Just finished setting up my workbench for woodblock engraving in the Ukiyo-e style. This is going to be fun.

Knowingly participating in the toxic divisiveness in America today just is not right.
Account deleted, photos saved I guess.

I pulled the plug. It’s not a huge deal, and the first thing I’ll say is thank you Facebook for allowing me to stay in touch with friends and family, reuniting me with old friends, keeping me in the fray to tackle Trumpers and the Q-Anon afflicted (I unfriended most of the Republican friends or family still breathing.), and giving me roughly 45 minutes a day to bloviate, taunt, appeal, and spin merry tales of our progress here on the Vaughndorosa high in the New Mexico rockies.

My motivation for cutting off Facebook was that underneath the benign and silly family stuff, the political parody and the fun, is an underlying sinister strata of the upper echelon of Facebook, an uncaring and divisive platform that is probably one of the major players in the schism in American society. Fomenting hate and division in the name of power and pervasiveness. All this captained by an insulated trillionaire high on his own position on the Asperger’s spectrum, and apparently active in right wing political dabbling and reveling secretly in the provocateur role Facebook is playing in a divided America. Facebook is where I learned that I could say things in comments that I would never say to someone’s face….time. Facebook taught us we could be rude and snotty, and extremely snarky without repercussions, one of which would be a punch in the nose.

I’m not saying my choice is appropriate for everybody on Facebook. I just chose to not participate in the platform any longer and that my data and algorithms are left unharvested. My message to Mark Zuckerberg is to retire and engage in the kind of philanthropy that Bill Gates is doing, before you are arrested and jailed, which would send your autism careening toward a screaming need to self-comfort.. At some point, there will be a revelation, or a second January 6, or a nodal point wherein Facebook augers in, or screws the pooch.

Anyway, I’m here now, and away from the zero sum game of Facebook politics and bickering. I will endeavor to enlighten and entertain. Por supuesto.

Going into fall, the sun comes up directly from the East and when it’s clear and cold, it makes the Sangre de Cristo mountains blush.

Back to the blog after a few months. I’m seriously considering leaving Facebook and all intrigue and malevolent aspects of the Zuckerberg kingdom.

When a family outgrew an adobe home, they built another one, only bigger. Or, they built a wood frame home. Sometimes a combination of the two styles seemed the better choice. More often than not, they abandoned the old adobe. These homes stand silent vigil as the seasons came and went. Cattle scratch themselves on against the mud walls, wearing them down. A family adobe can last for 100 years and longer, watching the family it sheltered grow larger still, and as time passed, it saw new homes arrive on the land. Manufactured homes of all shapes and sizes. Finally, when the metal roofing gives way to the west winds, it is the beginning of the end. The wood rots, the roof trusses collapse, and finally all that is left are the walls. Eventually the walls erode and the mud bricks return to the soil. Soon, all that remains is a bump in the pasture. When the roof goes, so does the casita… and like us all, sooner or later, returning to the soil.

I always like to say that I would have been more fulfilled as an artist if had learned to play piano, and maybe studied music, serious music… Whatever my father had, that musical savant thing, it skipped right over me.

As early as I can remember, if I drew something, or sculpted something, my father would seize it, hold it aloft, show my mother, and heap gushing praise down on me. More often than not he would take it to work, and similarly show it around DOT Records, and then finally pin it up on his office wall. There you go, the easiest affirmation there is. It was almost too easy, too facile. I played trumpet in middle school, and my father would criticize my tone, or find fault one way or the other. Music or art? Art was easier. Facile.

That facility made me fearless when I studied fine arts at three different state universities over time. I would try anything. And when the inevitable critique time came in the classroom, and and all the students would display their artwork for that session, my work would stand out. One instructor, a young art teacher at CSUN, tole me during one of the critique sessions that my drawing was too illustrative, too “facile”…. This comment coming from an instructor who Xeroxed the Sistine Chapel ceiling and assembled it on the ceiling of a local bank in Northridge. Eventually, I graduated from San Diego State University with a BFA, focused on printmaking, paid for in large part by the GI Bill. That was it. The only person in my nuclear family to obtain a university degree. Now what? I had a wife and child, and I would soon be 30 years old. Oh shit, I thought, what have I done? How are you going to make a living? I had not planned any farther than getting my degree. I had just spent the last few years as either a Neo-aboriginal mountain man/hippy dude/carpenter/stoner, or as an art student. What have I done?

Incredibly, I lucked into a job at WED Enterprises, which was eventually renamed Walt Disney Imagineering. I was a “designer”.

