works of wanderlust

Month: February 2023

  • three-sixty-five.

    I don’t want to say I’ve been saving up for this post, but after two years and two months of keeping a so-called “daily” blog, this — what you’re reading right now — is post three-sixty-five. One post per day for one full year. This should have been the post I wrote on December 31, 2021, but instead I’m writing it at the end of February 2023. A little more than a year late, and not exactly a great score for a “daily” writing plan.

    Obviously I missed a few.

    Yet, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of daily practice in the last couple months.

    For example:

    In February I’ve been trying to write every day. I’ve started a more succinct and back-to-the-daily-spirit and original intention of this site called “daily bardo” where I focus less on long-winded articles looking to have complexity and draw, and instead just write something every day. But I’ve also been writing a bit of fiction every day (not here) and flexing my creative writing muscles this month.

    In March, I’ve decided I’m going to try and do something call #mARTch wherein I’m hoping to draw and paint and sketch and do art every day of the month. Daily art. Most readers who pass through here probably don’t know but I’ve got a couple blogs that I write on, and one of those I started mid-last year and is very much an art and creative digital studio site where I post much more about that personal journey.

    In April, with my knee almost fully (seemingly) healed, I’m hoping that a few things come together with respect to my fitness and state-of-injury and the weather and I can work towards a daily run. Running every day seems obvious and a lot of people ask me if I already do that. “Do you run every day?” No. Of course, not. There are people who do, who have, run daily for years. But I can usually keep it up for twenty or thirty days before the body just goes “ugh” — tho, ultimately the payoff is worth it with the increase in fitness at the end. I’m going to try to do a daily run streak in April, all factors cooperating.

    I haven’t given much thought to the rest of the months of the year, but I’m sure something will occur to me to take on as a daily challenge for May… June… maybe even July and beyond.

    Daily practice isn’t about volume, nor output, nor streaks, and neither is it about simply filling a calendar.

    Daily practice is about doing something on repeat, routinely, no matter the mood or state of mind you happen to be in or the place you are at physically, mentally, emotionally, or whatever.

    Daily practice is about building a creative muscle that performs whenever you need it, not just when you feel like it. It’s about controlling the creative process, the writing mind, and the physical being — and being able to call upon it at leisure, and not merely building a skill that requires an external factor to be present and available and in control of you.

    Also, I like the idea of daily because you can go to bed each night fulfilled in accomplishing at least one thing. And tomorrow is always just one sunrise away.

    I originally set out to write the Cast Iron Guy daily. I started this blog in January 2021, in the middle of the pandemic and in search of something normal, simple, fixing me towards sanity, something to write about, think about, every day grounding me here. Ultimately, it took me over two years to write a year’s-worth of daily blogs, and I’m fine with that. It’s not a failure. It is 365 posts after all. It is 281,000 words and over 28,500 visitors. It’s something rather than nothing. So? Here’s to the next three hundred and sixty-five.

  • Local Adventures: Hiking Jura Creek

    It’s a long weekend in Canada and so with neither work nor school for anyone on Monday we skipped off to the mountains for some nordic-style fun in the alpine climate.

    We travel out there quite often. To relax. To hike. To just be somewhere beside home.

    And we always try to squeeze in at least one hike, though hiking in the winter is often a bit more challenging than hiking in the summer.

    The week before we left town I hunted down three pairs of crampons, over the shoe ice spikes with steel grips two centimetres deep and enough grip to walk us up any icy path the tourist-grade hiking scene could throw at us.

    So we bundled up, packed some snacks and water, stuffed a couple cameras in my backpack, and drove about fifteen klicks out of Canmore to an off-the-beaten-path trailhead for Jura Creek.

    In the summer, I assume, Jura Creek is a flowing mountain creek washing down the side of a mountain. The creek bed, frozen during out visit, made for a great short day hike in winter. We hiked up through the water channel, climbing up and over a few small rocks and then out into an open vista with views of the mountains around us.

    Jura Creek is apparently named for the false “jurassic” fault line that greets anyone who is able to hike the approximately four klick gradual climb to the first waypoint. As it turns out it is neither a fault line nor appropriately attributable to the jurassic era. Instead, the rock formations which resemble an exposed fault are something else entirely, including a layer of ash from some ancient volcano. It was still pretty, though.

    We made the round trip, grateful as always to be back at our car, and refuelled back in town with some local amber-coloured recovery fluid.

    Check it out if you’re ever in Canmore.

  • on a winter getaway.

    It’s a long weekend in Canada and so with neither work nor school for anyone on Monday we skipped off to the mountains for some nordic-style fun in the alpine climate.

    We travel out there quite often. To that point, I had bought a “travel” sketchbook that I’d intended to be for travel sketching but after the fifth time I brought it to the local mountains and drew pictures of wildlife, flora, waterfalls, pine trees, and (of course) mountains, I officially called that book my “mountain sketching” book and am now intent on filling it up with the same.

