Mobile Artist Musings: Creative in Yreka

I've started to mortar my goddess faces around town. They are supposed to look like ancient ruins oozing out of the ground, but I'm afraid someone might trip over one of them so I've begun cementing them to walls. Below is Ralph Starritt, a metal sculptor who has covered this whole area, including just about every little town, with his large metal sculptures. I'm making a video for him and in return he's letting me learn how to use his plasma cutter and welders. This is the most fun I've had in a long, long time. Yahoo!

Ralph's studio, below, and below that a couple of his pieces in town.

Below, my favorite new tool, the plasma cutter. It quickly cuts through steel.

My first attempt at cutting - sort of wiggly but I'll get better. Goddess heads I'm making out of shovels.

The deer are smart. It's hunting season now and many days I see them hanging out in the back yard. They move into town because they know there is no shooting in town. Ha ha.

This is the head I made in a clay class I took when I first moved to Yreka.

Above and below are paintings I did for my series on kids and animals. The one below was accepted in an exhibition about artist's books at the Siskiyou County Museum in Dunsmuir. The chihuahua book was also in the show.

FIRE!!! I took this photo at the end of my street. For two weeks we breathed smoke as the countryside and people's houses burned.

David helped me move all my stuff out of my storage unit in Reno, but it turned out that his alternator had died and we had to stop and charge his battery every half hour until we got to Susanville. There we stopped at an auto parts store and David put a new alternator in his truck - it has run perfectly ever since and I now know how to do it too.

Below, one of the many places we stopped to recharge David's battery, beautiful.

Three of the wild kitties I've been feeding since they were tiny little babies.

The autumn grape vine in front of my little house.

Below, the head of a dragon - to learn how to cut and weld I'm going to focus on building this dragon during the month of December. So far we have the head and three feet. I think I'll start with the wings.

One of the feet/claws.

My walking friend Berta took me up to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Hilt (Tashi?). They were having a retreat so we couldn't go into the Temple, but we visited this shrine near the entrance of their property. It was like being in Nepal.