7-31-99
We just came back from vacation today having driven as far South as Cape Blanco on the Southern Oregon coast on a quest for clear weather. While painting on my second day out, I fought a 20 knot wind on a cliff at Heceta Head light for 3 hours. I did a fairly decent job considering the wind and the curious crowds. Even the tour guides liked it and they must see several artists a week.

On Monday we camped at Bullards beach North of Bandon where there was a mile long stretch of lovely rocks I wanted to paint. The fog bit me there and we drove South searching for blue skies. I got lucky at Cape Blanco and painted two nice seascapes in one day. The first one was of the rock down below the Light called Spider Rock? I scrambled down the steep bluff to the beach and had a nice 4 hour session of painting orange sandstone against the blue sea. Seastacks, especially high ones like this are very dramatic. They have been beating off the winter storms for uncounted eons. They jut up out of the soft sand, soaring mutely towards the sky. This one was at least around one hundred and fifty feet high. I love to climb them but never get very high since there are no safety bolts or solid cracks. I stood in the grass above the high tide line in a deer bed to paint. Unless you scrambled down the cliff as I had, there was no access closer than 2 miles, so it was very isolated. It was the first good weather of my vacation and I could see the serenity reflected in my painting. Instead of painting to please my collectors I said a mental to hell with them all. The sky is wild and I like it. When I hiked up to the overlook, Sue wasn't there so I painted another small landscape of the same scene from above. I had to set up right off the parking lot on the cliff edge so I could watch for Sue. As expected I became a tourist spectacle. I think these people are so used to spectator sport they take it for granted I am there specifically to entertain them. Just as I got the line drawing finished the evening haze moved in and flattened the light. Still, I managed to capture a little beauty from memory. There was a beautiful working lighthouse there where they give night tours on Thursday. I walked out past the closed sign onto the grass at the base of the light and planned where I would set up in the morning. It was not to be, the weather was changing again.

That night I was getting something out of the car when I heard a cup fall off the table. That's odd, I thought, there should be no wind in this camp spot. Walking over to the picnic table I heard something pushing the cup around on the ground. As I bent down to shine my light under the table my leg brushed the shoulder of a skunk. He looked unhappy to have a flashlight in his face and spun around to present me with an raised tail. I heard a hissing sound as I ran over to the car but apparently it was just a warning. He hung around the table for an hour eating all the crumbs Lisa and Clint had been feeding the squirrels.

After that we had a peaceful night and I looked forward to painting the North view from Cape Blanco but we woke up to fog on Wednesday. I drove back up to Bandon and tried to get on the Internet for a weather report for the second time in two days. Talk about an under funded library. They had one Internet computer on the reservation system which was booked for hours both times I visited.

I called my dad in Olympia where he reported 80 F and sun. Goodbye ocean! There are four things to remember about on location painting on the Oregon coast:

• If it's not raining it's misting
• If it's not misting it's foggy
• If it's not foggy it's windy
• If it's not windy it's not for very long!

We drove to Olympia in 10 hours Wednesday, reaching my dad's house at 9:30 PM. Thursday we left Clint and his bicycle at dads and drove up to Mt. Rainier where I painted at the Nisqually vista for 4 hours. There is 70 inches of snow on the ground making hiking difficult in my beach shoes. I set up at a nice 8 person viewpoint overlooking the Nisqually glacier. I was commending myself on finding such a private painting spot when the Ranger showed up with 20 people and proceeded to give a thirty minute lecture on glacier movement. I usually enjoy a little attention when I paint, especially when I am doing well, but that crowd was a bit more than I needed. To make it worse, I was freezing in the shade the whole time and had put my raincoat on. I didn't notice that the cuff was loose on my drawing hand. While painting an exciting passage on the top half of the painting, the cuff erased the bottom half of the finished painting. Perhaps that was why the lovely teenage girl was staring at me so fixedly. She was won dering if I was an idiot.

