works of wanderlust

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.
February 12, 2023
from a cold winter walk.
It’s been a few weeks since I posted a sketch.

In fact, it’s been a few weeks since I painted or sketched anything of any worth.

That’s what happens when a beloved family member, even one who is a hundred and one years old, falls into a three week decline leading to their passing. Grief can be creative muse, but it was not mine.

I went for a lot of walks in January, often taking nothing with me besides the dog and my phone.

My phone has a camera, of course, so I took lots of photos. Photos of the snow. Photos of the dog. Photos of the dog in the snow.

snow is not white

Winter around here is nearly six months long, so any hope of avoiding painting the snow or snow-filled scenes goes out the window with my choice of residence. that said, snow is not white. Or rather, snow is rarely white. Fresh snow in the sunlight is blue. Snow along a path is speckled brown. Snow in the shadows is grey or purple or deep shades of blue. Snow reflects the light. Snow mottles with shadow and shape and prints and tracks. Snow glints and shines. Snow shapes itself to the ground or to objects, it clings in random shapes to branches, hanging, drooping, piling, mounding, or globbing. Snow melts into puddles, smooths into ice, and does a thousand other unexpected things, each that makes it a challenge to paint.

I didn’t paint any of this until yesterday.

My motivation to paint was low in January. My motivation to sit in the snow and paint in January was zero.

I have no qualms about painting from a photo, of course. Plein air sketching is of course a lovely way to spend some time during a walk, but watercolor requires water… not ice. So plein air en hiver has not turned out to be compatible with this hobby so far.

From a photo it was then…

And my dog, as complex as she is to get right in blobs of browns and shadow, is even trickier when she features in a thumb-sized rendering like in this small-format sketch in my 3.5×5.5 inch moleskine folio (to give you a sense of the size of the original work.)

Lacking any other motivation for creativity, I took it though. And I’m not unhappy with the results.
February 2, 2023
vision, start line

Since my modest and cautious update on my knee injury a couple weeks ago, I’ve actually been making some measurable progress in both healing and beginning my re-training.

Then a few days later I went to a tour showing of the Banff Film Festival.

I’m not clever enough to make a proper film, but I do think I have an interesting story to tell as I recover and train for Chicago in October.

So I made a video:

VIDEO REDACTED

The first of a series, I hope. The introduction to a happy conclusion, that too.

It’s a commitment to try and publicly document something difficult like training for a marathon. But it also commits me to training and trying harder to compete the story.

It’s gonna be a crazy year!

Check it out and give it a like to help me get some interest.

January 31, 2023
Knee-hab (January Update)

I ran last night.

Not much.

But I ran. Outside. On a trail.

And I can still walk this morning.

If running three klicks through on a random Thursday evening in January sounds less than impressive, let me introduce you to my Medial Collateral Ligament injury and the fact that I haven’t had a pain-free run outside or beyond the confines of a physiotherapy-prescribed treadmill run in over six months.

I pushed myself back in September in the park near my house and ended up limping home and elevating my leg for nearly a week.

This morning, fourteen hours later, I feel pretty normal. Good. Strong. Hopeful.

Back in July of 2022 I injured my knee ligament.

I don’t know how. I don’t know when. I don’t know why. All I know is that one day I was running and training and planning adventure runs through the city. The next day I was struggling to climb a few steps in my house.

I figured a couple weeks recovery.

After a month I went to see the physiotherapist.

He told me it may take a couple months, but maybe as long as four months.

It’s been six months and I’m finally feeling like there is something resembling hope in a recovery.

It was -15C on the trails.

My crew meets sporadically but regularly at an elementary school parking lot near an access point a ravine.

In the spring, summer and fall it’s a beautiful asphalt trail descending into the river valley under a canopy of big old trees.

In the winter, its dark and icy and hauntingly creepy.

I recorded a walking tour there just last week and the view hadn’t changed much to last night, except that I was plodding along at one minute run to one minute walk intervals, and listening to the crunch of my feet through the dark forest trail.

My four companions kept my pace for the first of my one minute intervals, but then I purposely slowed and they dashed ahead. On my second interval I almost felt like if I pushed it I could catch up with them. On the third interval they were little more than bobbing headlamps in the distance and by the fourth I had descending into a canopy of eerie trail that was as much like a haunted pathway towards some frozen hell below as it was the scene of my running recovery run.

At eleven minutes I made a u-turn and returned to my truck, logging exactly three slow kilometers of winter plodding and setting the stage for a “now we wait to see how I feel in the morning” scenario.

And?

And?

I already spoiled the lede, of course. I feel fine this morning. I can still walk… have walked. Gone up and down the stairs a dozen times and…

I have an appointment with my physiotherapist tomorrow. Now I need to fess up that I pushed the program. I suppose it all worked out tho, huh?

January 13, 2023
$3 Book Club: Old Books, Old Ideas

I’ve been reading.

If you’ve been reading this blog you may recall that my 2023 plan to dig into some vintage science fiction was something I coined the three buck book club, and was the result of some thrifty used book shopping and a notion that half-a-century old science fiction might be worth a second read.

Or in my case, a first read.

I wasn’t particularly wrong.

And my reading has introduced me to a small stack of novels that (chosen by literal chance and randomness) I would never have encountered in any mainstream way.

Great.

But it has also introduced a new problem.

Old books are full of old ideas.

I guess I knew this, but I didn’t think it would punch me in the gut so firmly as it has.

I’m on my second novel of the project and so far I’m two for two on some very misogynistic protagonist characters and a solid one hundred percent for some cringe-worthy bits of colonial-bent racism.

These books are products of their time.

But their time in the past had a few ideas that are probably — certainly — not worth dragging into the present.

Sunlight in Cleansing

Thus, I find my role here a little muddled.

At one end I could turn this into a kind of, to borrow a politically charged idea, “woke witch hunt” against decades-gone authors who had the misfortune to be randomly plucked from used-bookstore obscurity by some guy looking for something cheap to read.

On the other end, I (as a middle-aged Caucasian man in a position of privilege) could articulate that perhaps it isn’t my place to talk and write about that particular aspect of these books and focus on the stories they tell.

And yet…

An yet there is a tangled mess here that isn’t so easy to unravel.

I tend to think that discussion and education are pretty good solvents for bad ideas.

I can’t undo what these folks thought, believed or wrote. I can’t change the fact that uncountable numbers of cornball science fiction books still exist on shelves around the world filled with deeply rooted concepts that today would bin those stories before they made it past an agent. I can’t change any of that.

I can acknowledge it. I can call it out. I can make sure that as I pry open their dusty covers and look for the bits of vintage treasure inside that I also try to make sure everyone understands that there is some rot in there too.

Inevitably someone else is going to find copy of these books, and if they are anything like me google the title and read or watch what comes up. And there on the screen is my article, my video…

What would you want them to know?

January 12, 2023

blog.8r4d.com

Ah. Some blog, huh?

I’ve been writing meandering drivel for decades, but here you’ll find all my posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, parenting, and overthinking just about anything and everything since early 2021.

In fact, I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me.

Enjoy!

Blogging 404,290 words in 533 posts.

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