I never intended to stay away so long, but as with the rest of my unplanned life, intention by itself never proved enough; very long, incredibly convoluted story, extremely condensed version.

It took months to get this image up, please click here for a better view!

People think that my specialty is illustrating animals past and present. If I’m honest with myself, in truth that specialty has always been playing with metaphorical and emotional guns and shooting my career in the foot every couple years. In 1999 I was living in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was my 7^th state and at least my 30^th place of residence since I left upstate New York back in 1972. I was living on my own after being a lousy husband to a good woman and wonderful (amazingly still a) friend who really deserved better, when my father called and asked if there was any possibility of my coming “home”. As was always the case, I really didn’t think about what I might be getting into, I just let it happen. An old New York friend gave me the opportunity (and an entire building) to set up a studio where I could work and live and yet be close enough to enable my folks to stay in the only home they’d known for 60 years (my mother, in 82 years, had NEVER lived anywhere but her beloved hillside).

Things worked out fairly well until shortly after 9/11. My father had the first of three strokes and my mother started forgetting things. You know where this is going. As the sibling without a mate who could work at home, I inherited my parents. By the end of 2001, my life and my limping career were in storage and I was back where I swore I’d never be…home…literally. These past five years I’ve been a full-time caregiver and live-in nurse. My father passed away last summer two weeks short of ninety, and my mother, now 88, has descended into the depths of dementia and at last has an excuse for not recognizing who I am. When I started Olduvai on my 59^th birthday last November, I had my old dog Tito to get me out. He was my sanity, but as many of you reading this probably know, he died in early March.

So here I am in my 60^th year. Even though I once had a friend tell me that when he died he wanted MY life to flash in front of him, I wished I had planned things just a bit. Take away the two computers, the Concept II Rowing Machine (on which I spend an hour a day working out my frustrations) and the (truckload of) books, and I have the net worth of a second-rate, third world subsistence farmer AFTER chasing the elephants out of the crops.

If I believed in karma I would suppose that this phase of my life is penitence for the 35 rather self-serving years that preceded it, but it’s been worth it if only because I found out I have infinitely more patience than I ever believed possible. I’m also working on the premise that 60 is the new 40 (well, 45) and if I’m lucky, keep eating well, and stay in shape, I still might have 20 years of decent art in me. Who knows, I’m even learning to control my pathologically obstinate aversion to being told how things have to be done.

O.k., enough purging; Olduvai after all is my attempt to get away from responsibilities and lack of (fill in your own blank) for a few moments each day. Besides, writing this post has taken much too long. For three months* (I’m actually getting better, my first post last November took a year) I debated about how much I should delve into my present situation, and what you’ve just read in part is me finally saying to myself, “Oh shut the expletive up and post a picture!”

Although I’m not quite the attention whore I was years ago, I’m beginning this incarnation of Olduvai as I started it last November, with a self-portrait. Yes, I really am an exact stand-in for the 6-foot human silhouette that always seems to be used to show scale when depicting extinct creatures. I also have the redeeming social quality of being exactly as dumb as I look. No beer this time. Let me introduce my friends. Behind me is the Jefferson’s ground sloth Megalonyx jeffersonii. (Many thanks to Dr. Greg McDonald for providing me with wonderful skull and skeletal reference) To my right (your left) is the short-faced (and very leggy) bear Arctodus simus and the toothy “little” fellow in front is the “giant” (not exactly a) beaver Castoroides ohioensis. I promise I’ll get into each of these late Pleistocene residents of North America in depth in the future, but right now it’s more important to me to put this post up and be back in the blogging community. I’ve missed you guys and I want to thank everyone who took the time to email me over the past spring and summer to ask how I was doing. I was amazed and deeply touched.

*The worst part about taking so long to write this post is that since the accompanying illustration is digital, I kept looking at and changing it. I sent a jpeg of it out to half a dozen people before this posting and each time it was slightly different. Each of the creatures has been changed numerous times. When I started the drawing and it had no deadline, I worked in a very strange way for a guy trying to present anatomical accuracy. I pulled images out of my head (some might say I pull them from elsewhere) and worked with them without reference until I thought I was getting close. Only then did I refer to bone drawings, skeletal and skull photos, and measurements. I’ve been doing this for so long that I was well within the “ballpark”, but the animals I remembered and imagined were not exactly what the bones indicated and the resulting alterations were more like sculpting than painting. PhotoShop and Wacom tablets are such wonderful tools, but they enable my crash and burn and rise again methodology.

I am SO glad this is finally posted. I need deadlines! One would think since I’m so far past the midway point of my “career”, that I’d have learned better discipline…but NO! I have a third-grader’s dream job and still too often approach it like I’m in third grade.

I can’t come back with just one image. Here are two totally different little scenics that were done for publication earlier this year. I was rather pleased with both, but unfortunately, the paper they were printed on and the printing process used didn’t help the reproduction and I’m putting them up here so that people can see them as I meant them to be seen. I say that knowing full well that each of your computer screens may just display them a bit differently, but they look fine on mine!

Morning off an Alaskan island

Utah slickrock