Monday, February 04, 2008

Settling In

Here is the view from an upstairs bedroom window of my housesitting gig. I took this photo yesterday at sunrise. There were eagles and crows alighting on lampposts and rooftops all around me, but my zoom isn't strong enough to get non-blurry pics of them. It was around 20 degrees yesterday morning.

I'm working on a slideshow of the photos I took yesterday. My nephew Herman & I hiked out at the State Park - Abercrombie. It was snowy & brisk with a wind coming from NW, right into our faces. For some reason, all my photo uploading services are extremely slow the last few days. I'll post the slideshow here when (and if) the pictures get uploaded!

Here's a slideshow of the photos I took yesterday:

Saturday, February 02, 2008

The Big Commission - Finished!

The Sunday before I left for Alaska, my art patron picked up the large commission I had worked on since last August for her. The finished panels turned out great - and my client was delighted with her pieces. The photos don't really do them justice. But here are the finished panels, which measure 2.5 feet x 3 feet each. The panels hang side-by-side, but the column of my blog page is too narrow for the photos to show up that way.



(top) Octopus with 2 Jellyfish; (middle) Hair Seal Inhua, Salmon, and Bubbles with Jellyfish; and (bottom), King of the Salmon with Bubble and Jellyfish. The King of the Salmon piece measures about 26 inches long, and 24" wide; he carries 8 small salmon on the fin-like appendages (they are about 3 inches long). The Octopus measures about 28" across her longest tentacles. The frames around the panels are about 2" deep. The masks are stained with oil-based stain, and the panels are birch plywood, stained with watered-down acrylic, and finished with paste wax.

After Tina picked up her artwork, I began a marathon of preparations to return to my home town of Kodiak, Alaska, where I began my new job on Friday, Feb. 1. I shopped for necessary items on Monday (including new boots for the muck & snow), and spent Tuesday packing. I made it to Kodiak Weds. evening, after an almost uneventful flight. We spent an hour on the tarmac in Anchorage, after a check light failed to come on. We taxied back to the gate, and sat playing trivia games for cans of pop, pretzels, and a few lucky airline miles. Our Alaska Airline flight attendants were great & cheerful, and we finally took off over 1 hour late, and arrived in Kodiak after dusk. I was bummed, as I had chosen a window seat to see the islands as we descended. Of course, all I could see were the lights of town. But my first few days home have been spectacular - sunny, everything sparkling under 8 inches or more of snow. More to come in another post on my temporary new digs, the scenery, the snow, and my new job!

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