    This past weekend was no exception.

    Except.

    Except it was winter, and I’ve written in the past about my lack of patience for drawing in the snow. So, instead I was back to drawing from my day’s photos from a table in our hotel room.

    messy

    Splats. Dribbles. Drips. And spatter. There is something to be said for the abstraction that evolves from a carefree mashing of paints onto paper. I took another online course in February where the instructor emphasized this particular style. She didn't teach it, per se, but rather she left it hanging there in between the lines, so to speak. She alluded to it as a technique that she enjoyed, a carefreeness of paint upon the page that was as much deliberate and purposeful as it was accidental.  Messy does not mean random. Messy does not imply carelessness. Messy is as much about painting with physics and chaos as it is about painting outside the lines.

    One of our weekend activities was a mountain hike.

    We walked up through a frozen creek bed, between towering rock cliffs cut into the side of a mountain, bracing against the cold and occasional gusts of wind. We walked nearly four klicks up and then the same back down. I took lots of video and a few photos, and warm and dry and full of supper that night I pulled out my watercolours and tried to evoke the mountains as much as the feeling of the mountain hike, blustery, chaotic, and busy with life and people and shifting weather.

    The result was painting outside of the lines, and a bit of chaotic physics.

    I have a lot of learning to do about this style, and while I’m not ready to declare a victory here, also I’m not sad about the result for my first attempt.

  • of a fictional nature.

    One of the struggles any artist will eventually face, I think, is that of defining a personal style.

    What do you draw?

    What medium do you use?

    What feeling are you going for?

    How do you want to be seen?

    A lot of learning comes from imitation of someone else, watching the technique of others and trying to replicate it. But that’s just all it is: technique. At some point a whole bunch of pieces need to come together to define art: style, form, message, you.

    rust and decay

    During the pandemic I got into painting miniatures. Specifically, I bought a 3d printer, downloaded a set of designs for one of those big table-top strategy dice games, and then printed as many of the pieces and scenery objects as I could. And then I painted them. The style was post-apocalyptic dystopian, and I found that painting one particular feature of that was quite satisfying: decay.  Rust is abstractions of reds and browns and oranges. Overgrowth is organic shapes made of green and yellows. And somehow decay adds to the depth and feeling and story of whatever you draw.

    A while back I went through a steampunk phase. Steampunk is an alternate universe kind of technology, the idea that progress marched on in the absence of electronics but that humanity figured out a way to build all it’s gadgets anyhow powered by clock-works and gears and kinetically powered motions. There is a lot of grease and brass and smoke and wood.

    Adjacent to that I’ve been dabbling in art that extends along a kind of steampunk-futurist-apocalyptic mood: drawing pictures of steampunk-ish robots that have been left behind.

    I like to draw and paint buildings and scenes and trees and animals that I see in reality.

    I’m fascinated by drawing and painting science fiction scenes that never existed.

    And it makes me wonder if my own style will evolve, or already had started to, from something that is as much a fascination as anything else.

  • after a run day.

    I’ve been playing with a deliberately loose style, and I’m discovering that it’s a fine line between messy and interesting.

    My writing here does not usually mention that on some days of the week when I’m not trying to be an artist, I’m trying to be a runner. It also doesn’t really mention that I’ve been struggling with that latter goal for about seven months after a knee injury.

    On the other hand, things have been improving and today I went for a pleasant winter training run with my friends.

    I have also been recording some video for a little series that I’m putting together, and between shots another friend of mine nabbed my camera and suggested that she take some video of me “for a change.” Sadly, she didn’t quite figure it out and instead took a few still photos…. but photos of anything but stillness. She held the camera behind her back and snapped a couple seconds of failed-video but successful pictures.

    loose and fast

    Trying to capture motion is a tricky thing.  When I drew cartoons, I could easily emphasize motion by a few little woosh-lines behind the character. But when sketching, I've been playing with the idea of quick and simple drawings, fast squiggly sketches that ignore certainty in their lines and definition in their shape. I painted this simple drawing with a big brush and sloppy edges and a broad dynamic range of colour depth, trying to blur the edges in a way that a camera might, and in fact did in this photo, to suggest the subject was moving too fast to capture more accurately. I think it's a skill I need to keep working on.

    After I downloaded my camera I discovered her mistake (and my gain) in the form of a trio of blurry photos of myself running down a suburban street and another friend making faces to the camera beside me.

    Subject matter for a sketch journal should not be boring, static scenes, but instead capture the fluidity of everyday life. I plan to let this picture fully dry and then do some writing around the edges to fill out the page, just like have for a dozen pages before it.

    And I think the subject of being able to run again is very appropriate… and just like the painting, a little messy around the edges.