I spent 4 days working on a portrait of my son. Sue acted as my chief consultant, checking on it twice a day as she visited out in my studio / shop. Towards the end I sensed there were problems but couldn’t see them. I was taking breaks at night, hoping I’d see clearly in the morning but that didn’t work.
Back in the day I’d look at ‘from life’ paintings in a mirror, but now I take a photo and layer the photo on top of my photo reference. I reduce opacity of the painting layer and see all the errors. I had the chin way to short, the lips too high, both eyes were wrong for various reasons: Pupils were too large, left eye was too wide, right eyelid was too thick. The nose wasn’t tilted enough, lips were tilted too much, forehead was too tall and hair was too long. Other than that it was quite close.
Here are some notes I made for todays corrections:
make darker on left forehead
Eyelid too thick right
Correct lip tilt
Refine curve on cheek wrinkle right side
Mustache, left more contrast
Left lip darker
Define forehead muscles
Rite hairline curves in more
Tilt of nose is off
Right mustache too dark
Squint!!
I texted the painting to Craig and Jamie. They both said the eyes were wrong. Craig thought it couldn’t be fixed. He clearly doesn’t paint in oils. The first major change I made was to move the lips down a quarter inch. To get them to move I had to scrub them down to white gesso with solvent and then repaint in the right place. This was after agonizing over them for hours: refining the wrinkles, the shading, the hue, the chroma, the dark lip line, the shadow under the lip on the chin. And all in the wrong place, too close to the nose.
As I got closer to a likeness it began to breath. I’d make a few small corrections to the lips, nose or eyes and I’d hear him say: “Yeah dad, that’s it, you got it right there.” Hearing these imaginary conversations in my mind made me smile and helped the work continue. Which was incredibly frustrating at times. If this sounds like I’m crazy, hearing voices in my head. I probably am, or maybe it was the turpentine fumes. Anyway, what happens in the studio stays in the studio. No one reads this damn blog anyway. Except future me.
During the worst of it I questioned not only my skill, but my sanity in even trying something so far above my pay grade. I’m a total hack of a painter. Don’t have a clue how to use color correctly. I knew his beard was brown hair on tan skin, but those colors were intolerably boring. When I tried green though, it sparkled.
Sue: “Why do you use such stupid color? His beard isn’t green?”
Me: “I’m a retard! If you took as much acid back in the day you’d paint crazy too”
Sue: “You could tone it down a little. You have the skill to do that. I see it in your pencil work. You should work more in pencil, those are awesome!”
Me: “But I like color!”
We dropped by Clint’s after our walk today. He knew something was going on when I walked in with my wet painting carrier box.
“Got a new painting to show you.”
“Oh, you painted me! That’s not bad.”
I looked over at Rose who was bouncing off the walls.
“Hey Rose! Do you know who this is?”
Her attention slowly wandered over to me and the painting I was holding under the light. Her face opened up in wonder, her mouth forming an “O” shape.
“Daddy! You painted my daddy!!”
She reminded me of a dog who is super excited to see you. Tail wagging furiously, jumping up and down. But in a 4 year old human kind of way.
A small starved part of me wants to share it on social media, see how many likes I can get. I’ve been off FB and Insta for months now and don’t miss it at all. When I think about likes in the abstract, what are they really? Someone sees your work on a screen and presses a heart button. How is that real in any meaningful way?
Compare that to the huge smile on my son’s face, and the excitement of my grand daughter, and Jamie saying “Wow, that’s a huge improvement on the one you texted me!”
As I worked longer and longer on it I became increasingly sure that I had a likeness, that it was truly him I’d created with my brushes, oils and turpentine. Sure, the colors are all wrong, some would call it a train wreck. But there is something real there, bad colors and all. It didn’t exist before I put paint to canvas, and at the end of the day that’s a good day of work.
I especially like how I’ve carved out an attitude that allows me to work on stuff that is totally pointless, doesn’t have a chance of ever selling and is not intended to.
I’ll post it later. I like the purity of English. Van Gogh would write letters to his brother about his paintings. He didn’t need photos to express his feelings and neither do I.
And now is later. Here is Rose, his daughter:
Rose
And this is Olivia, my daughter’s daughter:
I also painted his chickens and his dog. They can be found over in my portraits gallery on my hand built website.
This is not a story about painting, climbing, or family. Rather this is a story about an 11 year old kid, new to town, on his first day in a new school. His dad had got a new job. All his friends were left behind 30 miles west.
