Cons"truck"tive Colouration

Bink to explode the inner reaches of water and pigment.

Barrister's Boat

This boat ended up on the lawyer's farm and was going to be a retirement fixerupper. Cruises were imagined, endless summer days cruising the inner coast, up inlets and down arms, through the straits bliss on the waves. However reality reared up and bit the plan and the boat was scrapped due to aesthetic priorities...it was junking up the garden by the house.

Bink to blow....

Sometimes A Little Colour is Good For The Soul

I sometimes don't have a clue...about colour, but its fun!

Wine Country

When I last saw this house, it was on the dry side of an interior lake fronting on a slough. Now its gone and a winery with irrigation and a reception room has taken its place.

You gotta bink for full effect!

The Poker Palace

Before the advent of the big-money tournaments and online gambling, the boys wagered their wages and parlayed their bets into car purchases and liquor fueled holidays to the coast. This shack is where poker pots were transformed into roadtrips. It was tradition that the winners funded the vacation, but the whole thing could have been accomplished by merely pooling funds. Somehow it was more fun to let the winners have the honour of paying for liquor, hookers, food and lodging.The cars were always wrecks with bald tires that made a trip or two and were then retired to an honorary position guarding the shack. The debris from these trips to the "Big Smoke" litters the yard and the "Palace" spent its sunset years as a chicken coup. Bink for an expanded version.

Back To The Hollow

This is a scene I have painted many times. Its one of my favourites. Bink to blow (up)!

History

PainterRon This is WetC Stuff, just lifted it and dropped it in. Lord of the Arts Courtenay, B.C., Canada

Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 2,245

From The Vault (I Got A New Scanner)

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The "Vault" is a cardboard box. In this box have negatives from the seventies of pictures I took of junkyards. Some of the negatives are of my early paintings. I have been worried that the negs were wrecked. I recently got a scanner and put the images in my library. Most everything was in good shape. I am going to burn them on discs and then they will be safe.

Okay, so I found some things that I thought might be fun to show. These are paintings that I did around 1977. The negs of the paintings were damaged a little, but I thought that created an interesting effect.

Go Big or Go Home

If You Stack Them Neatly, Dear, You Can Keep Them

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This is done in a style that I think is my own. Its one of my favourites. Its pretty near four feet wide.

__________________
Ron Morrison

More fun with the stories...

Water Taxi Bootlegger and the Rogue

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On a sunny day with a breeze blowing you can almost hear the laughing and bickering of the high school kids as they rode the water taxi to the mainland. Mind you, some of the kids were familiar with the after hours chores of this steel-hulled launch. By day, the owner of this craft was a mild mannered taxi-operator. By night he was a bootlegger. Some of the students were his customers, so it was a poorly concealed criminal enterprise, all things considered. Coastal villages and camps had thirsts that legal vendors couldn't quench. So you'd think that this boat was chased up the rocks on a stormy night by a patrol boat or dashed on the logs by a sou'easter during a gale that blew the arbutus trees flat against the ground. No, the captain and his accomplice were on a routine delivery, clipping along at an honest thirty knots on a moonlit night when outa nowhere they were lifted by a rogue wave and deposited on the beach, ten feet free of the hightide mark. Since they were relaxed due to being half cut dipping into their cargo and relatively unharmed, they climbed down from their lofty perch, surveyed the situation and the hole in the hull, and waited for daybreak and rescue. The cargo was unloaded and the boat was never retrieved.

__________________
Ron Morrison

Ol'Magruder's Farm

I found the three cars and the barn in the valley and created my own scene. Bink to blow...up!

Paintings and Stories

Hanging Out With a Bunch of Hoods (The Origin of the Term,"Magruder")

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There's no accounting for the accretion of eccentricities as the years pile up. In this case it was a joint effort, literally. Two ol'boys, the Brothers Magruder, lived in this shack and grew dope of the marijuana variety long before it was a popular career choice of many local residents seeking to avoid the nine to five. Paranoia being the operating imperative of many cash croppers these two built an elaborate early warning system. The cars were left by who knows who and housed speakers and sirens, that were activated by trip wires running everywhere. The scrap metal in the foreground was a booby trap, consisting of holes and cables and nests of razor wire, all guaranteed to dissuade potential intruders seeking to disrupt proceedings. After a successful period of maximizing some rather select principles of free enterprise, the brothers left, probably for Arizona as some of the original "Snowbirds".

Now here's the thing, these pioneers of what has become an important contribution to our economy left another legacy. Its called an eponym, I believe, where someone's name becomes synonymous with a thing he is is closely associated with. In this case the Old Magruders were bachelors or widowers, so we call an old single guy a "Magruder", as in "The old magruder lives in the shack down by the creek."

