Happy Fourth

          Happy Fourth of July. Let’s do drones instead of fireworks this year. Who needs another forest fire?

A few days ago, I spent an hour watching a crew from our electric company take down a large tree from the yard across the street. It had grown so much it was interfering with the power lines from the street. Or maybe the home owners simply wanted it down for their own reason. Anyway, it was a fascinating project. But it also looked to me like there was a tremendous potential for tragedy in such a job. One guy is in the power seat lopping off all the branches while another is on the ground below him, sharpening teeth on a second power saw. Branches are flying all over the place, hitting the power lines, barely missing the second worker on the ground. The upper guy is taking off the smaller branches with a little saw on a long arm, and a big saw for the larger branches and the trunk. After he’s finished with the branches, he powers up to the top, ties a rope around it, has the ground guy pull on the rope as the top guy cuts through the top. Then he moves down the trunk, cutting off five-foot chunks and shoving them in safe directions on the ground. Lots of room for tragedy. I wonder how long these guys can do this work before they kill themselves.

Years and years ago I got an idea for a painting technique (portraits, not houses). I had been working with the graphics on my computer. When I enlarge a picture to work with the fatbits, the pixels, all semblance of the original subject disappears into a random pattern of different colored dots. Nothing is recognizable until I pull it back into a normal perspective. I thought about doing a painting on a very large canvas, with the spots of color in an unrecognizable pattern from a normal distance of about ten feet. From there it would look like an abstract painting. In a gallery, this large canvas could be hung on one wall of a long, narrow room, and on the opposite wall, maybe a hundred feet away, there would be a large curtained mirror. The viewer would then be instructed to stand adjacent to the painting, face the other wall, then press a button that would open the curtain, showing him the painting at the proper distance as seen in the mirror. And there, suddenly, would be the real painting. The more I think about it, the more I realize it probably wouldn’t work. But if it did, wouldn’t that be exciting?