As he stood there bewildered by the new buildings, wondering which way to go, a small voice popped up beside him: “Hey there, are you new here?”.
The new kid was me, and Ted became my first friend in town. 59 years later we’re still friends through thick and thin. We got in so much trouble in high school, it was almost a right of passage to break as many laws as possible. We weren’t criminals or anything, we had our morals and sense of honor…but if a law didn’t make sense, was it really even a law?
If you lived thorough those times I need say no more. But we were there for each other through boy scouts, our first crushes, girlfriends and the inevitable heartbreaks. They were wild times but we soldiered through together.
He was there when I first picked up a guitar. He was in a band that played gigs around town, and I was invited to practices. A gang of 5 of us had our own garage band complete with some cute girls who liked our sound and the beer. His band later won a competition in Seattle and toured Europe.
I was working full-time then but still joined the band at house parties as the harp player. We jammed today for an hour, playing both old and new songs. It’s hard for me to remember the old harp riffs because I play them so seldom.
Going back to 1966 he and I and a few other friends played ping pong downstairs at my folk’s house. If you have kids, get them a ping pong table! It’s safe harmless fun and endlessly entertaining to kids of all ages. Plus it keeps them off the streets.
My dad took Ted and I on some hikes in high school, and we continued hiking afterward. Ted took this photo of me and Sue hiking and being silly in 1980:
After jamming today we wheeled his table outside and played for another couple hours. He raised his kids with a table and has some chops, especially considering he only plays every few months. Though I play up to 3 times a week, he still had me running around the table. I could not let my guard down at all or he’d be on me.
I finally painted my second grand child. I did my sons kid almost a year ago and finally got a good photo from which to paint my daughter’s kid. They are going to see it tomorrow. I hung it on the wall by the first portrait. I hope they like it. I look at it and see problems. But everyone else (Sue, Ted, Carol) all think it’s great and problem free. I’ve already spent 4 days on it and it’s in danger of getting overworked.
We’ve had the usual bout of spring colds. It’s hardest on Lisa as she is stuck so far from help. She drove up here while Levi had a fever. Nothing could make him happy and being unable to talk yet all he could do was make annoying Ahh, Ahh sounds. It was driving us all crazy but she was on day 4 of it and at wits end. Sue was right there with her. She gets on the same wavelength and the two of them are drama queens.
I played ping pong Wednesday and we had a great crowd. Randy and Bob showed up which would have been plenty, but then Lamson and his friend showed up. Lamson is the guy I took a lesson from. According to Kenny Lamson used to clean up at regional tournaments. Seeing him at our local gym was like a visit from royalty. His forehand smash is a thing of beauty. The movement of his arm as he flows through the punch reminds me of how Tiger Woods swings a golf club.
I need to work out and then start in on a portrait of Clint. He sat for me once before he had kids, but I’m afraid that window has closed. Many of my artist heros including Richard Schmid work from photos when necessary. And both of my grandkid paintings were definitely done from photos. 3 year olds don’t sit and neither do solo parents babysitting two kids under 4 years old.
I was 20 feet up the cliff and had no protection. I’d seen the bolt from ground and knew the hangar had been removed. What I didn’t know was it had been removed the previous fall and was now severely rusted. I attached the spare hangar from my little pouch and screwed down the nut, but because of the rust it cross threaded.
My power was fading fast as I frantically looked around for protection. I saw a crack over to the right that might take a small nut. I carefully weighted the cross threaded hangar, using it as a handhold while I tried to place the nut.
The rusty nut popped off the bolt. Time slowed down and I just had time to realize I was airborne with a useless rope coiling below. I fell 15 feet and hit the sloping ground at the base of the 5.9 route called The Knobs. It’s to the left of “A Crack” and the 5.4 gully route at the Peshastin Pinnacles.
Because of the slope my catlike landing posture was for naught and I broke my damn ankle. Will offered his shoulder as we hobbled down to the car half a mile away. The ER doctor loaded me up with pain killers and I caught a Greyhound to Tacoma. Will, Paul and Lemon had decided to continue the weekend of climbing. It was our first weekend of the year and I’d gotten overconfident. Sue wasn’t answering, probably at work, so dad drove half an hour up to the bus station and taxied me to our apartment.
Sue answered the door, shocked to see me home early from the weekend. She was wearing a cast on her forearm from wrist surgery a week before. She’d tried to crawl through an open window to clandestinely visit a friend. It broke, and she severed a tendon.
