APRILBLOG2008

This month just flew by. It is amazing, because only 11 days until the job in Las Cruces ( I am teaching teachers how to do what I do) and then only another week before we journey to Corsica...the time is evaporating.

1. Ruth and me in party mode. 2. Me still in party mode. 3. Stuff I paint. 4. Party mode. 5. Party mood.

I get up in the morning, make coffee and then sometimes go immediately to the chicken house.

I open the door and usually the ducks explode out the door squawking duck talk with the hens and the rooster right behind.

Most of the time Marilyn stays put on her roost and looks at me begging to be picked up and caressed. She is my girlfriend.

Today the new kittens got to meet Marilyn at the new feeding platform, which used to be our dinner table...

I lay awake for a long time last night thinking about the next few weeks to come. When I got to my office, I looked up an old poetry folder and found what is going through my soul.

Keeping up the resurrection of "when I used to be a painter" below are 5 paintings I did back in the late 60's. I was painting only in oils then, but somewhere around 73 switched to acrylic. I miss the odor of turpentine and oil...

So it is odd that so many wheels have started to roll at the same time, and many of those lines of meandering have crossed paths.

I could say much about the meaning of my images back then, and now, but rather, I would simply wish that people see what I paint.

1. The Card Game 4X5 ft. 2. King Midas. 2X6 ft. 3. Rebecca. 4x4 ft. 4. Oblivion Ring 2X4 ft. 5. Pregnant Moon 4X5 ft.

1. Some of the camera dust removed. 2. Jeannie 3. The Oblivion Ring. 4. The Sister.

Every once in a while I get so pissed off with my fellow homo sapiens. I think they are shit.

Sometime last summer, one afternoon I spent an hour or so whipping out an idea on a sheet of plywood that was reminiscent of the kind of painting I was doing back in the late 60's and early 70's. It just seemed a rough sketch at the time and I didn't think much about it until I hung it in the Mine Shaft Tavern. Ruth had never seen it and thought it was the best thing I had done. Then other people told me they liked it. One friend even bought it.

Judge for yourself of the below image. Ruth said it is like a Mexican version of the famous painting, THE LAST WARRIOR.

And then I had a dream of a girl friend way back in the 60's...and then...Ruth and I talked about the idea I should return to painting... a few hours later, I get an email from Bob Sanders who was a patron of sorts that bought several painting from me in 1971, of which was the last time we ever had contact...

Hmmm...all very coincidental and cosmic kind of stuff. Bob sent photos of the paintings he bought. Later I got his telephone number and we talked about a rendezvous. I look forward to meeting him again. Wow, 37 years and a lot of water under the bridge.

1. Bob Sanders and THE SHIP OF FOOLS. 2.Portrait of Jeannie. 3. Portrait of old friends.

There is one other painting, THE LAST SUPPER that Bob bought, but it disappeared some where in time. Looking through an old portfolio I found it...

I did not get involved with computers until January 1998. A few months later I bought my first digital camera which was a basic Sony model that used a 3.5 MB floppy disc. From there I began to go into the infinite learning curve of computers and digital cameras.

My buddy Harry down in Las Cruces called me yesterday because he was excited over the recent purchase of a Canon digital camera that has something 3GB memory and 10 mega pixels ability. That makes my first Digital camera seem like a Model T Ford.

I still have a Sony (DSC-F717) which has a 256 MB memory card and 5 mega pixels capacity, so the metaphor for cars brings it up to about a 1967 Chevy Impala compared to Harry's toy. Never the less, it has been faithful and I love it.

For the first couple years of my cyber-space experience I spent anywhere from 8 t0 14 hours a day on the computer, mainly inside Photoshop and the thousands of digital photos I had amassed. Some of that work is on another page, http://kewolve.com/Graphics%202a.htm but just for fun, below are few of my favorite manipulated photos.

1. When I was an undergraduate at NMSU I put together a few of the students in a sculpture class. 2. An idea for a Book cover. 3. A fantasy out the back window of where I lived. 4. My mentor and spiritual father, Mel Flemming and his two sons. 5. A Japanese woman I was once in love with. 6. My idea of hair dressing. 7. A collection of a few of the old motels in Las Cruces. 8. My old van I called the ORANGE CRATE flying into the restaurant in Fargo , North Dakota, where I painted many murals. 9. Fantasy of New York City. 10. One day in an art gallery.

It is finally beginning to warm up in New Mexico. I look at the space that was going to be our garden this summer and know it will never happen. Only 4 weeks until we go to Corsica which means I will be gone for a month at the time most beneficial to tend a garden. When I come back I have a job in Las Cruces and may be gone for weeks.

And so no garden. Perhaps that is not so bad. My last attempt at vegetables was not so cost efficient. I t worked out that two scrawny tubers of some kind cost about $100 a lb. The green things that did grow well, nearly got to completion when the ravenous bugs from hell decided to start a new civilization in the middle of my patch.

