Gravity, machetes, siesta

I haven't been drawing much on this trip, but yesterday I started at dawn and drew a fair bit all day long. I screwed up that tree. Every palm tree I've drawn so far is horrific, except for one I drew today. It takes me a bit to figure out how to draw different species of tree, it seems.

Siesta in the town of Las Galeras, from a French Cafe. Also, a little bit of a sketch trying to figure out how I could visually represent the Theory of General Relativity in computer animation software. Also, a shadow from the string that dangles from my camera.

Get this: gravity is actually a warping of space and time. As you get closer to anything with mass, space stretches and time gets slower. That's how we stick to the earth. So when you feel gravity as acceleration (like if you jumped off a cliff), what you're actually feeling is the distortion of space and time that the earth causes. Can you believe it?

More siesta drawings. Motoconcho drivers. 

The top of a papaya plant. They're like giant (ten-foot tall) asparagus plants. The papayas grow right off the stalk. There are only leaves at the very top of the plant.

...

The highlight of the day yesterday was walking home with a backpack full of groceries and being stopped by a couple of local farm-workers who were drinking beer in the back of their truck. They asked if I was looking for work, and if I wanted to work for them - get paid under the table, clearing
jungle with a machete.

I thought this was super cool for three reasons:

(1) I understand Spanish well enough to have that complex of a conversation (although it was very stilted and with a lot of gesturing).

(2) I must not look like a bewildered tourist any more. The dark skin and shaggy beard must help.

(3) I absolutely love using machetes. I worked as a surveyor for a while and the machete was the best tool for clearing a line through the bush - even West Coast Rainforest! You can hack down a 6" diameter tree with a machete in about 20 seconds. And you can use it to make poles / walking
sticks / hotdog roasting sticks real quick. Far better than a hatchet.

It seems like everyone has a machete in the Dominican Republic . Children are walking along the beaches with them. They use them to get into coconuts.

I can get a machete for 400 pesos (about 12 bucks). Coconuts are 50 pesos apiece. So if I buy a machete and use it to slaughter eight coconuts, I come out even.

Also, if I have a machete, I can go work with those dudes for a day or two, which would be an unforgettable experience. I think I'm too shy to do that though.

sentimental about coral

Abandoned casita - a place to hide from the rain.

Angry bull.

When I was a young 'un, our family had two collections of wildlife encyclopedias - about three feet worth of bookshelf - and I used to read them cover to cover, over and over. I drew hundreds of nature scenes, probably thousands of animals, but I think the scenes I drew the most were coral reefs.

There was a fair bit of variety to those aquatic cross-sections... anemones, clownfish, antler-like branches of coral. I distinctly remember the first time I drew a fish that looked three-dimensional - I must have been four or five years old. It was an HB pencil drawing of a salmon, twisting back on itself, caught halfway through a turn. I remember leaning the drawing up against the wall and laying on my belly and staring at it for a long, long time, being somewhat amazed that I somehow drew it with my own hands, without looking at a book.

Today while I was snorkeling I passed over a bunch of coral, splayed out and dispersed just the way I used to draw it thirty-four years ago. All sorts of wonderful fish floated by - I can't remember their names, but their colours and shapes are as familiar to me as if I read those wildlife encyclopedias a year ago. Even their relative sizes, the depth of water, which fish are in schools and which aren't - I was drawing some startlingly accurate drawings at that age. Thinking back to those drawings, I always thought I was just drawing fish out of my head, but today I realized it was just too accurate. I must have referenced fish and plants and coral from the encyclopedias, and actually understood something about how it all fits together.

It's not possible to describe how grateful I am to be reliving those childhood fantasies - to be swimming through scenes that I dreamed about, drew and imagined for years. 

guaguas and guavas

I've discovered the joy of the guaguas - a somewhat-organized system of vans and pickup trucks that the locals use to get around the Dominican Republic. Riding in the back of a truck has always been my favorite gas-powered way to travel. Here, the joyful combination of passengers and thrilling scenery makes a fun ride into pure bliss:

Buying coconut bread from an old lady named Modesta at 60 km / hour as she hitches a ride to her beachfront fish-shack with a bag of bread and a bucket of fish. Called to a halt at a barber shop, where a woman gives the guagua driver an empty bottle of hairspray and a wad of pesos, presumably to refill the hairspray and return to her later in the day.

Cruising slowly past beachfront villages with two young Dominicans who work at the Aquarium. They pass around an iguana and show me the boa constrictor packed in their bag.

Today is a rainy quiet day on the far Northeast tip of the Dominican Republic - an area renowned for it's clear water, plentiful beaches, and top-notch snorkeling. After a forty-five minute jungle hike to a completely private beach (pictured very top right), I snorkeled out and saw my first full-size flounder. I only noticed it because it was a perfectly fish-shaped patch of light sand. I swam closer and saw its two bulbous eyes blinking up at me. I could swim right down within a foot of his face without him flinching. Do flounders have adrenaline? I wonder if his heart was pounding, thinking "Oh god, I hope that big fish doesn't see me. He doesn't see. Think sand, think sand, I am sand.."

Vultures and pelicans soaring effortlessly in the thermals and low across the water. Stories of tarantulas and millipedes and a local boa that makes the chickens scream at night. Watching fireflies play across the room after the lights are out. Papayas, bananas, oranges and unrecognizable fruits hanging from the trees, free for anyone to pick and eat.