“Why are you home early? Oh no, you’re on crutches…what’s wrong with your ankle, what happened!”
A week later, we had just pedaled around Vashon Island. At the ferry, the dock worker noticed the plaster casts on Sue’s wrist and my ankle and told us we should stop fighting. Halfway across Puget Sound we heard a boom and saw the smoke cloud when Mount St. Helens blew up. That was May 18, 1980.
Sue and me 1980
My ankle has never been the same, but it is usually just an annoyance, not a deal breaker. However, at Wednesday ping pong I was playing Randy and Bob. They are tournament level players and I get severely worked when I play them. Normally I love the challenge. They wipe the floor with me but I put up a brave fight and it’s a ton of fun. But my ankle started twinging with severe pain.
I bailed early but my suffering wasn’t over. I still had to walk a mile back to the house. Sue was out helping her 98 year old mom at the hospital. Limping home with my ankle getting worse and worse was ugly. Now I’ve been sitting on the couch for 2 full days hoping it will heal up. Without exercise my weight has ballooned up to 175. When I’m healthy I was already struggling to get under 170 so it’s frustrating not being able to work out.
It’s Monday and I’m able to walk slowly around the house without pain. There are occasional minor twinges of pain but it’s generally much better. I was able to climb at the gym Friday while loaded up on Ibuprofen so that’s a plus.
It’s possible that the Prednisone of the last 15 months has been masking the ankle inflammation. And now that I’ve been off the drug for a full month my ankle is alerting me to the fact that I have a problem. I do get occasional twinges of pain in my knees and I still have a few lingering side effects from the drug. I’ve read that it can take more than a month to “get back” after quitting cold turkey. Glad to report that I just rode my Schwinn Aerodyne for 50 minutes. I had the rear of my foot on the pedal without any pain.
On a side note, I just de-activated Instagram and Facebook for a while…needed a break from the doom scroll syndrome. So much of Social Media is a bad joke these days. Jeez.
Newspapers
I subscribe to the New York Times. It’s important to support Journalism…especially when it’s under attack both from the government and dropping circulation numbers. Occasionally I see something worthy and feel like writing a letter to the editor, or, as they call it now: adding a comment. Today they had a great article about aging and I was prompted to submit a comment, shown below:
Nice article about aging! Everyone gets a chance to be young and pretty. If you’re lucky, you get a chance to be old and wrinkled. That’s me now at 70. Young people are so pretty. They’re like fresh roses, they sparkle.
I never wanted to be this old…couldn’t imagine it when I was young. Every year it seems like more is taken from me. I’ve had a few annoying diseases come and go, always taking something. Lost my hearing in one ear, for example. And Long Covid wasn’t pretty. Unlike many people I know, I’m blessed with a lovely woman, my long suffering wife, plus two nearby kids and 4 grandkids. I shouldn’t complain, but it’s hard not to look back at who I used to be as a young man.
I still do the activities of my youth, but I can’t do them as hard, or as long, or as often. Thankfully I can still rock climb, both at the gym and outside in places like Yosemite. And I treasure my back up activities like landscape painting, for when I need something less active. The years are winding down for sure. None of us get out of here alive. Carpe diem!
If you know me in person, you’ll know that I got Covid for the second time in April of 2023. I got it while leading 5.10 splitters at Indian Creek. I was in such good shape that I thought it was just sore knees from all the hiking.
I drove home OK but landed on the couch in full blown Covid for a week. Sue caught it and we sat on opposite ends of the couch with flu like symptoms: weakness, bronchitis. Mine were compounded with sore joints to the point where I could barely walk and sleeping was painful due to the sore neck, shoulders, hips and knees.
After a week on the couch the flu like symptoms went away but the joint pain lingered and would flare up and down. At that time I thought of it as Long Covid, partly because the exact same symptoms happened in 2020, but they all went away in a week. Here is a longer version of my Long Covid and Poly Myalgia Rheumatica (PMR) story. The short version is that I suffered with increasingly bad joint pain until August when I went to the ER. A nine day course of Prednisone cured it overnight, but then it came back.
Here is my Prednisone taper schedule:
August 8, 2023 started 15mg daily
September 19, 2023 started 10mg daily
October 20 start 9mg daily
Nov 20 start 8mg daily
Dec 20 start 7mg daily
Jan 20 start 6mg daily
February 20 started 5mg daily
March 20 start 4mg daily
April 30 started 3mg daily – Just after returning Indian Creek
October 1 , 2024 decreased from 3 mg to 2 mg. Thigh cramps, knee collapsed hiking. May need to go up to 5mg?
