White Mountain Retreat Pt 5
We’ve been putting some of our time and effort into art, gardening and decoration the last months. I have that budding B&B business and weekly sweat. A part of that is providing an inviting garden atmosphere in the mild winter months of Tucson. We like art. Here is a tale of that odyssey.
We spent a birthday up at Ted DeGrazia’s gallery in the foothills of Tucson’s Catalina Mountains. It has been a while. I love to wander in his old home. It’s an oddly shaped, textured and painted, creative endeavor, which states some down to Earth values.
It is basic, small and a true home.
It inspired my design of my Tortolita cottage, the piece by piece additions over years, the adobe southwestern ambience, the practical traditional feel and function of the kitchen area and the integration of the spirituality of the nature of the Sonoran Desert. I also had an entrance to my bedroom with one side conventional and one unruly, just to shift contrasting form.
He was an artist. He built a wonderful chapel next door, whose character is strikingly humble. I remember young friends being married there, as we all watched the ceremony, surrounded by his artful magic.
There is the more massive gallery, chronicling his work and reflecting his outlook.
The vegetation in the courtyard garden prompted me to take photos.
I am developing a garden in my home. I bought an urban dirt lot and built a tall wall of privacy around it. My aim is to make a useful space, meditative, edible and sustainable. After decades in a self-perpetuating natural living desert, it is quite a challenge.
In several spots on the property, aluminum cans have been shredded into flower-like mandalas and painted. These are hung on entry way arches mostly. They also decorate an authentic looking Native American ramada of tangled rustic mesquite wood and saguaro ribs.
My inquiry told me that these are doable and they may be coated to not bleach out in the sun.
My garden, like the desert in the winter, loses much of its green foliage. I’m looking to bring life to the dormant feel. I’m always looking for color amongst green. Crafty artistic flowers like these would do part of that job, if I can find the time.
Time came with several weeks in the White Mountains during our sojourn. DF is interested in painting, as she is now into her retirement. We both need practice mixing colors and with what is new to us, acrylic paint. We gathered my neighbor’s aluminum beer cans, a party’s worth of empty soda and tea containers and then I went to work cutting different shaped flowers.
The painting is one grand experiment. There are mistakes, but this medium allows us to paint over them. I have to wonder if this is how Van Gough felt at times. He said, “Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures.”
All in all it is meditative and fun. We spent several hours dabbling through afternoons, more than one time. I found a few nails and hung the art against the camp’s yard’s trees. We needed a feel for our inventory. It was also kind of like a child hanging his art on a refrigerator, or along with his peer’s work in class.
These will be interspersed in the yard like souvenirs from an alien planet and they will give color and a more festive ambiance. When I find one of these that I feel right about, I’ll craft several and make a flowered plant of them.
I’ll gradually find more perennially green life and sort out the summer and mild winter crops. Since those retreat days, I’ve found that Van Gough said, “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” When creating a garden, I must give time time.
Being constantly naked in a natural forest for days on end, every moment is augmented, more alive, sensual and focused in that moment. The concerns of the other world are cleared away. All of these factors were of benefit, when I sat down to experiment with color, texture and imagination. I was in a good state of mind to paint, or should I be bold to say make art. Coloring the metal flower petals is a Mandala Yoga, in a way.
The acrylic paint rubbed off of our skin much easier than any cloth smock can be cleaned. A few paper towels and the forest floor was saved from incongruent blotches of color.
Some might think two people sitting nude, painting flowers in the forest a bit odd. “Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it,” one more from Vincent.
One purpose of this site is to introduce, inspire, encourage others and describe how to live as freely natural as one desires, free-range humanity. “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”― Vincent Van Gough
We experienced the “Van Gough Immersion” a couple of weeks ago. It is very much worth seeing, or maybe better said, “doing.”
Here’s some examples of DeGrazia’s art:
More can be found here:
https://degrazia.org/gift-shop/originals/
I am on the forum of FreeRangeNaturism.com often, if you would like to converse.
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