IdyllopusPress Presents

I wasn’t at the Variety Playhouse yesterday, where Marty was playing, but I’m still going to try to provide a basic description of the scene, via his telling of it.
Not only was I not at the Variety Playhouse, I didn’t do my yoga yesterday. It’s the first time in the nearly seven weeks since [...]

Knowing that everything is just as it should be, with perfectly centered yogi (neophyte) breath I can direct you to this remarkable photo (I’m not kidding, I wish I’d shot this so I could do a digital painting of it)

of this remarkable woman

who, in these photos, happens to be hawking her

newest series of children’s [...]

If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst into the sky,
that would be like
the splendor of the Mighty One—
I am become Death, the shatterer of Worlds.
On July 16, 1945, the first test of [...]

The last leg of the trip is the return.
East of Phoenix, we passed through mountains filled with monolithic Easter Island rocks into mining territory landscapes of pityless or pitiful Golgothas, I don’t know which, and the surrounding communities look none the richer for it.

Open Pit Mine, Miami, Arizona, 2008

Google Earth view of Open Pit [...]

Day 10. We went to the Heard Museum.

Untitled (the hunter/hunted) by David Hannan b. 1971
Metis
Untitled (the hunt/hunted), 2006-2007
Mixed media installation
Metis artist David Hannan works with taxidermy-form sculptures to explore aspects of union, adaptation and metamorphosis. Hannan’s taxidermy hybrids present tension and beauty in the merging of animals into sculptures. Many of the themes in [...]

On the 9th day of our vacation (I think it was the 9th)…
The Stillmans were very rich. Probably still are. Big in railroads and banking. James Jewett Stillman was the first elected president of First National City Bank (Citibank).
I didn’t know this when visiting the McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park. I was curious about who the Stillmans [...]

We went on the Taliesin West tour back in 2005 and did it again this trip. We all enjoyed that first tour. And I got some great photos, a couple of which I later used as a base for digital paintings. But this tour was conducted by an architect and former student [...]

And then we went to the old Douglas Mansion in Jerome where H.o.p. (who carries his sketchpad with him everywhere) drew a gargoyle that was leering down from a bookcase.

The Artist at Work, H.o.p. sketching at the Douglas Mansion, Jerome, Arizona, 2008
And we watched one of the worst and yet one of the best [...]

On our sixth day, we hit the Out of Africa Safari Park in Cottonwood. It’s a fairly large park and minute-to-minute it changes as far as your opportunity to view animals, so in one visit you’re unlikely to see all that is there. From afar, we’d see animals roaming about their areas [...]