"MY TEACHER, Sr. Alcaraz, IN MADRID, WAS HONORED BY THE EXACT SAME FRENCH GALLERIES, SET UP BY THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT, THAT SHOWCASED THE "REBELLIOUS" (innovative, eclectic, trendsetting) IMPRESSIONIST PAINTERS --- LIKE VINCENT VAN GOGH. The big name high dollar art galleries and big name collectors scorned the IMPRESSIONISTS novel and varied techniques that spoke the language of their world of their time! Dr. Albert C. Barnes simply bought what he loved, AND that resulted in a spectacular (ENVIABLE) collection. Today they are the envy of the world's most prestigious art museums." :)
★ THE BLUE POCKETKNIFE (A TRUE STORY)
DIARY p.1, Spain, July 4th 1994. "That first step was SEVEN stories long. I leaned backwards 'til I was airborne with a seasoned chief pilot in control.
"Seven bungee jumps sealed the deal. I looked outward to my life changing goals at the far corner of the cushion below. Retreat with my tail between my legs and go back down the tower? No. I jumped off the bungee tower - 7 stories, 7x's. At the DFW Airport I was told to cash a traveler's check for pesetas before departure - As I stood in the queue I realized my checks and passport were in my zippered travel pouch beneath my belt and tucked-in shirt, above my rump. That led to a fine young Highland Park lady spotting me in seat 22B as she came down the aisle mirthfully saying, 'Oh no, it's you,' but, that is another story!
"Anyway, I'd marveled at our star spangled send off with fireworks shooting up toward us from diamonds on a necklace stretching from Dallas to Philly. At 33,000' I had a window seat view.
July 5th 1994
"We touched down in Madrid at sunrise. I deplaned with my backpack, day pack, paints, brushes, and 10 quartered sheets of watercolor paper and was greeted with my teacher's pair of welcoming cheek kisses and an 'abrazo.' So, off to the bus terminal we scurried, led by 'Paco' (Don Francisco Alcaraz), as I knew him, and his aristocratic Brazilian lady friend. All of our stops were unplanned along a few hours of highway lined with armed, military green clad, Guardias Civiles.
"The red hillsides reminded me of my bicycle racing days in Georgia. The high of 7 bungee jumps a few days before waxed and waned as my adventure really took off. I did not view art as a career choice at any previous time, nor did I in Spain. It was a thrill. You know, just drop everything and go. Art?
"Boy Howdy. At 9:30 AM the bus snorted to a stop, burped once or twice, and my feet scuffed down shiny metal steps onto the hard red clay in my 6-ounce racing flats. Oh boy! Or, 'Boy howdy' as I had learned to say in Texas (We'd said, 'Sheesh' in Pennsylvanian).
"Saldaña de Ayllón is a small, ancient village of 30-33 permanent residents in the foothills of a ski resort. They're craftsmen, gardeners, and sheepherders - I grew up on the outskirts of a country town of less than 200 people, 28 miles from Philly - But, we had a stop sign 'downtown' by the mineral springs, AND, we had a post office! The folks in small town Blue Ridge, Texas are like that. They looked out for me when I was hung up in some hard times. That's community. Keep your noisy, crime-ridden megalopolises and metropolitan areas! I'm a small town guy.
"Why make it easy to learn something new? Paco didn't speak English. I'd taken beginner Art in 7th grade, Art Appreciation in 11th grade, and I didn't know diddly about my teacher. My last Spanish class was 22 years before. I was prepared!?!
"His Brazilian friend said Paco was an orphan at seven and at nine was the youngest in hundreds of years to be admitted to a prestigious art school. I was half listening. She added that he had labored diligently on his first assignment for two weeks to win the applause of his esteemed teacher. When Paco presented his 'gem' to the great man it exploded into the air and crashed into the hungry flames of the atelier fireplace. His teacher knew the genius of his student and flung his work into the dancing fire, demanding his best --- not effort. His very best. That was his glad to have ya here story? What? No bezos y abrazos?
"We walked into Saldaña de Ayllón on a dirt road past Medieval mud adobes and skirted a cathedral on Calle Alcaraz. At 10:00 AM my first painting lesson began. 'He wants you to watch him and do what he does,' his aristocratic lady friend (England-schooled and fluent in 5 languages) told me. My first painting (#1, I intentionally mislabeled #3 on the back) was of Paco's favorite landscape, the very reason why he bought that Medieval shepherd's adobe in the foothills of a ski resort ... However, it was 105° F and I was hung over by a bad case of jet lag.
