HIGHWAY 10 TO ARIZONA

 

 

 

CHUCKWALLA CAMPSITE

 

 

 

 

 

 As you remember last time...our hero, (that would be me...) had made his escape from the Armageddon-like devastation in Big Sur and was pointing his trusty minivan, Pacifico toward the arizona desert.  After a few brief stops and an overnight stay at a rest area, I reached the Chuckwalla Mountains near the strange little town of Desert Center.  I pulled off on a very sandy dirt road and drove until I found a beautiful, quiet place to camp out.

 

 

  

After a long nap in the warm, dry desert, I stepped outside, pulled out the guitar and played a little blues to nobody but the surrounding rocks ,  and to a very large ( judging by the footprints) cat of some type that I felt sure was napping somewhere in the shade nearby.  Hope he likes the blues... 

 

 

 

 CHUCKWALLA BLUES

 

     I camped out there for a few days, relaxing from the drive and doing some reorganizing in the van.  On the way out I decided to check out Desert Center.  I usually stop in at the little cafe there, (which is the only thing there that's still in operation, other than the post office.)  I've always been kind of fascinated by the place.  The last remnants of what was once a fairly thriving town.  The cafe was closed this time with a note on the door saying building maintenance was going on, but I had my doubts...I saw no sign of any work being done and the note on the door looked old and faded...sad if it's the end of the line for the cafe...it was all that was left.  I walked around and took some photos, then headed off toward the Arizona boarder.

 

DESERT CENTER

 Next stop:  El Dorado Hot Springs....

GOLDEN MORNING by Barry Allen Howard

GOLDEN MORNING by Barry Allen Howard

I haven't written a blog post in quite awhile due to technical difficulties.  Long story and not that interesting so I won't bore you with it.  Anyway, after much work and head-scratching and a moderate amount of swearing, I think I may now be back in Blogger-World!   At least I hope so...if you are reading this then it worked!      So a long overdue update;   Last time I posted my blog I was living in a Microhouse I had built about 18 years ago.  

MICROHOUSE IN BIG SUR

      I lived there on top of a ridge with a magnificent view of the Big Sur coast and painted my pictures of Big Sur and helped take care of my friend's llamas, alpacas and goats.  I stayed for almost a year and a half and began to miss the freedom of living in my van, so.....from there I moved back into Pacifico, (my beloved minivan) and lived along the cliffs.  My friend Jim let me park below his house on an unused fire road with access to a little shack/bathhouse that I converted to a little painting studio. It was a lovely spot where I could hear the waves at night and the coyotes in the morning.  I would drive down to the cliffs in the mornings, set up my French easel, and sell my paintings out of my micro-van-gallery to the passing tourists.   Life was good...and then came the fire that swept slowly buy surely through Big Sur, filling the air with smoke and ash and driving the tourists away.  It lasted for two months and a thick fog came with it that lasted for 4 or 5 months, and no tourists stopped to admire the view because there wasn't one.  My fortunes were diminishing.  Then came the rains... Lots and lots of rain!  The cliffs became saturated, my studio started growing mold and then came the mudslides.  Highway one began to fall away in places and the cliffs slid down onto the highway in numerous places, closing off all traffic to the south.  Then to the north the bridge started to sag and it was closed, cutting off all access from the north.  Big Sur became an island.  The highway was empty, phone service went out, the power went out, and many of the locals lost their water supply.  There was no way to get rid of trash, people couldn't get propane, gas at the local station began to run low and along the highway it looked like the aftermath of natural disaster.  Tourists staying at the local inns had to be helicoptered out.  There was very little food available.  Deetjen's, ( a much loved historic inn) suffered major damage with redwood trees destroying several buildings and a mudslide that buried several cars.        Eventually the road crews were able to open a lane to the south for a few hours so locals who wanted to get out could make their escape.  I was out of business in Big Sur for the foreseeable future so I headed out and pointed Pacifico toward the desert.  (To be continued).....

MOONLIGHT SURF

The ocean and the waves are as much a part of who I am as the blood that flows through my veins. I've surfed the waves and sailed with the swells and have spent countless hours walking beaches from Hawaii to the Carribean, from the Gulf states to the wild shorelines of Northern California. It always renews me and fills me with appreciation for being born on this planet, in this time, in this body.

MOONLIGHT SURF ONE by Barry Howard

Walking beaches at night is a whole other world. The crashing of the waves seems both quieter and louder at the same time...as though the sound is amplified by the silence of the night, but quickly sucked up into the depth of the darkness and vastness of the firmament. The Moon and stars provide the only light, but seem more luminous in the stillness. I have just completed these three small paintings as an offering of gratitude to Our Mother Ocean.

