April Sketchcrawl

A lovely spring day today, though with the ongoing tornado outbreak in the Central Plains I am reminded that lovely weather in one place is always balanced by horrific weather somewhere else. We had our monthly sketchcrawl today in Davis, walking a four-block stretch on G Street downtown. I mostly worked large today, using a 9 × 12” pad of watercolor paper I picked up last time I was in Berkeley. Above at left is a black lab named Eliza who was outside at the Davis Food Coop. And at right is a gentleman with his coffee in Mishka’s.

Four Months Later

After the Pepper Spray Incident on November 18, 2011, which exposed sleepy Davis uncomfortably to a searing international spotlight, things slowly calmed down. The inevitable reports were delayed, almost as inevitably, by lawsuits.

But they were released today. In summary, egregious errors were made by university administration and the police force, including not ascertaining the makeup of the protesters on the Quad; use of weapons on the part of the police for which they weren’t trained and aren’t approved by university policy; miscommunication; failure to learn from errors that had been made on sister campuses just days before. But the best part, for my money, is this:

“The Task Force recommends The Office of the President should review provisions of the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights that appear to limit independent public review of police conduct and make appropriate recommendations to the Legislature. The Task Force did not have access to the subject officers. This limitation does not serve the police or the public. When information necessary to understand and evaluate police conduct is unavailable to the public, the public has less confidence in the police and the police cannot perform their duty without public confidence.”

Justice Reynoso and the Task Force panel had a hard time of it today in Freeborn Hall, but they have done their job in less than optimal circumstances. It now falls on the University to implement the report’s recommendations. My advice? Start soon.

Rainy Month

March comes to an end, being the rainiest month so far in the 2011-2012 water year. (Because California has a Mediterranean climate, yearly totals for precipitation are considered to begin on October 1st.) We recorded 4.81 inches this month, bringing the total for the year to about 11.7 inches. This is well behind normal, which is about 15.5 inches to date. Tuesday it poured — 1.5 inches of rain — and today we had showers and big winds, with 0.15” of rain.

Last morning we heard what sounded like a western kingbird, but didn’t believe it, since it seems awfully early for kingbirds. (A mockingbird imitating a kingbird?). But this afternoon I went for a walk out the levee leading past the Raptor Center, and saw at least two and possibly four kingbirds. An early spring for them?

Disembodied Soundtracks

I’ve been following the blog of James Gurney for a while now. Gurney is the author and illustrator of Dinotopia but like many creative people he is extremely generous about sharing his process. His most recent post is a sketch of some people in a diner with the snippets of conversation overheard jotted around the edges.

I do this a lot, listening to unrelated and hilarious-by-juxtaposition fragments of conversation. They are best done in a crowded place like a city, but usually more interesting if most people are moving, or at least moving on after a short stay in, say, a subway car. (This genre found a perfect outlet in Overheard in New York, but I love the idea of combining the fragments with sketches. Hmm.)

Edited to add: today is the blogday of Feathers of Hope. On March 27, 2003, Numenius posted his first entry in Moveable Type. To those of you who still stop in here occasionally, thank you. Welcome to newcomers too.

Trees For Contemplation

This morning we went up to FARM 2.6, Pica to feed a couple of lambs there, and I just to check on my plantings. I’m not sure how much clover I’m getting out of my clover field (I do however have quite a crop of mushrooms coming up), but my oak seedlings are doing well. I planted five valley oak seedlings around the perimeter of the property, and so far four of them are budding out or have well-developed leaves.

Trees. Yesterday I went to San Francisco to see upon the suggestion of Dave Bonta an exhibit at the The Contemporary Jewish Museum entitled “Do Not Destroy: Trees, Art, and Jewish Thought”. The title of the exhibit is taken from an injunction in Deuteronomy 20:19 that prohibits the wanton destruction of trees in wartime. This concept has been broadened since rabbinical times to form one of the bases for Jewish environmentalism. I had never been to this museum — now situated near the Yerba Buena Center on Mission Street — and was quite impressed. The tree exhibit was in two parts, the first being a broad look at trees in general contemporary art, the second having more of a focus on Jewish ritual and in particular the holiday of Tu B’Shevat.

Entering the show one sees a sand circle on the ground about ten feet in diameter, covered with what seems to be a forest of two-inch tall trees. Looking closer these are seen to be two-dimensional metal pieces of various plant forms, and getting one’s nose to the ground one sees these to be painted in many different colors. Another highlight from the first section of the exhibit was a 15-minute film entitled The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba.The final sequence of this film is quite striking. It takes place in Laos along the Mekong River as a flotilla of fifty narrow motorboats are being driven downstream. Standing up in the bow of each boat is an art student sketching the landscape in black-and-white on an easel. The fleet approaches a bodhi tree at the site of a monastery along the banks of the river. Many of the students abandon their easels, leap into the river, and swim towards the tree.

My favorite bit from the second part of the exhibit was a short video entitled Grafted Arboreus sabius, or a failed attempt to propagate the Tree of Knowledge. In Jewish tradition the Tree of Knowledge has been linked to everything from wheat to amanita mushrooms, so the filmmaker opted to graft all those possibilities onto a single base. As she puts it: “grafting may be the only way to propagate the Tree of Knowledge, as it does not grow from seed”.

