Drip, Drip, Rusting Away

A Cluster of Cabriolets

Snake Light Illumination

Barn Fresh Cabriolets

When a farmer advertises an old wreck he has hauled out of a web-infested corner of his falling down barn it is referred to as being "barn fresh".

The Car Lot in Cumberland Hill

Left Behind

Fletch Speaks From the Great Beyond

I would have liked to have been able to ring up Ol' James Fletcher Watson and ask him a coupla things. Maybe have had a little visit...a lesson or two. I re-read his wonderful, The Magic of Watercolor and was struck by his assessment of J.S. Cotman, after whom the paint is named. The Fletch was particularly impressed with how Johnny handled cloud shadows in the landscape. So I fiddled a bit with an old drawing and popped out this scribble. It prolly doesn't have much to do with what the masters had in mind but I liked the notion of darks and lights with no particular reason other than, "there they go...there you are!"

When the Wind Blows

I like to invent scenes that are hopefully resonant, the motion, the light...the way things were and still are in some places. Junk, clutter, the debris of the mid-last century, the fodder that I am compelled to re-arrange in my paintings to create my scenes. It is just plain fun for me and the reason I paint.

I am still working on this idea, there are a few things that are unfinished, but you can fill in the details like the unfinished chimney top...its the idea that is important. This is the middle section of a bigger painting that I thought could stand on its own. I love this breezy style of painting and I admit to being stuck not only in another world of old stuff but also an admirer of older painting styles and I lament their loss.

The Encore Performance of the Dowager Queen of Desolation Sound

When Vasiliev DeFrenz, a seminal influence on the local art scene, first batched up one of his "industrial art" pieces I was a teenager industriously working on perfecting the mechanics of a whole arsenal of bad habits. F'rinstance, I had taken up smoking filterless "Export A" cigarettes, learned how to roll a joint and was an apprentice acid dropper. My grandfather had provided me with the Panhead and I was generally a terror to no one in particular and a hazzard mostly to myself. The man I credit with my early career as a miscreant was the aforementioned Vaz DeFrenz ("seminal influence"...get it?), a charlatan of the first order and an instructor par excellence in the fine arts of dissolute inclinations and pastimes.

In the late sixties it was possible to get a Local Initiative Grant for any ol'hairball scheme and Vaz's proposal looked good on paper. Rolly paper, no doubt. He wanted to rescue an abandoned fishboat and restore it as an art piece, namely splash a coat of paint on it, drop it in the drink and hope it floated long enough for everybody on board to get thoroughly stoned. A noble enterprise in the opinion of the under-employed and heartily endorsed by the local council who were a bunch of comedians themselves. So, all righty then, grant given, boat located and hauled out and patched for painting. The usual rainbow- gaudy splash and dash paint job and sploosh back in the chuck. Well, some saboteur with a talent for the comedic had chipped out the seal around the propeller shaft and it took about five minutes for the boat to sink, right in front of the village council and the local M.L.A. It was seriously among the most pant-wettingly funny incidents that I have ever witnessed. Vaz beat it out of Dodge after draining the grant fundage into his pocket and I never saw him again.

The boat was eventually refloated but it was washed up in a storm and settled on the rocks across the bay and you can see it as the sun goes down, resplendent in it's glorious hues.

Before it was rescued and temporarily revived it had worked as the "Dowager Princess" in Desolation Sound. __________________
Ron Morrison

The Tub Unplugged

Light Circulatin' in the Holler

Pre-Study for the BIG PIC

An idea I am working on...bink to explore.

Seclusion Fusion

Truck-you-lent..."defiant".

have dreams about vehicles I have owned and collections of "stuff" that is stored and lost...I can't find them...because I never had them in the first place. Trucks that I lent to people and they disappeared. This is the shape of a lost truck that haunts my dreams sometimes...where the heck is it?

Left Behind

Stuck in the Mud

Doodlepot

Christian Ryder's Back Forty Relaxed

Bink to explore!

The Fish on the Watertower

The Miraculous Conversion of the Deacon, Christian Ryder

Deacon Christian Ryder, despite the implications of his sonorous appellation, was not particularly Christian until he was left a message just before his thirty-third birthday and on the eve of the birth of his twin girls. Left by natural forces at the command of a higher power, a fish appeared on his freshly painted watertower. Only he knows why he painted his water tower mud brindle brown, prolly got a signal from outer space, that being the origin of most important messages. He was supposed to paint the nursery, and not brown, but he decided it was a better idea to use up some old paint on the water tower. Now, it was hot and the paint was not inclined to form a permanent bond with the wood and that night a nasty little summer storm blew in and pelted the tower smartly. When all was blown and gone the watertower had a freshly inscribed fish. But it wasn't the stylized fish that school children stencil on catch basins to deter the pouring of used motor oil into the ocean or the bumpersticker fish identifying a certain type of zealot...it was a tropical fish, maybe an angel fish. Well Christian took this as a sign that he better get with the program on the brink of his wife delivering what they knew would be twins. So he looked in the phone book under "religious instruction", found the Holy Triangle Gospel Church and signed up for Wednesday night bible study classes. While not exactly mainstream, it seemed like a good fit and he was on his way to Deacon-hood.

Alrighty then, dial forward seventeen years, give or take. The Ryder twins, Debby and Dianne are in high school and are both gorgeous. I decide it might be a good idea to take a stab at asking Debby to a sockhop in the spring of '70. She says yes, but turns out "stab" was the operative word here. The Deacon decides to deliver his darlin' to the dance himself, what with him havin, a car and me not. So I hop on the' 65 Panhead (Harley) that my grandfather bought me on my sixteenth birthday and fixed up as a reward for me skipping grade ten. ('member him? Ironically he was another lay preacher...but I digress). I meet her at the door and we go in. I pay for the tickets and take her coat to hang in one of the cloak rooms. I put it on a wire hanger and the hanger slips out of my hand and stabs the back of her hand, producing quite a little geyser. Being a man of action (and scared &%$#less) I grabbed some masking tape from a sockhop sign and taped her up. I got her on the back of my bike, took her to emerge where she got three stitches, a tetanus shot, and later a scar. Her dad picked her up after I had beat it outa there. I steered clear of the whole gang for a while, but we all still live in a small town and Debbie never was mad that I could tell. Prudence kept me outa the reach of the Deacon as he was fairly sturdy and quite quick for an older guy.

This is how the spread looked in about 1980, long after the Ryders built a new shack...you could still see the "fish" and that brown paint stayed unfaded for years.

ImAginato Menacing on Easel

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Back to the easel for a quick sketch from the imaginato department. I have been reading Rowland Hilder and he was not a follower of traditional rules. Surprisingly, I have always just used transparent watercolor according to the "rules", mostly no opaque white, until recently no black, no chalk, pastel, graphite, carbon or plutonium. However ol'Rowland who shed his mortal coil some dozen years ago, used whatever he felt would work and his work is inspiring for/to me. I always wanted more texture and atmo in my productions, my wrecks are mostly dilettantes, they gotta be more wrecked...more menacing...

Riding the Bus

Fake Plein Air (Dodge-ing Traffic By Riding the Bus)

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I have always admired the P.A. practitioners and while I am constantly out photoging, it is nevertheless cold and dangerous out there, what with cranky bears and bottle collectors. So I closed my eyes and read the back of my eyelids and this is what was there. I painted it quick before it vapourized....so I guess I pulled it out of "thin air". I should fix it and color the windows but I like the play of whites against the linked darks so this is what you get. I will paint it again but this is the idea and I like the loososity factor. I will also cook up a story for the half dozen charitable souls who claim to enjoy them. In conclusion, while P.A. remains an item on the bucket list, the best I can come up with is T.A.