New Birds

I'd like to share some new birds I've seen on this trip. If you thought birds are boring, guess what? You're wrong!

(all of the photos are from the Internet) 

The Frigate Bird! These guys are huge - wingspans of up to seven feet. They have the highest wingspan-to-body weight ratio of any bird, which means they can stay aloft for up to a week! They can't walk, they can't swim, and they can't take off from water, so the Frigate Birds have to land on treetops and clifftops when they want to take a break.

These fellows are extremely fast and agile. They primarily feed by swooping down and plucking fish off the ocean's surface. I think it's fascinating that they do this, but could never become airborne again if they screwed up and caught a wing in the water or something. Would they just die? That way of life would be like humans bungee jumping over lava to pluck burgers out of it for lunch.

They also feed by chasing down other birds and forcing them to regurgitate their food, then diving down and catching the puke in their mouths before it hits the water.

The Hispaniolan Lizard Cuckoo! It is only found on this island. It hunts geckos. You should see it scampering around on the ground, peering up the trees with its big red beady eyes. I've never seen a bird hunt another animal like that. It looks very reptilian. 

Cuckoos have soft feathers that get soggy in the rain, so they have to stand in the wind and air them out to dry every morning after the nightly cloudbursts. 

This type of cuckoo doesn't sneak its eggs into other birds' nests. 

The Antillean Palm Swift!

I'm sure there are distinctive and miraculous facts about this bird, but I don't know any. All I know is that they're exceptionally sleek and beautiful and have a wonderful name.

motoconcho

Besides walking, here's how I get around. $1.75 Canadian gets me anywhere in town. $3.00 gets me to any beach I like.

I did a decent drawing today, but I gave it away to a boy named Marco who wanted to shine my shoes. The only other decent drawing I've done I gave to his buddy, Judi, who wanted to sell me a little wooden turtle. I gave him the choice of any page in my sketchbook, and he took my favorite page.

Before I gave them drawings, they stood over my shoulder, watching me draw, for a couple minutes. Moving closer and closer to see the details, and to compare what I was drawing with what I was seeing. I love it when children do that. Shyness overcome by curiosity and fascination.

When I lived in Berlin about a decade ago, I'd draw on the train on my way to work and often had boys and girls giggling as I drew them, or people around them. I'd be passing out pages from my sketchbook left and right.

I think that's my favorite kind of art-interaction -giving sketchbook pages to children.

states of mind

I've been in the Dominican Republic for nine days now, and I think I'm finally starting to settle into it.

This trip is a different experience than I've ever had. I've done a fair bit of travelling in places where people don't speak my language. I've also spent a lot of time lounging on beaches. And I've done numerous "working vacations" where I pack along my laptop and art gear and work from a house-sit or a sublet or some such thing. But I've never done all three at once like I am now. I think my brain has been reeling a bit, trying to figure out which of the three states-of-being to refer to. But it seems to have sorted out a comfortable place to be again. It's nice to freshen up my ol' spirit by splashing it with the cold water of a new experience like this.

Also, it takes time to figure out the local spots that suit me and make me feel comfortable and happy. I can't get that from reading websites or a Lonely Planet; I have to find them for myself, or through word-of-mouth.

Here's a place I found today where I'll be spending a fair bit of time (click it for the big picture):

Two old Swiss men recommended it. It's an hour walk down an empty beach from where I'm staying - pretty much in the middle of nowhere. A group of fishermen have set up a cookshack serving fresh fish, rice, beans, salad, "pommes frites", and $2.00 bottles of Dominican "Presidente" cerveza. The meal costs 350 pesos - about $8.50 Canadian. The ocean is pristine with perfect rolling waves, and there's no one else in the water as far as the eye can see.

The fisherman saw I was struggling with Spanish, so he quickly switched to French, then German, then Italian. But no English. I love that. I love that there's a European flavour to this place.

Robots and Water

Drawings / designs for a storyboard superimposed on a photo I'm using as a background for another project.


This is a very busy work-week for me - one proposal for an Artist Residency due on Friday, another funding proposal I'm trying to get done by the weekend (which is what the robots are for), and a longer ongoing project that I'm working on every day. So my only excursions are quick swims and walks into town for groceries. I'll have more time to swim and draw and paint next week, I hope.

I've seen some local men coming out of the water with harpoon-guns and belts lined with all sorts of big colourful fish, including octopi. All they had were masks and snorkels, and that's what I have, so I'm hoping I can see some of that as well.

The place I've been snorkeling has small colourful fish. There's some fairly large (and presumably healthy) coral reefs just out from where the local harpoon-fishers were, but it's been too windy to swim out to them. On the less-windy side of the beach I found one big chunk of reef where I saw my first Moray Eel! Very exciting.

When I was young 'un, it was my dream to be a Marine Biologist. The ocean still fascinates me. Peering into that diverse aqueous world takes me back to when I was a child, camping along the Washington and Oregon coast, playing for hours with the crabs and sea anemones in the tidal pools. What a gift, to be able to float over this cool, silent world and look in on all these amazing, almost alien, creatures.

Drifting back and forth with the currents and the waves, marbled sunlight casting along the sandy bottom.