I Often Don't Know What It Is That I Am Painting

     The other day I read a news article about “secret things” in famous paintings.  One of those “secrets” was the image of the artist in the reflections of a shiny object in the painting. “Wow,” I thought, “I have done that.”

    My paintings are based on photos I have taken.  I download the photo onto my computer, then place a 2 by 2 inch grid over that image.  I paint just one of those squares created by the grid at a time, and so when I am going to paint that square, I zoom in on it on my computer, so I don’t see anything else.  I then just try to paint the corresponding square on the canvas (that also has a grid of two inch squares) what I am seeing in that square on my computer screen.  

    Because I have zoomed in on just one square, I often can’t tell what it is that I am painting.  I just paint what I am seeing in the square.  Later on, when more squares have been painted, I am often surprised at what it was I was painting.  This happened to me the other day, after painting a couple of squares with different shades of blue.  I discovered it was some mountain slopes.

    The photo above is taken from my painting “Chrome” which shows the chrome vertical strip on the side of the grill of my old 1977 GMC truck.  If you use a bit of imagination you can make out my distorted reflection on that strip.  (photo above).

     The flesh-colored blob in the top is my head, and the blue color below it is the blue shirt I was wearing.  The two vertical areas in the middle are my hands, which are holding my black camcorder.  The darker blue in the lower section are my jeans.  Can you make all that out from the distorted reflection on the side of the truck’s grill?

    Below is the whole painting.

View my other paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: A Cruise Down a Jungle River

      The bus then took us to a river, where we boarded a nice-sized river boat with a large enclosed cabin for passengers.  The vessel took us on a comfortable and interesting voyage down a 70 kilometer long tropical river to the resort.  

    At the beginning of our voyage we had passed through recently cleared pastures with the odd dead naked tree, remnants of the jungle that had once occupied that space, but once the boat got to Tortuguero Park, the scenery we were passing through became even more jungle-like, with the thick growth of plants and trees forming a thick wall of green that came straight up from the river.  We could not see any river “bank”, just a solid solid wall of tropical foliage. 

    The boat traveled slowly along the river which snaked its way through the visually exciting jungle.  A lot of exotic birds flew from their perches on the tall trees that lined the river as our boat approached, and monkeys gave us the eye as we passed by.  A girl on the trip who had lived in Brazil told us the scenery we were passing through looked just like an Amazon River trip she had gone on.  Floating down a tropical river was sure a relaxing and memorable way to view the jungle.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: A Banana Factory

      While back at Infotur in San Jose, we booked ourselves onto a group tour, something we had never done on a vacation before.  Generally we just take buses to the places we want to go, then wander around on our own.  This tour was to take us to Tortuguero s to watch sea turtles crawling out from the ocean up to the beach at night, to lay their eggs.  The tour included transport (bus and then a cruise on a boat), meals, and a room at Hotel Ilan-Ilan (an eco-resort) for three days and two nights.  It cost $189 each plus $40 a night.  

    We had to cash some more Traveler Cheques to pay for the package tour, and while we were flush with money, my wife bought a new umbrella, another big one.

    We began our Tortuguero Tour outside a McDonalds at 7:30.  The bus drove us through pouring rain, which caused the planned stop at a jungle park to be cancelled, and then a planned tour of a banana plantation to be cut short, although we did make a brief stop at the banana factory to watch the workers wash and put stickers on the bananas. 

        We were surprised (and somewhat dismayed) to discovered that when the bananas start to form on the trees, the whole growing bunch is enclosed in a pesticide-infused plastic garbage bag-sized sack, where they will continue to grow.  When the green banana bunch is starting to ripen, the sacked bunch is cut from the tree, suspended on a moving cable, which ferries them to the factory where the bananas are washed.  In the photo below, on the right side, you can see a woman removing the sack from a bunch of green bananas.

        We found the whole pesticide-laden sack thing rather disturbing.  Every day when we cut up a banana for our cereal, we never visualized that they were grown in pesticide bags.  I guess sometimes its better not to know how commercial things are grown.

    View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: Last Day in the Cloud Forest

      At one point along the trail, we could hear fruit or nuts falling through the trees.  That excited us, making us think there was some exotic bird up there.  We scanned the foliage eager to see what was doing it.  We were deflated when we discovered it was just a squirrel.

    As we plodded on down the trail, my wife in the lead, I heard a flutter of wings, then she began cursing.  A blue and green bird had been on the trail in front of us which my wife hadn’t seen until it flew off in a rush.  It was a Resplendent Quetzal.

    When we got to the hummingbird gallery we were again fascinated by the unbelievably colored hummers, fighting and darting around at the feeders.  A heavy rain began to fall, so we paid $5 to stay and watch a fascinating slide presentation about animal coloration.  The leaf-shaped moths were hard to believe.  Some other moths looked like wasps and bees to avoid being eaten.

    By the time the slide show finished, the rain had also stopped, so we walked the three kilometers back to our hotel, watching the yellow sunset over the mountains.

    When we got back to the hotel we got a surprise.  The clerk informed us that InfoTur, back in San Jose had called us, and we were supposed to contact them when we got back to San Jose, because we had won a prize.  We were quite excited by the news, remembering being told that some of the prizes were tours.

    We forced ourselves out of bed at 5:00 AM the next morning, to organize ourselves before catching the 6:00 bus to San Jose.  We carried our luggage to the cheese factory where we caught the bus.  The road was again full of hills, twists, and turns, but much smoother than the one we had taken us to Monteverde.  There were a lot of beautiful views of the sun hitting the clouds as we traveled. 

