It’s been a busy past few weeks for me here at Wild Ozark. Today I’m doing some color experiments with suspended solids and trying to separate out some pigment.

There’s a whole blog post over at the PaleoPaints site to explain exactly what I’m doing here, but suffice it to say that this colored water has been sitting on the counter for two days now without settling. I added alum to it and now it’s beginning to settle out.

Other color experiments

Yesterday I finished up some black paint experiments. Black – a good, deep, smooth, black – has been an elusive target of mine since I first started this whole paint making endeavor. I have high hopes that this experiment finishes out nicely too. There is a post about it at the Paleo Paints site: paleopaints.com/bone-black.

I think I’ve hit the sweet spot with black, but there’s another experiment in the making using willow char, and it’s looking promising so far, too. The willow sticks made nice ‘charcoal pencil sticks’ that could be used just like the charcoal sticks you’d buy at the art supply store. I crushed the ones I made up to make the paint, but I want to make some more to use as charcoal drawing sticks.

Art shows, new gallery options

Over the previous weekend I went to Terra Studios to show my work and try to make a few sales. So the weeks before that were spent getting ready by making more prints, paints, and stationery. Plus I wanted to frame a few more small work originals.

The next things on my list of too-many-things-to-do include getting inventory together to bring over to the War Eagle Mill. Soon you’ll find Paleo Paints and Artwork there, too! Plus I have inventory to update at the Kingston Square Arts, and a decision to make about whether I want to also try and keep up inventory at Terra Studios.

I’m working Thursday this week at KSA instead of my usual Sunday, by the way. In case you want to make a drive out to the country to talk about rocks and paints and such 🙂

Madison Woods is an author, artist, and Paleo Paint maker living
with her husband in northwest Arkansas far off the beaten path. She uses Ozark pigments to create her paintings.

Contact Info:
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @wildozark
Facebook: @wildozark

During winter months I go to the Fayetteville Farmers Market but this weekend marks the return to my spring schedule. So I’ll be at the Kingston Square Arts on most Sundays until the end of the year now.

I will not be there during the month of May, but the gallery is open as usual on Thursdays through Sundays, 10 to 6.

Come Paint with Paleo Paints

When I’m there, I’ll have easels and paints and papers and brushes for anyone who wants to spend some time painting with my Paleo Paints without having to spend money on a whole set for yourself. The cost to come paint is $10, and that helps replace materials and pays the gallery a little for the use of space.

Paint All Day (or part)
11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
You can call ahead if you want to make sure I’m there.
(479) 665-2559

Small Doodle for Free

If you just want to see if you like the paints I have smaller scraps of paper and you’re welcome to doodle on those all you want at no charge. There are no set hours for this. We’re open from 10-6, but the only day I’m there ordinarily is Sundays. Use the number above to call ahead if you want to be sure that I’m there with the doodle supplies.

Wild Ozark Art and Paleo Paints

My corner is located at the back end of the store near the register and workroom. I have prints, stationery items made from my art, and some sets of Paleo Paints.

Aside from the Wild Ozark products, the gallery hosts other artists from the area. Greg Hall with Oddbowlz has a whole half a building full of beautiful, functional pottery. The other half is full of fine examples of art and craft workmanship of artisans within 50 miles of the tiny little town of Kingston, Arkansas.

More about Paleo Paints and Wild Ozark

If you want to see some of the paintings I’ve done with my Paleo Paints:

Here’s a few posts and pages at the blog if you want to explore more:

Earth Pigments and Watercolors

Little Pans Worth their Weight in Gold

I haven’t blogged regularly in a long time. It is so much more labor intensive to do a “good” blog post that I just haven’t had the spare time to do it.

But I miss the more journal-y kind of blogging I used to do. Maybe you do too. At any rate, here’s one of those posts, about what I did today. A ‘good post’ requires topic headings and some sort of focus. Haha. This is a rambler that won’t do well in the Google sphere, I’m sure. But it doesn’t need to.

The day’s schedule got thrown up in the air when I set up the coffee pot last night for this morning’s brew. That’s when I realized that I’d bought decaffeinated coffee the last time I went grocery shopping. Most of the time I use our home-roasted beans, but for the past several months I’ve been busy and the weather has been unpleasant, so I’ve been buying already roasted grounds.

So this morning, after I drank a few cups of the half-and-half coffee (I still had a little bit in the bag of real coffee, so dusted as much of that out as I could), I roasted fresh coffee. What’s the point of drinking coffee with no caffeine? Besides, I have an order to fill for a spring pound of fresh roast, so in effect, I killed two birds with one stone.

