Trailer Camping in Helga, the Winnie Micro Minnie

Our first trip in the new Winnebago Micro Minnie, and our first time as official RV'ers, was to Paris Mountain State Park near Greenville, SC. Figured we'd stick to somewhere close to home, not exactly knowing what we were getting into.  Dubbed "Helga", it is towed by "Thor", our blue Ford Ranger.

Paris Mtn has a nice campground.  Not too big, about 40 sites, a mixture of tent and RV sites, with electric and water hookups.  It was a cool couple days, with highs barely scraping 50 and overnight low in the upper 20's.  A good test of Helga's heater.  

We made use of the microwave, watched a few Outlander episodes on the TV, and made a fire to cook foil pack dinners.  There are some really nice hiking trails in the park, and we spent most of one day hiking around and exploring.  Found a nice little waterfalls, and a big dam/spillway that once serviced a mill.

Our camper has a Murphy bed.  One thing we discovered is that since the bed folds up against an outside wall, it functions as insulation when flipped up.  Even though the camper is nice and toasty, the bed can be pretty darned chilly if you expect to just pull it down and dive in.

We came away with a list of about 30 things to get, improve on, or fix for our next trip, and were pleased that we didn't blow anything up, burn anything down, or break something important.  Not too bad for the first time out.

 

Online Art Course Homework

In the spirit of learning something new during the coronavirus lockdown, I signed up for an online art course put on by MoMA and offered thru Coursera.com.  This was called "In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting".  It was self-paced, with videos and readings.  They took seven painters from the New York School, and went into lots of good technical stuff on how these people actually painted, covering materials and techniques.  

They even had homework - you were encouraged to try your hand at doing a painting "in the style of" these famous painters.  I had never made a painting of any kind before. I thought it would be kind of fun. It was.  

Most of original artist painted on a scale of, say, 8 by 8 feet.  I had some 8x8 INCH panels on hand, along with some very ancient acrylic craft paint. Here's some of the stuff I came up with:

Number 1:  Barnett Newman

8” square wood panel primed in clear gesso. Painted with very old acrylic fluid craft paint found in basement.  Process:

• Painted entire panel with the cool blue-grey.  Masked off one zip.
• Painted the entire panel with cobalt blue.  Decided it needed more depth and gloss, so I gave the entire panel another coat of cobalt mixed with gloss medium, then a coat of pure gloss medium.  
• Two thin zips, one black and one white, were masked on both sides.  (The white was actual student grade acrylic art paint.)
• The red one-sided zip was originally half the width.  I decided that was too narrow, and the paint too thin, so I went back and re-masked for a wider zip, and gave it two coats.  

Lessons learned?  

• That initial cool grey zip needs something…
• The cobalt seemed to have a lot of pigment, but the rest of the found paint was pretty thin, and needed several coats to cover. Decent paint counts!
• I liked the glossy cobalt ground.  The photos’s side lighting brings out the texture a bit more than you would notice in real life.  Still, I’d like to find a way to get it extra-smooth.  Sand & recoat?
• This was fun, and I believe the first actual painting I ever created!  And not so bad for a retired engineer whose artistic background is music and photography. 

Number 2: Willem de Kooning

This is one of the few I did in a slightly bigger format.  20x30” poster board. 

It was a fun, but challenging one.  Where to start? When to stop?  I did about four all-over layers.  I think I managed to make some paint blotches that you could call "gestural", which was the goal.  That lighter blue stuff in the bottom half should be reworked, but you gotta quit sometime…

Number 3: Jackson Pollock

Detail

This was also on larger format poster board.  The paint I used was all house paint that the previous homeowners kindly left behind for us. So the color palette is, "whatever comes out of these cans".  On a black background.   It was dripped mainly using a paint stir stick.  One trick learned is to do several colors, then let it dry so they don't pool and blend into one giant, muddy blob.  The real problem with this style of paining is that it's REALLY, REALLY FUN TO DO.  It takes great discipline to stop before you end up with, well, a big muddy blob.

I tried my hand at an 8x8" mini-Pollock. Same color scheme.

 Detail

Number 4:  Mark Rothko

Rothko is one of my art heroes, so this one was going to be tough.  Especially constrained to an 8x8 inch scale and using crappy paint.  At least Jackson Pollock actually did use house paint!  

I started with a black background with some blue mixed in.  There are many layers of thinned acrylic paint in the rectangles. Last layers on upper rectangle were a dirty orange with a very thin red glazed on to break it up.  White stripe is a creamy white over a pure white.  The small bright fire orange bits peeking through the edges of the bottom rectangle is a Rothko thing that I think I managed to at least create a hint of. 