The Old Farmer Had Piles (of Cars)

The Brothers Chayne, whose sobriquets were trimmed from the cumbersome "Clinking and Clanking" to "Clink and Clank" and who were referred to as the Chayne Gang, ran an informal wrecking yard on their family apple orchard for at least fifty years that I know of (to end a sentence with a preposition). Piling things up in any sort of monumental configuration with the emphasis on "mental" was a favourite diversion from actually working. This set piece was was constructed as a tribute to nothing in particular and was erected with an enthusiasm that can only be fueled by an excess of alcohol. To the untrained eye it looked as if some practical purpose might have been served by the "piles" but in fact they were the products of an unleashed mechanical aesthetic that was not to be denied. "Art just doesn't happen, its created!" was the unlikely axiom of these two creators of rural art.

Oliver Stacks

The Summer Home of Moonbeam D'Oute

There's a coupla things notable about "Moonbeam", I know her quite well so I gotta be careful and second she reinvented herself on her seventeenth birthday and it stuck. Formerly Kathleen Doute, she became Moonbeam D'Oute. It just so happens that "oute" means and I quote- "A Joint or Spliff with weed". Moony, as she became known, was the child of a single parent, the notorious, Branch Doute, logger turned actor (more about him in another episode). Since Branch was off killing trees mosta the time, Kathleen became a wild child with a hippified outlook and a renaming was necessary. So Moonbeam it was. Moonbeam and the rest of us spent a lot of time hanging out in the estuary of the lazy little river where this boat sat. How'd the boat get there? Glad you asked:

The boat belonged to my uncle, after whom I am named. Uncle Ronnie bought the boat sometime in the early sixties with the dream of sailing somewhere...anywhere. He parked it on the far side of the river and the only way you could get to it by land was over a decrepitated old log bridge. Misfortunately, my aunt's dream was to divorce ol' Ronnie. So rather than freeing Uncle R. up to sail away it sent him back to the plumbing business with a vengeance. The unintended consequence of this outcome was that I enjoyed a certain proprietary interest in the hulk. Moonbeam was the prime beneficiary, she stayed in that old boat off and on the whole summer of '70. I don't think I have to splain what went on, those summer nights...

Call It What You Will But Its Wet

The Last Temptation of Coe LaTrelle

Coe is currently doing a stret ch in the regional remand center awaiting trial on charges of marijuana production and distribution. Normally he'd get to carry on with only a few restrictions, but on previous occasions they had a hard time fin ding him. Cops can be real spoilsports when it comes to hide and seek. Coe is a large, bearded , bl ue-eyed, career scofflaw. If he had focused his good-natured energy on legal activities he'd be a beacon of something or other. This time, he buried a steel container on his rural acreage, procured with ill-gottens from previous crops, and set up a hydroponic grow show. State-of-the-art facility, power bypassing the meter, back up generator, flow through ventillation...bumper crops. Access was gained through the false bottom of a concrete water cistern and a precast tunnel. Foolproof operation, except for the fool running it.

Coe was proud of his work and couldn't resist showing it off just to impress the locals a little. I mean, whats the use of building such a fine operation if you couldn't share it with your friends. So bit by bit word spread as more of his associates got a glimpse of the inner workings. There was another complication. Coe was a pretty good shade-tree mechanic who loved (you know whats coming) old cars and the idea of restoration. He was mostly a theorist but he accumulated a collection of junk through his money laundering program. If you were in need of cash and had a interesting wreck you could push, pull or drag to his place, more'n likely you could come away with some cash. He became known as the "Pawnbroker". He got caught this last time because an undercover cop with a little leve rage on one of Coe's buddies showed up with an irresistible fifty-eight Edsel and a keen interest in Coe's production facility. A little flattery and when all was said and cuffed, Coe was in remand, again.

This is my pre-study its three feet wide at least and just an idea.