Author Archives: mandala56

Wonders Never Cease

Posted on May 22, 2013 | 13 comments

Just a note to those who are interested. Without making any committment to it, Old Jules is actually using Facebook from time to time. If you’re in the mood for some pithy observations take a look at So Far From Heaven: Ask Old Jules. He’s not enamored of the site, but it’s less time-consuming than he expected loading the page, and provides a place for short commentary.
I’m at work, so I can’t give you a link. If I think about it I’ll put one in later.
Thanks to everyone who has asked after him!
Jeanne (Admin.)

13 Comments

Posted in Adventure

Trip West Photos from Jeanne

Posted on August 26, 2012 | 19 comments

Crater Lake was a new discovery for me this trip. I took hundreds of pictures there. Heck, have one more:
That’s Wizard Island, the secondary cone. Crater Lake is about six miles across and 2,000 feet deep.
Aw, shucks, here’s one more, ’cause you’ve got to see the Phantom Ship:

Now to the Willamette National Forest. Here’s the view coming in towards the resort town of Detroit:

Below is where I like to hike around Devil’s Creek:

Forest floor.


My family has been going to Mt. Rainier since the 1920’s.

Mt. Rainier the first evening at sunset.

Clear weather is not always a given at the mountain, which makes its own weather!

I love bracket fungus and the dew drops caught my attention.

This lake can be seen by the road if you travel towards Sunrise (east) at Mt. Rainier. I’ll put pictures up of the view at Sunrise some other time.

This great view of Myrtle Falls is only a 7 minute walk from the parking lot at Paradise.

Narada Falls is too big to fit into any camera view, so I just put it in the background for this shot.


Evening sun on the mountain.

I hope you enjoy these, it’s hard to choose favorites from 2600 photos! I’ll put more up some other time if you like.

Jeanne

19 Comments

Posted in 2012, Admin., Adventure, America, Jeanne Kasten, Outdoors

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Taking it all too seriously– from Jeanne

Posted on August 26, 2012 | 11 comments

“Artists shouldn’t enter the arena of competitions until they are tough enough to realize it is only opinion and not a reflection on their worth.”  (Mary Moquin)

So… I got a rejection letter.  None of the pieces I submitted were accepted, although I’ve been in that particular exhibit twice in years past ( most recently about three years ago).
The above is one I submitted. Problem is with form letters, you never know what it was that made them reject it. I’ll only be able to speculate when I go to the exhibit.

I’ve noted before that they seem partial to some 3-D element for the prize winners, but I haven’t tried that yet.  There are a lot of ways that could be done with my work, but without my work by nature being 3-D,  I suspect it would look contrived. I also get frustrated when I get too far away from the actual drawing (like those pendants, where the glass cutting and soldering is time-consuming).  Cutting paper, layering paper, rotating layers of paper, mirror-edges around the design–all of them  sound cool but don’t really sound fun to put together.  I’m really not a paper-crafter.
I have a couple of other ideas about how I can give them more depth, so I suppose I’ll concentrate on that first.

I have a couple of little peeves about these exhibits. The first is the application fee (in this case, $25, which isn’t too unreasonable). The second is that photography and other kinds of art work are usually grouped together, and I think photography exhibits/competitions should be held separately from other media.  I think photography is an entirely different beast, especially now that good cameras are affordable and it’s so easy to use the computer in conjunction with that.  I love it, but just because it hangs on the wall doesn’t make it the same thing.

Evaluating my work is a constant process, always there in the background, but it’s good to put it up front sometimes.   Right now the difficulty of getting exposure to promote sales makes it a challenge in ways that don’t have anything to do with the  difficulty of doing the work.  I hope I’ll be able to draw some  honest conclusions later on.  Maybe that will include submitting some photographs next time.

There’s one nice little conclusion to this form-letter rejection, though. I was shelf-reading at work last night (shelf-reading is checking the shelves to make sure that every book is placed in exact order). I always keep an eye out for bookmarks since I have quite a collection. Usually I find check-out receipts and boarding passes. This time, in a book called “The Lord is my Shepherd”, I found $26.00. Just enough to cover the application fee and postage to send the cd. Is that cool, or what?

