Category Archives: On Creativity

On Creativity, On Illustration, On Speculative Fiction, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Art Show

Leave a comment
Imaginary Pueblos, by Betsy James

One of the liabilities of an oversized right brain is less room for the left brain. In my busy multiverse of painting, writing, teaching, and hiking, that’s a real issue at times.

I have four paintings in the Albuquerque Museum’s annual ArtsThrive show and sale—this is my seventh year—and I should have sent you the links a couple of weeks ago:

https://albuquerquemuseumfoundation.org/artsthrive/

https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/albuquerque-museum-foundation/artsthrive-art-exhibition-benefit-timed-auction-5450

Enter my name in the top right of the second link. And if you live in ‘Burque, the show’s up until November 8.

There! Whew.

On Creativity, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Two Joys

3 Comments

Two-track and Red Star, Betsy James

One: two-tracks, the dusty, lonely roads that follow the contours of the West. The one above reminds me of a long-ago hike taken from the low road to Zuni.

Two: hiking high and wild, to beat the heat and get up where breathing is a pleasure. Lately that has meant the Jemez Mountains, raked over by wildfires but springing up green with the monsoon rains. We just missed the wild raspberries: the bears got there first.

On Creativity, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Obsidian Ridge

5 Comments

Shining and blackest black: the obsidian of the Jemez Mountains at one of its prehistoric sources.

The closest road had been closed for years—at least since the Las Conchas fire in 2011—and was blocked  by the enormous trunks of dozens of burned and wind-fallen Ponderosas. We hiked the dusty three miles in.

For thousands of years, prehistoric miners knocked down big  cobbles of obsidian into pieces more easily carried to distant pueblos, where they would be knapped into knives, scrapers, projectile points. What is left is debitage; whole acres of mesa glitter with a pavement of black glass.

On Creativity, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Corvid. Yes, you read that right.

5 Comments

A local group, “Art as Antibodies” asked for pieces about how we’re coping with the Covid lockdown. I sent a  painting of the wide and windy desert, which is how—and where—I cope. Not covidy enough, they said. So I sent a corvid.

Slot canyons are spooky, mysterious, intimate. Ravens nest along the rim. When you emerge from the dark strictures of a slot canyon you feel reborn.

On Creativity, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Ochres

1 Comment

 

Beautiful hiking. Winter has lost its bite, but it’s still too cool for snakes. We crawled all over a Triassic-Jurassic hillside full of red and yellow ochre. We’ll take some to our Zuni friend Tim Edaakie, a traditional potter:

https://sarweb.org/iarc/native-american-artist-fellowships/2019-artists/timothy-edaakie/