Events where I plan to show art provides motivation to create new pieces.
click image to see more Life on the Creek art
‘Deer Creek Bridges’ was created for the 2018 Nevada County Fair photography competition.
click on image to see more Life on the Creek art
The ‘Pine Street Historic Bridge’ piece was made for display and sale during the 2018 Fall Colors Open Studio Tour.
Video Productions doing Double Duty
This video was created for the blog post, Native Plants for Healing the Land After Fire. It was produced a few weeks before the Redbud Chapter of the California Native Plant Society conducted their annual Native Plant Sale. It helped tell the story about the importance of native plants in the Deer Creek Watershed and promote the event.
Responsible Art Production
Since most of my work is digital, time and hydroelectric generated power (as well as computing hardware) are the main production resources involved in making these creations.
Historical Research Inspires New Design Concepts
As I do background research for posts, I also generate an art piece. At the time of this writing, 62 designs are in the Life on the Creek collection.
While I started with graphic designs involving text, Latin names, and waves, several recent posts inspired a new layout direction.
$5 from every online sale helps support the Following Deer Creek website/film project. (Production cost of selected item + $5 LoC savings + tax & shipping = total price.)Pony Express help wanted advertisement.
‘Pony Express Riders’ is a blending of a public domain map and a help wanted advertisement. This came about after discovering that Joaquin Miller, Poet of the Sierras (and a mining camp cook who developed scurvy for the post Scurvy in California’s Food Capital) was also a Pony Express rider.
*In the newer designs, you may notice an absence in the ” wording at the bottom of the Following Deer Creek logo. These pieces were created after I moved the website from a free site to a paid site in an attempt to reduce unwanted advertising clutter.
Made-to-Order Art Reduces Environmental Impacts
FineArtAmerica.com hosts my artwork online and produces made-to-order prints and household items.
At my Open Studios Tour booth (#30) October 13th and 14th, I will have a number of these pieces on display.
The California Floristic Provinceis considered a world biodiversity hotspot. It contains a large number of ecosystems that include alpine forest, mixed evergreen forest, riparian forest, sagebrush steppe, coastal sage scrub, redwood forests and more.
Currently, only 25% of the original vegetation remains unharmed.
Fragmentation [human building] has the capacity to generate persistent, deleterious, and often unpredicted outcomes, including surprising surges in abundance of some species and the pattern that long temporal scales are required to discern many strong system responses. National Center for Biotechnology Information
Characteristics of Invasive Species
successful invasion elsewhere
ability to live near humans
food source variety
survives in a wide range of environments
alters growth to suit changing conditions
grows and reproduces quickly
fast spreading
difficult to eradicate
Invasive species and biodiversity preservation is a topic much larger than one blog post can cover! Below is a brief list of plants commonly found in Nevada County.
The ‘Resources’ section at the bottom of the page contains links for extensive exploration.
Creates an impenetrable thicket (bramble).
Grows in areas where soil has been disturbed such as land grading, agriculture tillage, timber logging, housing construction, wildland firebreaks, animal grazing, and road building.
Provides shelter for rats and food for deer.
Damages livestock.
Sri Lanka / Korea. Imported as an aquarium plant in the 1950s
Behavior
Aggressively invades new aquatic environments.
Displaces native vegetation.
Forms large dense mats.
Impedes water flow.
Cloggs pumps.
Reduces water clarity.
Alters the ecosystem.
Blocks sunlight.
Decreases oxygen water levels, killing fish.
Reduces recreational water use.
Fragments easily carried to new waterways.
Impedes waterfowl feeding.
Impedes fish spawning.
Devalues waterfront property values.
Impedes water treatment and power generation.
Chilean-harvested alfalfa imported during the California Gold Rush.
Behavior
Grows in areas where soil has been disturbed such as land grading, agriculture tillage, timber logging, housing construction, wildland firebreaks, animal grazing, and road building.
One plant can produce nearly 75,000 seeds.
Alters water cycles.
Poisons livestock.
Overtakes native plants.
Imported from Europe in the mid-1800s as a land stabilizer and garden accent.
Behavior
Aggressively displaces native plant populations.
Highly flammable.
Fire hazard.
Seeds can remain active for over 80 years.
A mature shrub can produce up to 15,000 seeds.
Seeds can be transported over long distances by animals, water, vehicles, and people.
Grows in a variety of soil conditions.
As a legume, it changes soil chemistry.
After removal, native plants won’t repopulate.
Not pervasive, yet, in California, these animals have caused large-scale agriculture, water and forest management, and recreational problems in other states.
Carefully inspecting possessions after traveling from infested areas, and cooperation with Agriculture Inspection Station agents are ways to help prevent a species invasion.
Caspian and the Black Sea and Dnieper River, Ukraine. Brought into the Great Lakes in the 1990s through ship ballast water.
Behavior
Disrupts ecological water balance.
Reduces recreational value, shells overrun sandy beaches.
Impedes water flow.
Encrusts pipes and other structures.
One muscle can produce 5,000,000 eggs during its 5-year lifespan.
Estimated Five billion community costs since first discovery.
Europe and Asia. Escaped from breeding experiments in Massachusetts in the 1960s.
Behavior
Voraciously eats tree leaves and shrubs.
A single moth can consume a square foot of leaves per day.
Leaves caterpillars eat – cedar, pine, fir, spruce, aspen, oaks, birch, alder, manzanita, and western hemlock.
There is an urgent need for conservation and restoration measures to improve landscape connectivity, which will reduce extinction rates and help maintain ecosystem services. National Center for Biotechnology Information