Having web problems of uploading photos...test page of old photos from previous days...

This is the bathroom at present state, with the walls removed and shower and big Jacuzzi style tub ready...

I don't pay much tax other than when I buy taxable goods, and most of that other than gasoline goes to the state of New Mexico, so I don't begrudge the money...much.

But money that goes to the federal government is beginning to annoy me in a very political way. I see no reason to support a war in Iraq. They can say what they want, our noble leaders, but one would have to be a complete moron to not see it is about OIL.

We need oil only because of the greed /laziness of our industrial/automotive base and a life style that none of us want to give up. The truth is one day there will no longer be oil, or what left of it will be horded by the powerful armies of the most desperate of humanity. It will not be pretty.

I do not point fingers blindly. I am part of this mess. I drive a truck, own a motorcycle, use Ruth's car while two old but running clunkers sit in the driveway. I am as guilty as any for using a resource that will be gone by the time my daughter is my age.

The one simple thing that each and every one of us can do is to open our eyes and talk to other people about a problem that is bigger than all of us put together. We can complain openly about the INSANITY of a war that is over OIL.

Will that change anything? Probably not. But we will not walk to our graves in silence.

2. Huh, what? What happened to one? 3. We partied it dude! 4. The snow will fall. 5. Snow. 6. More snow. 7. More. 8. Even more. 9. Lots more.

1.Palmenti farm. 2. The cliff city of Bonifaccio. 3. Valley near Isle Rouse. 4. All the Italians on Isle Rouse beach. 5. Valley of Bastia.

Last night the weather turned atrocious for April, cold and wind blowing branches against the window. I had odd dreams and so did Ruth. This morning it is still cold and the wind continues. Combined with that, the news is full of the usual mayhem and madness, plus the uncomfortable fact that airlines are in difficult times...not that I have stock in airlines---just two tickets to Corsica which I hope stay good.

The odd thing for both me and Ruth, even though we are excited about our vacation in the Med, we also have a lot of insecurity about leaving our little world of New Mexico. Dread, may be the better word.

1. Beach at Porticcio. 2. The Bastelicca River that runs through the Palmenti. 3. Beach at Capo De Feno. 4. Yacht harbor near Palmenti. 5. Another beach at Porticcio. 6. The farm, Palmenti.

Below are a few photos of when I was last in Corsica, 2002. No doubt much will have changed since then, especially commercial development. The summer of 2002, I could see things had changed, largely due to arrest and imprisonment of the entire FLNC hierarchy, the nationalist who had regularly bombed anybody who wanted Corsica to resemble the Riviera from Marseilles to the boot of Italy...greed has no stopping.

But I know there are few places which will never change much, and one of those places is the west coast of Corsica near Porto.

1. Mountains above Porto. 2. Road around Porto Bay. 3. Porto Bay. 4. My old Renault at Porto. 5. Porto Bay. 6. Porto. 7. North of Porto. 8. West coast below Calvi. 9. Near Calvi. 10. Below Calvi. 11. West Coast of Corsica. 12. West coast.

It must be springtime because new creatures are popping up everywhere. The kittens were Ruth's idea and the baby ducks mine.

Other than that I am almost finished for the moment with the ROOF PROJECT which means I can turn my attention back to finishing the EXTENSION which started in early October.

1. Corsica looks like a potato with a finger. 2. Ajaccio, the capitol and just a few kilometers from the farm we will stay. I once lived in a mansion on the beach where the arrow points. 3. My friend Rollie lives in the apartment just above the palm tree in the center. 4. A back street of Ajaccio. 5. The mountains in the center of the

The odd thing every year I dig up my garden in one place or the other with the full intention of getting a vegetable patch started, and as it looks, once again other activities take me to other places.

I was not meant to be a farmer, but who knows, one day it may happen...at least a 10 by 20 foot piece of earth...

Okay the Bar and Grill was my contribution to April Fool's Day. But the Roof Top does exist.

Now is a new day and a new series of artwork exhibited at the Mine Shaft Tavern where it appears for the moment I share the artist in residence position with an old colleague who sadly is no longer in this world--Ross Ward, who I knew first only by his legend.

1. Ruth and Jet meet for April Fool's Day. 2. We all go to the bar where my new pieces hang. 3. The horse. 4. The Buckeroo. 5. The Wind Horse. 6. Ross Ward's paintings over the bar. 7. Miner's Angel. 8. Xmas in Madrid. 9. The Coal Train. 10. The Mine Shed.

Oh, but something very funny did happen on April 1. I got money that dropped from the sky which allowed me to buy Ruth and I tickets to Corsica. It is done and we are going. Hooray!

1. Roof Top gets there. 2. RT still gets there. 3. RT from another there., 4. RT just waits for first customers.