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I did another bicycle trip this summer, riding from Amsterdam to Italy. Fun times. I started in Dutch canal and windmill country, rode down through Belgium, bits of France, Luxembourg and Germany, then to Basel, Zurich, and Innsbruck, and then down through the Dolomites to just outside Venice. I went through 9 countries all told, though that includes just 20 minutes crossing Liechtenstein. I took lots of photos of gardens and stone along the way which I’ll be showing in the future. For now, these are my drawings from the trip.
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Bolgona, Via Rizzoli

These are my drawings from Italy. Mostly piazzas. I found it very pleasant to sit at a cafe or on some steps and draw a lovely Italian piazza. Towards the end are a bunch of bridges in Venice. Drawing saved Venice for me. I was shocked by the onslaught of crowds and felt bad to be a part of it, but I eventually found a bench to sit and draw Piazza San Marcos, and it felt like catching my breath. Later I drew a bunch of the bridges and ignored everyone taking selfies on them. I missed a lot of the famous sites, but I felt good about what I did see and glad I got to see such a unique city. Venice is amazing, Italy is amazing, I hope to go back as soon as next summer. (more…)

These are my drawings from Switzerland. They loosely track my progress across the country. The furthest west is from Lausanne on Lake Geneva. The last is a view from Guarda, a town in the lower Engadine near the Austrian border. The interior view and the pool are from Therme Vals, Peter Zumthor’s phenomenal thermal baths.

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Anyone want to buy some beef? The two cows that wander our property have outgrown the space and are heading to the butcher as soon as we have enough orders for the meat. It’s time. They’re full size, they’ve eaten pretty much everything there is to eat on the property, and recently they learned how to break through the fence to get to our neighbor’s literally greener pastures. I’ve had to track them down and drive them back onto our property half a dozen times in the past month. So as soon as the meat is spoken for, they’re going off to the abattoir.

Our landlord has found takers for quite a bit of it but not all. Two full-sized cows is a lot of meat. Anita and I will take some, though it will be strange to eat animals we’ve known by name. I don’t really want to, but I feel like I have to eat them on principal, either embrace the reality of meat or become vegetarian. We’ve bought shares of free-range, grassfed cows like this in the past. The flavor was good, but it was leaner than supermarket beef and we found we needed to cook all of the cuts like game, almost always braising even when that was not the traditional way to cook the cut. The ground beef made great burgers. Our landlord wants five dollars per pound. I’m not sure how the logistics would work but anyone interested should comment or email me at ryan at buenoluna dot com and we can figure it out. (more…)

Watercolors from a trip to Puerto Rico. I used a variety of paper and tried to play around with different styles and subjects. A lot of fun, I managed one for every day of the trip. A great trip, a great place. Coquí!

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While I was in Oaxaca I tried to do a watercolor every day. I didn’t quite manage that, but I was quite prolific by my standards. Kind of fun, I’m hoping to continue maybe once a week throughout the year. This isn’t every single watercolor I did — I did a few others that I’ll mix into my upcoming posts — but it gives a decent overview of my trip while I work on my more targeted posts. The first one is from the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Garden in the center of town inside the walls of the historic cathedral complex. It’s a fantastic garden; I’ll do a post about it soon. The others show the main cathedral and a booth selling clothing near a side entrance. I painted a lot of agaves and palms while I was down there. Gotta like agaves and palms if you’re going to watercolor in Oaxaca.

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