, or find some science to mess with.

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A few days since I tackled the street scene. Worked on the portal on the right side some more, and got the figure over there done. Also got the face visible in the car done, and some stonework along the lower part of the building. Maybe four hours?

Reasons for the break in the work - Mona visited from Wyoming, worked at the Food Bank, worked on the new Shambhala center, worked at a English class for Mexicans (due to teach solo next Thursday - ackk!).

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Four hours or so today didn't really result in a lot of progress. I worked on the umbrella and the portal on the right side, including the fellow seated at the red table. Also a bit of the detail for the door on the right side of the portal. Probably work on the standing guy on the far right next. There's a white door on the seated guy's head - think that's just a photo defect or a reflection.

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Yesterday I spent part of the day helping with demolition at the site of the new Shambhala Buddhist center in town. I have been participating in community events with this group since we arrive here, and while I am not engaged in all their practices, I'm glad to have a way to contribute something in return for the pleasant environment these nice people provide.

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Didn't work on the street scene painting today, but did go to a figure-drawing session tonight organized weekly by a local artist coop. Maybe try to attend regularly for the practice working from life instead of photos. Also, the 20-minute or so limit per sketch discourages fussiness, a tendancy I have.

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Three to four hours today didn't result in a lot of progress. I worked on the middle door and the detail overhead the right side portal mostly. It gets really scary when you first start working in detail for areas like these. You just need to keep moving and have faith that something will evolve that conveys the appearance you are looking for.

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I got a late start today on the street scene painting. Couldn't find some of my supplies, and general stalling. Then, only an hour in I got a nap attack...

It really is intimidating to confront one of these new pieces. There are a lot of challenges, and there is no certainty that a worthwhile result awaits some twenty or thirty hours later. I log the time for each session, out of curiosity.

All I accomplished today was to mull over the array of challenges this image offers, and start filling in some large areas. About two and a half hours maybe. Tomorrow I'll try to invest most of the day and see what happens. Scary.

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Ackk! I recently suggested (in a sort of approving tone) that it might be interesting to see Michael Bloomberg enter the presidential race if the major two parties don't come up with satisfactory candidates. Well, I just read a piece in Salon by Glenn Greenwald that reveals a bunch of Bush-supporting propensities that make the prospect of a Bloomberg presidency more than a little chilling from this perch.

By the way, I listened to a replay of yesterday's Republican debate from New Hampshire while driving home from Wyoming this afternoon. Be afraid - not of Islamo-fascists, but of smooth-talking demagogues who will probably send you a nice flyer in the mail sometime soon.

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The Andrew Johnson impeachment trial in 1868.

I see that today, former Senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern issued an impassioned statement calling for the impeachment and removal from office of the President and Vice President of the United States.

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It's time to resume painting. Beginning Monday, I'm going to attempt to devote the bulk of my time to completing a few pieces over the next two months or so.

First up will be the Merida (Yucatan, Mexico) street scene that I got to the sketch stage early last year.



After that, I'd like to start a series with a subversive social/political point of view.

Today we are headed up to the ranch for a brief visit. We're going to look at the possibilitiy of ownership of a corner of the ranch property for the eventual purpose of building a small home for our US presence as we try to continue our exploration of life in Mexcio.

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Well, I muddled through another New Year's Eve - my least favorite of all 'holidays'. After dodging the orgy of excessive consumption and thin veneer of sentiment that pervades the landscape for Christmas, the rolling over of the calendar always represents some sort of milestone of not feeling like I'm in the right place, doing the right things. People say to be satisfied with what is, but if I ever accomplish anything worthwhile in a place that I can better relate to , I'll be glad I didn't leave things as they were.



We went out on the 31st to sample some activities the city puts on to give people alcohol-free options. The first few venues were mobbed with agitated infants and grade-school children, which are not high on my list of tolerated artifacts. After we made our way to Old Town things improved a bit. We heard some Latin music, saw a half hour of musical comedy theater, had a good coffee drink at a cafe while we watched some short films from the recent film festival, then headed to a Latino pot luck in a housing development clubhouse South of the city. That was the highlight of my evening, with good comida casera and a cerveza someone graciously brought us. We watched the kids play sillas musicales and the adults dance to the DJ's disco lights and salsa music until we headed home around 11pm.


I'll try anything to crawl out of the year-end abyss...

Tonight we went to see the new film by Richard Kelly, the writer and director of Donnie Darko. Southland Tales has been reviled by most critics, and was vigorouisly booed by the Cannes festival audience (the version they saw was 167 minutes, now reduced to 137 minutes in its US releaase). As I was very impressed and entertained by Darko, I was anxious to see Southland, and I was not disappointed. Kelly has the darkest of visions of our stature as a country, and is in your face intensely with his condemnation of the venality and the banality of evil that permeates government, the media, and business in this dark age.

Which brings me to another event of this evening - the Iowa caucuses. I see the Republicans have selected a pious squirrel-eating fellow.

I'm starting to take an interest in the primaries.

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