Number 5: Agnes Martin

Detail

This was kind of a process painting, where you come up with an idea and some rules, then just execute it.  Started out with two layers of light yellow over a base layer of black.  The grid incised with a sharpened metal awl.  The light blue lines are two shades colored pencil.  I think Agnes would approve of the subtle difference in the blues, and of the imperfections of the awl lines.  Clear coated to keep the pencil from smudging.

Number 5: Yakoi Kusama

 Detail

Another process painting, of sorts, in her "infinity net” style.  White over a non-uniform dark red/brick background.  Some paint was straight from the bottle, some with a little gel media mixed in, some with gloss media.  Here's where the cheap paint really shows.  All these marks looked very opaque white-white when painted, but dried kind of thin and transparent. And I really tried to glob it on.  

Number 6: Ad Reinhardt

Reinhardt did lots of unusual things with paint to get that extremely uniform matte black. I went into this one knowing it was going to be a big experiment, that I was venturing far from Ad Reinhardt's already unusual materials, and the chances of failure were great.  And fail it did. Long story short: after a couple weeks of trials, I had gone past the point of no return.  The panel was sanded back down to bare wood. The world shall never see my "sludge painting". It couldda been a thing...

Holiday Newsletter 2019

Seasons greetings from Bob and Betsy!       

Well, 2019 was quite the year.  We started with Betsy retiring at the end of 2018. But our plans for a quiet, relaxing, uneventful transition to retirement didn’t even last a month.  

Betsy’s mother passed away unexpectedly in late January.  She lived by herself up in Michigan, and it was just a matter of luck that we found out quickly.  Mary Bond was active and socially involved right up to the end.  She was also a big collector of things, and even with professional help it took us about 10 trips to Livonia to get her house cleared out and ready to sell.  The whole family met up in Abingdon, IL so she could be buried with her husband Paul.

A few weeks later Bob’s mother Lorraine passed.  She had been slowing down recently, and we thought her time was likely coming.  Although the Blichmann brothers rarely have the opportunity to all get together, we were all able to pitch in and put together a nice memorial service for Mom.

Nathaniel’s final Occupation Therapy internship was located close to Brevard, so in April he and Lindsey moved in with us.  He finished his OT degree - yay! They are now both working in the Asheville area.  We really do enjoy having them around - Nathaniel is a great cook, and Lindsey has been our personal tour guide as we work our way through Game of Thrones.  We’ve had some interesting conversations with their Senegal parrot, Mako. Now officially degreed and gainfully employed, their next big project will be house hunting and moving out of our basement. 

In that same timeframe we sold our Charlotte house and moved to Brevard full time (new address on back).  Bob made many trips to the mountains with the old ’88 Ford pickup loaded up like the Beverly Hillbillies. It was a big challenge to condense 25 years worth of junk into a pile small enough to fit into a downsized abode.  Craigslist Free became our new best friend, “stuff” our new arch enemy.

Although a lot of our time and energy went to driving between Brevard and Charlotte and Livonia, we did manage to squeeze in some recreational travel.  We had a great time at the Big Ears Music Festival in Knoxville, TN.  Pat and Betty Schroeder were down in June for a big bike ride, and I was able to meet up with Pat again in August for the Ride Across Wisconsin.  A week in Washington, DC, taking in the art museums, monuments, and famous places in general rounded things out.

Paul is still enjoying Madison, WI.  We got to see more of him this year with all our Michigan trips.

Betsy completed her Master Gardener program, which seemed to require a lot of volunteer weeding.  She has been exploring hand dyeing yarn, and is currently working on a sweater based on the coloring of Mako the parrot. 

Zeela is looking forward to her first winter as an outside rabbit in the mountains. She has mellowed out somewhat, being a somewhat elderly, single rabbit.  She still likes bossing us around, though. And chasing those dang wild rabbits out of her yard.

We are looking forward to 2020. Here’s to a new decade! I think we all deserve it.

Contact and social media info:

• New address:  17 Broadview Circle, Brevard, NC 28712
•  Bob  704-989-9230    bob.blichmann@gmail.com
• Betsy  704-292-5378    betsy.j.bond@gmail.com
• Knitting:  Betsy’s knitting creations are found under “Knitbert” on Ravelry.com
• Photography:     www.flickr.com/photos/bobblich/albums  
• We are both be easily findable on Facebook.  
•  Cycling and hiking activities are tracked on Strava.com (think Facebook for fitness geeks).