north country windmills

watch and weep (well, not literally, but . . .)

Werner Herzog is the voice of a plastic bag as it searches for the meaning of its life.

fixed it

Hi, all.
I changed the size of the video window in the previous post so that now it is much easier to see the entire tsunami video, as well as getting to the right-hand-side buttons that would take you to either full-screen or to youtube.com to see it.
Enjoy better!

watch this

NOAA's animation of the March 11, 2011, tsunami, with narration.
Amazing what the Earth does.

business as usual

Second Nature

10 inches high x 8 inches wide

collage

Illustration Friday: routine; that which is habitual, customary, automatic.
Yeah. Nothing new here.

listen

This is the sound of the start of the Missouri River, at the confluence of the Madison and Jefferson Rivers (the Gallatin comes in a mile downstream).

gates to hell

Postcard photo copyright Scott Wheeler 2001

Postcard caption: "Butte, Montana, at sub-zero temperatures, where steam from present day heating systems is a vague reminder of the heyday of the copper mining and smelting industries of the 1800s. The Anselmo mine gallows frame is featured on the front."

That says it all, eh?

pH 2

pH 2

10 inches high x 8 inches wide

collage

Illustration Friday's theme was sour. A good friend and critic challenged me to do this collage with no animals.

Here it is.

fierce peace

Fierce Peace

10.375 inches wide x 8.25 inches high

collage on moleskine notebook cover

The bunny and the owl are strong in their protection of home. Keeping the peace, however, is difficult when anything that opposable thumbs do is antithetical to the creatures' understandings of how things should be.

Illustration Friday's theme: fierce.

wyoming

Coal mining is going on in full force here. The hotels and motels are full with construction and other workers. Long trains pass each other over the plains, each pulling coal car after coal car, all full. All to make electricity to keep this country running...away.

what is not kept

Tell Me a Story of When We Had Everything

10 inches high x 8 inches wide

collage

Hoard: n. 1. a supply or accumulation that is hidden or carefully guarded for preservation or future use; v.t. 2. to accumulate for preservation. . .in a hidden or carefully guarded place. Synonyms: stockpile, reserve, cache, store, stock. With a little editing, that is what the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd edition (1998) says about the word that is this week's Illustration Friday's theme.

If one doesn't keep a supply of things carefully, they will run out because they will be used. And then there will come a day when we will want to hear the stories of what the days of plenty were like. Enjoy the stories.

the big one

The mountain top, from the air. 20,320 feet high, the highest peak in North America.


The bottom of the mountain is somewhere in the clouds, here in the Alaska Range. Treeline is at about 2000 feet elevation.

Arctic Ocean

Looking north. That is sea ice out there, mostly fresh water ice made as the salts are squeezed out when the ocean water is freezing.

The water was cold. The air was at about 40°F. The sun was out all day, up there somewhere and everywhere.

wells

BP drills for oil on the North Slope of Alaska and in the Arctic Ocean. There are several oil fields underground there, each producing oil that travels down the Alaska Oil Pipeline to Valdez where it is put on ships to go to refineries.

Each of these blue boxes contains a wellhead. Once a hole in the ground is drilled deep enough, equipment is attached to the top of the pipe that was put down the hole, and then the whole thing is enclosed in a box to keep critters and cold out. The holes are drilled on ten-foot centers, so many wells can fit in a relatively small space. The wells here are on Endicott Island just offshore in the Arctic Ocean.

The substance that comes out of the ground is in three parts: oil, natural gas, and water. These three must be separated from each other, which is what happens right after these blue boxes. All those pipes carry these things to different places to be processed differently: oil to the pipeline; water to be reinjected into the wells; and natural gas also to be reinjected into the wells until BP builds its new $90 Billion Alaska Gas Pipeline (click on view the powerpoint presentation).

The water and gas are injected into parts of the wells to produce pressure that pushes more oil into the hole so that less oil is left at the bottom. If there is not enough pressure, then oil just does not come up the pipe.

Notice the blue sky; it is daylight there for 24 hours at this time of year.

BP tells a story about its commitment to the environment and its action to avoid spills here.

oil

The Pipeline is the Punchline

10 inches wide x 8 inches high, across two pages of a notebook

collage

I spent the last week in Alaska. Three days were spent in a Chautauqua workshop on Oil in Alaska; two of those days were in the BP conference room listening to many lectures on the production of oil on the North Slope. Then the last day, we went to Prudhoe Bay up on the Arctic Ocean to see how BP gets oil out of the ground and sends it down the Alaska Oil Pipeline. There will be much more about this in subsequent posts—stay tuned.

Today's post is really in response to Illustration Friday's theme, punchline, put up last Friday. I created this piece out of images from various brochures and other publications that I saw while in Alaska. As good as BP might be about their safety and environmental concerns, their bottom line is still, indeed, the production of oil and soon, if all goes as they plan, natural gas. And the pipeline(s) that move the stuff are the end of the North Slope story. This is where the fuel goes to get to the Lower 48 where we use it all up. And of all the oil that we use here, 20 per cent of it is produced by BP from the North Slope of Alaska, up on the Arctic Ocean, pulling the stuff from underground reserves that were laid down millions of years ago. It is a long, long story.

where are they going?

The Forgotten Are Leaving

10 inches high x 8 inches wide

collage

Illustration Friday thought that the word forgotten would be a difficult theme to work with. Too much is forgotten in this world to make it hard to interpret. Could have gone anywhere with anything. I chose this route. Go with it. Maybe it is better over there.

new world

New World

10 inches high x 8 inches high

collage

Illustration Friday's theme this week: Baby. A new person.
How many more people do we need? It's the Earth that needs to be reborn.

why worry indeed

Why Worry

10 inches high x 8 inches wide

collage

Another theme starting with a "w" from Illustration Friday, and a worrisome one at that. Just what is there to worry about? Man is progressing as he was directed to. It is up to him to define what being stewards of the Earth means, and so he has done so. Really, why worry at all?

I would worry about what women think.

warning: snake ahead

Planting Knowledge

10 inches high x 8 inches wide

collage

Another week, another theme from Illustration Friday. This week, the word is seed. Seed, seeds, seedy. Planting them. Seeds of love. Seeds of war. The end always follows the beginning. Beware of what you start.

international fiber collaborative

Yesterday was the opening reception for Jennifer Marsh's Wrapped Gas Station International Fiber Collaborative in Syracuse, NY. It was a cloudy and chilly day, but many people came out to listen to some music, to eat some food, and to celebrate her accomplishment. I was one of 450+ participating artists—there were also something like 2500 elementary and other students involved. (My panel is the one directly to the right of the upside-down duck; it's called sunset over picnic and is knitted and sewn.) Her website explains better than I can what she is doing and why. Check it out and enjoy!