A plasma portal opens at the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah and E.T.s materialize. / collage

They’re just some rowdy inter dimensional kids that come around once in a while to raise Hell on Earth then they go home. They might make a crop circle and we all love a pretty crop circle except the farmer who is not amused when his crop is flattened. They might mutilate a cow taking whatever they want out of the cow with surgical precision and leaving the dead cow in the field without a drop of blood. No one knows why they do that but it’s enough to keep anyone from raising cattle on the ranch. They might buzz around in their UFO or maybe abduct a human. There isn’t much we can do to stop them.

A rich guy bought the ranch but he doesn’t live there. He hired a team of scientific paranormal investigators and wanted to get to the bottom of the question. They made a documentary which seems inconclusive. It’s on TV if you want to check it out. I think the guy wasted his money buying a ranch that can’t be farmed.

I’d like to go there some day. I’ve been to Utah before and there’s so much beauty I only saw a little of it. I bet the Skinwalker ranch wouldn’t let me on the property since the show is on TV they probably have a lot of people going there to see the UFOs. The Navajo tribe reservation is there and they knew about how weird it is and all about the shape shifting E.T.s long before shape shifters were in the pop culture. Yes. There are shape shifters too.

oops. This one is fuzzy. Good thing I’m not a pro photographer. I don’t care.

If I ever go there I’ll probably park my car a few miles back and bike in and leave my phone in the car because things with batteries and electronics suddenly go mysteriously dead there and I don’t want to risk a dead car battery out there in the middle of nowhere. But I feel like if I could go as far as the gate and hang around long enough to get a sketch that my intuition would tell me yes, this is a spooky place or no, the story is all hype. Have you seen the documentary?

E.T.s come to Richmond / monoprints and story

As soon as they stepped through that bright light portal people loved them. They looked like a delicious tossed salad and smelled so fresh. They communicated through mental telepathy that they were here in peace and said,”Take me to your leader.”

The governor rushed right over to meet them and they promised that they could increase our crop yield 1000%. Imagine getting a real ton of tomatoes from each plant, 50 foot tall corn stalks with 100 ears on each, pumpkins large enough to be made into housing! They could do all that because they are actually vegetables themselves and they want to put down roots in Virginia.

The governor gave them the key to the city. Then the next day they were shopping downtown and some kids started chasing them with bottles of ranch dressing and forks. Suddenly the portal reappeared and they vanished.

I hope you enjoyed the story. If the mono prints look like something else other than aliens tell me what you see!

It’s raining and I had some fun with these prints but I’m not finished with them. I want to do a larger collage using them and make something deep with layers of paint. I’m not sure yet how I’m going to do that. I’ll have to wait a few days for this to dry then I might cut these and rearrange them.

E.T.s bringing in the oxygen sucking machines

My fellow Americans, stop wasting ammo. When this happens the rest of the world will be depending on us to kill the E.T.s

Anyone can do art.

Art can be a discipline, therapy or just for fun depending on your needs.

If you really want to get into doing art, the more skill you get the better. It’s like playing a musical instrument. You have to spend a lot of time practicing but anyone can pick up an instrument at any time in their life and if they live long enough to keep practicing they can see an improvement and possibly even master it. It’s not something an artist is born with. To think that is to ignore the time the artist has actually worked on it.

But not every artist wants the discipline. And they don’t have to have it in today’s art world. Self expression is valued even more highly than skill.

A lot of people just need to distract their minds from a problem and art can help with that. If you have some fun doing something with paint, that’s a couple hours that your brain took a break from whatever is eating you. What if you’re stuck at home and you’re tired of Netflix? What if you’re stuck at home with a tyrant and you can’t escape to your job like before? What if you have to home school your kids and you don’t know how to teach? Art will help in all of those situations. Any art, any project.

Art as therapy:

I wasn’t always sane, but now I am. I can’t say for sure how I got my mental health because there might be more than one reason but I think art helped. It didn’t happen suddenly. I didn’t get my head shrunk or take meds for it.

And simply not dying might have helped. Like the cliche, Time heals all wounds. That’s why I tell young artists who are suffering to stay alive. If I lived long enough to enjoy my retirement you can too.

This art therapy project:

First, think of the thing that bugs you the most. Do a rough illustration of it (stick figures or blobs will work for this). For me, the thing annoying me is the global pandemic so I threw some yellow watercolors down on the paper and then scribbled in some red lines with my Inktense pencils to make rough corona virus waves and hot spots. If I didn’t tell you my E.T.s started out as corona viruses would you have recognized it from the pictures on TV?

You can do corona viruses too or some other subject.

Second step, Think of something much worse than the original problem and add that thing into your picture. Like, what if those yellow dots with red lines aren’t corona viruses? What if they’re aliens coming to rob us of our air?

It could happen. Then we’d feel nostalgic for the days when all they talked about was the virus because suddenly they forgot all about the virus and then it would be E.T.s 24/7 on the news and our president might not be able to strike a deal with them.

Third step, Put the more scary thought’s picture in the brains of 100 people on your blog. Now 100 people will have a new perspective on corona. It’s possible to live through the pandemic without ever getting sick but impossible to live without our atmosphere.

We have a lot of brave guys who would volunteer to fly up there and destroy the oxygen sucking machines and kill the E.T.s. They’re going to need bullets and bombs.

That’s today’s art therapy project. I’ll leave it to the mental health professionals to explain how that made me feel better.

It’s raining again. I’ll go back out to draw in plein air as soon as the weather clears up.

E.T.s on their shiny pink world

Do they look like E.T.s to you? They do to me.  They’re cypress knees.

It’s nice out today. The sun looked great on the knees but it was spotty and moved fast. I enjoyed sketching much more today than last time when it was cloudy and decided to finish today’s cypress knee study by working on the  reflections and adding a background color.

Last time I sketched them they reminded me of fingers pointing up but today I thought they looked like figures. They could be human if they were abstract but they could be nonhuman, aliens. If I titled this “cypress knee study” it wouldn’t be as much fun for the viewer because they might not think of E.T.s. Now you see them like I do, otherworldly.

On the way home from the swamp I decided to do a fun spring color in the background, not green, so that it would be easier to see them as something other than cypress knees.

It’s just a study for a painting I’ll do in the future. I need a lot more knee studies.