aguardiente “La Quezalteca”

Image | August 24, 2016 | smallestforest

Kris needed a bottle of cheap alcohol for his homemade Elegguá (the Orisha who, as you might recall from my previous posts, is fond of cigars, strong spirits, and sweet things)…more about that later! He bought this pocket-sized flask at the local supermarket. The label was so pretty that I just had to draw the bottle, to go into my growing collection of local beers and hot sauce bottles.

No, I didn’t try it…it smells like paint thinner! And I found bottles of cabernet sauvignon, from Spain, at the same supermarket, for under $4. I have a weak spot for red wine. 😉

A compound word from agua (water) and ardiente (burning or glowing), aguardiente is what English speakers would call “firewater”…a strong alcohol, technically distilled from sugar cane, though other sweet musts and grains are also used.

The ♥ is curved like a road through the mountains

Image | August 22, 2016 | smallestforest

Inspired by a two-week trip among the volcanoes, lakes, and colorful mountain villages of Guatemala’s lush highlands. And an ode to chicken buses. I love chicken buses.

What are you waiting for? Hit the road and have an adventure! It is later than you think.

This is a new art print, available in my Society6 store.

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Junk on the High Seas

Image | August 19, 2016 | smallestforest

junk-on-the-high-seas-qnj-prints

This new art print available in my Society6 shop features a tiny hand-embroidered Chinese junk sailboat, tossed upon the wild blue and green waves of a piece of canvas that Kris and I marbled, ourselves. (Marbling is not something you’d expect people who live on a boat to be able to do, but we’re stubborn as hell when we want something badly enough, and we manage to do it despite the challenges of storing huge quantities of pH-neutral rainwater and a rolling anchorage.)

Also available as a print on stretched canvas, or a framed print under glass.

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I wrote (not much!) about the making of this piece here.

recent sketches…

Image | August 16, 2016 | smallestforest

The Rio Dulce School for Awkward and Inelegant Egrets

Image | July 31, 2016 | smallestforest

When you think of birds, you usually think of grace, no? The curve of a wing in flight, feathers fanning out, the swoop of a long white neck, the weightlessness of gliding on air. You think of sprites and nimble spirits. Hummingbirds and swans.

Kris rowed me out to a group of trees standing in the river, this morning, to photograph a rookery of cattle egrets. I snapped what I could with my camera set on continuous exposure, hoping that maybe one or two of the hundreds of exposures I made would give me a good photo of the birds, which were in constant motion.

Looking over them after lunch, I certainly did get some clear, interesting pictures of this bird community…not the sort I expected, though. I caught many birds in incredibly awkward, ungainly, and…well…freakish postures. Most un-birdlike! This was no Swan Lake photo shoot…they look more like monsters from the old Muppet Show. Or…a rooster?

This one. The unstable artist and substance abuser of the community, I’ll bet…

Cropping and choosing photos to upload to my Flickr account, I laugh out loud more than once. Kris looks up from his newspaper.
“What are you doing?”
“Editing photos of a bunch of chickens on meth,” I tell him.
“A bunch of what, on what?!”

Finally, there was a photo where these gangling, long-legged dance-hall freaks in yellow tights and orange mohawks managed to get their act together, and give me one reasonably bird-like photo that embodied, if not exactly grace reminiscent of Clair de Lune, then at least the idea of three birds having finally agreed on facing one direction. Better than nothing, theater people, carry on!