Also, We Are Drawing The Saint Johns Bridge

3695We are either languid on one project or trying to do more than one simultaneously.

About three (!) years ago when I finished the drawing of Mount Saint Helens - Luuit - in eruption, I felt great guns to go on to something else. What do I love? Landmarks! What sort of landmark? How about something more geometrical, like a bridge. What's the best bridge? The Saint Johns Bridge, of course.

So I sharked me a picture of it from the intarwebz (this is before I had a good one of my own) and laid down my grid on a big piece of Bristol, and started in. And then, finding the structure in some parts was more complex than I thought, hit a wall.

And this piece of Bristol has lain there ever since, while I painted over it and cats walked over it (don't fret, it's not as nasty as all that ... nothing an eraser and a bit of elbow grease can't fix).

So, today, something told me to get it back up to the top of the stack, said "to hell with the technical complexity, this is about learning something, just stick it out and do the best you can", and I accomplished this:

I am once again painting,which in this case is drawing, and what is drawing but painting with graphite? And after I laid that down, I had that spark, that frisson, that something just clicked. Like with the drawing of Luuit, I finally ... finally ... grasped that I could just possibly do this, just represent it the best I can, take it easy, one square at a time, and come as close as I can.

The Luuit drawing was an approimation, after all, and look how good it wound up!

Yeah, I can do this.

Unboxing Paris Flower Shop, Dimensions PaintWorks #73-91651

3694Done with the last work, on to the next one.

We have before us today the Dimensions PaintWorks Kit #73-91651, Paris Flower Shop, design credit to The MacNeil Studio which represents artist Robert McNeil (who has a Facebook page here and the I found the original at artlicensing.com here).

Parenthetically, I must add that looking up these artists is giving me a great visual lesson in artistic voice. And here is another way that PaintWorks kits are more than just an idle PBN habit. They're always teaching you something you don't know.

Anyhow, this morning I opened the box, which looks like this:

... and removed the contents, which look like this:

The standard stuff, really. Hey, it's PBN: you couldn't expect more than this: The media itself, thick card, 20 inches by 14 inches, the mixing chart and painting diagram, 18 acyrlic colors in PaintWorks' splendid paint pots, and a round, #2-ish brush.

A couple of technical points of interest: the brush matches the quality bar of the other components of the PaintWorks line that I've come to enjoy. It is a cheap brush, but it's a well-made cheap brush, good-quality gold fiber bristles (no doubt synthetic), fit and finish of the ferrule is good. Though I usually use one of my serious brushes for this, I'd use the provided brush. And usually the provided brush in a PBN is more than a hindrance than a help and it typically really only good for throwaway things like spreading masking fluid, but these are just a bit better than that. Also, the painting and mixing chart which, up until now, has been both sides of one sheet, is half-on-one-sheet-half-on-another. PaintWorks usually provides two, one being the painting chart and the other being a sheet of instructions and tips in English, French, German, and Spanish, but they split the duties this time.

The finished scene is certainly romantic and intriguing with all the different things in it to paint, and I think this is going to be another good one. I'll be documenting my progress by the day as I go, posting them all here.

Drybrushing The Moon

3693 Now, as I said before, Lighthouse In Moonlight is essentially finished, but for a few areas of drybrushing. And, in the past, being the impatient artist that I am, I basically blew it off most of the time. This time, with such wide areas of drybrushing to do and the potential to improve the painting, I decided to really apply myself and try.

Hence the two graphics.

The first is the painting before, the second, after. And there is something to be seen and learnt here.

Before Drybrushing

After Drybrushing

Doing PBNs you learn to process the posterized look of them, it's just part of the visual language of the thing, so you learn, in your mind, to interpret. PaintWorks kits give you the opportunity to kick it up to the next level by encouraging these little painterly techniques. Its directions for drybrushing are: load the brush with the lighter color, use a paper towel to wipe off the most of it then, with a realtively dry brush with enough color to leave on the painting, dab into the darker color. The resulting thin, translucent layer of paint seems to blend in from the lighter color to the darker color, disappearing into the darker and setting up the visual blending. My original attempts were unsatisfactory.

Then, The Brown Eyed Girl, who had drybrushed with aplomb in painting her RPG miniatures, suggested I pinched the belly of the bristles rather than wipe. And I tried this. It helped a great deal, if only to give me the courage to go in again and be ready to make a mistake or two. In places I laid it down a little too thickly and was able to blend it out before it dried too hard.

The results are fairly satisfying if not wholly accomplished. I don't doubt I have a ways to go, but practice will bend toward perfection, if not ever actually getting there; the hard, posterized color edges around the Moon and on the lighthouse tower have been softened and the soft layer of light color visually influences the darker color in a kind of atmospheric way. The first image is before I tried; the second, after I decided I was through.

I'm pronouncing this effort a qualified success, and am much more likely not to blow this step off in future works.

PBN Today: The Process of Lighthouse In Moonlight

3692Of the PBN boon provided me by my Brown Eyed Girl on my birthday, I've breached the first and have largely conquered it. And here's the general arc of the diver.

The PBN in question was PaintWorks by Dimensions' #73-91424, Lighthouse in Moonlight, based on a painting by artist Al Hogue. This work is very much his artist's voice, if you see the other works on his site: soft-focus stylized landscapes drenched in moonlight made of magical realism. All very dreamscape-like.