I managed to salvage that piece but like everything I did during this trip, it needs to be touched up a bit. I was painting too slow for the changing light and conditions. The next day I hiked up the snow for 30 minutes to my favorite viewpoint on the Skyline trail. The mountain played hide and seek most of the day but I managed to get a piece finished by evening light. While I was working on the preliminary drawing, a chubby mother abandoned her hiking family and approached me with her camera as if I was a rare species of elk. Snapping pictures as she approached, she gradually worked her way around until she had both me and the mountain in the frame. I had been trying to ignore her after performing for the crowds of the previous day. Just as I reached up to paint, she spoke for the first time, "Hold that pose!" For a second I held it and then realized how ridiculous the whole situation was. Weakly resisting the urge to tell her off, I turned my back and continued measuri ng shapes and sizes of the rocks and snow.

When I was packed up and ready to hike back down I stood and stared at the mountain for a while feeling a sense of accomplishment. Rainier seems very up close and personal from the Skyline trail. As my eyes roved over the many rocks and glaciers they seemed like old friends. I felt like I knew their every bulge and wrinkle. I honestly think I could paint that mountain from memory, I have done it so many times.

In the morning the fog was back and we said to hell with lousy vacation weather and drove home. I got two good paintings out of the trip and three I can probably finish from memory here at home. It is nice to be back. Tent camping is ok but houses were invented for a reason.

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7-22-99
I have had a couple of hellacious days in printing. It didn't help any that I wore myself out working on the car for 7 hours before and after work yesterday. We took the van in for a check up. The dealer wanted four or five hundred for a front brake job. I did it for sixty. But it made me tired at work and I blew a job. It's almost a step forward for me to blow a job from carelessness. I am far more likely to kill the profit on a job by being overly careful.

Our old family friend came over yesterday. Tammy and Rachel and Ryan have been friends since Sue did home daycare back in 1984. Rachel and Clint played together for four years in the daycare until Tammy moved away. Now they come to visit once or twice a year. It is fun to see the two kids growing up and remaining friends. Rachel is doing extremely well in soccer and Clint is the big air guy out in the back yard. I was sorry I missed them this time.

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7-20-99
Sunday turned out to be an unusual day. Instead of working on projects all day, whether art, computer or household/family stuff; I went out into the yard and vegged out with a book. The grass felt so nice. What is it about lying in the grass with a book that is so relaxing? I was reading a non-fiction book about the Lockheed Skunk Works plant in Burbank where all the spy planes were designed and built. It wasn't even that great a book. I just needed something to entertain my mind while my body took the day off. Later on I went for a bike ride and worked out in the yard digging up a bush in the way of Clint's BMX jumps. After they all went to bed I prepped (tinted the white paper grey or blue with watercolor)12 sheets of art paper for my upcoming time off. I plan to paint full time for 9 days. Today at work I was able to kick butt because I felt so rested up.

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7-18-99
Ahhh, Sunday morning. Our stereo is broken so I am listening to classical music on the Internet as I type these words.I can't seem to settle on a favorite musical style. At work I will listen to anything as long as it isn't commercials. I've shaken that bone weary fatigue from the long week of printing. Yesterday I finished modifying our new bicycle hitch rack. It came without the bottom pull down bar to keep the bikes from swinging. Sportrack wanted $30 for the accessory. I made it out of plumbing pipe for six dollars. I should be an inventor. I enjoy solving problems with pieces of metal and wood on my old stand up drill press. I draw mechanical illustrations first then make it in metal or oak. If I can't figure out how to make something I wonder through the hardware stores until I find something that is close and modify it. I can usually make the process last half a day.