A Painting a Day

I have not been keeping up with Bird by Bird, but there’s a lot of nesting activity at the moment and I mean to get back to it.

My friend Jennifer has just alerted me to a gorgeous Swedish blog, 365 Akvareller. My Swedish is not up to the task of finding out the artist’s name or gender, but I urge you to take a look at these beautiful watercolor sketches. The translated description:

365 + 12 watercolors in a year I painted a watercolor for each day plus a large watercolor of each month, which is 365 plus 12 watercolors. Here you can see all. I did not have time to paint every day, but I started a new one every day and could continue with the next few days while the other watercolors dried. I usually say that you cannot do one every day but you can make seven in a week. Each watercolor is
a book with all 377 images.

There are lots of birds here, and I’m motivated to get back to it!

Nitrate Report Released

For the past 20 months, I’ve been working on a project at UC Davis that has been examining nitrate contamination in groundwater in two agricultural regions in California, the Tulare Basin and the Salinas Valley. We just released our report today and we all went to Sacramento today to give a set of briefings. Here’s the UC Davis news service writeup on the report, and the UCD Center for Watershed Sciences has a blog entry on the report here . My role in the project was to compile land cover maps, both current and historical, for the study region. It’s been a pretty amazing collaboration to develop the report — it’s not often you get 27 researchers at a single university all working on the same thing!

Sketchcrawl!

Pete Scully organized us all for another sketching outing in Davis. Today we dodged rain showers in the UC Davis Arboretum. I drew lots of birds, some of which can be seen here.

It was a fantastic opportunity to draw early flowering trees and shrubs.

I took my new Maruman accordion-fold sketchbook, and pretty much filled on entire side. This made me very happy, being out with a pen. It was a minimalist pack, too: a pen, my tiny watercolor set, a waterbrush, and the small red book.

FARM 2.6

Back in September we went on Yolo Audubon Society’s fall field trip to Point Reyes. Riding with us was a postdoc from Chile who told Pica that she was involved with a fiber collective, mostly UC Davis students, who were interested in spinning, weaving, and dyeing and had ongoing plans to start a fiber garden. Somewhere along the way, this group had met up with a woman named Robyn Waxman, who several years ago during her studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco had a thesis project where she created a community garden on an abandoned plot of land near the college. She had since started community gardens near City College in Sacramento where she teaches and one on K Street in Davis. Last summer, she and her husband bought a house with 2.6 acres of land about 6 miles of Davis with the plan of turning this into a community farm, dubbed FARM 2.6.

The fiber collective saw this as their chance to start their garden and plant flax, indigo, and so on and began to plan for the farm’s first workday, held in the middle of February. I went to one of their planning meetings, toured the plot of ground, and somehow had the idea of putting in a grainfield. (Now that I’ve been doing some baking again, there’s quite a fantasy of baking bread from wheat I grew myself). The workday was well-advertised and quite a success. The fiber garden got started, about 50 fruit trees were planted to form a food forest, and irrigation pipes were put in. Two big patches had been tilled earlier with a tractor, one for the orchard, one for the grainfield. For the grainfield I decided that I’d put in a cover crop of red clover for now, and plant some portion of it in wheat in the fall, so I did that a couple weeks ago at the subsequent work day. At left and above is a picture of the grainfield plot. It’s huge — about a quarter of an acre. Watering it turns out to be a challenge: we need to come up with a better system than a single high-efficiency sprinkler. At right is the fiber garden, starting to take spiral shape.

Back from the San Juans

I spent last week on Orcas Island in Washington at a spinning retreat with Judith Mackenzie McCuin, one of the world’s most famous spinners. And certainly one of its best teachers.

What I learned, among other things:

1. Not to be afraid of qiviut.
2. That the reason I’ve had so much trouble with my cable plying is because I’ve spun the singles normally, which for me includes a lot of twist. Underspinning and overplying result in perfect cableplied yarn. When this involves bison, it’s a bit unicornish.
3. Almost any lichen will make a dye, not needing a mordant. Almost all the colors are like compost, though. For people with pink skin and white hair, this is a disappointment.
4. JMM and I share a bewilderment at the Canadian obsession with the Queen.
5. Angora bunny is held to have curative properties such as an ability to alleviate arthritis pain, and that it’s REALLY warm. I don’t think it’s as warm as qiviut, though.
6. Spinning flax with spittle is better at breaking down pectins than spinning it with straight water. Break them down further by boiling in Tide.
7. To spin semi-woolen. OMG. The possibilities.
8. That bald eagle courtship happens in late February in the San Juan Islands.
9. That spinning cotton straight from the seed isn’t just possible, it’s easy, no super-fast flyer required. I’m going to try and get all kinds of cotton bolls from now on. We’re planting cotton later this spring at Farm 2.6. Cotton grows in many natural colors.
10. Cross-plying pygora onto reclaimed cashmere yields a yarn of unimaginable luxury and makes the pygora go oh so much further. Pygora, a cross between African pygmy goats and angora goats (the cashmere ones), is the world’s newest fiber animal.
11. One load of laundry from a week’s worth of exotic fiber spinning will yield enough dingleberries for a large tweed sweater.