I retired early in 2012, have spent the previous thirty-three years as a “designer”, not an “artist”. My friend Roberdeau Drury once said that “Design has manners, Art has guts.” Design to me was art with a purpose. over the span of my design and entertainment career, every facet of creative endeavor, whether it was music, dance, illustration, writing, sculpting, film and media, were all for a purpose. Desireé and me moved to New Mexico, and on a treeless horse pasture we built our house, and designed and built, with the able help of a master builder across the road, our studio. This is the place where my wife and me together, are going to make “art”.

Here, the story falters a bit. It’s the “art” part. I spent almost 40 years designing designs as a designer and a storyteller. Art with a purpose. Here, in Ledoux, the long and linear journey comes to an abrupt halt. I have the tools, I have the time, I have a beautiful studio, I have the desire, but I have….. too many options. After a long creative career, and gift for visual art and design, I’m rather like a draft horse that has been set out to pasture, I could trot in any direction I want to go. But, which direction? My problem is that I have too many choices. None of them bad.

I would like to say this was an epiphany, but it was a process of elimination which was too tedious for me to recount. I’m going to write and illustrate children’s books. Art with a purpose, art and design, art and entertainment. I’m a storyteller, I’m an illustrator, I’m a designer, and I now live in the most inspirational environment of my life.

I’ll keep you posted.

It’s 2021, January 27 to be exact. I went to WordPress to start a blog and discovered I already had one. It’s just been sitting here all this time. In the interim, I have had a 3-way bypass (2016). I’m being treated for prostate cancer. Desiree has returned to Hong Kong for a Disney project and we now have a beautiful home on these 22 acres. Much has happened!

We had a modular home built that we designed and had delivered to the property where it was installed on concrete foundation wall. At the same time we poured the foundation wall for the attached studio. what happened next took a while. We began the attached studio in 2017. My neighbor across the road from us is named “Brad” and I would describe him as a “master builder”. I asked Brad to help me build the studio. Brad just turned 66 this year, and although we had a young man helping us for a time, that fellow simply stopped showing up in 2017 after we finished the OSB panels on the framing , and it’s been just Brad and me building the studio since 2017. One story became two stories when I drew a section and realized that we could add a loft. Brad was not thrilled because he’s afraid of heights. The studio has a shed roof and the high side is about 26 feet. The low side is 14 feet. We then designed the stairs, the windows and window placement, the door placement, the plumbing and fixtures, and we were off and running, I mean, as well as two old farts could run… We started framing, then applied the shear panels, and placed the windows, and this is when our plucky sidekick found work elsewhere.

Desiree was going to be taking a new job in Hong Kong, so Desiree and I determined that we would agree on any design decisions every step of the way. Thank God for FaceTime! But our system work. We began to design the studio organically, modifying our design and even improving on an original concept when a problem arose. Basically, if I wanted to know if I could do something I would ask Brad, we would then slide into a dialogue that was circular, frustrating, sometimes infuriating, and eventually we would reach agreement. We managed to learn how to work with each other and still remain good friends. I don’t know how, but we did pretty well for a couple of grouchy seniors. Milestones were roughly as follows: We dried -in… then the metal roof, then the metal siding, then rough electrical and rough plumbing, and then trucks and trucks of rock wool insulation bats, and then interior drywall…more sheets of drywall then either of us ever imagined. We just kept buying drywall! Then came the drywall putty, then the texture coat, then the paint…. and finally, we finished the lighting, the fixtures, the switches and outlets, and then we installed our porcelain tile. Once the tile was complete, we installed the sinks and water. The only thing remaining was the interior finish woodwork for the stairs, the railing, and accents.

Incredibly…after a full three years, we finished the studio, and we moved in. We unpacked boxes that were filled when this blog started!

Several of my friends have asked that I start a blog about our move to New Mexico.  I’ve been thinking of a way to chronicle the last move I’ll ever make and a blog seems to be the best way to share and to record the saga.  So much has happened already that the first few posts will be after-the-fact, with pictures, and my rusty narrative.

My wife and I purchased 22 acres in Mora County, New Mexico almost three years ago.  It’s taken until this Fall to get started, other than visiting the property several times over the last three years, and endless discussions about what to do with the 22 acres, what kind of house to build, what to grow, how to grow it, what kind of animals to keep, and where to put everything.  Twenty-two acres is pretty big.  Our current acreage in Los Angeles is a ten by 20-foot patio with planters.

We discovered a few things after our purchase.  I’ll take you there in future posts.  Most of these discoveries amount to pure serendipity.  Other discoveries wound up costing us money.  The best discovery of all…the neighbors, to a person, are lovely, kind, and helpful people with a sense of humor, and a real desire to help us get started.

Getting started was what this post was all about.  I’ll leave it at that.