(the) Cave of Forgotten Snowmen

Charcoal & pastel painting on wood
2015 – 24″x60″

This is the Snowman charcoal drawing one. Yes, I blog-bloviated about it in my “Panoply” post. It’s my ode to the demise of snowmen 😦 Will they disappear forever? I’m not sure, but I hope not. Of course I don’t have to live way.. way up above the Arctic Circle. After I move there for a few decades I’ll repost. THEN we can see how nostalgic I remain about the Great White North with its ten feet of snow for months at a time. Or its soggy tundra and southern invaders fleeing fires, drought, floods, heat . . .

Maybe it’ll be a gentle warming, like chestnuts roasting on a open fire. This is Christmas Day <:>}

But I have a feeling I’d still feel the same, even if I didn’t, somehow. The earth’s climate seems to be a very flexible entity. It is wind after all. Wind and the windy people who get windy about it. Like I’m doing right now!! HA!

Oh, I make light of something that’s important to me. And worse, it’s important to my inner self, that eternally youthful self in me. Now that’s a sad thing to be doing. But it’s a protection from the coming waves of warm and warmer that I fear. More than cold.

More than cold.

I console myself by remembering one important fact about this charcoal-pastel drawing:

(the) Cave of Forgotten Snowmen is a visual experience

It’s reason #1 when I’m asked why I create them. I never set out to try to change, or save the world with my artwork,

 

 

Haboobs for Real in the US (of A)

This was taken from my front door! Yaay… It was about 6 years ago – don’t exactly remember. But since I haven’t been a driver for quite a few years now, I rode my bicycle home through it – luckily the dust hadn’t gotten quite so terrible until I got home to the “relative” safety of my wee castle. The wind was pretty rough though – pedaling agains 50+ wind gusts 😦

I’ve seen these as long as I’ve lived here in Haboob, TX, but this was most def a bad ass sandstorm. Growing up we also called them dust storms. I think the name sandstorm must have originated from further south where the topsoil is more sandy. But sometime in the last 20 or so years the name Haboob, from Arabic (I guess) appeared. I like it!! It fits this picture and the experience for me.

I could have told you I’ve already moved to Mars, because this sort of looks like it, except Mars has no soil people. Or trees. Or atmosphere, really. I’m not on the list to move there. Not my idea of a home destination. Earth is a thousand million times better on its worst day imho. But if you don’t like normal gravity or an atmosphere, be my guest.

Ok I’ve sidetracked. But to answer a question some people might have, NO, I didn’t fiddle around with Photoshop to make the sky look more red than it was. It was this freakin’ red.

Yeah, living in the panhandle of Texas can be rough sometimes. But so can anywhere. That’s what I read – when I’m inside avoiding such a Haboob!! But really we don’t get this sort of atmospheric disastro too often. Dust storms yeah, every year, several times. Not this though. Actually I’ve learned not to hate them so much. I’m almost grateful. Because you can almost bet that when we get this… a few hours and a few hundred miles downstream (windstream) from us, somebody will be getting some terrible tornadoes. The winds that produce this usually just blow like heck through here, but then hit the warm moisture front coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. That means real trouble. I’ve seen it happen over and over.

Livin’ in the USA. You gotta have a spine. It does get real!