Category Archives: On Integrating Word and Image

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

Up and Running!

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Mudding bread ovens in Zuni

The mud is dry, the dust has settled, the links have been checked twice (remember, though: imperfection is vitality). The updated digital Betsy is here, as multilayered, quirky, and internally referential as its author.

Check out the Gallery, with examples of my current painting series. It’s not a sales gallery–for that you’ll find a link to Matteucci Galleries in Santa Fe–it’s a group of my favorites. You may find paintings you own; you tend to buy the ones I like best!

Enjoy the “Boots” photo series—you’ve seen a few in my posts. And since I have a more or less equal appreciation of boots and books, look for “Stories,” which features complete short stories published in Fantasy and Science Fiction and Realms of Fantasy. I had fun digging through years of daybooks and art files for illustrations.

Note that if you haven’t explored the portals to art-and-writing process you may enjoy that rich wilderness. You’ll find updates there as well.

Thank you for your patience, and enjoy! I’ll return to hike entries soon, I promise. Now where’s my paintbrush?

 

 

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

Horned Toad Hatch

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Our horned toads—the Desert Short-Horned Lizard—give live birth. Or rather, they incubate shell-less eggs in their bodies, and give birth to a litter of six to thirty-one (thirty-one!) infants still in their amnions, little marbles that break open into horned toads ready to run.

On Sandia Crest I came upon what must have been a recent birth, a fat adult with a salmon-colored chin and a handful of babies the size of bumblebees.

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

Agua Viva

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It poured.

I’d never seen live water on Red Mesa before. High up it was milky, coming off the pale-yellow-to-gray sands and clays; below it was a rich red, thick with mud. We couldn’t get any wetter, so we waded right through the freshets that were neither sun-hot nor rain-cold but somewhere in between.

On the highway home, just east of the Ojito road, an arroyo roared down like ocean waves. Astonishing.

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

Star Person

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We went up the stony wash that is westernmost of the Syncline drainages, beautiful from the cliffs above. Petroglyphs on its water-scrubbed sides: a symmetrical spiral in dark desert varnish, and a pale Star Person almost erased by flashfloods. There was still a skim of water running down the linked pools.

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

Vibes y Víbora

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Foothills of the Nacimientos: a Western Diamondback was stretched in the morning sun. It coiled and cocked only when I shouted for the other hikers. Snakes are deaf, so it must have felt the vibration of my shout.

Posed, rigid, it never moved. John the fiddler said, “It’s a musical clef.”

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

Dancing in Two Worlds

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In the Guadalupe Box area of the Jemez Mountains, on a boulder fallen from the sheer rhyolite cliffs, the five-foot-tall petroglyph of an eagle dancer.

Compared to the most ancient spirals and suns the work looks recent, but “recent” is relative: These mesas were refuges for the Pueblos when, ten years after their successful 1680 revolt, the conquistadores marched north from El Paso to retake New Spain.

Smudged drawing from my pocket notes. Those feet: one human, one an eagle’s.

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