In the past my overall strategic approach to one of these paintings was to find a color and hit it wherever I found it, trying to get as many of, say, color 4 (or any given mixture) in one pass. This has been efficient but ultimately unsatisfying. The layout of the painting seemed to speak to me to try a different approach: doing one region at a time even if it meant I'd be remixing and reopening pots later on. It made it a very rewarding experience.

I started with the sky because enclosing the Moon appealed to me in a gut way.

The clouds and moon precipitated out of the sky like those old Polaroid instant photos developed. It was fun to watch it happen.

Once the sky was sufficiently filled in, I moved on to the promontory.

This is a painting with a great many small fussy areas to fill in. It's not uncommon for me to regard these as small countries, with areas you get familiar with and then move on once you've done your time there. Specifically satisfying was to watch the colorful foliage display blossom under the brush. Al Hogue knows from palette; the colors, warm and cool, coming out with a lush, rich sense of calm and comfort.

I then worked up the tower of the lighthouse, ending at the rather detailed filling in of the light and structures around it itself. If I get nothing else from PBNing, the dexterity workout is worth it alone.

Last but certainly not least I entered upon the sea and the waves. I'm always charmed by the way the interplay of color, thoughtfully selected, makes for the illusion of a phosphorescent, translucent, yet solid wave of water. This painting had that and more. At this point, I hit that moment of epiphany, got that feeling of frisson when the painting became more than just a pattern of lines I was filling in with color but a thing I was creating, that had volume and space and depth, that I was a participant in. I'm convinced that this is part of the magic of art making, whether you're creating original work or rotely following directions. You get into it and it gets into you.

This makes completing a mere PBN more than just following directions. PBNs are an easy way for the non-pro to get a taste of what the pro feels when they're in the zone, and it's a great feeling to have, that moment of realization. I recommend it to literally everyone.

In the more practical wise, it was satisfying to watch the waves emerge from the ground the way they did, and it was also easy to recognize that it was the interplay of light and dark colors, perspective generated of contrast, that made it all so.

Next, and cruising into the homestretch now, we get the colors that define the foreground and cause the small wave in front to emerge from the pattern just like the bigger wave in back did. Warm colors reflecting the lighthouse and reddened moonglow and darker greens giving dimension to the water's surface tie the whole thing into a coherent whole.

All but completed. All the colors are filled in but I'm going to confront a thing now. The extra added feature of PaintWorks kits, as I've said before, is that it gives you more than just a pattern to follow, it encourages you to take it a little farther. There are blends that would make this painting even more of a visual treat, blending the borders between the gradient bands circling the Moon and the shadows on the lighthouse tower and these call for drybrushing, which the kit, as all PaintWorks kits do, give you instructions for.

PaintWorks' system gives you actual instruction in some basic painterly things. Drybrushing is the most common. However, not only am I an impatient artist, I also am having a bit of trouble grasping drybrushing. I've tried in on a few of them and have been dissatisfied with the results. However, the Brown Eyed Girl, whose skill with painting RPG miniatures I've sncerely not matched elsewhere, gave me some protips on drybrushing and I learned something there, and I'm going to try them here. I'll work around the Moon first, then try them on the tower if it works.

So, stay tuned for that.

Positively Southwest 4th Avenue, September 2008

3691... and another throwback photo from twelve years ago. On the same walk me and the Brown Eyed Girl took around the south end of downtown Portland back in September 2008 I found an angle I adore looking north, as I did in entry 3686, which inspired me to take those pictures.

It's a lovely prospect, truly. And in 2008, here's the way it looked:

The Wells Fargo tower on the left, the Portland Plaza on the right. Must be something about being born a country mouse that I have never really tired of looking at and walking amongst the tall buildings in downtown. And there's a thing about Wells Fargo - strangely, it's austere beauty doesn't work for everyone. I can't understand this. It's a lovely simple thing, poetic in its minimalism. Flares gracefully yet modestly at the bottom (a little of that can be seen here if you look), and seems to encapsulate the aesthetic that seemed to inform everything in the 1970s from telephones to the look of the space hardware in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was clean, simple and hopeful. I mean, there are people who bitch and moan about this building but I sure won't be one of them.

I guess it means something to me that's kind of atmospheric and ineffable. and even though I'm a certified city mouse of decades'-long standing, there's still a bit of the Silvertonian country mouse in me, and there always will be.

At least enough to go rapt at the tall buildings downtown.

Photos courtesy of the Vivitar ViviCam 3705. 3.3 MPx of technological wonder.

Portland's Lovejoy Fountain, September 2008

3690There is a part of downtown Portland called Portland Center. This is the part of downtown that used to be a charming and somewhat ramshackle area full of blocks of Italian immigrants and Jews, until the City of Portland got that fever that cities all over the United States got during the 1960s and 1970s, urban renewal. They created an area called the South Auditorium Urban Renewal district, created a few nine-square-block 'superblocks', erected posh apartment towers and made it over so thoroughly that you need pictures and a vivid imagination to picture it the way it once was, charming, vital, and ethnic.

Sic transit gloria mundi. Anyway.

Today it sits between the equally-toney Riverplace area on the east (or is that south?) and the still-on-the-rise University district on the west, bounded on the south by the Stadium Freeway and on the north by the south edge of the central business core. The streets that ran through the area have been replaced by wide pedestrian walks, and in the midst of all this tree cover and hidden by the apartment towers, there are these pocket parks. And, despite the acid cut of the jib of this prose, they are very lovely places worth a walk-to.

And when you get to the park, located in the center of the superblock bounded by Southwest Market Street, Southwest 1st Avenue, Southwest Harrison Street, and Southwest 4th Avenue, you'll find a plaza with this in the middle:

Portland does fountains.

This, as well as the picture in the following entry, were taken by my first digital camera, the Vivitar ViviCam 3705, the 'Plastic Fantastic', which had a imaging throw-weight of 3.3 MPx, which was something in 2008, and had nothing but digital zoom which resulted in some delightfully small pictures, and basically obsessing on on the specs of a camera you can now find on eBay and Amazon for as little as five or ten bucks kind of takes the intimidation factor out of the fact that this picture is nearly twelve years old, so there's that there.

So it goes.

Fence Charming on 117th

3689This delightful production, fencing off the front yard of a duplex about 200 feet north of Southeast Market Street on the east side of Southeast 117th Avenue:

Two frames with class, a patchwork of mismatched boards, just this cute, happy, delightful thing to look at.

Well, out here in Mill Park, we MacGyver stuff all the time. Making it fun comes at no extra charge.

Spiritual Hygiene Is Important In Days Of Covid

3688Actually, this may be something of an old joke by now, what with all our nerves shot by the ongoing pandemic-will-we-won't-we-open-up-and/or-contract-the-'rona, but if it's sweet enough for the Lutheran church around the corner (Gethsemane is located at SE 117th and Market), then it's good enough for us:

Also, think clean thoughts.

Our Primary Election Ballots Are Counted At Last

3687It's been a long wait ... a bit too long. I had faith but that faith was being tested.

Covid-19 has caused wholesale changes in everything, and if you doubt that, understand this: our household's ballots were dropped in the drop box out front of the Mighty Midland Brand Library two days before the election day. This is usually more than enough time to have them logged in as recieved before or the day of the election. Usually. This time, not only had election day come and gone but the weekend after that and Multnomah Ballottrax had not recieved word that our ballots had even been accepted. 

Multnomah County Elections are solid. What it caused was for everything to slow down because of the necessity of new regimes of social distancing at work. Wouldn't do at all to have someone come down with Covid just for working the election.

But, today, I checked Ballottrax, and found this:

Positively Southwest 4th Avenue

3686This is a couple of views northward down Southwest 4th Avenue, one of the princpal north-south through routes through downtown Portland (the other being Southwest Broadway).

The vistas are thanks to Portland's advantageously-hilly geography, the white shadows due to the stuff'n'nonsense on our dashboard (I had to take the picture through the windscreen of the old battle-wagon Subaru):

We are looking north on Southwest 4th from about Southwest Hall Street. Two buildings of note here: the nearer tall one on the left is a triangular apartment complex with rounded corners called The Portland Plaza, and it comes from a day that such buildings weren't so common. Still a pretty posh place, and iconic in its way.

The vertically-striped one has been, since the early 1970s, and still is today, Portland's (and the State of Oregon's) tallest building, despite it having two fewer floors than the US Bancorp Tower fourteen blocks farther north and one block west. I adore the slender lines and the minimalist style of it.

The beauty of Portland cityscapes is that if you frame it just so, you wind up with something that looks much less urban than it really is. Southwest 4th Avenue is one of the most urban streets within the bounds of the State of Oregon, yet if you zoom and frame just so ...

It looks like you're driving into and through a park.

Social Distancing in Clackamas County

3685This is how they tell you how it's done at the hi-tech second-hand and pawn joint in Clackamas next to the 7-Eleven at SE 82nd Ave and Otty Road, that place called simply Stuff ...

Bruh!

They're serious about it too. We have a mask to hand wherever we go now, and we donned them before entry. But while we were there, we saw them turn away more than one chucklehead who couldn't be bothered to pay attention or thought maybe they could get a pass

No, pal, not even. We've all read about intubation and we're not really in the mood for that, thanks. You go shed 'Rona somewhere else.

The Very Last Day Of A Very Good Burgerville

3684Over my days off, we got the word. We were at the drivethrough, getting our favorites, and the kid in the window hands us out these three coupons for one free cheeseburger each, and encourages us to patronize another location, because this one will be closing permanently.

Either tomorrow or the next day.

Farewell, David Douglas Burgerville, like it says on the sign.

Forty-six years. Forty-six years?!?! Yes. Since 1974. As I understand it, when it was built, the drive-through window was on the wrong side which, I imagine, meant that you were handing food and cash across the passenger's lap.

This was before our tenure in David-Douglas-landia, which began nearly 20 years ago now. This has been our trusty neighborhood burger dive for all that time (when you live less than five minutes away, you don't not patronize your Burgerville ... you wanna be that way about it, go live in Boise, pal). Uncounted hamburger meals looking out the window at that strange office building on the west side of the property and wondering what goes on there, watching (and taking pictures of) sunsets, enjoying the traffic coming and going through 122nd and Stark.

We're gonna miss this place.

Know what I'm thinking of right now? There's this fortyish-fiftyish guy, goes everywhere with a heavy backpack and a small armful of personal electronics, might be houseless, it's hard to tell, but during our Library Days he'd have his electronics out on a table in the library and then on those days we'd repair to the Burgerville for our repast he'd already be there, using the free WiFi and inhabiting a booth toward the south end of the building.

I wonder where he's going to get his late afternoon-early evening WiFi fix now?

It was a lovely place, and we got Burgerville options nearby, nearest is 92nd and Powell, and there's a couple of DQ's in the area. But we've always been fond of this place, and we wish it wasn't going away.

And ... so that goes.

Meet The New Church, Not The Same As The Old Church

3683There's a new tenant at the old building on the southwest corner of SE 122nd and Oak. Up until recently, it was a church, the Shepherd's Gate Church.

It's another church, Universal, and, reading the other graphics affixed to the building, it's a church that caters to our local Latinx population.

SE Stark Near 122nd Is Still Kinda Empty

3682This is what SE Stark Street, looking west from SE 117th Avenue, looked like today around 7:30 AM.

I know that I've perhaps been a little low-key melodramatic about the lack of traffic on these pandemic days, but Multnomah County is the sole county in the state that has not yet embarked even until Phase One of the 're-opening' journey, and this is all we still have to show for things in the early stages of rush hour on one of Portland's principal arterials.

Still pretty empty.

The New-to-us New Camera

3681Well, we all go through transitions and one has come upon us here.

For many years now we've been lensing with a trusty little point-and-shoot job called the Canon PowerShot S100. That camera was a workhorse and never let me down ... until she did.

It's like this: The last several shots were gotten, then we stopped for reasons at the Fred Meyer Stadium store. I saw some likely snaps out the 2nd floor (I posted one taken from the crap camera of the very tablet I'm writing this on ... I have a DigiLand 1032, very low cost but punches well above its weight in just about every category of functionality except that one). What happened was the camera would power on, the lens barrel would extend and then the camera would report LENS ERROR, then power down. Many years of flawless service and then ... splat. That camera's lens barrels are now jammed out, and the camera is essentially useless now, unless we get it repaired.

Since the S100 came out in 2011, that's kind of a non-starter as well.

A good friend, Rick, bestowed upon me a camera he was no longer using; the Canon PowerShot A1200, a camera from slightly before that. Functions fine and takes great shots. Doesn't do as much but is a great bridge. We are grateful for Rick for the boon of this camera; it meant that I didn't have to cut my rate of picture-taking and, going foward, will make a fine adjunct to the range of amateur equipment we have access to.

Thank you again, Rick. A lifesaver you are.

I do still desire a camera that has functions and capabilities in the range of the S100. Calling the used tech places we love, we came up empty-handed here. However ...Stuff, that redoubtable electropawn store on SE 82nd at Otty, did have this little baby, which we have acquired:

Allow me to introduce the Canon PowerShot SX230 HS. This, as the S100 and the A1200, is a 12.1 MPx camera that supplies all the functionality that the S100 did, and  was released about 18 months before the S100 was. It doesn't do Camera Raw, but then, I never used that. One really beautiful thing about it is that it offers 14X optical zoom ... even the S100 only did 5X optical zoom. And that means something to me because I love playing with in-camera effects I can create with zoom. The more optical zoom the better ... digital zoom cuts down the image, but optical zoom gives you all the image at every level.

It also has that great intuitive Canon interface that I already know quite well. I hope to get an S100 (or its equivalent) back into the toolbox at one time. Until that time, though, this looks to have all the chops to become the workhorse I'll always have with me, as the S100 was.

And so it goes.

Holgate Slough, Corbett and California

3680

Most of the photos I've been exploiting over the last few instalments have been from the picture-taking expedition to the wilds of South Portland. The ideal viewpoint we located was the intersection of SW Corbett Avenue and California Street ... that's where the big downhill grade begins.

It offers gifts in more than one direction, though, it must be said. As witness:

What you can see from there is the Willamette, where it widens out to encompass Ross Island and Hardtack Island, two large gravel bars that would eventually be tied together at the south end to provide a lagoon for Ross Island Sand & Gravel to quarry for all those years. That charming floating home community is lined along the side that becomes what is called Holgate Slough. Of particular note is the blue building perched on the bluff overlooking the river, in the upper right of the frame. The mural on it is famous and the target of many a fellow amateur photog and blogger, and it's on the back side of Wilhelm's Portland Memorial Funeral home. It's reputedly the largest mural in the United States of America.

We journeyed to this corner of town to find street blades with the new South directional; we found none (though those odd brown blades in the South Waterfront continue to annoy in more ways than one). We expected something since the City o'Portland is apparently locked and loaded to run out and slap a decal on all suitable blades and then replace those that need replacing, but nothing. Nada one. So despite the City insisting this be a problem and fixing it nonetheless, we can still go out there and pretend to the preferable reality that it didn't happen. However, looking at the weathered blades at the corner, it's still a known thing that they went from merely worn to instant antiques. Sic transit gloria mundi.

SW 4th And Harrison

3679

The street blade set caught my eye because there is something so pleasantly urban about the way it contrasts against the new-as-new-can-be building behind it. I also like that the block is 1850, not an even number; an address quirk about Portland I'm happy to say that they can't get rid of.

This is in the part of the city center that's south of SW Market St, which is the 1600 block south of West Burnside. SW Harrison St is three blocks south of that, but instead of a full block it only gets a half block; 1850 instead of 1900.

There's a reason for this, and it has to do with the end of canted downtown blocks, which align to the river, and the part beginning at SW Lincoln St, which is the 2100 block, which runs more cardinally east-west and begins the more cardinally-oriented grid south from there. Lincoln was designated 2000; SW Mill St, one south of Market, was designated 1700; SW Montgomery, 1800, SW Harrison, 1850; SW Hall, 1900; SW College, 1950; SW Jackson, 2000; SW Clifton, 2050. These all occupy a wedge of land which starts narrow on the east and widens as you go west at the point there the grid straightens out, and while the streets continued to march southward at the rate of one every 220 feet, the north-south address blocks on the numbered avenues were stretched to fill by 2 every hundred numbers, to even out at 2100 by the time they, either notionally or physically, crossed Lincoln Street.

Not all of these streets exist on the ground, of course; a great many were erased by urban renewal in the 1960s, construction of the Stadium Freeway and, in some places, ground too steep to build a street on. But it's a fun pattern to suss out.

Trains And Buses, Old Town Portland

3678

The area at the north end of NW 4th Avenue, in the Old Town district, along Hoyt Street and beside the now-former Greyhound Station, is where a lot of transit comes together.

There's a parking lot and staging area for TriMet - this is the north end of our Transit Mall, the north-south axis at the center of the regional transit system which extends, in its current configuration, over a mile through downtown. There's a small building there where the drivers can take their breaks on layovers and just beyond that, if ever there was an icon for a town, there it is ... Union Station.

There's been altogether too many changes in Portland, but that still seems to be the same. It's a gorgeous and lovely building.

The Greyhound station has gone through a change; it suddenly isn't one anymore. Apparently Greyhound has decided it can do without, and ticketing is a few blocks away and the actual stop is just the curbside on a small newer street tucked under the Broadway ramp onto the Steel Bridge called NW Station Way. Sic transit gloria transit. 

The tableau, with its nowhere-somewhere-anywhere feeling, does charm me muchly, however.

Retro Future, The Way It Used To Be

3677

A little bit of delightful architecture along Corbett Avenue, this one near Hamilton Street:

A little bit of the future the way we thought it would be. I love this architecture; it dates itself as being the sort of futuristic style we thought would be all over the place now, instead of whatever it is we have. And that makes it terribly terribly charming.

I see this and remember that, back in that day, I thought the future would look like that too. So it goes.

OK, City Of Portland, If You Insist

3676

A bit of wry humor from the City O'Portland as far as describing the feature Corbett Avenue goes into from California Avenue north through the Johns Landing area.

Oh, it goes down at about a four or five percent grade about a hundred and fifty feet and then up a little over the course of about half a mile, but, OK, we call it a 'dip' for now.

Heh, heh, heh.

That 10MPH advisory? I'd take that seriously.

South Portland, And Google Maps Can't Cope

3675

While the new address district of South Portland is an official thing, but it's still not applied to any of the street blades we've seen there, it has apparently broken Google Maps's tiny mind.

The South 'sextant', as it will be recalled, encompasses that part of Portland east of a line formed by Naito Parkway and View Point Terrace, west of the Willamette River, and out to the Multnomah County/Clackamas County line, taking in part of Lair Hill, most all of Johns Landing, and the posh-above-posh estates of Dunthorpe and Riverdale.

Google Maps, though, thinks that the "South" directional extends farther west than it actually does. As in this area around Cap Hwy and SW 30th Avenue:

If Google Maps cruises this blog, we'd like to reassure them that, no, at this point the named streets are Southwest, along with the numbered Avenues. Seeing Carolina spelled out as South Carolina Street is just plain bewildering.

This bemusement extends into the area were everything is actually supposed to be South, which Google Maps can't work out successfully either:

Because we have S Idaho, S Nebraska, and S Florida Streets all crossing Southwest Corbett Avenue and Southwest Macadam Avenue.

Quite an ironic outcome for an evolution that happened because, as they said, geolocating software couldn't cope with the way the addresses were laid out in this area.

I mean, I know we didn't order this side of unintended consequences, yet, here we are.

The Ziggurats From Three Miles Out

3674

This is an edit of the picture previous, that points out three great buildings in Oregon and suggests the grandeur ... human, certainly, but grand nevertheless ... of the cityscape of Portland:

Mostly blocked by the rise that the Lair Hill neighborhood perches upon, you have the Wells Fargo Tower (or one I still think of as the First National Tower), built in the 1970s and still the tallest building on Oregon; in the middle, the KOIN Tower (which still contains the TV station ... you can't count on that sort of thing anymore) and on the right, the US Bancorp Tower (which no longer houses US Bancorp, thus proving the previous parenthetical point).

The views I get are a great amount of the reason I love my hometown as much as I do.

Via Southwest Corbett Avenue

3673

Two days ago we went in search of South Portland. We found that Southwest was still where South was supposed to be, but we did rediscover Corbett Avenue.

Corbett Avenue runs north and south and parallels Naito Parkway and View Point Terrace; it's the fifth street east of that line, but still west of the Willamette River. As of the First of May, 2020, it's South Corbett Avenue, but all the street signs say SW Corbett Avenue. Maybe it's pandemic rules, but all those decals that were supposed to have changed the signs from SW to S haven't appeared yet, not even in the toney-a-la-toney South Waterfront.

As far as we were concerned, we were still in Southwest Portland.

My route for viewpoints intended to take us via SW Macadam Avenue outward then inward via SW Corbett Avenue. I should have indicated a right onto SW Nevada Street but we went up Taylors Ferry Rd to LaView Drive, a narrow, winding way that fairly drips poshness, just like everything on the prosperous west side does, in the way that it does.  LaView winds and corners up hills that goats should be so lucky to climb, then we get to Corbett Avenue.

I love Corbett Avenue. It goes up and down some pretty steep hills, and as some interesting touches to it you won't find in any other town. And here is one reason, one big reason, why I love my hometown so much. You just don't get sight-lines like this in any other city in Oregon:

From the intersection at California Street, Corbett fairly falls down a steep hill down to a low point at Boundary Street, where you can hang a quick ralph for a block and get back over to Macadam, or ascend another hill and go into the thick of the Lair Hill nabe. That hill can be seen in the distance; right up there, above and to the left of where the road disappears again, one sees the bright green of a freeway exit sign, and that's the Corbett Avenue offramp from I-5 northbound (Exit 298, if that helps). But for the fact that I-5 here is below grade, you'd see that, too.

This was a major landmark for traffic reporters during radio's local drive time, back in the day.

Over the top of the hill in the distance, three of Oregon's tallest buildings; that's downtown, and the ziggurat on the right, Big Pink, is at Burnside Street. California Street is the 6900 block south; at 20 blocks to the mile, we're about three and a half miles from that.

The zipline would be insane.

One other unique thing worth noting is how the street splits there. One upper half, one lower half. Two way traffic may or may not be how it's sanctioned, but that's how they locals do it. And all down these streets are the kind of houses George Orr, in The Lathe Of Heaven, survived the destruction and rebirth of the world in. This is the Portland you couldn't have anywhere else.

Northwest 11th by Powells On Any Given Late Afternoon In The Long Ago

3672

This one tugged at the heartstrings, you know, now that we're all in search of lost time.

The point of view is the units block of NW 11th Avenue, between Couch and Burnside. I'm facing north-northwest. Powell's Books is at my back and on the right. The building you're looking at is called the M Financial Center, which impresses me in as much as I know of no other letter of the alphabet that has so much finance devoted to it.

The intersection in view is that of NW 11th Avenue and Couch St.

NW 11th and Couch is unique amongst Portland intersections is that it is the only place in the city of Portland and indeed the state of Oregon where the so-called 'scramble' crossing is implemented. Couch traffic goes and Couch pedestrians can cross; then 11th Avenue traffic goes and 11th Avenue pedestrians cross; then all traffic on the streets stop and the six cross walks (two for each street and two diagonals crossing the middle) flow. It's an innovative thing and maybe it's the mad dash of everyone toward the Powell's entry on 11th and Couch convinced the city to put it there, I don't know. It's been three years and more since it's been put in and I hear nothing about it being put elsewhere, which is strange in our town where traffic patterns seem disrupted on the basis of wish and whimsy in these latter days.

Indeed, the streets there are so very narrow it's hard to see who, if anyone, is really saving any time by cutting across.

Quite a few years ago, as a teenager in Salem, I remember the city there piloting the idea at the corner of High and Center Streets, and in Salem that makes sense as the street widths there amount to a considerable hike. Surprising therefore that it never caught on there. I guess we love it here, we inscrutable, quirky Portlanders who do things, I guess, just for the sake of being seen doing 'em.

Anyway, that was then and this is now and Powell's is still not opening, not yet. We remain hopeful but understand why this is.

So it goes.

Well, Make A Fruitking Choice Already

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Such language in a grocery store!

Well, kid, make your fruitking choice already so we can get the fruitking fruit out of here.

Well, at thirty-three cents a piece we can just fruitking get 'em both, can't we. Man, I can see why Mom comes home all bent out of shape.

Happy PBN Birthday To Me

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The Brown Eyed Girl knows me and knows me well. Although I sometimes feel that, in doing my art projects, I'm her art project.

Like I'd mind. She gets me to become the person she sees, I get to play with paint and (pandemic allowing) go to art supply stores, which are pretty much the happiest places on earth. Sounds like a win-win.

It has just been my nth birthday (where n=a number from 1-100 inclusive, though realistically, it's not, say, 14) and when I got home from work, there was this glandularly-large box-shaped thing on the table, and when I got to open it, it was not one thing ... but eight things. Here are those things.

... all the Dimensions PaintWorks PBN project kits I could want for a while. These are simple-yet-involved works which require a bit of time to complete, hard working art working just the way I like it to. As I've pointed out before, I am in love with this brand because it lets you get as sophisticated as you want: the picture on the outside doesn't show the idealized result, it shows the picture as you'll actually complete it, and by introducing you to painterly techniques such as feathering, stippling, and drybrushing, makes it so that you can achieve effects that make them look a bit more than the sum of their parts.

Or you can just skip the fancy-pants painterly stuff and it still looks danged good completed.

I can't say enough nice things about the PaintWorks approach. I just wish there were more of them.

On to the easel.

PBN Progress Report: Isn't It Romantic?

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Last issue, I mentioned returning to PBNs to keep my artistic somatic work going. Used a little clip of what I was working on. But here's the whole thing, in three stages for work-so-far:

When I abandoned it then picked it up again, here's the state:

Pretty subdued and earthy-toned so far. But then more colors come in ...

The fancifulness of the colors begins to really blossom and shine.

The title is Isn't It Romantic?, and I've got to say it is, with the warmth and fantasy is supported by the palette. I'm enjoying it.

The Paint By Number Life Preserver

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The first real post on art in ... well, a while.

For a while I was going great guns with the series from 50 Small Paintings, and was thinking I beat the wall that I usually run into when I try to kick my artist game up to the next level. To be fair to myself, that next level was in sight.