    My wife was in a bad mood in San Jose.  The bus driver had broken our black umbrella which she had strapped to her bag.  We weren’t able to get the room we wanted at the hotel, and then when we walked down to InfoTur to claim our “prize”, it turned out to be a flimsy-thin T-Shirt, instead of a free tour.

View may paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: A Palm Viper and Morre Jungle

      Continuing on our way to the Reserve, we came upon a meter-long, slender snake with a cream-colored underside.  It had just started to cross the road in front of us, but then turned around, went slithering through some grass, then up a tree.  I struggled to get the telephoto lens onto my camera, but it was already up in the tree by the time I did.  I managed to take a photo of it from below, as it strung out across some branches above me.  

    When I described it later at a slide presentation, the naturalist thought it sounded like a palm viper, which is toxic.  I was happy it didn’t drop down on me when I was taking its photo.   We also watched a three inch lizard that seemed to hop instead of crawl.

    We paid another $10 each once we got to the Reserve entrance and took the el Camino, a 2 kilometer old road.  We saw a flock of birds the size of crows, that were blue like a Canada Jay, but they had a powder blue “cap’ on their heads.

    We were eager to go to the “Mirador” (overlook), but unfortunately but the area around it was totally clouded in, so we couldn’t see much on the self-guided trail.  It was however, very beautifully lush with all of the leaves of the jungle plants dripping with the condensed water from the clouds that surrounded them.

    We met some girls who also happened to be from BC.  They asked us where we were from and when we told them McBride, one said, “Oh, that’s where they are having the forests fires.”   That was not something we wanted to hear, but since they had just left Vancouver two days earlier, we could only assume that the Robson Valley was still having problems during our first week of being away.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant.ca

Lucifer: "Where is the Good Stuff?"

     The photo above shows our cat Lucifer looking me in the eyes, questioning when will her special supper be served.  You can se in the photo, she already has a bowl of kibbles there, and twice a day she gets wet canned cat food, but she is waiting for something with taste, that she can eat throughout the night. 

    We feed Lucy upstairs on my desk.  That is the only place we can safely do it so that Kona doesn’t get to it and scarf down all Lucifer’s food.  Right before bed, I am scrambling around downstairs in the kitchen, trying to come up and prepare some kind of special treat food for Lucifer.  While I am doing that, she up on my desk waiting patiently at her feeding station, ready to be served.

    Her special food is made up of something relatively fresh;  like strips of cheese, little chunks of chicken or turkey left over from our meals, or maybe just a small puddle of milk or cream in a plate.

    We readily admit to spoiling our pets, but a year or so ago, I was sure Lucifer was about to die.  She was incredibly thin and urinating very frequently, making us think her kidneys were giving out.  That’s when we started really spoiling her with the special food.  While she is still incredibly thin, now she is more motivated, energetic, and healthy.

    Looks like she is getting cheese strips tonight.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmaarchant2.ca

I Loved Those Paper Drives

     During the 1950’s when I was a kid, local community organizations periodically held “Paper Drives” as fund raisers.  At our church the Boy Scouts would do it, and the elementary school’s “Community Club” would do it on the school grounds.  A big truck freight trailer would be pulled in and parked, with the rear doors unlocked, so people could bring in their old magazines, and stacks of newspapers to throw onto the paper pile in the trailer.

    Back in those days, there were plenty of newspapers.  Our middle-sized city had both a daily morning newspaper and evening newspaper, with a thick Sunday edition.  People would save stacks of the old newspapers, to donate to the paper drives when they happened.

    There were a lot of magazines around also.  My parents rarely got magazines, but being a Cub Scout, I did monthly receive “Boy’s Life”.   My grandparents often had copies of Life magazine, Look magazine, and Saturday Evening Post.  All in all, there was a lot of old publications that could be recycled to make more paper.

    My love of those paper drives had nothing to do with recycling paper, although that seemed like an intelligent thing to do.   What excited me was some of the other publications that could sometimes be found in the giant pile of paper:  Comic Books!  

    Although my sister and I loved to read comic books, my father took a dim view of them, and discouraged us from buying them.  “Don’t go wasting your allowance buying comic books” was a line we often heard.  We still did buy a few, but when I discovered that paper drives could be a readily available source of comics, I was excited every time I saw a paper drive trailer in our community, and could hardly wait to go rifling through the giant pile of newspapers and magazines looking for comics.

    I found comics of cartoon characters (Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck, etc), super hero comics (Superman, Batman, etc), mythical character comics, like The Phantom, Turok, (Son of Stone, an Indian who fought dinosaurs),  and I always really treasured the Classics Illustrated Comics I sometimes found, that featured the classical stories by Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and Robert Lewis Stevenson.

    At one point in my paper drive searches, I came across a Mad Magazine, and when I got home and started reading through it, my life changed forever.  I loved the amazing comical art, the really clever humor, and the satirical social comment.  Mad Magazine put an end to my desire for comic books, and set me looking instead for more Mad Magazines.  Unfortunately, they were an extremely rare commodity in paper drive trailers, so much to the chagrin of my father, I started to spend my money buying new ones, as they were printed.

    Mad Magazine did have a profound affect on my life.  Not only did it give me a more cynical  and questioning view of the world and introducing me to a higher form of humor, it was in trying to draw some of the characters I saw in Mad, that I later in life, ended up as a local cartoonist.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca