Deer oil painting

I started this oil painting of a deer in the woods several months ago, and got overwhelmed by the thought of trying to paint all that green and make it look like something other than just a stippled wash. I have decided to give it a go again, but I may have to lighten the background to allow a little sky to show through.

This is the original that I am working from:

abstract landscape

I painted this little landscape a few weeks ago, and have been looking at it for a while, trying to decide how to proceed. After staring at it for a while, I have decided that it is done, and any further tinkering would probably ruin it.

It is 8 x 8 inches, oil on canvas.

Dog Show

It wasn't a particularly creative weekend, but it was an enjoyable one. We spent three days at the dog show with our borzoi. She won Best of Breed each day. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that she was the only borzoi in the show - no competition means that she automatically gets best in breed. She didn't win any prizes and the group level, so she didn't get any points for this show. It was her first show, though, so it was good practice for both of us. Here she is standing pretty.

Costa Rica Day eight

I managed to snap a picture of this spider web in the early morning sunlight just before we left the hotel. Luckily nobody walked into it.Our last full day in Costa Rica was spent travelling back to San Jose. We stopped at a road-side market where they had mountains of watermelons and other fresh fruit


We also stopped in Sarchi, which is a small town that had a few stores offering locally crafted artworks. This is a picture of the local breast screening clinic. Although the country is very poor, they have a well-established public health care system.
We stayed in a nice hotel in downtown San Jose, and went out for a festival supper at a local restaurant where there was a performance by local dancers demonstrating the traditional dances. We were all pretty tired, and since we had to get up at 4:00 am to make it to the airport in time for our flight, we returned to the hotel and bed as soon as the performance was over.

It was a fascinating trip, but everyone was grateful to return home.

Costa Rica Day Seven

We visited Manuel Antonio National Park, which is a tiny little park on the coast. It was less than a quarter section of land, but home to howler monkeys,



sloths,


and lots of lizards


The park was also home to one of only two known troupes of spider monkeys in central america, although we didn't see them. After trekking though the forest, we spent the afternoon at one of several beaches. These ones didn't have rip tides and were quite safe for swimming. We had a bit of time to just lay on the beach under the palm trees and enjoy the heat and the view.

These orange-cheeked parakeets were everywhere, eating the fruit of the trees around our hotel.

Costa Rica Day Six

We left Monteverde the next morning, and headed toward the coast. Once again the road was a narrow gravel track, winding along the ridge of the mountains, with a steep drop only inches from the bus tires. The terrain got drier as we progressed toward the ocean, because climate change is causing desertification of this once-lush tropical area.


There were coffee plantations all along the road, planted on the steep sides of the dry hills. Our first stop that day was at the Tarcoles river. The bus stopped and let everyone off on one side of the bridge, to let everyone walk to the other side and to stop in the middle to look a the wild crocodiles in the river below.

These suckers were HUGE, basking in the sun and waiting for some tasty morsel to wander from safety. Carlos said that when he first started researching bird numbers, he was collecting data in Carara National Park, which is right beside the river. He had a few close encounters with these crocs by accidentally blundering into their nesting area.
Once across the river, we climbed back into the bus for the very short trip to the park entrance. Carara National Park was originally owned by a man who bought the area so he could capture wild macaws and export them to the US for sale. That is now illegal, and the park is a protected area where the macaws nest and are trying to replenish their numbers. The soil is very shallow, so trees have huge buttressed trunks that help them stay upright.

There are lots of creepy crawlies in the undergrowth...
and some spectacular flowers:

Carlos showed us a camera he had set up with a motion detector to take pictures of the baby macaws in the nest in the hollow in this tree (remember I mentioned he was an Ornithologist and studied local birds when he wasn't leading tours):

After our tour through the park, we headed off to our hotel. We passed through huge palm oil plantations. This was not a native tree, but the climate is perfect to grow these palms, and the government is exploring ways of developing this industry. It seems quite destructive to the natural environment, but at least it is green.

The hotel for the next couple of nights was right on the ocean, by this beautiful beach. There were no other people on the beach, except for the hotel lifeguards, so we had it all to ourselves. The water was rather dangerous, because of the powerful rip tides, and the hotel had a few patrons who went swimming in the dark and died a couple of years ago, so they were pretty cautious about letting us swim in the water. The lifeguards made sure that nobody went in any deeper than mid-thighs. We arrived early enough to get in an hour of wading (and getting washed into the shore by the huge and powerful waves) before dark.

We also had a chance to watch the pelicans flying in formation along the top of the waves, again and again as the tide was coming in.

Cost Rica Day Five

We started the day in Monteverde by planting trees to help built a shelter belt to stop the mountain from washing away in the rainy season. Each student got a tree and we found holes already dug in the hillside where we could plant our trees.

This is my little tree:
It is a tree related to a Lychee that is fast growing and will create a little forest of trees in no time.

The next activity was a walk through the cloud forest at the top of the great divide. This forest was a true jungle, and remains shrouded in cloud most of the time (hence the name). It doesn't have to rain much, because the plants can get enough moisture just from the ever-present mist.
I managed to snap a photo of this little guy hiding in the trees, waiting for the people to leave so he could continue to build his nest. Her nest? I'm not sure what kind of bird it is, or whether it is a female or a male, but it was only about the size of a canary.
and some picture of ferns just opening:
Then in the afternoon we went walking through the jungle on the suspended bridges:

I hate these things, and I had to just look straight ahead and walk quickly to get across all nine of them. The bridges are various lengths and heights, but all of them were too high and too long for me. Of course, I can't claim credit for this shot from the middle of one of the bridges:

but the scenery was incredible, and the walk on land parts of the trail was worth daring the bridges. There were a lot of people ziplining, but the zipline is only about the challenge of flying through the air, and it isn't possible to see anything of the jungle, so it didn't appeal to me at all. I was walking along, thinking about the tragedy of the loss of rain forest, and how few animals we had seen on the trip so far, and a little gecko scurried across my path, as if to remind me that they were there, they just chose not to show themselves.

We returned to the hotel for lunch, and then went to shop in the tiny town of Monteverde for a few hours before dark. The town is very small, and just made up of a few small shops, some hotels and a bank, but the bank had armed security guards and a special entrance that trapped each person as they walked through the double doors. Our bank cards still didn't work, even though the bank looked sophisticated enough.

Angel Raphael came to the hotel after supper for some more dance lessons, but everyone was so tired that they all retired early.