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7-16-99
It has been a long week. Any time a pressman goes on vacation I get stuck working late. And since I can run any press there, I seem to get a lot of OT. I've been running a bunch of 4 color on the two color KOMORI. We print the Christian Musician magazine every couple of months. It is reasonably satisfying as far as running press goes; 40 pages of all four color with extremely high quality national ads for major companies like the guitar makers, Martin and Tacoma and the music recording industry. But the long hours drain me. I have to keep reminding myself that someday I will have a life of my own, it is just a matter of time. My son Clint was grumpy yesterday. He just got his braces put in. That has to be tough to have a mouth full of barbed wire.
7-12-99
Boy, am I glad this weekend is over. We finally had the 50th wedding anniversary of my parents. My brother and sister started planning it a year and a half ago. I was in charge of scanning their old photos and making four poster boards covered with pictures and brief titles like "The 50's" and "The Wedding", etc. That works out to 16 Publisher 98 documents and 60 scans. My daughter Lisa and I did it all in about 3 weeks working mostly on weekends.

My brother John solicited hand written letters from all of their friends and relatives and assembled them into a three ring binder. My sister Connie printed and sent out the invitations. Her husband Brent and my brother John's wife Margee performed songs from the year my parents were married. Brent sang and Margee played the piano. I was getting a bit peeved about all the songs they were performing until one of my cousins from Seattle, Joann Pentz, pointed out how all the old people were tapping their feet and mouthing the words. They had clearly not hear d many of those old tunes in a long, long time. As I watched my parents generation grooving to the old songs I reflected on how each generation has their own music. I imagined our children trying to perform a Joni Mitchell or Neil Diamond song at our 50th. It is not a pleasant thought, picturing myself growing that old.

My son Clint had to endure two days of boring family smoozing. The poor kid was going nuts with boredom so today we invited two of the neighborhood kids down to Olympia with us. We carried all three BMX bikes on our new Bauer rack down to the reception. They were in heaven, trying their tricks on the smooth concrete of the cool underground parking garages in the State buildings. I wrote a long letter for the 50th anniversary "memory book" about what it meant to be their son.

I don’t even know where to begin writing about Mom and Dad. There are so many memories going back a lifetime. Kindness is the word that best describes both their marriage and my earliest memories. Mom and Dad are the friendliest, kindest people I know. It seems to run in the family. Some of my fondest memories are of the years from 1965 to 1992 in Olympia when the extended family would gather for Thanksgiving dinner at Mom and Dads house with our patriarch, Grandma Laura Webster. I could always count on that being a safe harbor from the uncertainties of the changing outer world. As the years wore on, the numbers at the Thanksgiving table grew from a dozen to upwards of 20 souls as the cousins married and brought children of their own to join in the thanksgiving. What remained constant even up until today is the love we could always count on in their house. That is their greatest heritage to us. The ability to be consistently kind is something that many people today have never learned. The fact that they made it through 50 years of marriage doesn’t surprise me at all. The art of marriage can only be learned though observation. They learned it from their parents and I learned it from mine. Now that I have teenagers of my own, I marvel at the skill they used in handling me during my rebellious years. More than anything I think it was the kindness and the consistency that pulled me though those years, and the knowledge that they would always be there, no matter what. I can remember coming home one night when I was 17 after three weeks on the road. It was a dark, stormy night in midwinter and I had been hitch hiking steady for three days to get home from a fools errand in Los Angeles. I was starved, soaked and at my wits end. I lugged my heavy, waterlogged pack up 5th Avenue until I could see the white house on the hill. It was 3 A.M. and the house was dark except the glimmer of a night light upstairs. I thought bitterly about all the wasted days I had spent thumbing around the West Coast and the empty pockets I had to show for it. That white house on the hill was a beacon of sanity for me. I labored up the front steps, and with my last ounce of strength pulled open the screen door. As I reached f or the front door knob, it opened under my grasp and Mom reached out and embraced me saying, "Thank God you’re home at last, I was up worrying about you." An appreciation for the creative muse also runs deep in our family. From my Grandpa, the Reverend Jackson Webster’s poetry, down through my own children's amazing gift for drawing, I can see the muse, like a thread of gold, running down through the generations. Many families today let the TV be the source of culture in their lives. At Mom and Dad’s house, if we had a talent, we were encouraged, even begged to share it with the larger group. Whenever more than a few people gathered in their living room, it wasn’t long before one of us would get out something to share. As Grandma Webster’s eyesight faded in her nineties, she would ask us to play her some music on the old family piano. At first it was her children‘s generation: Dad, Mom or his sister Mary Ellen and Uncle Ed playing and singing the old Presbyterian hymns. Later it was Mom playing the piano and Connie on her flute or John’s wife Margie, playing a Bach Concerto and making the house ring like Carnegie Hall. Later still, when I began to take art seri ously in 1988, they marveled over my early pencil drawings, drawings that I cringe over today. The creative muse, whether writing, music or painting, is a very tender plant requiring a great deal of loving care and cautious weeding. Ignore this plant and it can wither and die. Mom and Dad, I am happy to say, are world class gardeners. Dad still has a large compost bin on the lower lot. When I was a teenager, he used to pay me to go out and turn it, aerating the dirt in preparation for the spring garden. Little did I know, as I stabbed the pitchfork into the great steaming pile of moldy corncobs, lettuce and dirt, turning it over and over; as I was nurturing his outer garden, he was nurturing my inner garden, my artistic muse and the man I would become. Thanks Mom and Dad, for the family and the kindness and the love, Mark

