ROOSTERS AND A LINE OF SKATING GIRLS

I'm on my electric tricycle and I   go for a ride at about ten every morning.

Four homes on this route have chickens with roosters and as I pass, I give my version of a rooster crow.  They've gotten  to know me, somehow, and now will usually beat me to the crow...(damned egotists). :-)

I kept chickens as a kid...also white rabbits, six nanny goats, a loft of white pigeons, four muscovy ducks and a dog named "BO BO"...about the dog...I still keep a "BO BO" but it's a fake.

We might like a live one, but the vets in our town treat pets like children and they really run up huge bills for care.  So we pass.

This A.M. as I was nearing the park, a line of girls on skates were approaching.  I stopped my trike and got my camera out...the lead girl hollered "Picture" and caused great disorder in the line...folks really like to look good in a picture. you can be sure of it.

The reason I'm on an electric assist tricycle is my age and safety concerns.  I really love the thing and I call it my Cadillac.  It really is a lifesaver because I have to peddle to make it operate.  My other electric bike is full on power, no peddling required...but I really need the exercise of peddling.
                                                                                ELBERT

SHIRLEY'S PORTRAIT

                                               Shirley's Portrait      


I've always kept the photo that I took of Shirley, taken when she was with the mall.  She was about thirty-nine and we were dating.  I decided to paint the portrait including events in her history.  In the far background is "Eva" the mail and passenger boat owned and captained by her Grandfather, Ed Calhoun.  He also organized the local fur trapping on Johnsons Bayou. She lived with them for the first five years of her childhood.
The hay stacks and tractor represent the annual hay mowing that she did.
Ole Billy was actually sort of brownish but I needed his coat to be white.  The sunflowers were other loves of her early years.  The huge wooden palette, we had both used in past studio sessions.
She looked good at thirty-nine...so at least on my canvas, she gets to stay there.

                                           Shirley Picking Figs

We've been picking figs for two month.  Shirley finally agreed to allow me to preserve two dozen with added lemon and a little sugar.  i split them into quarters.  WHAT A TREAT! (I gained four pounds).  Elbert

                                           Elbert's Fig Preserves

PARTY TREAT... DARK CHOCOLATE (85%) SMEARED GRAHAMS

Dark Chocolate Grahams

When I was a teenager, I sometimes worked unloading boxcars of produce for a local merchant. I got tired eventually and would buy dark chocolate covered grahams. I supposed they must have dunked them.

Those aren't.around today and I was reminiscing... so I asked Shirley to make some using my 85% cocoa dark chocolate (which isn't very sweet), add nutrasweet to it to improve taste and smear it on the top of a few grahams for me. She did a good job and these taste much like the old ones, but better.

I add this in case you are letching for dark chocolate grahams also but cant find them anywhere... 

Old loves die hard, don't they. Elbert.

ABOUT GEORGE RODRIGUE'S BLUE DOG

BLUE DOG

I've recently learned that George Rodrigue had died...I've met George several times  at shows while I still lived in Louisiana and I liked him, 

While I knew him, he was trying to get his old time Louisiana theme to work for him and was having some success.  He had a gallery in the French Quarters of New Orleans as well.  

We live in California now and he came to my notice again when he had a show in L. A. and his own gallery on Rodeo Drive.  It was featuring the "Blue Dog" theme.  He also had acquired a first class publicist and she was his WIFE.  She did a great job keeping his art out there.

I'm sure that the owners of his original "Blue Dog" paintings are glad they bought one.

I'm also sure that his publicist will be eagerly sought out by a new artist.

Elbert

sketch of "Blue Dog" by Elbert Price

Elbert Price and George Rodrigue at book signing in Lake Charles, La. at the Prien Lake Mall in 1976

  

CAUGHT IN THE ACT

"Caught In The Act"

She drove into the art school parking lot in a grey Rolls Royce Corniche convertible with the top down. Her coiffure looked like the stable hand had done it, totally beyond casual. She was about five feet seven inches tall and very attractive... I'm saying "this can't be our model".  She wasn't.  Our model didn't show at start time.

