Coyote - Mountain Man

Well, this isn't the picture I thought I was uploading. But it will do. As a wildlife artist, I found painting mountain man reinactors to be an easy transition. This guy's mountain man name is Coyote, and he is wearing a coat made from coyote hides. Shirt is leather most likely from tanned deer hide. I think the painting caught the wild side and it took on an authentic look.

This piece was done some time ago, and the mountain man series was very popular. I am looking forward to getting back to doing new work. I have new and exciting ideas to explore, but am in the middle of a project that has taken more time than I had hoped. I'll get there. 2008 will be the year I can do what I want, and actually make it to some shows.

Special morning today. At 5 a.m. I happened to look out the window and there were two doe deer. They were stretching their necks high to nibble on the leaves of the elm in my front yard. The light was just so that you almost couldn't see them. Every thing had the same blended gray. They wandered out of the driveway and stood at the edge of the road for a few minutes. Looking and listening. When they thought it was safe, they kicked in their after burners and raced across the road, jumped the fence, and were into the middle of the next pasture quick as a flash. They safely wandered away toward the river bottom.

I am on my way in the morning to visit my sister. She is in Kansas, so will have about a 10 hour drive. Looking forward to the visit, and she sounded excited that Gizmo and I were coming. It might well be the last time I see her.

See you when I get back.

All art, poetry and writings are copyright & cannot be reproduced in any form without written permission from Judith Angell Meyer

"Four Horse Power"

This painting is a watercolor and from the series from the Pagosa Junction area lumber camp operation. I call this "Four Horse Power." These work horses did a lot of heavy hauling. Without the modern equipment of today, logging was a very hard and dangerous job.

Trains were used to bring supplies into camp, and they also brought up temporary housing. They looked like railroad cars converted to housing, but were smaller. In one of the photos an engine was off the track. Possibly the rails spread from the rains and heavy mud, or just got top heavy with the load. The men got the horse teams out and managed to pull the train back up onto the tracks. Amazing what a few men and a few horses can accomplish. Without cranes!
Time to sleep. Will try to get more up soon.

All art, poetry and writings are copyright & cannot be reproduced in any form without written permission from Judith Angell Meyer

"Bless the Beasts and the Children"

Enough with the snake already. Time to get out another painting. This one is "Bless the Beasts and the Children." It is a watercolor painting. My reference source is a photograph taken in about 1917, at a lumber camp in the Pagosa Junction area of south west Colorado.

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What drew me to this woman were her hands. You can look at her and see a young, or maybe more accurately, a naive or unworldly person, but her hands are very worse for wear. They show an incredibly hard life. Yet she holds the kid goat with a gentleness that belies her age.

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This might have been a Sunday or a special occasion as she is wearing a dress made with fabric with designs on it, and a home made shawl. Not quite a shawl, but a decorative shoulder drape to accent the occasion.

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Other pictures in the series have her three sons. They have to be her children as they wear the same bowl hair cut. They are showing off new Montgomery Wards overalls, with the youngest wearing the newest of the hand-me-downs.

All art, poetry and writings are copyright & cannot be reproduced in any form without written permission from Judith Angell Meyer

A new guest

Sorry this guy is a little blurry. He is a beautiful King snake who actually startled the heck out of me. I had stepped out of the barn door with a stack of hay in front of my face, (feeding time at the zoo), and almost stepped on him. At the time, he was stretched out full length on the driveway, soaking up the sun on a very warm day. It took up almost half the width. Really long, but skinny and his skin was still loose. Clearly out for the first time, and maybe hoping to pick up a meal. By the time I got back from the house with the camera, he had moved to what he thought would be the safety of the grass. I hope he hangs around. We had a King snake here before that was really large. Around his middle had to have been about 14". He was out sunning himself and my son's wife didn't see him, and she tripped over him. I'm thinking it took days for her to stop shivering after that.

Well, this being Mother's Day and all. I have things to do before I go to the kid's for dinner. Hope all you mothers out there have a wonderful day.

My Lilacs are in full fragrance!

This first photo is the front of the Studio.

This is the back of the Studio. In close for the fragrance.

This one is closer yet! Close enough to draw from!!

I'm sure I have gone over board with the photos here. But you have no idea how hard it was to wait so long for my lilacs to bloom. The late frost took them at the bud for the last two years. And I just love sitting on the porch taking in their wonderful fragrance.

This of course is the back of the Studio, but you can see both of the bushes.

I got all three of them on Mother's Day as my little kids could afford to get a starter bush. It was always fun to pick out the next spot. They all took to their locations just fine. I think the reason that the kids stopped getting them for me was that we decided to start a long row of them across the front. But the front is north, and the bushes didn't do well, until they finally quit trying. These remaining three are the light of my spring!

I just have to make a comment

I feel I just have to comment .. This is the first time blogspot has allowed me to sign in for days now, and I finally found a work around that worked. Usually I can go to my friends blog and click on her link to my blog, and I can at least get the sign on link. From there sometimes I can get the sign on box and sometimes I can't. Today the box came up with the error message that the page could not be found. So knowing it was looking for a different page than I was on, I did a right click on the blank sign on box and refreshed the page. It worked!! Probably only this once, but since I actually got in, I knew I had to write something. Let me add a picture for you ... hang on!

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Okay, this is a pencil drawing that I did while participating in a challenge draw on WetCanvas.com I call this "The pout." I loved doing this drawing and it was a good practice for me to get back into drawing. Also, it was so well received that I ended up with the job of choosing photos and running the monthly challenge myself. I guess that was to take me out of the competition! (Not really!) The photos are copyright free donations to the Wet Canvas library.

