Luuit With Mild Icing

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The rain that swanned through the district last weekend put a very welcome whitecap on some local volcanoes I may have mentioned in the past. And will continue to mention in the future.

The storm dumped about two and a half inches of rain on the valley, here, but dusted just around the top of the crater of Luuit (Mt. St. Helens), here, taken from a spot along NE Killingsworth east of NE 82nd Ave.

Luuit/Mt St Helens Over SE Portland

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Wy'east wasn't the only volcano out that day, last Wednesday; Luuit made a showing too. Due to the nacre-like sky and the muddled light that the high overcast attenuated, I had to do a little push-me-pull-you in GIMP to make any detail come out.

We're going into another droughty summer, but the peaks still have the lovely snow upon.

Luuit/Mt St Helens, With Rocky Butte Lampposts

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The summit of Rocky Butte is, as I may have mentioned, Joseph Wood Hill Park. You get to the top by finding NE Rocky Butte Road off NE 92nd Avenue between Brazee and Russell Streets, or take NE Fremont St east from 82nd and follow it around the City Bible College (which was once the Hill Military Academy, the namesake of the same man who the park was named after). 

Once at the top the road goes around what appears to be a crenelation at the absolute summit: that is the centerpiece of Joseph Wood Hill Park, and where these views I've been sharing can be obtained. Now, during these pandemic seasons, the part of the loop that faces east has been closed, one presumes to prevent too many people from clustering into an ongoing superspreader event. But the park is still accessible, parking now being somewhat limited.

If you do go, mask up. 

Once within the limits of the crenelation, there is an absolute flat area with wide red-pumice paths and an old airway beacon (which is lit and rotates at night) and unparalleled views of outer eastside Portland, and a view of Wy'east only exceeded by that of the Johnsrud viewpoint near Sandy. The rock walls and seating niches are immensely charming. And the lamps on the stone pylons? Incomparable.

They even frame Luuit/Mt St Helens magnificently. 

 This is also a way you can see a lot of IKEA without actually going. Still, It's calendar-worthy.

2010 Throwback: Luuit (Mt St Helens) and NE Portland from Council Crest

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During our first few years here as permanent Portlanders, we lit up to Council Crest Park every chance we could.

For those of you unfamiliar with Portland geography and history, it's like this: Council Crest is a very high hill in SW Portland, topping out at 1,070 feet above sea level. It's got a gorgeous and long view almost all directions, the north being obscured by a lush grove of evergreens, and the south somewhat obscured by hills and neighborhoods that direction, though, on a clear day you can catch a glimpse of every Cascade volcano from Tahoma (Rainier) to Seekseekqua (Jefferson). Its name came when a group of church people met there for a conference in 1898 and thus decided to call it Council Crest; over the years, this evolved into it being called that because representatives of surrounding indigenous tribes thought it the idea high ground for meetings though, in actuality, that likely never occurred anywhere but in the vivid imaginations of colonizing settlers.

This day, in May, 2010, I made Luuit (St Helens) the star of the show. 

In the lower left, just above the tree line, is the Fremont Bridge. Just to the right of the tangle of ramps that it feeds into is a tower of Emanuel Hospital; the crane a presage to the seismic shift in development and income that was just then still incipient. The developing nacre of the Pearl District can be seen along the tree outline in the lower right.

In the middle distance, the Columbia River; beyond that the eastern suburban fringes of Vancouver, Washington. And, if you squint at the left-hand edge of Luuit there, you can just barely make out a round hump, and that's the summit of Tahoma (Rainier), which means that me and a great many Greater Seattleites were looking at the same thing at the same time, Advance Cascadia Fair.

Those practiced in that-was-then-this-is-now can probably make out all the changes in the cityscape since then.

The Lloyd District from Terwilliger Blvd

3721There is an area of town called the Lloyd District, and it's undergone some changes over the years.

Generally speaking, this area of town centers along NE Broadway and Weidler, and goes from Williams Avenue on the west to about 15th Avenue on the east. It's spiritual heart is the Lloyd Center Mall, which has gone through many evolutions over the years and is now in what seems to be an accelerated metamorphosis into sort of a second downtown for Portland. More high-rises, more business, fewer shops and whatnot. Even the seminal Lloyd Center itself seems to be on the decline despite some passionate rebranding over the last few years.

But this is what it looks like, today, from one of the viewpoints on Terwilliger:

That would amount to a respectable downtown in any medium-sized city anywhere else. In Portland, that's our back-up downtown in case we ever have to send the usual one in for service.

In the washed out horizon blue of the oppressively clear day, Luuit keeps its own counsel.

LooWit: Mount St Helens In The Sunrise

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Leaving work about two days ago I saw the same sort of sunrises we've been enjoying lately giving great color to the sides of the truncated cone of Loowit:

Still I remember when it wasn't lopped off like that. Snow is now heavy on the mountainsides, and the long rays of the winter sun gave that great color.

But in this ... extreme closeup ...
 

... I bumped the color.

Yep. That's me. Color bumper. If color bumping is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

[Wy'East] The Mount Hood For The Day Is St Helens

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In anticipation of the coming wintry mix (Winter? Stahp!) I looked to the sky this morning and there was that gorgeous salmon-pink again.

The eastern sky pretty much obscured Hood, but the pink framed Loo-wit … Mt. St. Helens as we white folk call it … memorably.

This shot was taken from the hill overlooking the area of Parkrose that contains the old Rossi place, just east of 122nd off NE Fremont Street, where there are a handful of short cul-de-sacs which afford an even better view.

St Helens is, sadly, remarkable for what she looked like and what she did back in 1980. The real treat is found on the north side, the great crater with the lava dome which has entertained us muchly over the past decade.

But it is something to look at from the south side, knowing what happened there in a lifetime a great many of us share.

[pdx] Mount St Helens, With Extra Lenticular Cloud

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Mount Hood was too suffused in brilliant sunlight today to mess with, but I did see something interesting across the river.

Nobody needs an introduction to Mount Saint Helens, of course, but since there's no smooth peak, you don't see lenticular clouds capping it often. This, however seems to apply:

The picture was taken from just off NE Fremont Street, on NE 124th Pl, a very short cul-de-sac street hard by the I-84 freeway, with a great view.

The contrast was a little soft, so I zoomed in and fiddled about with settings and such until something looked good. And that is this:

That cloud is formed by winds rising over the hump, clouds condensing out when the winds get high and cold enough. It looks a little like Donald Trump's hair-do, to be honest, but I didn't say that out loud where Loo-wit could hear. She's got a hot temper, as we all know.

And, since I can't stop playing with the Vivid Color feature, this:

Punching up that red color makes it feel more like fall. Of course, with climate change being what it is, who can say?

[art] #MtStHelensArt35 : Gridding Out the Picture

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The object so far is to make this print into a form that I can copy. Bigger is better; you have many little details that you want to reproduce as faithfully as possible, and in order to see them well, you go big. Everything because more easy to cope with and draw that way.

If you're doing any kind of visual arts these days, technology is your friend! The above picture shows the graphic, which I had gridded out with a pencil and scanned back into a digital file. This TIFF is then loaded into Photoshop, where I made guides along those pencil grid lines. Then, making sure the snap was on and set to guides, it was pretty easy to copy out individual squares and paste them into another 8.5x11" document, then scale up the individual squares until each was about 3 inches on a side. Each square was individually labelled so I'd know where to put them on the final drawing grid, which I've not drawn out yet, but that should be my next step … selecting the size of Bristol I want this on then positioning the grid to visually satisfy.

The grid is 10 modules wide and 8 modules deep. The squares are all 1-inch square, except the bottom rank, in which each is 1/2 inch tall and 1 inch wide. I'm holding in my hand right now a print of the E3F3E4F4 sheet, and the detail is big and lovely and reproducible.

The two main concepts at work here? 1) Lift something complex out of context, obliterate that context, and the complex tends to simplify, and 2) a big drawing like this is best accomplished the way you eat an elephant … one bite at a time.

One bite-size square at a time, in this case. 

[liff in Cascadia] Drawing Mount Saint Helens on Her 35th Anniversary

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I adore the anniversary of the Mount Saint Helens eruption. So much archival footage. So available via the internet. So many gratuitous apostrophes.

It's Mount Saint Helens, not Mount Saint Helen's. Just so we all know. Now that I've said that, I feel better; I can move on.

Specifically, I'm going to be taking up an art project that I've attempted once already. I've printed out, courtesy of the intarwebz, two pictures of Loo-wit in full-throated roar from May of 1980, thus:

I'm going to rendering one of these in graphite, more than likely on Bristol board. The idea of these monochrome studies are intriguing and beguiling because I can picture the techniques I'd use to do it; the laying down of the graphite, the blending out, the marks I might make for details; the lifting out of layers of gray with kneadable eraser; I can see every technique I might use. I've used them all before in smaller, much less consequential drawings. I've never used them all in such concert, though.

The thing is, I'm intentionally swinging for the fences here. I will either come out of this project clearly punching above my artistic weight or making of it a beautiful failure. I don't think I can wait until I'm ready for this, though. I've got to do it now whether or not I'm ready. Cannot explain why that is, but I'm sure it's evident in one form or another, if only ineffably.

I'll post status updates as I work through the various stages, and the hashtag will be #MtStHelensArt35.