I said "To hell with the model, I'm going to sculpt her".  So I sat up across the studio  and began my portrait blank in preparation. The model came and the class began. 

I sneaked shot several photos of my intended model before she spotted me and delivered a look that clearly said my attention was most unwelcome. I went back to my work and tried not to notice but it was wasted activity.  She took a look at my results and left, never to return.  I always regretted offending her and I know that I did.  I had to complete the sculpture from my photos of her.

 Elbert

THE SECOND ROCK AT ALICE KECK

"The Second Rock At Alice Keck"

In the current dry conditions of our early summer (little rain since last spring) our Ventura River has gone to the look of a desolated white stone skeleton of it's previous self.  I miss it so much that today I painted a reminder of a painting that went to a lady doctor many years ago

When the doctor visited my El Paseo Studio in Santa Barbara, many years ago, she was on her journey to a field assignment in the Sudan, as I recall, and was unable to take a large painting along.  She promised to call upon her return.  I was impressed.

About three and a half years later, she called, asking whether the painting was still available... and she said "I am on a gurney in preparation to deliver my first baby and my husband said I could have anything.  I want my "Rock" painting".

We were both pleased.  Elbert

painting by Elbert Price

THE ROCK AT ALICE KECK

HOCUS POCUS

"Hocus Pocus"

When I was six, I was still living with the three widows in Joy, in the sharecropper's shack.  We knew that Aunt Vera and Uncle Hub were coming for me in August to put me in school in Georgetown.  We decided on a last visit to Aunt Belma and her kids was in order before I left.

When any sort of storm threatened, the three women that I lived with, would go into fits of anguish and I too, became upset.  Kids were always saying "Hocus Pocus is gonna get you".  This scared hell out of me.  I became fearful anytime I saw clouds of any sort.  I suffered often from this acquired fear of "Hocus Pocus". 

At Aunt Belmas one day near noon, I was asked to go and take Uncle Harvey's lunch, in a distant field just as a spring thunder storm was gathering and Aunt Belma had no other family member to do it.  My grandmother told her that I was afraid of storms but Belma would insist.  So off I went with lunch pail in hand.

When I neared the patch where Uncle Harvey was plowing, the storm got nearer and so did the thunder and lighting.  I cringed, but Uncle Harvey was watching.  I stood up and flung my fist upward and shouted "Hocus Pocus can kiss my ass".

I've never feared thunderstorms since.  Elbert     

sketch by Elbert Price

DEAR JULIA,

Thanks for the very thoughtful and original Father's Day card.  I really enjoyed being your dad.  I never knew what you'd do next.  I still brag about your ability to climb fences.  I, like you, when little, would escape and wander about, exploring and self entertaining.

I feel so lucky to have lived to see the internet and the cloud.  Self entertaining types, like us, feel we have found the true "Golconda".

When I was struggling to get the first publicly supported Educational T V
Station, Channel 10, launched in Memphis, Tennessee, I thought that getting important informant information from TV would be a miracle.  I never dreamed of the Internet, little alone The Cloud.  But now we have it.

I know many wonders come next and I know I will have to miss them but as you marvel at it all, remember that you got here at a fabulous time to be alive and that I assisted, peripherally in that achievement.
                                                                   
Love you, Elbert (Dad)

DREAM

I dreamed that I had a tiny helicopter controlled by mashing on it's base with my fingers and by turning my wrist and hand in any direction that I wished it to go.  I, of course, was its passenger and went flitting about wherever I wished.  Elbert  

QUINCE

QUINCE

Some, there may be, who consider the knowledge of where to find Quinces a picayune possession...

but if one has a lust for quince jam on morning toast, it's priceless knowing.