October 5, went back to 3. Knee, hips even finger cramps were bad
October 12, 2024 went back up to 4mg, all symptoms went away
December 16 went to 3.5mg/day. I’d forgot a morning dose until 4pm with no problems. Was starting to think I was healed.
December 20, 2024 went to zero with no side effects, not even a headache. That’s after 15 months on Prednisone.
January 4, 15 days without drugs. As mentioned above, my knee pain has returned, but it’s manageable. Hips and shoulders tweak now and then…but very short duration.
When the prednisone my doctor gave me almost miraculously vanquished the paralyzing joint pain I was suffering from, I was hooked.
At first, I didn’t care that I had to take a second drug (alendronate, brand name Fosamax), to slow or prevent osteoporosis, one of the dreaded side effects of prednisone. But I would learn there were other drawbacks.
Prednisone can wreak uncontrollable havoc on one’s central nervous system, leaving some users feeling like a zombie. It can also cause difficulty sleeping, problems focusing, decreased mental acuity, weight gain, lowered sex drive and, not surprisingly as a result of all the above, depression. “High doses for long periods of time can cause muscle weakness, drops in blood sugar levels, higher susceptibility to infection and even cataracts,” explained my Berkeley rheumatologist, Dr. Brian Kaye of the Sutter East Bay Medical Foundation, who was treating me for the autoimmune dysfunction polymyalgia rheumatica.
This is Monday, December 23, 2024. Last Friday I’d been on 3.5mg of Prednisone a day for a week, down from 4 a day since February. My sore joint symptoms were completely gone, unlike before (see below) when I’d try’d to taper down on the dose. The online forums about PMR are full of people warning of the dangers of tapering too fast.
They talk about tapering by a quarter of a milligram. Do they even make pills that small? Anyway, the side effects of Prednisone are serious and I was willing to gamble that I no longer needed the drug. Friday December 20 was my last dose as I quit cold turkey.
There have been zero withdrawal symptoms. On the plus side, I’m sleeping better…my dreams are full of color. The side effects are quickly fading. My joints feel normal for my age. The huge crash of prednisone withdrawal is a no show. I had read that the body makes 5mg of natural prednisone (cortisol) every day. But taking prednisone suppresses that natural production.
I was worried that my body couldn’t get up to speed after 15 months on that awful drug. But so far I seem fine.
My first attempt to taper off ten months in
I went below 4 during the summer, down to 3mg a day. Gradually my thighs started aching. But not regularly. Chris and I hiked up to Lookout Point and climbed Cloud Flare. I was strong and had no pain. But on the way down my right thigh was cramping. Halfway down I felt a stab of pain and collapsed into some boulders as it completely gave out. I very nearly broke my leg as I’d fallen into a sort of trap between large boulders.
Chris, 50 feet ahead, heard the commotion and offered to come up.
“You ok?”
“My knee just gave out”
“Oh no, shall I come up?”
“No, I’ll come down to you. It still works, it just hurts.”
Chris: Why don’t you give me the 70 meter rope? We’re going down hill.
Me: No, you already have the rack of hardware.
Chris: But you might fall again, and you’re going so slow, just give me the rope.
Me: I hate to make you do it, but something is wrong, I guess you’d better. This makes me feel really old. I hope my climbing days aren’t over. I knew it would happen some day.
The next time my knee went out it was the left knee. With the cramping pattern switching knees, I realized it was probably my Long Covid PMR disease. I bumped my Prednisone dose back up to 4mg a day and within a few days all my pain went away.
After a few months I noticed that I wasn’t cramping up in the mornings when I was 24 hours out from my last pill. One day I forgot my morning pills and was still pain free at 4PM. It appeared that the disease was slowly fading away. In August of 2023 my Reumatologist doctor had told me it could be as long as two years, and I was 5 months short of that. Eighteen months of joint aches, fifteen months on Prednisone.
A few weeks ago I cut my dose down to 3.5mg/day. After two weeks of that with no adverse symptoms, feeling great…other than Prednisone side effects…I decided to take a chance and quit cold turkey on December 20. If it blew up on me, I had a brand new refill of Prednisone to fall back on.
