So how, you must be asking yourself, is this guy going to bring us all the way back around from a photographic travel and story blog back to his strange art, weird writing, and silly Photoshop pictures?
Oh, I have a plan.
So follow along with me.
These are the last pictures of where I grew up that I am going to show until I decide that I want to show some more.
I will end these on a very personal note.
This is the backyard of the house I grew up in…
The back yard is sort of terraced. There are flat levels between the sloping hillside. There are often more flowers, but this was taken in summer. That house poking up in the back of the picture is the house my friend Chris moved into when he was just a kid. Our back yards are sort of connected. You can imagine how great this was when we were young.
On the top level of our yard, there was this wooden fort. Chris and Andy and I cut a hole in the floor and put a trap door in it. Then, from underneath the fort, we dug a trench leading about fifteen feet to where we dug a huge pit. We covered the pit and the trench with flat pieces of plywood. Then we covered the wood with dirt. We now had an underground bunker. We could crawl through the trap door and the tunnel to get to it from the above-ground fort. If you have never been a ten-year old kid with your own underground bunker, I think you missed out on a lot.
Here is one picture from inside my Mom’s house. Notice the two tikis I carved for her…
Oh don’t they look mysterious in the shadows?
So why would I feel compelled to share these pictures of my life?
Is there a point to all this?
Well, I do happen to think that the garden is lovely. And my father’s ashes are buried there. And I grew up looking at this view and I can still feel my heart beating with childish enthusiasm when I gaze upon this scene. But there is one other thing…
I have been trying to get my mom interested in watercolor painting. Just as a hobby. You know, to keep her out of trouble. So every time I go to visit her, I pull the old art supplies out of their box in the closet and try to lead by example. For the last two or three visits, I have been just sort of working on an interpretive picture of the backyard, and sometimes she sees me doing it and joins me for a while. We chat and I give her a few ideas and pointers.
I have now moved on to some abstracts and flower pieces, so I have decided to call my painting done…
And that is how I am planning to bring it all back home.
Pouring My Art Out 
I was a tomboy, tree climber, fort builder, warrior. It was fun to see that we had similar adventures.
Perhaps there are other similarities.
Yay to childhood homes, memories and forts! Great painting as well. I find watercolor to be more difficult and less forgiving than acrylic.
Watercolor looks so easy. But it fools you.
cool…….we had a couple of forts……and a really cool game we played by making an obstical course out of the wire garden furniture that had to be crawled under whilst being bombarded with clods of earth…good fun as you can imagine……..also bombarding action man with rotten peaches was rather good……as was doing our chores of cleaning up the rotten plumbs by bombardation of the next door house and swimming pool….ahhhhh to be a kid again…………
My three brothers and I used to have dirt clod fights… we put rocks inside while it was mud and then let them dry. I don’t know how little boys survive to grow up.
Awww…how cute is that…sounds like my therapy is rubbing off on you. Now all I have to do is paint something and I’ll be able to say that your art has rubbed off on me. Hmmmm…do you have anything in shades of red?
Go way back to my early posts on military history Photoshop art… I strongly suggest the use of reds and yellows.
Yes, I figured you would. What I was hoping for was an example…
Well, the typing is surrounded by good examples. Most of my art, which I have scanned into posts, features at least some yellow and red. I just happened to make a joke about how much yellow and red there was in those pictures… due to the fire and blood.
I love this post and your picture.
Yay.
Beautiful!
I know you are, but what am I?
You are a beautiful blueberry head!
I feel pretty… and blue…?