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7-7-99
This morning before work I drove up to Seattle to Sport Rack on N.80th and Aurora. They gladly exchanged the mickey mouse Yakima hitch Terragate Rack for a Bauer swing open hitch rack. They make the Bauer brand themselves. Or, rather they Patented the design and have it made in Taiwan. It is far better than the Yakima swing open design in many ways. That toasted my brain pretty good for work but somehow I survived a eight hour shift. My son is sleeping over at the neighbors. I don't particularly care for that. I used to get way out of control when I did that. But I guess we have to trust his good breeding at some point.

I drew my hand again on my 10 minute break tonight. It never ceases to amaze me how fast I can access my right brain doing that.

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7-4-99
We drove in and watched the fireworks in Tacoma yesterday. Although we haven't been in 6 years I could still remember how crowded it was. This time we took our bikes on our new Yakima Terragate hitch rack. I am not sure I like it. I have to call Yakima and ask them some questions. We have to lift it to latch it so I think ours might be defective.

We parked up on the hill above old town where there were still parking spots. My son hadn't wanted to come. He wanted to stay home and go down to the community lake where all his friends were. Unfortunately we have had some close calls with drunks lighting fireworks in our faces down there but he was too young then to remember. He swore he was going to stay in the car and sure enough, he wouldn't get out. His reasons were:

• He wanted to stay home anyway
• He didn't want to ride with us and our stupid (un-BMX) bikes
• He hated crowds
• He wanted to read his book
• He didn't care about fireworks
• We always drug him along and he was tired of it

What a charming little vignette we must have made: My wife Sue, me and my 11 year old daughter Lisa, all standing by the car with our bicycles. Clint, sitting in the car refusing to come out and ride his fancy BMX bicycle. The bicycle, by the way, that he lives to ride. The same bicycle that he can fly through the air 10 feet high. The bicycle that he can yank up into the air and land going backwards. Welcome to being a parent of a teenager.

It was 9:30 and getting dark. I knew that if we didn't get moving we wouldn't find a place to watch the show. Knowing if I got mad it would just stiffen his resolve, I calmly listed my reasons why I wanted him to back down. Eventually he seemed to realize that we weren't going to let him sit alone in the car in a strange neighborhood until midnight. We reached a compromise when he decided that he might be willing to watch the show from a hill somewhere away from the crowds. Once he got on his bike he was so interested in showing off that he didn't seem to mind where we went. We ended up on some uncrowded land in front of a construction site by the railroad tracks right on Ruston Way. The fireworks were nice for spectator sport but I don't think I will bother for another 5 years.

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