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Okay now, any questions be sure to ask.

All art, poetry and writings are copyright & cannot be reproduced in any form without written permission from Judith Angell Meyer

Many Fire's Quiet Strength

I decided that today I would get out an old painting, and tell you its story. You saw earlier the drawing of my husband Big Foot, the Mountain Man.

The title of this painting is, "Quiet Strength," which speaks of the man as well as the lodge.
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It is time to let the lodge work its magic. It has been a long winter this year, and it's time for my husband and his fraternity of brothers to get away for a few days. Several years ago they found a place near Chadron, Nebraska, that, for them, has great healing powers. They stop to visit The Museum of the Fur Trade and then find a site to set up camp.

The lodge goes up in about thirty minutes. There are fifteen, twenty-four foot poles that serve as its frame. First a tripod is raised and anchored, then four poles are placed in each of the three partitions. One of the back four is used as a lifting pole for the cover, and there is an anchor peg every two feet of the circumference. The dimension inside the lodge is twenty-one feet from front to back and eighteen feet from side to side. There is a lining inside that ties to the poles. The lining is from four to six feet high, and the bottom drags the ground. By placing your bedding, boxes, or some rocks on the skirt you seal the lodge from drafts on the floor. The space between the outer cover and the liner creates a flu for the fire so the smoke is drawn up and out through the smoke flaps.

My husband sets the lodge up without many modern conveniences. It works best this way. The last to be set in place is Many Fires, the buffalo skull "alter" piece where the friendship pipe is kept. There is a lot of peace derived from Many Fire's quiet strength.

When it's late at night and the fire is flickering away to embers there is a warm glow in the lodge. As you look up, the stars shining through the smoke flaps, your eyes are slowly drawn back down the poles. The poles encircle you like a protective hand. Falling to sleep without a care, complete with a feeling of being safely tucked in, is illusive for most adults today. But not when you surrender yourself to the lodge.

Big Foot and his friends will come home shed of the stress of their everyday responsibilities. They will be able to draw on the peace until next year when the promise of spring calls them back.
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My husband is gone now and the memories are as strong as if he were here. Then one day I got to playing with the two pictures. The drawing I made of him, and the painting of Many Fires. When I superimposed the black and white drawing on the painting, it looked like he was a part of the fire's smoke, still here yet spiriting away. I will someday put the two together in a print at least in an edition large enough for me and our kids. Then, who knows ...

All art, poetry and writings are copyright & cannot be reproduced in any form without written permission from Judith Angell Meyer

Do Not Blink...

Do not blink...

A fast and sad tale
by Judith Angell Meyer


How do I pen a cliche’
so it isn’t the cliche’,
but the reality.

My skin has soft little wrinkles
that look like ripples on water.
Yesterday it didn’t.

When did I start needing naps,
that have now become mini comas.
Yesterday I was working until I got my second wind.

The mirror seems to feel the need to taunt me
with an image of someone I do not know.
Yesterday the image was 18.

When I forget and sit too long,
it takes the length of the room to work out the stiffness and pain.
Yesterday, I didn’t have time to sit.

I won’t think about this today
I’ll do it tomorrow
But, tomorrow was yesterday, and the year is gone.

I must have blinked while laughing in the face of spring,
a brief summer warmth on my eye lids as they go down,
and as they started up again, fall is turning to winter.

Hans' Birthday

This is my husband Hans' birthday month, and I decided that I needed to get this portrait out again. He would have been 67 this year. I did the portrait on one of the years that we couldn't afford to buy Christmas presents for each other, saving what we had for the kids.

We were Mountain Man enthusiasts and enjoyed going to rendezvous with our friends. We would set up our lodge and enjoy a week or a weekend pretending that there was no rush hour anywhere, that the kids weren't tempted by drugs, that there weren't any bills to pay nor a hundred things pulling us this way and that each and every day.

Hans was a professional baker, and he could make an apple pie in a dutch oven over the coals that was to die for. And his biscuits! But when it came to getting the meat for dinner, he relied on my eye looking down the barrel of my .45 caliber green river black powder rifle.

I enjoy catching a person's special look in a portrait like this one done with a pencil. This one is an 8x10, but I enjoy going on to a full portrait in watercolor too. One of these days I'll have to compliment this one with a watercolor portrait.

Have a good day all. Thanks for stopping by.

All art, poetry and writings are copyright & cannot be reproduced in any form without written permission from Judith Angell Meyer

Finally an entry!

I cannot begin to tell you how much trouble it was to use and write in my blog today. I had to change settings in my computer just to be allowed to sign onto a site I have used for quite a while now with no trouble at all. I have to tell you, if this continues, I'll have to go back to Live Journal permanently. So ...

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We have had some wonderful rain the last couple of days. This is most welcome on this desert prairie. But today dawned sunshiny and warm. Got to 55 degrees even. When I went out I discovered that the lilacs are only a day or two away from blooming, and the apple tree has begun to bud out. This just all means that it is going to hail within the next few days. It has been three years in a row now that one thing or another took my lilacs away from me. But they have a much better start now than they have had in all those years. Cross your fingers for me.

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My Gizmo has something ... don't know what he got into, but he has suffered with the dine-a-rena's all day which results in a bottom bath after each trip to the tall weeds. He threw up this morning too. I'm sure this will be better tomorrow, but in the meantime ...

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I'd best get to my work. Have a website to try to finish soon, and several illustrations to get back to. Should not have wasted the time here, but hey, it WAS time to say hello!