"Each day the temperature swung from 3.9°C ( 39° F ) at night to a hellish Death Valley 45°C (113+° F) by day. I slept on a rickety, swaybacked ol' sofa with tired springs in the old sub-abode sheep barn with an ancient Dutch door entry at its head and a screened open window at its feet. Supper was at midnight. Painting began at 6 AM, seven days/week.
"I struggled with sketching perspective, then cautiously, carefully, meticulously painted using ochre, cerulean blue, sap and viridian green - Hey, that's what I had on my paint tray ... And she said, 'He wants me to tell you that there are more than two colors of green, and to stand at the balcony looking down at that sapling until you tell him how many colors of green you see.' Twenty minutes later, to end the miasma, I blurted 'at least 1,000.' Paco was satisfied and I dodged another minute of blurry pain. FYI. Just 10 years before I was walking down Ben Franklin Parkway in Philly right after someone pointed out that I hadn't killed my older sister (which I blamed myself for) and hadn't anything to do with it. On that Philly day I felt the warmth of the sun, realized trees are green and the sky was blue for the first time. Wow!!! And, here I was in Spain.
"Paco beckoned with short, rugged, swollen carver's hands, clutching my pretty landscape. The lady's thick Brazilian accent intoned, 'He wants you to follow him.' I did. In his workshop (an 'atelier') I felt the crisp slap of a cold, aged, metal ruler on the face of my first masterpiece. His unfolded blue pocketknife surgically bisected my painting in one short, quick stroke. He pivoted in the doorway and returned to finish an oleo on the balcony. And, his lady friend said, 'He wants you to know you have two paintings. Go fix them.' I didn't know the summer sun could be so hot. I buried the smaller piece in a waste basket, thinking he wouldn't ask about it. He asked the next morning. I didn't retrieve it, but kept the larger part and re-signed it a second time, as you might imagine.
"By the way, Paco's flower-loving lady created the floral arrangements in the myriad vases I painted. Paco explained this was an important discipline to keep my wrists loose. Well, OK then.
"One night after dinner, so at about midnight, Paco opened a book of his friend Picasso's stains and traced the brushwork with his fingers as he explained how the icon had made them. He hadn't read about it in a book. He'd actually been there, with Picasso. It was an experience had by a small handful of artists.
"You know what floors me? Paco Alcaraz' painting style was more traditional than Picasso. At one of their two-man exhibits, rebel artist Picasso moved his masterpieces to each side of Alcaraz' painting thus, Picasso gave traditional art center stage. Talk about big time recognition!!! Kings and queens and the wealthiest of the wealthy spotted his virtuosity. In America Walter Chrysler, Jr. saw Alcaraz' work in Paris and cherry picked for an exhibit he soon hosted at five museums! (I have copies of Chrysler's letters to my teacher.) I didn't know any of this until a few years after I got back to Dallas. I read the 1977 Dallas Times Herald interview. My teacher was someone famous! I'm his only one-on-one student. I had lived in Alcaraz' home. I was self-taught. If I'd known about Paco's celebrity at the time I'd have wet my pants. Sheesh."
August 23rd 1994 ...
"Let's jump to the end. Paco, his aristocrat lady friend, and I stood together as the oily, black exhaust of a creaking bus swept past the highway marker. As I climbed the shiny balding steps, the lady said, 'An artist is born.' Like a proud papa, Paco handed me his blue pocketknife. From my starboard window I saw he was crying. I scaled the bungee tower at Walnut Hill thrice more, blindfolded from the bottom, as a victory dance after I got back to Dallas, Texas.
April 1, 2024.
Today, self-centeredness runs wild over sincere gratitude and common courtesy. Mentorship is refused with an irritated backside. Yesterday is never soon enough. Genuineness and authenticity bow to confabulators. "Now, I trout fish cold water streams, enjoy redolent pines, rain squalls, starry nights and glorious sunrises. I've canoed several times. A canoe has a painter. I tossed the painter into the bow and pushed it out into the hungry rapids. Thank you for the safe passage. Farewell."
★ DILIGENT VIRTUOSITY IS LEARNED THROUGH ENDLESS COACHING and FEARLESS FAILURES. SEE Following the Cloud (ABOVE). BAR NONE, RAIN OR SHINE, YOU NEED A COWBOY's FAITH, DETERMINATION, AND DARING TO REACH YOUR POTENTIAL. Dr. Vivien Thomas, surgeon and trainer at Johns Hopkins said, "If you are going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don’t even start." (Something the Lord Made, a 2004 film). "Yep, the guy with the unkept beard!"