 

MOONLIGHT SURF two

These paintings are 8"x10" oil on canvas. The edges are painted and they have a hanger on the back so they can be framed or are ready to hang as they are. I have signed them on the back. I am offering them for sale for $60 each or all three for $150. Please message me if you are interested at: barryhowardstudio@yahoo.com

Thank you for following my work.

MOONLIGHT SURF THREE by Barry Howard

 

 

 

 

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PAINTING THAT ELUSIVE SOMETHING...

I seem to have become obsessed with painting Big Sur...it's been this way for years. I find that even when I'm living somewhere else i am drawn back into painting it from memory. I finally decided the only thing to do was to just settle in here in this place that won't let me go, and fully immerse myself in it. Big Sur is a very long stretch of winding highway perched high above the ocean, and every turn in the road reveals another spectacular vista. It would be easy to just hold my hands out in those little "crop marks" that artists do to frame the composition and then take out my french easel and paint it...and that's what I've done many times...but it hasn't satisfied me.

The view, as magnificent as it is, is only part of the story...only one aspect of the thing that keeps me pretty much mesmerized by the place....and I realized that I don't just want to paint the vista before my eyes....I want to somehow capture the feelings that I get from being here. You can see it in the faces of the tourists who come through for the first time. It's more than just, "Oh what a beautiful view!"....they become transfixed...it's almost a religious experience. Partly it's the scale of the place...it seems that you can see the curvature of the Earth from these cliffs. The ocean seems bigger than anywhere I've ever been and one could spend the day just watching the light show as the sun reflects off the water, lighting up the mist around the base of the cliffs as it climbs and receeds and flows over the hills like a sentient being. It's a very big place, and standing on the edge of the cliffs, looking down at the turquoise and lapis-blue water can give you a feeling of vertigo. It's these feelings that I want to be able to express with paint on canvas. It's more than just painting a picture...it's finding my way into the ebb and flow of all the elements around me. It's an elusive quest and each little success keeps me hungry for more. At times, when I find that flow and it's working, I feel like I'm literally soaring....it's an ecstatic state and it is the thing that keeps me working to improve my skills so that I can share these experiences ever more clearly and powerfully.

RHAPSODY 24"x24" oil on canvas, $1200

 

 

 

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OR MAYBE THEY'RE JUST SOAP BUBBLES....

 

SERENITY oil on canvas by Barry Howard SOLD

For many years, these bubble-like spheres have shown up in some of my paintings and people often ask what they represent....I try to have an answer because I want to be helpful but in reality I wish they wouldn't ask. To me, one of the best things about art is that it means different things to different people. Each person brings their own perception to it and gives it a meaning that is personal to them. At times I have painted, say, a landscape of the town of Mendocino, for example, and someone will see it and say, " oh look, that looks just like that place we went to in Cape Cod..." or wherever, and they buy it because it represents something meaningful to them....doesn't matter that it wasn't Cape Cod that I painted...and if I insist that it isn't Cape Cod it simply steals the significance of the image from them. So I would rather just leave the meaning of those bubble-like spheres open to interpretation.

Having said that though, they do have a significance to me. They represent other worlds that exist within this world...because there are such worlds going on...we just don't know it because we don't have the receptors to percieve them. We tend to think of reality as a very definite, fixed thing....it's not. We humans only come equipped with a limited abiltity to recieve information. Take, for example, the electro-magnetic spectrum...we only detect, with our limited senses, a small range known as the visible light spectrum, when in reality there is infrared, ultra-violet, micro-waves, all kinds of stuff going on but we don't know it, because we can't see it....so to us, it's not part of our reality. Other creatures have different receptors...butterflies and hummingbirds see a whole world of color that we don't....dogs hear sounds that we can't hear and dolphins and whales percieve sonar and can pick up on the blood flowing through our bodies. Reality looks much different to them....IS much different to them. Our own reality is only a partial picture constructed from limited and incomplete information....like putting together a jig-saw puzzle with half the pieces missing...you still get a picture, just not an accurate one. All you get is a partial representation of reality. But we humans are very insistent that reality is what we can see and hear. We say, "Seeing is believing..." we tell people to "face reality." All of our senses tell us that this boulder we are sitting on is solid and unmoving, when actually we know it is in constant motion and is made up of mostly empty space. It looks the way it does because of where we are sitting...our point of view...if we could pull back far enough to look at our own galaxy it would look solid and unmoving too. We would be completely unaware of all the stars burning and exploding, planets zooming around them, people sitting down to tea on those planets as they zoom around, and discussing things like our limited abiltiy to percieve reality. From our hypothetical distant vantage point we would swear that we were looking at a fixed, lifeless solid lump of rock. From our distant vantage point we wouldn't exist. The farther away we get from things the more they slow down and appear fixed in time and space. If you have ever looked down at a line of breaking waves from the window of an airplane you will notice that they don't seem to be moving. Like telephone poles whizzing by the window of your car ten feet away...put those telephone poles a mile away and they seem to move by very slowly. It's all a matter of perspective. Perspective changes both time and space. Reality conforms to our perspective. Reality is very fluid and malleable. Reality is what we believe it is...and we're mostly wrong. So those bubble-like spheres help remind me not to take my own interpretation of reality too seriously.

