Key West: The Strand

Posted on by Thor

My friend wanted to entertain her niece so we took a trip down to Key West. Ironically I spent much of the time teaching virtual classes from the Air B&B we rented while they explored the island. I have been to key West before so I know many of the typical sites. I did get out in the evenings and they wanted to hit up a posh restaurant on Duval Street which thankfully had outdoor seating.

The main drag of shops were constantly crowded. It was like navigating busy Manhattan sidewalks. My friend and her niece have both had COVID and they are over it. They dropped all basic mitigations. At first I tried regulating my breathing but then I put on my N-95 mask and forgot about it. I might be the only person on the island in a mask, but that is fine with me.

The Strand Theater is gorgeous, but unfortunately it has been turned into a Walgreens. Entertainment venues might come and go, but people always need drugs.

Next to the Strand is a bar with tons of dollar bills hanging from the ceiling. Stickers covered every other surface. I didn’t try and sketch all that detail.

We ate at La Tratoria, a posh Italian Restaurant. They have flavored martinis, zuppa, antipasti, insalate, and of course lotsa pasta.

After diner, we walked to the west site of the island to watch the sunset with the rest of the crowd. Once the sun set, a bell was rung.

Memorial Day

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On Memorial Day a friend and I got away to the beach. I kind of miss beach days. Granted I spend most of the time under an umbrella with my legs covered with a towel. I am like a vampire, if the sun hit my skin it instantly burns. My friend can lay in the sun all day and not be effected in the least.

The couple to the left clearly did not wear sun screen. After several hours the guy was as red as a lobster. He was clearly a tourist and had no idea how strong the Florida sun is.

Being in the middle of the state of Florida, a drive to the beach is an hour in either direction. That drive is often enough of a hindrance to keep me from taking the trip.

The sound of the waves breaking on the shore is relaxing, but I never manage to relax. I always feel the need to sketch.

I am just noticing now that the book in this sketch looks like it is floating. I should have found a way to sketch in the far hand holding the book.

Taco Cheena

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I was near Taco Cheena on Mills Avenue in Orlando one morning to meet a student. As I waited, I sat down and finished off a sketch to pass the time. The student never showed up. When you are an urban sketcher such moments are never wasted.

Someone was waiting for a bus across the street in front of the Forest Gump mural. He was picked up long before I finished the sketch.

Taco Cheena wasn’t open yet but I saw someone moving trash out. It looks like they have a food truck as well. They open at noon. I have never eaten there but I will have to order food from there someday. I don’t eat in restaurants anymore since I know too much about the COVID virus which is still circulating but unreported. There is outdoor seating which I appreciate.

Maybe someday all restaurants will have strong HEPA air filtration systems so that patrons can breath clean air indoors while they eat. I am not holding my breath however.

Cyclops

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For the day of the out Macular Degeneration patient Eye surgery I had to wear a plastic Eye shield. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do a Van Gogh inspired self portrait.

The eye patch was removed the following morning at the doctors office by a nurse. She waved her hand in front of my face to see if I could see and then held up one finger to see if I knew how to count. She pulled her hand away with the one finger and asked if I could still see her finger and I let her know that it was still attached to her hand.

What had been a red blob in my patch covered vision was now a blurry and wet view of the office. The lower half of my vision was till a grey air bubble. I can see through the grey air bubble but it is like looking through gauze of a thick fog.

My eye looks like I was punched by Mike Tyson without a boxing glove on. There is no white to my eye, it is all a bloody mess. I was told the bubble sloshing around in my eye will disappear in several weeks. In the mean time I tend to get sea sick whenever I move my head. It turns out I am always moving my head except when I sleep.

I will not be venturing out to sketch on location for a few weeks. My Sunday Crealde classes were canceled, not because I look like a monster, but because not enough students signed up. I am thankful to have the Sundays off to recover, but I have a dozen virtual classes each week that I need to pace myself through. I had rescheduled virtual classes that were slated for the day of the surgery to the following day. I am very glad I did that because I felt nauseous and rested most of the day after surgery. The make up classes went alright but I rested between the classes. Today I have 8 hours of virtual classes back to back. It will be an adventure to see how I hold up.

Eye Surgery

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I have been seeing double and no it is not because I had too much to drink. It has gotten to the point where I hesitate to drive at night because there are far too many lines on the road.

Going to a regular eye doctor, I was diagnosed with macular degeneration. What that means is that the retina inside my eyeball is swollen and therefor my vision is distorted in that eye. since one eye is unaffected, by binocular vision causes me to see two of everything. This is not an idea situation for a visual artist.

A friend drove me to The Orlando Ophthalmology  Surgery Center. It was scheduled for 6:30am but was thankfully rescheduled for 8am. The receptionist asked which eye need surgery, I said my left eye and pointed at it. He responded with Right Eye, and we had to correct him. There was the usual agonizing wait in the waiting room. I had sketched this waiting room before since I took another fried in for an eye surgery years ago. I felt less inclined to sketch but once I put a few lines on the page I was called in.

There is no HEPA air filtration system in the waiting room or in the pre-op gurney waiting area as far as I could see. I was intubated. pointing my toes in pain when the needle was shoved into a vein in my hand. An anesthesiologist and nurse who would control the drip both asked me a series of questions. I was asked multiple times which eye needed surgery and they pasted a sticky note above that eye. My surgeon came in and asked me again and he signed off on the sticky note. A clear eye shield was placed over my other eye.I wonder how many incorrect eyes they jabbed before they developed this stream of checks and balances.

As I lay on the gurney the lights blacked out and then flickered back on. A nurse joked that they really should pay the power bill In another passing conversation a nurse said she would marry for money rather than love. None of the nurses wore masks though the anesthesiologist wore hers as a chin strap. I had to take off my quality N-95 mask and wear the baggy yellow surgical mask they offered. I know it is worthless against an airborne virus and it is amazing that doctors and nurses do not. I had a brand new n-95 mask in my bag, but I could not use that either. I breathed as shallow as possible especially since one nurse was coughing up a lung. I felt like I was in a horrific third world emergency room. Doctors and nurses who are not required to wear masks refuse to wear them because the do not care about the health of their patients. They are actively promoting and encouraging infection. In the surgery room, everyone wore their surgial masks which offered me some form of relief.

I was awake but groggy for the surgery. My doctor told me most patients don’t remember a thing. I however remember seeing everything as it happened. A blue bag was taped over my head. I saw a purple pitchfork shoved inside inside my eyeball from the left and it stabbed a sheet of film which waved in the fluid like a flag. After the surgery a patch was taped over the eye. when I tilt my head a black fluid line separates the red on top which is light shining though my eyelid, and grey below which I was told is a large air pocket in the eye. tilting my head makes that air pocked move up and down. Shaking my head makes it slosh around like an ocean wave. Watching that air pocket sloshing around tends to make me sea sick. I did some painting the first day after surgery but got sick to my stomach and had to lie on the couch for the rest of the day.

This is day two and I can type, but I need to keep the wonky eye closed so it doesn’t distract me too much.

 

Longwood Ranch Farmers Market

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A friend and I went to a crowed Longqwood Ranch Farmers Market in near Bradenton, Florida. I stayed masked the whole time but my friend went mask less like most in the crowd. I tend to leave my mask off outside but in a crowded situation like this it stays on.

My friend found a tent that had all sorts of pickled items and multiple jars were purchased to add to the baby brain shelf of the refrigerator.

I do recall that it was a gorgeous spring day. We also went to the Rollins Art Museum and saw some huge Peter Paul Rubens paintings.

For diner the plan was to go to The Mullets Fish Camp. The line to get in was insanely long. There was an outdoor patio but that filled up, so we left and found another restaurant with outdoor seating across form Morton’s Gourmet Market. The market was small but good. The food at Libbie’s neighborhood Brassiere wasn’t memorable and the service sucked.

Maitland Art Center Demo 2

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The point of this lesson at the Maitland Art Center was that the center of interest doesn’t need to be in the center. I was also pointing out that the beams up above all relate to a common vanishing point and the horizontal bean is not horizontal in the sketch.

I knew this would be a rushed sketch since we were already an hour into the lesson. Most of my sketches take about two hours to complete and I am happy if there is even more time to refine the sketch.

This was a fun morning of sketching with warm sunshine and cool weather.

The Mayan courtyard at the Maitland Art Center is a great location for taking the time to observe intricate detail and balancing that against wide open spaces.

I enjoy these one on one sessions with students. Contact me if you ever want to join me on sketch outings to learn something new.

Maitland Art Center Demo

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This sketch was done as a demo for one of my students. It was a nice day, cool and sunny. We did several sketched on the property.

I am always stressing the importance of perspective when doing a sketch on location. The sign in the foreground and the building inn the background have the same vanishing point. The fact that the vanishing point is off the pace often throws a beginning sketcher.

There is also a vanishing point off the page to the right which defines that sidewalk triangle shape in the lower right corner and the angles in the roadway.

Now that I am on my own, I am feeling the need to get out and sketch on location more often. The trouble is that most days I teach until 8pm and most events start earlier.

I might just start doing nocturnal digital paintings after 8pm. I am thinking I can go to event venues and sketch from outside. A COVID cautious artist doing outsider views of crowded venues might be interesting. I used to document each hellish superspreader event, but those are happening every day now.

Yesterday I started designing the COVID Dystopia book. The format I am considering is a hardbound book 10 1/4 by 13 1/4 inches. Learning InDesign is proving problematic. I have the cover set up but there are many technical issues I need to address. I made a mistake downsizing cover art, and now it is pixelated. Well. if I can teach myself Premiere and After Effects, I should be able to tackle InDesign.

Baldwin Park Dog Park

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For the last class with my Crealde Urban Sketching students I often take them to Baldwin Park Dog Park. At Crealde I do an in depth lesson on how to draw dogs doing lots of sketched on the chalk board.

Once My students are warmed up and have enough dog sketches under their belts, we head over to Baldwin Park which is a short drive away.

Once in the dog park I do a quick demo showing that the dogs are not the biggest focus of the sketch. Instead the focus it the large trees and the far shore of the lake. People and dogs are scattered throughout but they are tiny compared to the expanse around them. On this day there was an orange utility fence blocking dogs access to the lake.

I work on the demo I sketch I started but walk around and share each stage of the sketch and offer each student thumbnails to show how I might tackle the scene they are sketching. By this class I know what level of finish each student will bring to their work I encourage them on their journey.

Hard to Port

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Hard to Port performed at a Cemetery Tour fundraiser. Large event tents were set up in the cemetery with circular tables for all the paying patrons. I do think I was the only soul in the cemetery that was wearing a mask. I did wear a mask while doing this sketch because people kept walking up to me to ask, “Did you do that right now?” I arranged to sit at the open end of one of the tents so there was at least air circulation.

This event involved a strange adjustment to pandemic risk assessment. The person I was with already had been infected with COVID and after multiple vaccines had relaxed their stance on basic precautions.

My precautions today consist of always masking indoors and removing the mask when outside. If there is a crowd outside or I am withing 22 feet of others, the mask goes back on outside.

This fundraiser was outside but the tents were an enclosed space. I remained masked most of the time but removed the mask long enough to wolf down the food and then exit the space. I hoped the open flaps nearby offered enough circulation. I dodged the bullet but didn’t feel great about removing the mask in the crowded tent area. My stupidity makes me want to double down in the future.

After diner, actors in turn of the century outfits took groups of guests on a tours around the cemetery. Each guest had a flashlight. We stopped at a tombstone and the actor spoke about the life of the person buried there. In our group one lady was too drunk to pay attention. At one headstone two actors performed, one as the husband and one as the wife buried side by side. It was an interesting way to lean about local history.

This sketch was done on the day Joe Biden lifted the COVID National Emergency declaration. The government will save money by not having to supply tests for COVID and offering vaccines for free.  A governments job isn’t to protect it’s citizens but to keep the economy ticking. It is a win win for Joe who tests anyone who gets close to him to be sure they do not have COVID. I know the declaration is meaningless. The pandemic is far from over.

Right now hospitalizations are down. COVID deaths are down to less then 600 people a week. That number at the start of the pandemic would have been horrifying, but now it is business as usual. About that many people die every week in auto accidents. I still drive, but I take basic precautions like wearing a seat belt. Others seem intent to drive into walls just to prove they can. If they get sick multiple times they want you to get sick as well.