SPREAD THE WORD. TELL A FRIEND.
"Don't ask if you want a corporate elevator speech. Won't happen. Dovetailing and mysterious catenations, like parables, are fabulous 'Ice 9' jigsaw puzzles. I invested myself drawing meticulous images of dissected insect anatomy, where highly-detailed accuracy was essential. DYK, 4X0 pens fit naturally in one hand with a beer in a graduate student's other at UGA (The NCAA National 2023 Champions). Doors opened to matriculate with a university graduate school with my studies, research, and publications underwritten by a power company.
Gustavus Adolphus College where Carroll took no art class, BUT, was a Biology graduate whose favorite professor, Dr. Myron A. Anderson, PhD taught Freshwater Biology, Invertebrate Zoology, led Carroll's Independent Studies. Dr. Anderson put him on a National Science dragonfly study and got Carroll a Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society (ΣΞ) research stipend for his innovative freshwater Baetine (Mayfly) Honor's Thesis. Albert Einstein and Linus Pauling were members of ΣΞ, an Honor Society supporting excellence in scientific research and engineering, founded in 1886 at Cornell University. He enjoyed Atmospheric Physics, Descriptive Physical Oceanography, and José Ortega y Gasset existentialist studies --- BUT avoided college and departmental requirements. Dr. Anderson saved his eccentric hide and he graduated with his classmates.
Richard L. Proenneke wrote, "To look around at what you have accomplished in a day gives a man a good feeling. Too many men work on parts of things. Doing a job to completeness satisfies a man." and "Eight and a half miles can be covered in minutes in a car on an expressway, but what does a man see? What he gains in time he loses in benefit to his body and mInd." and "There is always a sadness about packing. I guess you wonder if where you're going is as good as where you've been." and "When the time comes for a man to look his Maker in the eye, where better could the meeting be held than in the wilderness?" One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey.
SEE: www.nps.gov/lacl/learn/historyculture/richard-l-proenneke.htm
Carroll was in the Junior Curator's Club at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia as a 5 y/o. He loved entering the old mecca of science walking past the full-body statue of Joe Leidy, a University of Pennsylvania MD, examining a fossilized jawbone. Before the Burgoons moved to the horse farm 10 miles beyond Valley Forge NP, his best friend was the son of a former Navy CPO and small animal (dogs and cats) veterinarian., who matriculated at MIT as a 10y/o (Acc. to Carroll's mom). Carroll was a microbiology lab tech on C-14 studies of leaf decomposition in a 2nd order Piedmont stream and a taxonomic assistant to Jay Richardson on EPA environmental surveys of insect species, because of their high sensitivity to water pollution. Carroll quit a Master's of Science (Entomology) at Georgia the same day he quit doctoral studies in ecology at University of Delaware. Then Carroll quit consecutive MBA programs in Texas - Both with the top grades. He prefers being outdoors in cool, pine-stained fresh air, starry nights, fast-moving rain squalls, seagulls hovering above whispering waves and boulder-strewn shores, a lab paddling after diving ducks, neat aged-Scotch, splitting and stacking logs, a v. cozy fireplace, sleeping under a down comforter, fresh fish and blueberry buckwheat pancakes, rugged beauty. and the propellers chopping sound of a Twin Otter landing on a crystalline mountain lake from the co-pilot's seat --- It's all an adventure, like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (Ode to Joy), as is his timelessly popular repertoire of genius.
Joseph Leidy quipped, "Going fishing!” How often the question has been asked by acquaintances, as they have met me, with rod and basket, on an excursion after materials for microscopic study. “Yes!” has been the invariable answer, for it saved much detention and explanation; and now, behold! I offer them the results of that fishing. No fish for the stomach, but, as the old French microscopist Joblet observed, “some of the most remarkable fishes that have ever been seen”; and food-fishes for the intellect." Dr. Leidy was a leader in founding the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia where he chaired the curators and was elected president. He was the world's front-running Helminthologist and Parasitologist and was known as the "father of American vertebrate paleontology." Doc was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College. He received an honorary Legum Doctor (LL.D.) from Harvard."