 

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THE MOONSTONE

Thanksgiving Day

I followed the winding dirt path that wound it's way down the steep cliff face to the ocean. Many of the paths along these ridges of land are precarious....a misstep can lead to a quick trip to the bottom. The sun had spilled over the ridges hours earlier, warming the rocks, transmuting the cold of the night that was stored in them, into the warmth of the day. I finally reached the beach, removed my shoes, left them by a large boulder and began to walk the empty strand. It wasn't a sandy beach, but one made up of small grey pebbles warmed now by the sun and smoothed round by endless cycles of wind and waves.

As I walked i relished the feel of my bare feet sinking into them. The pebbles felt like some exotic accupressure treatment to my soles. I walked on, and the crashing waves washing up on the beach provided a musical score to my footsteps. White water running up the steep beach, grabbing hold of the small grey pebbles in its fingers and tumbling them back down, continuing the process of smoothing, sorting, refining the stones, turning them slowly into sand. The uniform greyness of the pebbles was somehow comforting in it's sameness...like a subdued backdrop for whatever anyone would like to add to it.
Up ahead something caught my eye. A bright flash of light in the field of grey. A piece of glass maybe? As I approached the small object it seemed to dance as it caught the sunlight. Bursts of light in reds and blues and yellows sparkled and drew me in. I leaned down and picked up the object...seeing that it wasn't a piece of glass at all, but a perfect, beautiful Moonstone lying there among these ordinary pebbles. I held it in my hand, feeling the smooth velvety surface and marveling at its clarity. The small round stone seemed to hold within it an entire world of light and color and beauty. It was a beauty that was never static but always changing and moving. As I turned it in the sunlight, different facets that I hadn't seen before would become illuminated, capturing my attention. It was much like watching the waves break on the beach, or the flames of a fire...I felt as though I could gaze at it forever and never see the exact same thing twice. There was always something new there, always another perspective that I hadn't noticed before. I had truly never seen anything like it. It was exquisitely beautiful. I looked back down at the beach to see if there were any more like it...there must be, I thought....so I walked along, scouring the entire landscape of small grey stones looking for another....I never found one. This one Moonstone was entirely unique...a gift in it's singularity. I thought about taking it home, putting it on the windowsill where it would catch the morning sunlight...but somehow it didn't seem right. It belonged here in the open, warmed by the sun and washed in the sea...and left so that some other fortunate wanderer might discover this jewel and delight in its magic.

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PAINTING BIG SUR....

I have obviously taken a long break from writing...I have needed time to shift gears into a new lifestyle after selling the micro-gypsy caravan. It has a wonderful new home with two delighful people who love her. She has been spruced up and redecorated to be even more gypsy-like, and is a happy caravan. I cherished every moment I lived in her, knowing it wasn't forever and appreciating it all the more. She is in very good hands.

The redecorated micro-gypsy caravan

In the time since then there have been many changes and events in my life. I've spent most of the time on a beautiful piece of property in Big Sur. I met a wonderful new friend, Annie Mahoney, who passed away shortly after we met. My friend Rose and I took her to the emergency room late one night. She never came back. Annie was one of the most delightful people I have ever met. I knew, from the first day that I had made a friend for life. Her passing was completely unexpected an knocked the wind out of all of us here who loved her.

My studio on the cliffs

Plans for my own life have changed since I've been here. I've wanted nothing so much as to paint the dramatic scenes that are Big Sur...the place that has been more home to me than anywhere. So I have decided to settle in here in this place that keeps pulling me back. I bought a small van, outfitted it for camping and painting and have just gotten my easel and oil paints out again. Through Thanksgiving and Christmas there have been some of the most perfect days here on the cliffs that I've ever seen. Painting here has been pure bliss.

I'm very excited about this next chapter of life. I'm looking forward to seeing what transpires on my easel and also to living in this awesome landscape that lies along coast route one....and I'm happy to get back to writing about the things that inspire me. I hope, dear reader, that you will continue to follow along as I explore with my paintbox, this unique landscape.

New Morning 12x24 oil on canvas

Thank you for being here.

 

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