Painted on a full sheet of Arches C.P.140 using my faves from W/N. The horizontal compo is debatable under epert scrutiny I'm sure, but its just some fun...thats my excuse.

http://i178.photobucket.com/albums/w...s/IMG_2015.jpg
Bink here for bigger image

__________________
Ron Morrison

I Like to Paint Junk

Vintage Tin

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There is a certain intangible quality about old tin, as it sits rusting away in fields and junkyards, that fascinates those who discover it. There is a mysterious, eerie sensation of looking into the past through the face of a survivor that compels artists and photographers to preserve these vestiges of simpler times in their paintings and photographs.

These tin derelicts assume attitudes of defiance, puzzlement, and resignation in their stand against the onslaught of weather and metal scavengers. Paint blisters and peels under the scorching sun, revealing layers of colour and primer that both blend and contrast in expressions of abstract art. Faded scales of original blues and greens flake from oxidized surfaces as old metal returns to natural hues.



Memories lie in these metal shells like the dust on their dashboards which even the wind cannot blow away. Faint traces of things past remembering are reflected in glass that is almost opaque, and chrome that is dull and yellow. Shreds of rotten upholstery, hanging from roofs and torn from seats, provoke speculation about particular circumstances that are now long forgotten.

http://i178.photobucket.com/albums/w...s/IMG_2043.jpg
Bink here for bigger image

__________________
Ron Morrison

Florida 98

My grandfather (the surgeon) had a sister who was a nurse. She married a steel tycoon who she nursed back to health after a bout with some contagion or other. She lived in Florida and would drive up to visit every couple of years. She was my great aunt but was known as Aunt Anne to everybody. She was an imperious matron with a heart of some valuable mineral. They were lean years and she brought chocolate and oranges for my mother and her five brothers and sisters at Christmas during the depression. Now, near as I can tell she did this for over thirty years. Here's the deal...she drove up some time around 1958, from Florida to Vancouver, British Columbia. She must have been at least eighty. The weather was cold and it was starting to snow when she was due to start back. One of my uncles, her nephew, worked for Air Canada and suggested she fly home, which she did. She left the car, never came back again, and my uncles who couldn't register the car beat around with it for a while and just left it. I rediscovered it pretty much as they left it in a friends yard when they subdivided their big city lot. It was towed away and that was that.

My great Aunt lived for at least another ten years and her millions were drained dy unscrupulous nursing home operators. My grandmother had to fly down and pay the funeral bill. She (my great aunt) used to buy a big new Olds 98 every couple of years so that it would make the five thousand mile trip without breaking down. She died broke. __________________
Ron Morrison

White Lightening and the Black Mariah

White Lightning and the Black Mariah

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For those of you with tender sensibilities, dwell not on the details of this morality play, the lesson is unclear, but the tale entertaining I hope.

With the proceeds from his private distillery, this free-enterpriser built a replica ante belum mansion in the style of the Victorians. Long after prohibition he maintained a hobbyists interest in the distribution of his product - "white lightning". He had two sons, one was relieved of his mortal coil in a friendly fire napalm incident in Vietnam and the other was lost in a firey crash on a bad track in some backwater hellhole (don't jump out of your knickers, its just a word). Due to his poor attitude about the inequitable distribution of divine providence, his wife bolted for town. Annoyed with his God and anxious for a face to face with his maker he dispatched himself for the showdown with a colt forty-five.

What is left behind is the shell of the house and his last rum runner. It is a four-door "sleeper" with a three twelve wedge and dual Holley four-barrels. He called it the Black Mariah. Now curious thing about these cars is that they were built with steel that was bought from the Japanese after WWII. The steel was reclaimed from the blast sites at Negasaki and Hiroshima and sold as part of the post war rebuilding of Japan. Problem was, that since it had been irradiated, apparently it rusted quickly. And quality control on these cars was bad. But this one has sat for forty years and is still intact.

It seems that a ghostly light, strange and nonsensical (like this story) floods this hollow on occasion and provokes from the viewer speculation about circumstances that have uncertain details. I did not want to "fix" this painting by correcting its flaws because the light suggested the story to me. So I just stopped painting and wrote the story fearing by fixing the goofiness I would ruin the effect. Its doodled on the back of a scrap of Arches. Its from the imaginato of course...I did look at a picture I had taken of the car for reference and went from there.

Hot August Day

Bink link to blow..up!

http://i178.photobucket.com/albums/w...s/IMG_1875.jpg

On a hot August day fifty years ago there was blood and glass on a sandy road above the river canyon. Beer and whiskey bent this car on a tree and a girl with raven hair was killed.