Then I hit number forty-five and ... the engine sputtered, died, and wouldn't start up. The picture is that of an elephant, and it just kind of mocked me. And then I couldn't do it. Then the pandemic hit, and all its psychological centrifugal forces. And just like, that, my habit pancaked and I fell into the hole of too much Candy Crush Saga (we do what we do), too much Facebook posting.

It's a touchy road back, but I started blogging again. Didn't have that much to say, so I made it a sorta-daily photo blog (quite a time to do it, what with Covid-19 reshaping our world). And then, I got out the PBN.

When I started really hitting the freestyle acrylic paintings, I left a last PBN just-started. Isn't It Romantic, a Dimensions Paintworks joint, a fanciful Venetian scene full of saturated color. Well, I didn't have anything but the basic urge left, so I pulled that out, got out the paint pots, and got back to work on it.

It's feeling good, and it's confirming a hypothesis I've long had. It occurred to me that that, like repetitious workouts, when you hit a rocky spot in the road artistically, keeping the motions moving is sometimes enough. I started late on becoming an artist, I wanted to keep going, I need to remain prolific ... but then the old executive dysfunction kicks in and the inertia returns and you just scroll and hit the space bar in social media too much. 

Over the last two days, I've been mixing paints out of the PBN kit, filling in numbered and lettered spaces on the card panel, and getting the sheer joy out of just the physical act of painting which, I think, is at least half the thing of it for me. It's pleasant to work, it's pleasant to work on art. It, in and of itself, is a nourishing thing.

So, I'd suggest to anyone like me who's aspiring to an artistic life to have thier own version of paint-by-number for whatever media they're working in: something that just makes them follow instructions but makes them get out the media and work it, just for the sheer somatic joy of creating an artwork even if there's no particular creativity involved in it. Just working the media is bliss, even if a limited sort.

It's the sort of lesson that may have come late, but at least it came to me. I owe it to myself, and certain others, not to quit on myself now, like I have so very often before. Some motion is better than no motion, and doing something half-assed is better than not doing it at all.

And I'm thinking I can do that elephant painting, maybe this other brush I had here will do the trick.

I'll keep y'all posted.

Russellville PDX, Where We Try Hard

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Russelville is kind of a Miss Congeniality of Portland neighborhoods. We're not particularly noteworthy except, really, as Gresham's gateway to Montavilla; we don't have any notable quirks or brands or atmosphere other than the 70/30 Nitrogen/Oxygen that the planet provides at (for now) no extra cost.

But what we have is guts and know-how and gumption. You try hard ... we try harder. I mean, I could have settled for subscribing to New York magazine but I wasn't happy until I was New Yorker. 

Now, you may be proceeding eastbound on Stark at about SE 100th Avenue. If so, turn around; that's a one-way westbound and you're in for a world of hurt, pal. There. Now that you've stopped driving like an asshole, and you're westbound on Stark as PBOT intended, it has occurred to you that your wealth management isn't stangy enough? Now, wealth management is complicated; you're not expected to know what stang is, really, but you are aware that your portfolio isn't keeping up in the stanginess department.

What to do, what to do?!

Well, if you're at 100th and SE Stark, just look up to the left, pal. Your prayers, which you didn't know you were praying until I told you just now, have been answered.

Yes, in Russellville we try everything harder. Living, playing, your nerves ... everything. 

And so it goes.

House Under Reconstruction, SE 117th and Washington

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SE 117th Ave is a road which connects us to the rest of the world and so we go past the house I'm about to show you fairly often. It looks like it was one of the first out here, when it was all getting gridded out and farms and such; when this was built, our part of Stark was still probably called Base Line Road (after the Willamette Base Line, upon which it was surveyed).

This house is on the northeast corner of SE 117th and Washington. Over the past few weeks we've witnessed a painstaking removal of the veneer of this house, seemingly one board at a time. Now, it looks like the renovators are down to what real-estate agents charmingly call the 'bones':

It do have some good bones. It still looks sturdy and not a little be redoubtable. It's good to see someone rehabbing a structure instead of levelling it and putting in yet another few narrow houses or another apartment silo.

ODOT Updates The Overhead COVID Message

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I-205 southbound, milepost 22, today at about 7:15 AM. ODOT's electronic signs, which have been reading STAY HOME SAVE LIVES have updated. Here it is, with a bit of nearly-empty I-205:

STAYING HOME SAVES LIVES KEEP IT UP is a very positive message, considering. The estimate is that Oregon Stay-at-Home has prevented around 70,000 people - that's about one and a half Corvallises or almost one Medford - from being infected. That's smart public action and it's tough for all of us to go through, but if we hadn't, 70,000 Oregonians would be sick or worse because of it.

One of them may have been me. Or you, dear reader.

At The Dawn Of South Portland On Asbury Barbur Day

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Well, we've had about two years now to get our psyches into the idea of a sixth address 'quadrant' (the CoP loves the word sextant but we do not) called South encompassing that long shim of land between a line made up of SW Naito Parkway and SW View Point Terrace on the west and the Willamette River on the east, and we must admit ... we're still not entirely there.

We loved the zero-hundreds, the city-termed leading zero addresses. Of all the quirks a city could come up with to deal with the reality that their west-east division south of the north-south baseline not behaving itself and dawdling off to the east, this was the most charming and the most local. We also, with all charity and no necessary malice, don't entirely buy the reasons the city had for making this change.