"My first job was principal investigator for BP, P&G, Scott paper, Washington, D.C.'s water and utilities companies, in Limnology and Ecology at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Founded in 1812 by businessmen, clergy, scientists, and high society, it's the Western Hemisphere's oldest natural history museum --- While on staff, I found a novel way to identify 1st through 5th instar Hydropsychidae larvae to species. Less than 5% of environmental impact aquatic specimens could be identified to species as needed by the federal governments EIS316's to bolster their efficacy. My Honor's Thesis presented to Sigma Xi in Nobel Hall of Science was a dichotomous key to identify subimagoes of Baetine species, collected from inside the basement windows at Stroud Center the previous summer, to species level using immature morphology. My classroom had mayflies on the windows and an artificial flowing stream wending through it. My Wild Heerbrugg M7A was my friend who helped me see structure and relationships others never saw.
"It was a Harvard PhD, the Invertebrate Section Leader, Limnology and Ecology, Samuel LH Fuller, at the Academy of Natural Sciences who hired me over a few brews in the backyard of a hole-in-the-wall Philly restaurant. I told him I didn't like and wouldn't continue any of his current methodologies his former PIs employed. I replaced two gentlemen on their way to U Penn grad school. I had Sam's unassailable support. Don't ask me how to interview 'cause I don't know. I wore blue jeans and a yellow Kliban T-shirt ("I loves to eat them mousies, mousies whats I love to eat ...") Hey, classy!
"I graze in libraries. The staff research library was exceptional. I hungrily perused the First Edition Carl Linnaeus Systema Naturae 1735, the first person to group critters into orderly groups. That's where family trees came from. I use Solander (Captain Cook's botanist) archival specimen boxes. Daniel Solander was an apt apostle of Carl Linnaeus. The Swedish naturalist was a Fellow of the (British) Royal Society. At ANSP, I was Principal Investigator of Benthic Invertebrate Environmental Impact Studies for Potomac Electric (Frederick, Maryland), Washington Suburban Sanitation Commission (Wash., D.C.), Procter & Gamble (Susquehanna River), British Petroleum (Marcus Hook, NJ), and Scott Paper (Kennebec River). Woo-hoo. At first, I used SCUBA to collect benthic insect samples to wrap up impact studies that had been started previously on the Potomac River. The late big John Dudas was my NAUI/YMCA certified instructor. I became his assistant instructor."
Carroll studies trees in winter to paint them in spring, summer, autumn, and winter - All species have distinctive branching and bark. The leaves (Patterns, arrangement, margins and venation) come later. Trees are not a stick with a ball on top. All trees are individually recognizable with common characteristics. Listen to Mozart's 41st and Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Light, lines, depth, and perspective are compositional aspects. The finest abstract art complies, otherwise it is sophomoric, lacks depth, and is painfully cacophonic. Remington's The Old Stage-Coach of the Plains will silence most critics, as will Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night. Masterful balance, harmony, depth to the 10th degree, and colorful storytelling will always be in vogue. "I can't explain why I like the oeuvre of Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Pollock, Modigliani, and Rothko."
Art is multilingual and has no borders or boundaries --- Art dances on the corpus callosum of life. Art is rich in ideas, righteous or damning, either but, never ever both. What you display on your walls quietly, innocently, unwittingly shapes your personhood to its image!
Harvard Crimson Man, Henry David Thoreau famously penned, "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me Truth." and "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." in his timeless classic, Walden; on, Life in the Woods (1854). Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher who escaped societal demands and lived on the shore of Walden Pond, now in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places and a U.S. National Historic Landmark.
"Despite all my extensive training and tireless work to prove there is no God, through conclusive daily empirical evidence, yes, by firsthand experience, I learned and know that He is good and powerful and mighty and wise and does as pleases Him. He loves me, is v. patient, thorough, and gracious. I know this art I made is a God-given gift (the only kind of gift there is) and you gotta polish it with hard work daily or it'll rust like an old wreck on the bottom of the sea. I hid my light under a bushel. Now, it's out where you see it. THIS one relationship matters above all else to me. You can make up your own mind. My time at the Academy of Natural Sciences was a cornerstone in my schooling to be a versatile artist and draftsman depicting the macroscopic and microscopic simultaneously, a seminal thinker seeing the forest and the trees - as one of my patrons told the Dallas Morning News. In 1979, my boss, Harvard PhD Sam LH Fuller, Section Leader in the Academy's consulting/research arm (Limnology and Ecology) wrote the same in an open letter of recommendation to you."
All Rights Reserved in the USA and abroad by Carroll F. Burgoon, III.
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