I was talking to my father yesterday and a part of me is considering making a pitch for the remaining part of the old farm I grew up on, although I'm a little cautious for a range of reasons.
Anyway, I want to visit a few in person first but barring any unpleasant surprises I think I'm buying a yurt in the next month or two and moving into it. I'm rewriting all the BME software so that it operates on a distributed “work packet” model so it's very easy for the half dozen people who help keep things going can work from anywhere. Anyway here's a picture of a yurt in Mongolia:
I don't have a lot of money to spend but that path would let me have an owned-without-debt semi-permanent place to live (for something I can afford while I
build a “real” house), and if my father pseudo-gifts me that property, it would work
now, and the same applies if I buy a property that's a bit more north-east of here. I think if I had a yurt I could spend next summer building a
sand bag house (versus an earthship, although I still think earthships are great) — I like both how cheaply they can be built, and how they integrate into the landscape.
Here's a shot of another one:
Or maybe something crazier… although when I showed Nefarious a picture of the house below (she liked everything else, especially the yurt picture, but I think that's also because it had a little door with kids in it) she told me that it was most definitely a broken house.
I feel like I have to do this now not just because I really want to, but because it's important to me that Nefarious sees a beautiful art house being built inexpensively. All of the pictures in this entry are from the highly recommended book
“Home Work” by Lloyd Kahn, a part of the amazing
Shelter series which has kept these thoughts in the front of my mind for a long time with stories of outwardly successful people who ditched corporate life in the city to drop out and do something more rewarding.
Admittedly I have not played with paper mache for at least twenty years.
I painted the rest of the tones in the snake part of the painting… Next is the octopus character, and then the whole thing gets outlined. It's painted in a mix of iridescent paints (ie. metallic) and interference paints (like the car paint that changes color from different angles). The two main paintings I'm working on right now are my first two experiments with interference pigments…
If you're interested, feel free to click through to zoom in (but remember that this isn't lined yet so it'll look very different and much “sharper” when it's completed). This is a mix of acrylics, tempera and mixed polymers, and gesso mixed with dirt and cigarettes…
I made a silly simple frame with a few four foot sections of 2″ diameter bamboo (notched like a log house). I am going to suspend/stretch a canvas in the middle of it but I haven't decided what I'm going to paint on it (although I have a few ideas which I'm sure you can guess at because I'm pretty predictable). I think Blair is coming by in the next week or two and we're going to have a frame making party or something because we both have so much stuff that needs frames.
That said, I can't do it until my truck is out of the shop because I have to pick up wood. Other than that I did more software work on the scraper (which you can see is taking stuff from BMEshop and inserting it into the sidebar of ModBlog, and soon will power a new BME frontpage), and will do a little more painting still I hope. If I get my camera back today I'll post a shot or two of whatever I end up doing.
Sorry to Phil and Roo for setting the fire alarm off a couple times today… I'm sure it's very irritating!
