The Boneyard

There is a certain culture of acquisition by default that is prevalent in the boonies. Someone wrecks a car on a bend, over a cliff, down a hill with no brakes...whenever an accident claims victims it often leaves a salvageable hulk. These cars were retrieved to this yard, conveniently located on an stretch of mountain road that was particularly perilous and thus productive for the proprietor of this "boneyard". Some of these cars were habituated by reluctant ethereals or so the steward of this collection claimed, mostly in an effort to discourage anyone inclined to borrow parts.
Click to pick up the details...

The Creepshaw Place

Sometime things are so deliciously convenient they are irresistible. That's the case with this scene. The house was inherited by John Creenshaw and he had a talent for junking stuff up including the house, the yard, himself...the unintended consequence of his slovenliness was inadvertent creepiness. So everybody called the property, "The Creepshow Place". Its amazing to me that wit never fails to land in fertile ground...Ol' John the "batch" kinda grew into his reputation and became a part time ghoul. Once again the "ironic" rears its amusing head or "how reps are unfairly gained", because while he sorta encouraged everybody to think he was running some kind of haunted house he was actually an amiable, generous, gentle slob unlikely to ever scare anybody. Mind you Halloween was always fun and we would usually head over to his place with the kids for fireworks and maybe to see if he could set some of his junk on fire.

Bink on image to explore the inner reaches of my watercolour world...

Chainsaw Manor

Its fun for me to look at all the silly/fun things in this painting, I must admit. The tower face was really fun to do without over doing but then again the whole thing is ridikulos. The window dormers were made out of oil drums cut and welded into shape. The mysticism of the builder showed in the various symbols all over the place. The weather vane is a sea gull rather than the traditional rooster. the birds were fun to get in flight. The boat and truck props were subordinate to the house but still visually compelling I thought. All in all I was happy to do it in one go...it will get done again but maybe that will kill the spontaneity, who knows? I had a story but the creep factor won out and the story will tell itself, especially with Halloween coming up.

Sedan Delivery

A friend of mine grew up in this farm house. It was a warm friendly place with stuff in the oven baking all the time and kids hollering and dogs barking. There was no shortage of dandelion wine and my buddies old man smoked big honkin' stinky cigars. We rode to school in the back of this sedan delivery with the yapping dogs licking our ears. There are a lot of old houses on the back of farms all through the valley. Properties have been subdivided and new houses built. My buddy is a developer and his ragtag bunch are very prosperous. He had a younger sister....

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Ron Morrison

Cluttered and Shuttered

Bink to explore the inner reaches of the watercolour world!

Miss Wilson's House

This is a sad story, I admit as much. Miss Wilson was a grade two teacher at the elementary school that I attended. It was a country school on a chunk of land cut out of a farm and donated to the school board in the twenties by Miss Wilson's family. She went to normal school and started teaching, conveniently enough, at the school on the land her grandparents donated. This would be about 1956, I think. By the time I got there she had learned to drive and had set up camp in this house which was also on the family farm and was old even then. I guess it had been her grandparents shack or something. She bought this Dodge and was all set, short walk to work, a cruiser for going into town, in a word-independence. My parents knew her parents, but I never had her for a teacher, although my brother did. Half way through 1960 she got sick and was replaced by an old battle axe the kids called "Bullfrog". She as much as vanished except we knew she was in her house being looked after by her mom. She later went to hospital, where she died of leukemia in January of 1961. She was young and pretty and then she wasn't. Nobody ever lived in the house again and the car is still sitting there forty-seven years later on the farm her nephew now owns. I guess its sort of a shrine and I drive by it all the time and think about her often although I hardly knew her. (As a side note my dad died three years later of the same thing...musta been the water.)

I did this with no drawing, just painted it to see if it would work, I'll paint it again and pay more attention. Its a full sheet of the ol'arches 140 C.P. with assorted paints some of which were payne's gray, yellow ochre, burnt umber, cobalt blue, rose madder, cobalt green...I think that's it.

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Ron Morrison

For Lorne

Now, I may not be able to explain this clearly but I'll give it a try. When we were in high school I had a buddy named Lorne who was a Ford fanatic. We called him Ford Lorne. He always wanted a five-window coupe, but ended up with a four-door sedan his dad gave him for graduation. He was sorta aggrieved about the whole situation and we just had to call him "Four Door Lorne". Well as monikers go it was cumbersome so he became Four Lorne and then just plain Forlorn. To this day he is still Forlorn to his friends and ironically he's quite a happy chap. This car was acquired later on, its a five window coupe, but it just sat and is now truly forlorn rotting at the back of the property. (Don't blame me, I don't make this stuff up...wait a minute maybe...)

The Art Installation

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About thirty years ago someone started to collect old cars and parts and deposit them on leased land at the bottom end of a wooded acreage.. He placed a few in what appear to be aesthetically pleasing positions and stripped a bunch more down to parts and positioned the pieces in rows and stacks. Only he knows what he had in mind. What looks like a junkyard is a deliberate tableau. There is moss everywhere and what light penetrates the trees lands on fenders and chrome and glass and bounces off again. Bus loads of German tourists used to visit and the whole thing became too much as the "installation" became popular and an intrusion on the privacy of the owner of the property. There are a couple of strange buildings with trees as corner posts full of parts and memorabilia. All in all a very eerie creation.

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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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