Spring Break!

Soon... some Desert Solitaire. Currently preparing by reading up on Cold Splinters, the Non-Technical Canyon Guide to the Colorado Plateau,  gathering supplies, and making playlists. Music of choice for long drives in the West this Spring will be:

• Phosphorescent, "Muchacho" 
• Morriconez, "Cloud of Dust Cry of Death"
• Songs: Ohia, "Magnolia  Electric Co"
• Music from Saharan Cellphones
• Handsome Furs, Plague Park (every road trip)
• Neil Young
• Javelin, Hi Beams
• Charlie Parr
• Jack Rose
• Daniel Bachman
• M. Sage

and probably several episodes of Mysterious Universe, The Extraenvironmentalist, 99% Invisible, This American Life, and Radiolab podcasts.

 Photo from Natural Bridges National Monument from last year - taken by me.

In Search of A Lost Icon

I'm currently reading "American Buffalo; In Search of a Lost Icon" by Steven Rinella and it is fascinating. I don't want to give too much away about the book but I would definitely recommend it - it can be enjoyed for the adventurous aspects of the writers life and travels as well as the historical background of the animal and its relationship to man.

While doing some supplemental research on the history of these animals I came across this article at Cryptomundo - "The Wood Bison Discovery Story" -

"The largest land animal in Canada, the wood bison [shown above], had been disappearing from all over North America for centuries when the last animals were officially declared extinct in 1940. Then in 1957, a wonderful discovery occurred. During a regular air patrol, federal wildlife officers flying over a remote part of the Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta, spotted a small, isolated herd of two hundred wood bison. They had gone completely unnoticed for decades – and had kept physically and genetically separate from their cousins, the plains bison, so familiar to Americans as the buffalo. The wood bison were found about one hundred miles from a new road being built from Alberta to the arctic circle and within fifty miles of a mission station that had existed for a hundred years. Inspection of these animals showed that they were indeed the last remaining pure wood bison (Bison athabascae), an enormous Ice Age species not known to exist in a pure strain anywhere else in the world."

Writer Loren Coleman goes on to say,

"This animal tale is one the late Ivan T. Sanderson and I have both used to demonstrate the simple fact that large animals can remain hidden in North America, quite near humans, relatively speaking." In a way, this goes back to my post called "Some Mystery Left" - written about the mysterious appearance of a mountain lion in the Chicago area.

woods bison
Beautiful photo originally uploaded by rootrider

The world we live in

Here's an excerpt from Alan Prendergast's article in this weeks Westword titled, "In Colorado, it's not about why the wildlife cross the road, but whether they'll survive the trip";

"Establishing safe passages for wildlife is a long-term investment in the state's future, insists Julia Kintsch, an ecologist who operates her own consulting company, ECO-resolutions, and has worked on the Vail Pass bridge project for years. 'There's this hangup that it's for wildlife, not for people,' she says. 'We need to recognize that wildlife are an important part of the world we live in, too. It doesn't always have a monetary value attached to it, but it has value to our economy. It's a large part of why people come here to recreate and to live.'"

Three from the Western Exhibit at the Denver Art Museum

"The Open Range"

"War Bridle" by Frederic Remington

"Stampede"

If you live in Denver and you still haven't checked out the recently reopened 7th floor of the Denver Art Museum you're missing out. It is dedicated to Western art - a genre I've really begun to appreciate since moving West. I shot photos of these three pieces on my visit Tuesday.

While I don't always relate to the subject matter in a lot of Western painting, many of the artists are exceptional painters - especially in their ability to capture different atmospheric and lighting conditions. Take these three for instance;

• "The Open Range" displays the clear, often blinding sun that is typical of the West. If you look carefully you'll notice that there are no real dark color values- even the shadows on the ground are bleached by the sun.
  
• Remington's pieces also portrays a high-noon sun gleaming against the backs of the two white shirted cowboys.
• The "Stampede" on the other hand carefully composes the work with more detail in the foreground and soft, looser brush-strokes in the background - adding to the action and the depth of the image. It is almost entirely monochrome and his handling of subtle value variations is amazing.

Airless: Wallace Stegner on The American West as Living Space

photo by Nathan Abels

I'm reading Wallace Stegner's The American West as Living Space from 1988 -taken from a series of lectures made in 1986. It is a really informative book. I've been writing down a lot of quotes or experts from it and I wanted to share this one in particular:

"...the rootlessness that expresses energy and a thirst for the new and an aspiration toward freedom and personal fulfillment has just as often been a curse. Migrants deprive themselves of the physical and spiritual bonds that develop within a place and a society. Our migratoriness has hindered us from becoming a people of communities and traditions, especially in the West. It has robbed us of the gods who make places holy. It has cut off individuals and families and communities from memory and the continuum of time. It has left at least some of us with a kind of spiritual pellagra, a deficiency disease, a hungering for the ties of a rich and stable order. Not only is the American home a launching pad, as Margaret Mead said; the American community, especially in the West, is an overnight camp. American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging. Freedom, when found, can turn out to be airless and unsustaining. Especially in the West, what we have instead of place is space. Place is more than half memory, shared memory. Rarely do Westerners stay long enough at one stop to share much of anything."

Old West Hipster Art?

George Catlin (1796-1872), this one is probably from the 1830s.

Doesn't this look just like something you might see in Juxtapoz or on FecalFace right now? If only he had drawn the buffalo and wolves on a blank piece of paper...

case in point: Maya.Bird on flickr

Who Owns The West?

I found this interesting post at Strange Maps stating that the United States government has direct ownership of almost 650 million acres of land (2.63 million square kilometers) - nearly 30% of its total territory. In fact, nearly 37% of Colorado is owned by the government.

Patti Hallock's "Greetings from the West"

photo by Patti Hallock

I am not the only one that is getting the out-West fever lately - fellow artist and friend here in Denver area Patti Hallock is working on a excellent series of photographs that present the West in all of its real and artificial/mythological splendor. Patti says that the series is an, " examination of the myth of the American West through the landscape, Wild West-themed amusements and Hollywood Western movie making." I love these photos and I'm really looking forward to being in a show with her this late-summer/early-fall. Check out all of her photos, because this isn't her only series -and they are all fantastic.