Jeanne

11 Comments

Posted in 2012, Admin., Adventure, Art, Human Behavior, Jeanne Kasten, Libraries, Mandala Dreams, Mandalas

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Jeanne Checks In

Posted on August 21, 2012 | 8 comments

While we all twiddle our thumbs in anticipation waiting to hear whether Old Jules is giving the lawyers a bad day or has gone fishing, here’s a very brief update from me, Jeanne.
I just realized I never showed you the final version of this particular mandala that I was working on in June, so here it is:

Those little shaded areas are actually a clear metallic ink.

I  completed four good-sized works in June and July before I went on vacation. I’ll put the others up at some point, or Old Jules will.  I entered an exhibit application showing those other three as examples of my work, and if one of them gets chosen, I’ll get that one matted and framed. I’ve been in the exhibit before, which is held in a local nature center building, but I haven’t heard anything yet for this year.  I like this one because they let you put prices on your work and the Parks and Recreation Dept. actually makes some purchases themselves for their buildings throughout the county. So we shall see. I’ve never won any prizes or sold anything through this exhibit, but the judge this year is affiliated with our  Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO), so it makes sense to let one more art professional  see my stuff.  Usually the winners from this show are either doing photography or have some 3-D element in their work.

I took 2460 photographs on my trip, most of them in Oregon and Washington. If you want to connect with me on Facebook, you can see some of them (I’m there as Jeanne Bangs Kasten). There were some really great photos because I got a new camera, a Canon Powershot Elph somethingorother.  Even just set on automatic, the pictures were great. I took pictures at Breitenbush Hot Springs, the Oregon beach, Tacoma, WA, Mt. Rainier, Ballard Locks (Seattle) and the Dale Chihuly Museum at the Seattle Center (right by the Space Needle). I have a ton of scenery and greenery photos, and I have an obsession (apparantly) with running water scenes.  I haven’t passed on very many to Old Jules yet because it involves either re-sizing them all or putting them on a separate flash drive. 
 Well, back to work!  And the rest of you can go back to twiddling your thumbs. 
Jeanne

8 Comments

Posted in 2012, Admin., Adventure, Art, Jeanne Kasten, Mandala Dreams, Mandalas

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Art Work Update from Jeanne

Posted on June 13, 2012 | 16 comments

Last week when I finally cleared the decks and got out all the pens again, I realized how critical it seemed for me to start drawing every day. In the meantime I came across this little book while I was shelving at the library:

It describes Resistance and how to combat it. Those of you who are doing creative work already know what I’m talking about. But knowing the characteristics of Resistance and having a plan to fight it helps. I’m going to have to own this book just in case I ever see myself getting away from drawing again.

So here are a few photos for you showing what I’ve been working on.These aren’t scans, so the photo angles will be a bit off.

Although I find the asymmetrical ones very fun to work on, I also demand that I retain my ability to do the symmetrical ones free-hand. All those curlicues in the middle area compensate somewhat for where it got off track. I hope.

I rarely get out a ruler, but on this one I did for the next stage. I just used it to mark dots where I wanted to start those outside edge designs. Once I had one that I thought was round, and when I got a circular mat cut for it, it turned out it wasn’t round at all. So now I’m more careful about that, either making sure it’s round or not getting round mats!

Here’s one more from the end of last night:
I don’t think it’s finished, but at this point it’s definitely time to walk away and not look at it for a few days.

However, I couldn’t help bringing it over to Paint Shop Pro to see what I could come up with:
Love it!

Here’s a close-up of an old one that I had already matted about 6 years ago. I had pens that weren’t as good as the ones I use now, so I’m brightening it up with better colors:
I guess that center motif has always been a favorite of mine. I need to break away from that.

Just for fun, here’s a photo of the above taken under a black light:

A photo of the work table. My son took a card table and cut off the legs so it’s only about a foot high.  I sit on a cushion on the floor. I have a clamp-on light and a clamp-on magnifier. It works great since I can move it around easily and can use it for anything up to a couple of feet square.
Oh, I also worked on that long strip one lying across the pens. But I’ll show you that one again when it’s finished.
I hope everyone has a good creative day!
Jeanne

 

16 Comments

Posted in 2012, Admin., Art, Books, Mandala Dreams, Mandalas

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Mandala Dreams update from Jeanne

Posted on June 7, 2012 | 7 comments

Hi everyone, I thought I’d sneak a  post in here when Old Jules isn’t looking.

Since I got back from New Mexico last weekend, I’ve been clearing space to draw again so I thought I’d tell you a little more about what I do with these gel pens.

When a drawing is finished, it’s never really finished because I can take original drawings and make hundreds of variations on the computer using Paint Shop Pro 7. The first picture is a really old drawing I did when I was just starting to get serious about it. Soon after it was finished, I was unhappy with it for several reasons. I  hadn’t developed the ability to plan for margins and also lacked the skill for keeping it symmetrical.  (Although it did sell, I never got a good scan of it because of the size. I’ve since learned that Kinko’s has a huge scanner so now I use their services for large drawings. This one is about 12×12 inches.)

But the second version is a favorite that I always enjoy looking at, and I frequently use it for greeting cards. It’s also in the running as a possible variation for fabric.  Same drawing, just tweaked with PS Pro 7.

The originals are always the best for viewing in person because I use a lot of metallic and fluorescent inks which don’t show in a reproduction, but playing with changing colors and shapes  gives me more variety for printed copies and fabric.  I’ve even used the manipulations as starting places for entirely new drawings.

Here’s a mandala that really is special just because of the capability of the particular gel pen I was using. There is a line of Sakura gel pens that actually makes an outline on the edge of the color as it’s drawn across the surface. If you enlarge this piece, you’ll see how much more intricate this becomes.  Although I’m pretty good at fine line drawings, these pens add even more detail. The finished size of this drawing (not the paper)  is about 4 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches.
This is  also an old one, but it shows off this added line feature really well.

Since I’m only working one part-time job right now, I have time to draw again, and I’m working on several half-finished pieces. I also have an order for some greeting cards that just need to be assembled since I already have the photo reproductions.  I also intend to get back to those soldered glass pendants since I have a stack of those that I set aside when the soldering started to drive me nuts. I listed three on Etsy last night and will probably put up several more soon: http://www.etsy.co/shop/Mandaladreamer).

Here’s what I was working on this evening:
This one will be fun when it’s finished because all those fluorescent inks glow under a black light.

I also sorted through my entire collection of pens and threw out at least a couple of dozen that didn’t survive not being used frequently last winter, as gel pens  to dry out easily. Here’s what’s left:

Old Jules suggested that I write a post about my recent trip to New Mexico, but since the main thing I came back with was a determination to keep  drawing and work harder at sharing it, I figured I’d post this instead.

~Jeanne (Mandala56)

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, Admin., Adventure, Art, Mandalas

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Gamblers, Gambling and Risk-taking

Posted on May 28, 2012 | 5 comments

Previously blogged May 17, 2005

Saturday a recently acquired friend and I revisited one of the sites I spent a lot of time puzzling over during the search for the lost gold  mine.  The place was the focus of the ’98 search  and a good many years prior to that.  Sometimes it amazes me how many times I climbed and unclimbed the west face of that mountain, always finding something new and puzzling.  I spent most of a month camped at the top, friends coming in for a week or so, then heading back to their lives elsewhere without finding what we were looking for, but finding enough adventure, fellowship and mountain air for a while and remember as one of the good times.This was Jim’s first time up there.  We went in mainly to look at a rock pillar that’s peeling away from a cliff face.

It’s a formation that fascinated a man I’ve come to know awfully well by his work; a man I never met, but whom I followed around that mountain puzzling over what he did, how he did it and why he did it.  A man who lived and died 150 years ago, roughly.  A man who knew a gamble when he saw one, went into a canyon spang in the middle of Apache country at a time when the best he could hope for if he was a quick death, or if his luck was bad, hanging upside down over a slow fire.

I’ve been wearing the arrowhead that almost certainly killed him hanging from a leather thong around my neck for a decade or more.  The ruin a few charred logs high, a long-tom sluice he carved with an axe out of a three-foot diameter log, a 400 pound rock he chiseled down to use as an arrastra and a hundred or so signs and symbols he made on rocks, along with his various diggings are all that’s left to tell what kind of man he was.

A gambler, he was, gambling on being caught by Apaches, gambling a broken leg in a place where such a thing was sure death.  A man who believed in himself so thoroughly that in that setting that he pecked away at the base of a 50 ton pillar of rock trying to get at what was underneath until it gives a man the fantods even today to walk beneath it.

One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating as I watched Orion chasing the Pleiades across the night sky to the background music of wind in the treetops is the thought of how a man of that sort would feel about a world where low-level risk-taking is a criminal offense.