But here I am, seven days out feeling fine. I have some very minor stiffness in my knees, but I’m not sure it’s the disease. It might just be old age. And it goes away when I start moving. It might be early days. I can imagine a scenario where the disease is so used to being subdued by Prednisone that it is hiding, still scared of the big bad drug. But it will eventually peek out the door and realize all the guards have left and the palace is wide open and unprotected.
A brief diversion for the holidays
As I do every year since the grandkids were born, I spent 3 weeks practicing Christmas Carols for the family sing along Xmas eve. While the songs are fun to sing and I enjoy the process of mastering them, it feels silly to perform them once, and then be done for another year.
Normally I master a song and sing it for months or years. I need to reach out to Dave L. He was part of our Guitarbecue group while Fletch was in town. Last year he invited me to perform with his new group at the senior center where he plays every Thursday. That would give me more satisfaction than my one family sing along.
Back in the day my mom, dad and my sister would play for hours, maybe days during the holidays. Me and my cousin would sit on either side of our 99 year old grandma, who was mostly blind from cataracts. She would hold the sheet music and I’d sight read the music on my 30 year old chromatic harmonica. My cousin would sing in her lovely stage trained soprano voice. All the aunts, uncles and cousins sang. No one worried about perfect pitch to make an instagram moment. Those were beautiful decades.
In the absence of drawing, music and writing is my only creative outlet. What the hell is up with my art? It vanished again.
December 31, eleven days since I quit Prednisone cold turkey. I’m starting to get some stiff joints in my knees and ankles. Basically anywhere there has been injuries or past inflammation due to overuse or tendonitis is an easy target for the disease to re-establish some beachheads.
I haven’t been too active other than rolling some logs on Lisa’s new property and helping Clint on his 2 inch lift for his Tacoma. He put Bilstein 5160s on the front and rear, including the new leaf springs for a 2 inch lift. It took us two days, one for the front, and one for the rear. I didn’t do much other than sit around and advise on safety aspects. He doesn’t have much time with jack stands or floor jacks. Most guys trust their jack stands completely, but I like to back up everything. I put one foot cubes of wood beside the jack stands. We sat one end of the truck on those backed up jack stands then used my floor jack as needed to lift axles and lower control arms.
We had both watched videos, and I even made a pdf of screenshots with torque settings. But in the end we did a lot of head scratching and wild guesses: “Well, that didn’t work!” Our first front wheel took 5 hours. When we did the other side, in the dark, in the rain…it took 90 minutes. We couldn’t believe how much we’d improved. A couple key tools were a set of ratcheting box end wrenches, from 12 to 17mm, and a 3 foot crowbar. That was critical for aligning the leaf springs bolt holes. Those things are under tremendous pressure and don’t cooperate when you try to bend them. I gladly let him do all the wrenching. Occasionally I’d turn a nut, but it was his project and I was happy to be his assistant. There were numerous times where he really needed a second hand.
I played ping pong twice last week and was fine. Tomorrow might be harder with my stiffening knees. I’m fully expecting a month of suffering as my adrenaline gland emerges from Prednisone caused hibernation. They say it makes 5mg of cortisol a day naturally. Which is basically equal to 5 of P. But it hasn’t needed to in 15 months and they say it can take up to a month to get up to speed.
Sue and I had a great day today. I took ibuprofen before ping pong. She was playing strongly, jumping around like a teenager. A couple of times I was behind her and watched her line up on the ball and smash it down the table. She can’t believe how much better she has become lately. I reminded her that it’s all about practice. You will inevitably get better as you do it on the regular.
Later we came home and read books on the couch. She scratched my back while I massaged her foot. It was a pretty wild New Years eve.
It’s January 2, thirteen days off Prednisone. My achy joints have returned as expected. Getting up off the couch is painful. It seems better in the morning, and better when I exercise. I played well at Ping Pong today. We had 4 tables going, that is 16 people. I’m usually one of the top players there, everyone knows and respects my serves. But today there were two 30 year olds and they were in the Bob and Randy category. The one guy was maybe Randy’s equal. His serve was wicked! He could take my most devious serve or spinny return and slam it back with a wild top spin. He was treating my best work like high slow floaters. It’s super fun to play against hard guys because they bring out my best game. I still lose to their superior skill, but I go down with a smile.
Now it’s January 6 and my knees are the only thing missing Prednisone. They ache when I do deep knee bends and I get little random stabs of pain under the knee caps. It’s quite painful, I took Ibuprofen since I’m going climbing this morning. This disease is still around, but I will gladly tolerate some sore knees to be drug free.
This could have been so much worse. Be interesting to see how I am going forward.