When I find wrecks, occasionally I wonder how they met the end of their useful lives. I have been on that sandy road and I have felt the cold touch of something as I take pictures. And I think I can see that blood. And there is always glass...


Ron Morrison

The Industrial Park

The conceit of this production is that people will live anywhere they can park and recreate as opportunity affords. Full sheet on the back of something or other. Bink link for bigger.
http://i178.photobucket.com/albums/w...s/IMG_1869.jpg __________________
Ron Morrison

Going, Going, Gone to the Other Side of the Road

Homesteading, logging, working in the mill, hauling shingles, growing your own grub, hunting and fishing, and then the kids head for the big city as soon as they are old enough. Maybe built a new house on the other side of the property? Bink to blow...up!

Donor Cars

When restorers are looking for parts, donor cars are often cut up and harvested. This accounts for entire sections missing. The two Caddies in front are missing substantial sections after amputation. What I really enjoy doing is creating a clutter scene with intersections of shapes and colours that are unqiue to each car. Its fun to be the creator of a scene that doesn't exist until brush hits paper.

I bashed this thing off in a hurry to force me to "decide and do" rather than fiddle and consider. Its in an effort to just paint. Its on a full sheet of Arches 300 with W/N and DaVinci. There's things to fix and the paint wasn't completely dry leaving a couple of darker spots...but you get the idea. Bink to explore the molecular structure of my own little world....sort of.

Transportation - A Personal History

Down in the back forty, against the tree line, is a small pile, all thats left of a much bigger car hedge. The light dances on a bright hot day and the shapes and colours blend and contrast in expressions that are almost abstract. When the wrecker went through only a few hulks were left, the ones with a special significance to the man who farmed the land. Cars like the honeymoon express, the first born rocket to the hospital twenty miles away, the grad taxi, the grandchild's first Christmas ride, and the last trip to the "home". This fanciful depiction was done without reference or concern for accuracy as a tribute to the notion of a car monument, created randomly and inadvertently, as a byproduct of just living, by a person reluctant to let go of an essential part of his personal history.

There's a whole nother world to visit through the miracle of "binking".

The Home of the Surgeon

Trying to get a back to basics look here. Unembellished. I am going to add some silliness and cook up the story. Bink for a revelation.

My grandfather built this house, he was a surgeon in the first world war. He married my grandmother in 1916. While courting her he was married to another woman and engaged to a third. He sorted out his affairs (literally and figuratively) and legalized his preferred choice. My grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of a very famous English poet and claimed to have been born on Christmas day, 1900, which would have made her a child bride. When my mother found my grandmother's birth certificate after she died it showed her birth date as 1896, making her almost twenty when she was married. My grandfather the surgeon was twenty four years older, which might explain his large inventory of partners, present and past. He built this house in 1919, by which time they had three kids under four. When the flu swept through, they lost their precious three year old boy. My grandmother was so upset that she would no longer live in the house. She wanted to move to a more moderate climate with no mosquitoes and warmer winters. My grandfather who was shell shocked and partially deaf told her that if they moved he would never build her another house. They moved and rented for the rest of their long lives. He never practiced medicine again.

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Ron Morrison

The Fishscale Chapel

Bink to blow...up!
A Norwegian fisherman was pitched out of his small fishboat while jigging for cod during a squall. Snagged by a log and deposited on the beach, he believed he was delivered there by God. Filled with "The Spirit", he read "The Book" and built his version of a church and delivered homespun sermons to the seagulls. The belfry contained a big brass bell which can still be heard when strong winds whistle through. The shingles are cut in the fishscale style.

Found Under the Bed

These have never seen the light of day, just organizing. Detonate for a larger picture.

More of the Same Only Different

I just put this up to change the scenery. Bink to Blow!

Gone With the Tide

The title of my new pulp fiction. Blast for seismic upgrade or enlargement.

On the Rustaway Plan

Sometimes things get filed or forgotten or lost and then there they are, again, and you realize that they were "pre-studies", idea paintings, or flawed versions of salvageable compos. Maybe they are okay, after not looking at them for awhile. You get the digital out and started shootin'. You get them in the compu-library and edit and you realize you got some tolerable stuff. Maybe not the ones you'd put in your self-directed bio epic, but some fun stuff nonetheless. They are your own personal art history. You can say,"This was the first version of a later painting that sold to a fancy private collection or I gave to my Grandma cuz she was the only one that liked it and she's only a little blind." And then you start thinkin', I am an artist, this will be in my autobiography, better organize them figure out the dates, gotta be accurate for the students when they are studyin' my life......Then you have some lunch, maybe a little nap and never think about it again, cept you got a whole bunch of new old pics to show the unwary visitors to your new post. Ha! Bink Me You Fool!_________________
Ron Morrison