06/29/2005: "Guests arriving / when bears attack!"

Well, my house guests are set to arrive tonight at 10:00pm and I'm very excited. Unfortunately, because I've been under the weather the last couple of days, I didn't get any house cleaning done! So, after work tonight I have 3 1/2 to do a load of dishes, sweep and mop the floors, vacuum the entire house including the stairs, dust, wash the bedding for the guest rooms, and go shopping for supplies!

I hope they have a good visit, they aren't keen on hiking near any bears, I was going to tell them how rare bear attacks are but then there was the recent death of an Anchorage couple on a rafting trip a couple days ago reminded me of the couple killed two summers ago in katmai. Scary shit, I mean, the couple in Katmai were eating in their tent, but this most recent couple had a clean camp site and food stored in bear proof containers. The photo from the recent campsite reminds me of one of Dio's pinhead paintings. Only depressing.

What else? Most of the paintings are practically finished with no dramatic changes in the future for any of the pieces, though all the pink in the one of the woman sleeping with her fiddle, bothers me for some reason I can't put my finger on. I may feel compelled to dramatically alter it but again, I could be just making it worse.

Also, I'm going to be registering tonight for the "Only Fools Run at Midnight" charity race. We get glow in the dark t-shirts and everyone wears costumes. I'm going as agent Sydney Bristow from Alias! I have a hot pink wig and everything...

Replies: 4 Comments

on Thursday, June 30th, elderberrystudio2000@yahoo.com">Jackie Madsen said

E: Wow - I had read the articles, but the Anchorage paper didn't have the photo of the camp site. It is eerie looking. A tragedy for all involved: bear and humans. I mean - bears are predators. Big ones. With sharp teeth, long claws, and outweigh people by 3:1, right? Not that these folks were doing anything wrong...it was a freak attack. But kinda like the girl who got killed by the shark off the coast of Florida this week...I don't know why the bears should deserve to die because they did what bears do naturally. Maybe if the couple had taken a Chihuahua along, it would have alerted them to the bear.

Soo...about your painting. I like the sleeping fiddler. Perhaps what is 'lacking' is a bit more detail in the background. It seems to be mostly blocks of color, whereas in your other paintings, you have details of the grass, the fireweed, or other object in the foreground. But the composition doesn't bother me ... it has a surrealist feel to it!

on Thursday, June 30th, Elise said

I know, it's very tragic all around. I know the man who was killed 2 summers ago was in love with bears and had said that if he got eaten he didn't want any retribution taken against the bear that did it, but the ended up shooting the bear anyway.
:(
I changed the link for that article because I didn't realize that the juneau empire was making people register now to read their archives (lame) now it links to the article in the Anchorage Daily News, which is long and very sad: http://www.adn.com/front/story/4110831p-4127072c.html

Recently there has been this big debate here over whether or not they should kill this black wolf near the glacier because it killed someone's puppy that was off its leash *and* chased after the wolf agressively barking at it. I mean, when you live (or play) in a wilderness area you have to expect a certain amount of wilderness. If I ever got killed by a wild animal I'd hope they'd let it live but that's not the way they do things. Something about animals getting a taste for human blood makes them more likely to attack humans as prey again.

As for the painting, perhaps that is the problem, the mountains, trees, etc. are very flat, and the woman appears to be floating in the grass. Thanks for the insight!

Also, doesn't the shadow of the guy taking the photo from the camp site remind you of Dios pinhead paintings?

on Friday, July 1st, Amy said

Did you also read about the bear that charged two Fish & Game guys about two weeks ago? It was in Sunday's Empire. They weren't sure why, thought maybe they had woken him up.

on Friday, July 1st, Elise said

No Amy, I hadn't read that but thanks for letting me know. I'll look it up.
:confused: