Carefree Artist: Creating Art in a National Park

6/20/16

Creating Art in a National Park

Recently I was the official artist-in-residence for Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks (the first one ever, they told me!) The residency was all volunteer and I provided the materials for the program and I donated most of the rights and all the of the original art produced there to the parks. The purpose of my residency was to create artwork and materials that could be used for programs in the parks now and in the future. Judging by the enthusiastic response of all those who came and participated on presentation day I think it was a success.

During my week in Sequoia -- I actually only had five days to work because of travel and the presentation day -- I created over 14 photo-op masks, 6 mask and other coloring pages, and several watercolor and acrylic paintings and lots of thumbnail sketches. My only regret? Not having more time there. It was so much fun and I still had a lot more ideas for artwork.

Thanks to all the great people at SEKI for the invitation to create art in the park!

UPDATE: In October 2017 the Jr. Ranger Book for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks won a 1st Place Interpretive Media Award for Site Publication from The National Association for Interpretation (NAI.) I illustrated the activities and spot art for interior pages. Read more about it by clicking here.

And here are a couple of watercolor sketches of Kings Canyon.

Above are other pieces of artwork created for SEKI including Jr. Ranger Book artwork. I have also created artwork for Pinnacles National Park and Grand Canyon National Park as well.

Please note: I'm always interested in volunteering to create art, etc. for our National Parks. If you work for a National Park and need artwork please feel free to contact me. Click here.

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Some Food for Thought

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.”
-- Georgia O’Keeffe

"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life."

-- Rachel Carson

"We simply need that wild country available to us… For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."
-Wallace Stegner

“Art is never finished, only abandoned”
--Leonardo Da Vinci

“There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.”
--Henry Moore

“The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.”
-- Vincent Van Gogh

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for.”
--Georgia O'Keeffe

“Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.”
--Rene Magritte

“To create one’s own world in the arts takes courage.”
--Georgia O’Keeffe

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost..."
-- J.R.R. Tolkien

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
-- Henry David Thoreau

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
-- Virginia Wolf, The Waves

“The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.”
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

"What this world desperately needs to make it a more humane and beautiful place is well-funded artists and starving politicians."
-- Mark A. Hicks

“Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know.”
-- Groucho Marx

About this blog...

My art — whimsical, random, silly, and maybe a serious piece now and then — is what this space is about. One post might feature a cartoon, the next a published illustration that I’m selling to raise funds for my charity project*, and the next an abstract painting. All with an emphasis on originality.

Why did I name this blog the Carefree Artist? A life in the arts, including mine, is usually anything but carefree. It's not reality, only a wish. (Oh how so wonderful it would be to be a carefree artist living the simple life in a quiet and inspiring location and creating a ton of art just for art's sake!)

The blog name was also inspired by the Carefree Highway... More about the blog name at the bottom of this page.

My Free Teacher Clip Art

Originally created way back in 1999, most of the artwork at EducatorClips.com was featured in the Discovery Education Clip Art Gallery for nearly twenty years.

The Original Clip Art Gallery was created when the World Wide Web was still very young. Back then computers and modems were painfully slow and storage capacity and applications were quite limited. To make the art available to as many users as possible all the images were posted as small, poor-quality .gif's and .jpg's.

Discovery no longer hosts the Gallery or licenses my artwork but you can still download a few of the best whimsical images from the collection for free for education and noncommercial use at EducatorClips.com. And the artwork featured has been totally reworked to make the images bigger and better.