Stories, etc.

Alamoosook Lake, mid-August sunset It was a long, lazy summer afternoon in the town of East Orland, Maine, population 1,825. I was on the shore of Alamoosook Lake, looking out at the water, and all its possibilities glimmered like light on the backs of a school of fish. Without a doubt, it was the hottest week in the state that summer, late July, with trees so green they looked yellow. I was to embark on a motorboat ride with my cousin Colin, three years my junior, into those aforementioned hopes. My grandfather had just acquired a new Evinrude 500 motor that was clasped onto the back of the little tin boat, ("as tinny as a tin can" he used to say) and everything seemed alright. He wasn’t around that afternoon, so without too much supervision my cousin and I proceeded to paddle the boat out, from the shore to just off of it, to a place deep enough to start the motor. It was passed the reeds and patch of cat tails. The waves were tiny, delicately lapping the sides of the ...

I first started really enjoying the process of drawing heads when I was in high school. Our art teacher, Mrs. Menninghaus, made us simply draw the head and some of the neck of a fellow classmate for an in-class exercise. I think I used a pencil in medium softness. I drew a girl named Keely. Keely Downes. I realized as I was drawing her that her upper lip had a protrusion that dipped down onto the middle part of her bottom lip. Getting that subtlety with the pencil made the mouth look so much more convincing. After Keely, some of my friends wanted me to draw them, and some of them came out looking pretty good. The Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones once said the fastest way to lose a friend is to draw a picture of them. Luckily none of my friends have ever stopped talking to me because of a poor drawing I did of them. It's hard to draw some people from real life though, especially if they are your friends; I always feel the impulse to talk with them while they are sitting in front of...

Hi all, Check out my String Theory music EP at  Heatherjovanelli.bandcamp.com

Painting the Grand Canyon A cavernous hole that constitutes itself on this planet is known as the Grand Canyon. Each year many a caravan, including Mike Brady and his Brunch (minus the r, and plus an Alice) venture to this southwestern retreat to explore the crags and caves of the big GC.  In honor of the subject itself, I'll intersperse relevant sentences from the chapter "Grand Canyon", excerpted from  Our National Parks, a book written by Nelson Beecher Keyes in 1958, with some action shots from the watercolor painting I did there.  Main Supplies. I like tubes just as much as cakes. Couple bottles of water. Temperature was a pleasant 85 so didn't need too too much water to carry in there.   "In 1540 a large party of Spaniards, greedy for easy wealth, pressed up out of Mexico intent upon locating and seizing the seven mythical cities of Cibola, supposedly built of pure gold. While this was to prove a most disappointing and ...

A few summers back, I was with my mom at Schoodic Point in Downeast Maine. We were on a mission to do a watercolor painting en plein air. In honor of the recent mother's day, I decided to post a picture of this watercolor I did that day on our trip. Painting ocean or lake water with the medium watercolor can be tricky. You don't want to reveal too much with a solid line, but I always do feel like I need to indicate some darker tones so the paint reads as the texture of the water's surface. My method for painting the water was to use a rather pale wash of ultramarine blue, with a darker prussian blue added in the background to establish a more definite line for the horizon. Once the ultramarine dried, I overlaid a few more saturated layers on top. After that, I was able to use a small filbert paintbrush to add in some choppier, horizontal lines to show some perspective.

Steve didn't want to show up to work on time. In his office in the research wings at London's British Museum, he had been helping the renowned archeologist, Dr. Atticus Block, prepare to exhume the mummy tomb of Osiris. This coveted, seminal piece of Egyptian history had made its way to the laboratory of Dr. Block through a pile of grant letters Steve and Block had written, indefatigably, over the past seven years. Seven years Steve and Block had been planning and hoping for this acquisition, and seven years they had experienced, through the throes of professional museum protocol and dense pleas, that challenge of getting what one wants most: and in their case, it was the mummy tomb of Osiris, the great Egyptian demi-god who, while married to Nut, gave birth to Isis. Osiris was the mystical figure to whom King Tutankhamen had prayed before going to bed every night. Osiris was also believed to be the one who instituted both common sense and magic into the dynasty of ...

Down by the Berkeley Marina at Cesar Chavez Park there are always people flying kites. Here are two that seemed to be traveling through a wind moving with great determination.