                                                                                            Elbert

OZZIE'S GARDEN

The Garden

Sometimes when I was a five year old kid, I'd sit on Ozzie Wilson's shady back porch and look out upon the sun flooded back vegetable kitchen garden. There was a martin house about midway and humming birds, wrens and mocking birds were everywhere. The fencing was fronted with a type of domestic blackberry and a fruit orchard was beyond. Nothing spectacular was going on. One could tell life was happening.

This is a warm spot on my mind that I often go back to.  The Ranchera garden reminded me.                                                          
                                                                                           Elbert
                                                                                 

I JUST LOVE RABBITS

There must be lots of portraits of me with different pet rabbits in my arms.  When I was about two and a half or three years old and totally white haired.....

Elbert at Three

I was not only drawing constantly at three, I was also very unpredictable in behavior and would just vanish if not closely watched.  When I escaped my mother, I never just came home at suppertime, I kept wandering and examining the things I saw until I was found and returned home.

Many Bunny Portraits

My mother, on a whim, asked an artist living next door whether he needed a model.  Happy Days! he did and he kept the treats coming... gave me undivided attention.  

When we had finished a painting, we piled into his convertible "rag top" Ford

Us in Rag Top Ford

and headed for the Indian market near Oklahoma City Capitol Building to search for ornaments and treats for our next sitting. 

I loved his car and the rabbits and the portraits he painted of me.  I wish I could have kept even one of them.  But I didn't!

                                                                          Elbert

"LIFE IS THE LAST THING WE'LL EVER DO"

                                          

                                   

"Life Is The Last Thing We'll Ever Do" I tend to think of me more as we . . . to think of my collection of cells, sinews and nerves, as being like a colony of honeybees.  I can relate to the constant humming, I . . . We hum a lot too.  We need a home.  Bees need a hive.  We  all need a sustainable environment to exist.
A song by The Daylights  "The Last Thing We'll Ever Do". brought tears to my eyes . . . it is so true and beautifully stated.  I'm . . . We are almost 88 . . . just getting up in the morning and looking at my first cup (may be last).   :-)   The song and the humming of bees woke me . . . Us.  Elbert

Andrew Wyeth's 'Christina's World'

I was attending the Pittsburgh Art Institute in '48.  When I attended a national show of American Artist.  Everywhere I looked was a vast field of Abstract canvases.  Then I came upon "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth.  It totally jarred me, the power of the thing.  I've been a fan ever since......Elbert

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

(sketch by Elbert Price)

THE JUNE BUG

                                             THE JUNE BUG

At five years, I was always fascinated by the possibility that one could fly through the air.  My first target for accomplishing this feat was June Bugs.
They were all over the place when I was a kid.  If I could just get enough thread to make strings for more hind legs, I would soon have enough be airlifted away on the wings of June Bugs.  I just tortured the hell out of a lot of poor old June Bugs whose only purpose in life was to find a mate and die.  But what did I know?  I stomped a lot of green corn and killed a lot of June Bugs in the process.  Elbert

(I suggested that he insert the word 'procreate' in the sentence about the June Bugs purpose in life and his reply was "No, you do not want to use a fifty dollar word in a two dollar story".) Shirley

MY ALTER EGO

In early days, when all had eaten the stew and had gathered around, the story teller and show man .....

He used a drawing stick and drew in  a large, clear space on the ground, in front of him, while sitting on his stool and scooting about as needed.  He wore a boar's head bone and skin with pride, for the boars are fierce fighters and very intelligent in tactics of evasion and attack, and have killed or maimed many members of the group.

The storyteller was, of course, an artist and as such was teaching his people to be able to communicate by sketching on the bare ground with a stick.
Early days, we all learned to sketch as the important necessity to say where we had been and what we had seen.  All our early ancestors could sketch or draw things.  And many of us could do it Very Well.

Our sketches were how our languages developed over time and our early writing was pictographs or quick sketches as symbols of the real thing.

Drawing on the ground was how we all learned a language and if we even try at all, we can do it too---It's in our genes.by now. Elbert