California mix-n-match. Water, some water, no water. No Growth vs. Growth. Function, dysfunction. Passive, aggressive. Power grabs and space-outs. The light, the light...

Took a break last night and tried jamming with over-and-under pairings.  Searching, not fully there, in progress, but got me looking, thinking. I'm ambivalent about how broad or narrow to shape these things.  I want to keep within the context of the James River, though there's one with a news clipping (from the Nov. 28 thing) that was fun to do. Also included some multi-panel sweeps, one nighttime fungus from Huguenot and another with the tag "Visionary" from the south side of Belle Isle.

Here's a blow up of an alternate glacier sandwich, in parts.

Expanding "rivers" to include glaciers, fjords and lakes. These three glacier sandwiches from Norway. Increased human mobility = increased glacial mobility.  This glacier in Norway has been receding progressively more quickly.

Agua Caliente and Manzana additions. I'm trying to figure this out for painting purposes.  Still unclear, but these photos groupings help, I think. Burn, regrowth, water, slides and silt, debris dam.

More So Cal burn and watershed imagery.  The same fire that hit the Manzana also hit Agua Caliente, a creek that has a hot springs near the road head, hence the name. You can see some traces of the burn on the sides of the mountain, but since it is so dry here anyway, it is often hard to tell from photos.

Two more experiments from November 28th: river of news, news of river. Bottom image I refer to as "Call of the Wild". Also two from California, parts of the Manzana River that got burned out in one of the largest wildfires (second largest in recorded Calif. history I think) a few years ago.  Ranch hands welding fences or something in dry grass and wind. Sloppy, reckless, stupid. Sparks took off and thousands of acres gone over weeks, not days, of burning. Unimaginable. I took these images last year as part of my project to explore rivers of flood and burn, Virginia and California. I still have more to do. I backpacked along this river when I was a teenager. At one point you leave the Manzana and hike steeply over a high, exposed ridge called Hurricane Deck into another beautiful watershed called the Sisquoc where we camped (also burned out in the fire).  Hurricane Deck is brutal in the summer. No water for miles of hard hiking: dehydration and cramps. Still, all of it fantastic in its sparse, western way. The four-panel one is called bear-tracks because the bottom left panel, along the muddy bank below, shows a pair of fresh bear tracks (probably too small to see). Black Bears here. Grizzlies, as featured on the state flag and once upon a time everywhere, have been extinct in the state for decades. Pointing out the irony of our flag is a truism. It's always been too sad, and obvious, for such clever observations. As a kid growing up under a flag that was pure idea, a kind of fiction or lie, you figured the flag could just as easily been an image of a unicorn. I realized later that as a kid I felt the flag really represented, unintentionally, betrayal. And with it I assumed that such an extermination should never happen again, like the flag was a kind of oath. That idealism and naivete live on.

This experiment may be a real stretch, a shameless conceit, but what the hell. I read the paper every morning and then go about my day, sometimes down at the river painting. The experience of reading the news is everything the river is not and I can't piece those two activities together very well, though their complementary aspects are not lost on me. Anyway, I decided to photograph one day's worth of news images along with that same day's river images and then riff on the two sources. This day was November 28th.

Here are three structures.  For the last one I chose the darkest of three exposures for the way that the darks massed into silhouette and framed the hotter lit areas. Simplifying the darks turned the eye and subject onto the heat of the light. Once I saw it like that it suggested a painting possibility, simplified and dramatized. I don't think about using such strong contrasts normally, so this awakened me to a neglected avenue in the studio. We'll see.

So the last ones were when they first started prepping for building the new bridge. Mike, I include these partly to compare these to what you saw when you were out here. I hope they provide some continuity. These new entries include a diptych and 5-panel piece based on a 1-2 hour wandering through the Pony Pasture on November 30th.  It started with seeing a plastic fork stuck (placed?) in reeds/branches. I also put in a sunny flood and a dark flood ("flash flood", that's bad). And then there's a more playful one. The fungus reminded me of stylized clouds like in Persian miniatures and Japanese prints. I keep referring to it as "clouds and divers".