But all that's as may be. The decision was decided and the thing has taken its course. Personally, while I like it not, go along with it I will (I mean, it's not as though I have a choice), and have made my peace with it by watching the process and consoling myself with the knowledge that I'm watching the most consequential city address rationale change since the very Great Renaming itself. That was 1931. Almost 90 years is a long run.

In honor of this suspicious occasion, my online friend Michael Long, every bit as much of an Address Nerd as I am, has dubbed this "Asbury Barbur Day", in honor of the man who gave us an unbroken thing that the City o'Portland, in the way cities are time and oft wont to do, strove to fix.

Photo courtesy of Michael Long; used with permission

If the name sounds familiar, it should; that great southwestern gateway to Portland, SW Barbur Boulevard, is eponymous of him. Ironically, the easternmost curl of Barbur, that part east of View Point Terrace and generally between SW Hamilton St and the ramp that sends northbound traffic down Naito Parkway will be ... South Barbur Blvd.

Because if there's anything we Portlanders are, it's consistent as hell.

And so it goes.

• Michael Long is a smart fella of much ilk and geographical knowledge and Portland history, and his Facebook feed is hither and hence.
• My long-time PDX blogging colleague Isaac Laquedem has a nice thumbnail of Asbury Barbur and his life the original Portland address nerd here: https://www.isaaclaquedem.com/2016/12/asbury-barbur-1861-1941-who-told-you-where-you-are.html.

Bridges Through Bridges On The East Bank Of The Willamette

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Let's go back the air of 2014 to see what we were doing then.

Me and the Brown Eyed Girl went down to the east bank of the Willamette, which is probably a place we should visit a little more often; you get great views of the west bank and the downtown skyline is always photogenic.

This time I decided to let the sightlines and points of view do the work for me. The result is that looking through the approaches to the Marquam Bridge at the Hawthorne Bridge and the Justice Center across the river becomes something that is at once identifiable and abstract, and since I was able to get the picture with no other people in it it actually becomes a little other-worldly.

No other large town on the Willamette gives one a view like this. Portland seems to belong to its river more than Salem and Eugene and Albany and Corvallis do.

I can't be the only one for whom sightlines in this town inspire one to wrought indulgence in text. Ah, well.

In Which I Design A Logo For A Candidate That Could Win An Election

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I did this some weeks ago, and I can't understand why I didn't boast about it. The client seems pretty happy with it.

First a word about Metro. We have this regional government here in greater Portland and it's simply called Metro. It's a unique thing, something no other collection of governments do anywhere else in the United States. There are still cities and counties (an armful of the former and three of the latter) in this area of Oregon and they operate independently of Metro but they also operate interdependently with Metro. Metro, as summed up by Wikipedia, does this:

Metro is the regional government for the Oregon portion of the Portland metropolitan area. It is the only directly elected regional government and metropolitan planning organization in the United States. Metro is responsible for managing the Portland region's solid waste system, coordinating the growth of the cities in the region, managing a regional parks and natural areas system, and overseeing the Oregon Zoo, Oregon Convention Center, Portland's Centers for the Arts, and the Portland Expo Center. It also administers the Regional Illegal Dumping Patrol or RID Patrol which is tasked with cleaning up illegal dumping and it is the designated point of contact for citizens to report illegal dumping in the Portland metro area.

So, Metro provides some of the common bones for what is a colony creature made of of three very large Oregon counties who have their own ideas about how to go and grow. Crazily, it works, but that's the way we Oregonians tend to look at things.

A good friend is involved with the campaign of a man running for the Metro commission, district 3, which is an area which encompasses a large swath of the southwest metro: cities like Wilsonville, Tigard, Tualatin, a big part of Beaverton, and the areas both incorporated and unincorporated adjacent to them. This candidate is Gerritt Rosenthal, and my brief was as kind as it was loose; I was provided with kind of a virtual vision board, a collection of files of some already-extant ideas, background designs and such. they provided a sense of color and style and allowed me to home in on a key design element and a palette to use.

This was the design I developed:

 

The tree was the key element and it brought the heart of everything I saw in the various files together. The palette drew on all the cool blues and greens I saw, and the type went for a solid yet friendly feel. How I settled on letting the tree come up through the G, I couldn't tell you; I thought the two should entwine and just went with the idea. It come out divinely, I thought.

Application used was Inkscape with some support from GIMP. It was rather fun. And should Gerritt win ... and Willamette Week has endorsed him so he has a chance ... at least I'd have the pride of being able to say I contributed a bit.

The Hill Going Up 102nd From Parkrose

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Maps can, of course, be unintentionally deceptive: Anyone looking at a map containing northeast Portland who have never been here may be forgiven for thinking that's a simple way to go, from NE Halsey in the Gateway district to NE Sandy in the Parkrose district via NE 102nd Avenue.

That first step, as they say, is a doozy. Here's a look up that hill from the street in front of the market I wrote about in the chapter immediately preceeding:

To give some idea of scale, the distance from the traffic signal in the foreground, NE Prescott St, at the 4500 block north, to that signal in the distance, at NE Fremont St, at the 3500 block north, is 10 blocks or 1/2 mile. The distance from where yours truly is standing to the crest of the hill is about six-tenths of a mile. The change in elevation? About 170 feet.

That is a steep hill. Think of it whenever someone goes on about 'Portland's flat eastside'.