A time when edging the nose of  a vehicle onto the pavement without fastening the seat belt probably won’t get you hurt, but it will almost certainly get you a conversation with an armed pair of mirror sunglasses.  A time when risk is defined in how many years it might take you to get cancer from whatever you’re eating or smoking.  When excessive gambling is betting the grocery money at the blackjack table.

I wonder if he’d have played a wheel, or just picked a few numbers that suited him and bought a hundred tickets with the same six numbers on them, going for broke on something he believed in, the way he did in life.

One of the ways we define who and what we are includes what we’re willing to give up to travel around the sun a few more times.  That guy on the mountain wasn’t inclined to give up much.

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Gambling, History, Human Behavior, Lottery, Native Americans, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Prospecting

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A Military Man

Posted on May 27, 2012 | 13 comments

Previously posted August 21, 2005:

The man in this picture is my old friend Richard Sturm.

[Note:  I’m going to edit this a bit before I post it to the So Far From Heaven blog, add and subtract a few hindsights and afterthoughts.  Jules]

Richard died in December, 2004, in Port Lavaca, Texas.

Richard was a 100% disabled veteran of the United States Army. From 1964, until his death he spent his entire adult life in and out of Veterans hospitals. When he wasn’t in a hospital he was usually in a café somewhere drinking coffee and being friendly with anyone who’d give him the time of day.

Or he was with me, camping, fishing, seeing the sights, singing, passing the time. That happened less than he’d have liked, probably more than I’d have preferred in a lot of instances. Richard wasn’t an easy man to be around.   

A while back [2011] his brother and I were discussing Richard, and Vic remarked, “You never really saw Richard when he was at his worst.”  I didn’t say so at the time, but I think I spent a lot more time with Richard over the years than Vic did, or than Vic was ever aware I did. 

Aside from Richard, all those Sturms were super-achievers, and although I spent a lot of years from 1965 onward considering Vic among my best friends, he was a busy man.  People sought him out.  If I wanted to talk to him, I called him.  Over all those decades I could count on one hand the times he initiated a contact between the two of us.  “People call me.  I don’t call them,” he explained to me once when I mentioned it to him.   I’d guess that applied to Richard, same as it did to me.

But that’s digression, edited in this May, 2012, with a lot of hindsight.

Before Richard volunteered for the Army he was a patriotic youth, intelligent, dynamic, from a family of super-achievers. He graduated from high school with honors, well liked and respected by his teachers and classmates. A young man with a future. Then he joined the US Army.

In 1964, he was stationed in Massachusetts with the Army Security Agency. Without his knowledge or consent, he was selected for an experiment by the career military men who were his superiors. He was given a massive dose of LSD. He sustained permanent brain damage as a result.

Richard spent several months in a mental ward of an Army hospital, presumably under observation by the powers-that-be, to see what they’d wrought. Then they gave him is medical discharge, released him from service and from the hospital, and sent him home without confiding to anyone what the problem was and why it happened.

Several years later after he’d been examined, had his thyroid removed, given electric shock treatments, everything the puzzled medicos could think of to try and improve this mysterious condition, his brother, an attorney, came to suspect something of what had happened. The stories of events of this sort had begun to creep out of hiding and into the press.

A formal demand was made for release of his records, and finally the story came out.

Richard wasn’t injured defending his country. He didn’t get his skull fractured on some battlefield by enemies. He was betrayed by the career military men of his own country, officers and enlisted men, whom he’d given an oath to obey and defend. He served in good faith, and he was betrayed by his country.

Some have noted on the threads that I don’t have an automatic high regard for career military men. They’re correct. Richard’s just an extreme example of thousands of men who’ve been killed, injured, disabled by irresponsible, insane, and idiotic decisions by men who make a career of blindly following orders without thinking, weighing consequences, not feeling any remorse so long as they were ordered to do it.

Like good little NAZIs, Japanese, Soviets, Israelies, Americans, Cambodians, British, Africans, Chinese, Cubans, Argentinans and military men everywhere.  Just following orders. 

Support our troops.

Old Jules

2012 note:  During a conversation with Vic in 2011, I mentioned the LSD experiment and Vic replied, “It’s a shame I could never prove it.  Richards records were all destroyed in a fire at the Army Records Holding Center in the late 1960s.”  Live and learn.  Somewhere back there, I must have heard it from Richard, I came to think the records had been uncovered and it was established, official fact.

