Prickly Pears - and an Excellent Painting Lesson

Prickly Pears

Oil on canvas, 10x10

Sunday is sunny, Dad and Paula are off playing golf, and I set out to see what I can see and paint what I can paint. I have my regular issues finding a safe place to pull off the road - it always seems that when there's an excellent subject to paint, there's also a huge ditch, or a 6-inch-wide shoulder, or some other impediment. 

But in Sahuarita, where pecans are king, prickly pears are princes. Or, after painting them, and realizing how deceptively difficult and cranky they are, perhaps I should say they are princesses. 

The genus of prickly pear cactus is Opuntia, named for the ancient Greek city of Opus, according to Wikipedia. They have flat, roundish or oval cladodes - the pear part, I'd imagine - with large prickers and small, hairlike ones called glochids that come off the plant easily, and stick into human skin even more easily. I did not get close. 

I think they are beautiful, in an alien-creature kind of way. I love the rounded paddles, and the way they catch the sun. Some of them have purple tinges, and even nearly fully purple cladodes. They all look a little like heads to me, and grouped together, they look like a crowd, a gathering. 

And they are very tough to paint. But I had fun experimenting, and think this is probably the first of a series of prickly pear paintings. 

My painting in the prickly pear landscape. 

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THE DAUGHTER of a couple who collect my paintings gave her mom a workshop with me for a Christmas present. The couple has a home in Tucson, and so I traveled up there in the rain on Saturday to paint with Barb. 

She is a talented painter, who has a real feel for the palette knife. We had fun, and made paintings that I like very much. She liked only one of the two we made, but my guess is she will come to love that other one. 

Here's Barb with her painting (the larger one) and mine. 

Here's the two of us with both our paintings, in front of a copy Barb made of a painting I made! 

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 Above is ocatillo. I think it's such a cool desert plant! When it blooms, it gets bright red flowers at the very tips of the branches. Below is a saguaro cactus. They only grow in a small area of the US; it takes 70 years, at least, for the saguaro to grow its first arm. Some never grow one. Sometimes you see them with holes in them - I think that birds have drilled the holes, to make nests.

 Rain, on the way home from Tuscon. 

This is the entrance to a restaurant that has since closed. I think I might love to walk into the mouth of a giant cow skull. What about you? 

Seen at a gas station in Sahuarita. 

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Dog of the Day

(Perro Detector)

 All you lazy, couch-potato, slugabed dogs, take note. Perro Detector is hard at work out here in Arizona, while you are lolling about, taking it easy.

The dog is stationed at a Border Patrol checkpoint just a hair north of Tubac on I-19. I am not sure that this is legal, but it has been here for years. People have made the effort to fight it on all sorts of grounds, and have failed. Perhaps the smartest argument I've heard is that the checkpoint should really be at the border, yes?

At any rate, agents stop every vehicle traveling north on I-19, and the dog is out with them much of the time. I saw an agent let the dog loose in a car this week, searching - I guess - for drugs.

If I wanted to smuggle people across the border, I think I would hire ME, and my giant van. I've never been stopped, or even elicited the slightest interest from the Border Patrol people, in spite of the fact that I could carry a small village of illegals in the back of my van.