7/13/23

 Thursday, July 13, 2022

In bed at 10:40, up at 6:00. 57℉, high of 73℉, a partly cloudy day ahead  The wind is NW at 5 mph, 3 to 8 mph today, gusts up to 14 mph.  AQI=23, Good.  .85 inches of rain in the last 24 hours.  The sun rose at 5:23, and will set at 8:30, 15+7.  Slight GERD had me in the recliner for a while last night.  Tinnitus is roaring.

Camille Claudel, attempt #3.

Starting sketch, began with the eyes, pencil work is too heavy with erasures and reworks, trying to get them right

I'm not good at drawing or even rough sketching or painting for that matter, so everything I try I consider an experiment.  If I end up with something that is in any way pleasing to me, I consider the experiment a success.  I'm loathe to discard anything that pleases me in some way so I hang onto stuff that everyone other than me would consider real crap.  Actually, even experiments that are so bad I toss them or paint over them to reuse the canvas are in some respects worthwhile since I learn something from whatever it is that makes the work totally displeasing, i.e., having no pleasing quality whatsoever, crap.  Camille Claudel #1 is mighty rough looking but I like the colors and even the roughness or sketchiness of it.  Camille Claudel #2 has a face that is much rounder than what I intended, plus the glazing didn't work out as I had hoped.  On the other hand, I used a sword striper brush for her stray locks of hair and that worked out pretty well.  I'm not sure what I'll try with CC #3.

I am sticking (Freudian slip - I typed 'stinking'!) with these paintings of Camille in part because I enjoy drawing and painting images of beautiful women and I have developed a generous understanding of 'beautiful' as I've grown older.  But also because this particular subject is Camille Claudel who has interested me (wrong verb) since I watched the 1988 biographical film about her with the beautiful Isabel Adjani and kind of creepy Gerard Depardieu.  It isn't so much her relationship with Rodin that interests me, but rather her relationship with her family, with her supportive and loving father, her cold, distant, and religious mother, and her famous younger brother, Paul Claudel, and the Catholic religiosity of her mother and brother Paul.  It appears that, for a time at least, she suffered from some mental illness, perhaps paranoid schizophrenia focused on Roden.  When her father died, her mother and brother had her committed to an asylum where she spent the last 30 years of her life, only rarely visited by her 'good Catholic' family members.  Paul Claudel is known as a diplomat, a poet, a playwright, and a 'big Catholic.'  To some, he was known as a misogynist, an anti-Semite, and a right-wing authoritarian, perhaps not uncommon traits in European Catholics pre-Vatican II era.  Camille was buried in a common grave, apparently unknown, unappreciated as an artist and as a person, and unmourned.  The portrait that I'm working off of is based on a captivating photograph of Camille, with her intriguing-accusing-tired-beseeching- eyes, her sad, listless mouth, and her disheveled hair with its little ribbon.  It would be nice if I could manage a decent knockoff of it.  Fingers crossed.

Rain finally arrived in some abundance yesterday afternoon.  Our rain gauge cracked over the winter presumably from a freeze-thaw cycle and I never replaced it.  I wish I had.  I suspect we got somewhere between 1/2 and an inch of rain, the slow, steady, soaking kind.  I put the patio cushions under the glass-top patio table to try to keep them dry for patio time tomorrow morning.  Might work, or might not. Again, fingers crossed.

Crazy thinking?  I read a story in this morning's NYT about the discoveries being made from the James Webb Space Telescope and I thought the building and launching of JWST reminds me of the I-43 construction project, complicated projects involving years of planning and coordinated inputs from hundreds or thousands of participants, each contributing some portion of combined human effort necessary to bring about the desired goal.  In the one case, the goal is a hard-to-believe scientific instrument orbiting around a point in space almost 1,000,000 miles beyond the Earth's orbit around the Sun, an infrared telescope that will study every phase in the creation of our universe.  In the other, the goal is a better roadway.  JWST cost about $10 billion; I-43 about $550 million.  I find each of these projects thrilling.  With JWST I could and can only read about it; with I-43, I watch some portions of it almost every day and think each day of how much coordinated human effort goes into accomplishing this project.  How is it that scientists and engineers can accomplish so much and politicians and governments so little?  Back to Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society?

😱Lost Internet Service😱.  Since 7:30 this morning.  My friendly Spectrum representative in India tells me that there is an outage in our area, that they are working on it, and service should be restored by noon.😠. . .  Back online at about 9:30.😊  Discombobulated my whole day.

When Will the Southwest Become Unliveable?  That's the title of an article in this morning's The Atlantic online.  The author, a resident of Tucson, refers of course to the current heat dome parked over the region but also to the long-term warming of the climate and to the phenomenal surge in population growth.  Our friends, David and Pip Lowe, are having a house built outside of Tucson and will move out there by the fall.  My sister and her family moved to the Phoenix suburbs decades ago.  In August 2021 I flew into Phoenix for my last visit with Kitty before her death on March 3, 2022.  On the approach to Sky Harbor Airport, I looked out the window at the always-busy traffic on one of the freeways that pass through and surround 'the Valley of the Sun.'  I wondered to myself why people choose to live and work in that area with its summer heat, lack of water, horrendous traffic, and unsustainable growth.  I wondered then, and wonder now, why state and local governments seek all that growth, with new subdivisions pushing further and further into the desert.  According to the latest census, Phoenix is now the fastest-growing of all large American cities; its metro area recently surpassed 5 million people. Las Vegas, another water-strapped desert city, is growing disproportionately too.  How long can this go on with the Colorado River, Lake Mead, and Lake Powell at historic low levels and with so much water needed to sustain the extensive agricultural industries in California and Arizona?  On the other hand, I recall enjoying life in Yuma in 1964-65 and wanting to move back there after my discharge from the Marines.  The deterrent?  How to earn a living.  Also, Yuma city then had 30,000 people, 60,000 in the county.  Now, 99,246 live in the city, 213, 787 in the county.  Marine Corps Air Station Yuma used to be out in the desert; now it is surrounded by the city (and by sandbags and armed Marine guards.)  No thanks.