13 Comments

Posted in 1960's, Adventure, Government, Human Behavior, Liars, Military, New Mexico, NM, Politics, Texas, US Army

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Morning Gratitude Affirmations

Posted on May 17, 2012 | 4 comments

A previous blog post from April 10, 2005

Hokay.  I try to think of five particularly communistic things going on in my life every morning, every evening, during the day, to find reasons for being grateful for.  It’s a ritual I try to practice constantly, but if I begin the day with it, it’s a lot easier to remember for the rest of the day.

Soooooo.

I’m going to let the numbers on the lottery draw last night be my first, even though it’s really easy.  Those numbers did good and I have a lot of good feeling about what hit last night.  It’s cheating, but I’m going to be grateful for that anyway.

Hokay.  Number two.  It snowed last night.  It’s April, everything was budded out, and it damned well snowed.  Maybe you think I’m not grateful, but I am.  If the frost gets those buds for a third time there ain’t going to be any apples, apricots, grapes, pecans, but there’s always another year, and we need the moisture, probably more than we need the fruit this year.  It’s been a long drought and the moisture deficit isn’t entirely made up, even with all the rain and snow this winter.  Yeah.  I’m grateful.  Yes, I am.  I can feel it, reluctant, squirming, fighting every inch of the way, but grateful is emerging.

Number 3.  Tres.  I’m grateful for these affirmations.  That’s an easy one too, cheating, but they’ve had an enormous influence on my life for the past decade, and sometimes I forget to be grateful for knowing how good they are for me.  And besides, it fills a slot, allowing me not to have to confide to you what some of the ‘really communist’ troubles I’m going to have to be grateful for before I get past these affirmations in my private mind, this morning.  But those are none of your business, so I’m going to try to keep this clean and well lighted.

Number 4.  Quatro.  Lessee.  A cat just took a dump on the rug over there across the room.  Knows better than that, but did it anyway.  It means, hopefully, that the cat was communicating to me the litter box is getting too full.  I’m grateful that cat reminded me of my neglect.  I haven’t cleaned it up, but when I do I will examine the stool and make certain the cat wasn’t telling me something else, something more important.  I’m grateful a cat will tell a person willing to listen what’s going on with it, what sort of health problems might be hidden there in that pea brain, wanting to come out but not knowing how.

Number 5:  Half an hour after daybreak and the wind’s coming back up outside.  I’m grateful for that wind, that howling and clattering of things loose on the porch, the rabid windchimes, the cold air whistling in around the old wooden frames of the windows.

Maybe you think I’m not grateful for that wind, but I am.  Here’s why.

Hmmmmm.  Hmmmmmm.  I am.  Just give me a minute here.

Ahhhh..  I’m grateful for that wind because it’s going to melt the snow quickly.  Maybe even soon enough to save the blossoms and buds.  Maybe that old wind will just evaporate enough of the snow, good old wind, temperature 37 degrees F, maybe it will have all that snow gone in no time at all and the new grapevines won’t lose their buds, the apples will be okay.

A lot of people mightn’t be grateful for that wind howling to blue blazes out there, me sipping my coffee here, typing, feeling the cold air on my bare ankles, but I am.  Yes, I am.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Animals, Country Life, Human Behavior, Lottery, New Mexico, NM, Placitas, Spirituality

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About Trust and Knowing Other Humans

Posted on May 15, 2012 | 5 comments

Originally posted on another blog Tuesday, October 24, 2006 

Maybe this is all bull, but it’s the most painless way I’ve ever found to view reality and my human co-conspirators here in this lifetime.  Riding the mudball around the star and watching the two-legged critters wade around the muck beside me hasn’t caused me to admire us as a species.

As for knowing other humans, we mostly don’t allow ourselves to ‘know’ anyone. Instead, we construct them as we wish them to be, assign a set of behaviors required of them.  Often the people we’re trying to hammer into our mold haven’t  agreed to try to satisfy these requirements.  Still, we count it a violation of ‘trust’ if they don’t perform according to the rules we created.

But, even if they told us they agreed to be what we wished them to be, (and they might have meant it when they did it) obeying contracts of that sort just aren’t part of the usual human machinery. The flesh is weak and time and circumstance erode the best of intentions.

Trusting human beings based on unrealistic contracts probably leads to more heartache than simply abandoning the concept of ‘trust’ and the demands that go with it, and adopting a consistent readiness to forgive and continue loving them. (With no joint checking accounts or shared credit cards).

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Communication, Human Behavior

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