Before roasting the beans there were other things that needed doing. I had an Etsy sale of one of the paint sets overnight, so I boxed that up and got it ready to go. Yay! First time to Australia! And then someone emailed to express interest in buying my Fox No. 1 painting that’s hanging over at the Faulkner Center for Performing Arts in Fayetteville, so I made a reply to that. I tried real hard to sound professional and not all overly excited about it. I think I did alright.

I know I did a lot more things this morning, but now, just because I’m trying to figure out how it got to be 4 p.m. already, I can’t think of much. Oh, yes.

After roasting the coffee I went to the post office to bring the packages that needed to go out in the mail, then I went on to Huntsville to get a few groceries and some horse feed. The round trip took about three hours. I have a post from a few summers ago about how long it takes me to get to town and back, and why. But this time I just went straight there and straight back, without all the usual rodaying I normally might have done.

That word, rodaying, is not the way it is spelled, but that’s how it sounds. The root verb is Cajun French: Rôder, and it means to wander around… my preferred way of getting places 😁

On the way back in through the gate the cute little screech owl was sitting in her tree-hole again. This time she had her eyes wide open, watching me. But of course I didn’t have the camera capable of getting a good picture of her. I am calling it a ‘her’ and have no idea if that’s the case, but I think I can see a nest in the hole when she’s not blocking the view.

Now I’m getting ready to start up the tractor and move a bale of hay over to the horses. We don’t have a hay spike so I use a chain on some hooks Rob welded onto the loader bucket. I wrote a post about that a few years ago.

How did your day go? Does it tend to slip away and leave you wondering what you did the whole time?

I read Simone’s falconry story over in the Lady Hawker’s group at Facebook. While I’ve never owned a raptor of any sort, I could relate to the chasing down of a bird. Parakeets and cockatiels like to go on ‘walkabouts’ too and I’ve kept a few of those in my earlier years. She gave me permission to repost it here and I hope you find it as funny as I did. If you’ve ever chased down a bird on the loose, I have a feeling you will.

Simone and Henry

The Epic Story of Henry’s Walkabout in Seattle:

One afternoon in September I was coming home from the San Juan Islands with a friend and had all of my animals with me. As I was unloading my truck it was getting hot and I had Henry (gyr x merlin) in the back and he was panting a bit. He overheats quickly being part gyrfalcon. I couldn’t find my glove so just picked him up on my bare hand (I do that sometimes, he’s so tame. BAD IDEA.) and walked him to the front house door. I don’t know what happened next exactly as I would never let go of the jesses on purpose of course but he bated and slipped through my hands. Fat, zero telemetry, hadn’t flown the lure in two months and it was 91 degrees out. He landed on the awning of the porch and looked pleased with himself. “Ok, ok no big deal,” I told myself as I reached for the jesses. I was within a centimeter when he launched off the roof and disappeared behind the big trees (the trees in our neighborhood are easily 100ft tall) in our backyard and my heart SUNK. I yelled at my brother that I needed help…he was prostrate on the couch with no shirt and no shoes but ran out in that condition…bad mistake as little did he know he would be in that state for the next four hours in 90+ weather.

I proceeded to catch sight of Henry here and there (but lost sight of him many, many times for up to 20-30 minutes each time) as I ran around the neighborhood with my brother (and my mom and dad at times, my brother was on the verge of heat stroke as he had just run a half marathon and didn’t bring enough water, my mom had to rescue him on a park bench..yes, he’s an adult…24 but go figure) in the heat….My mom and dad would take shifts bringing us water or help look for Henry or keep an eye on him if his location had been confirmed. Keep in mind I live in a residential area and the people on *our* block know our house as “The Nut House” and that at any given moment there may be hawks, falcons, owls, crows, ravens, ducks, chickens, dogs, cats, or strange people. But go two blocks away and you become the stranger with giant crazy curly hair holding a fishing pole that has a dead quail attached to the end. I’m swinging the lure in the middle of the road at one point yelling “HENRY!!!!” when a front door opens and a woman yells at me: “What are you looking for?! A falcon?!” ….. “Um, yes”, I say (is she for real?) and she says, “Oh, haha, I was kidding.” Not funny lady.. maybe it was the lure, maybe she just had a lucky guess. I told her what he looked like (yeah right) and where I lived and ran off. I’m sure she thought I was crazy. Anyway, Henry had disappeared now..

And at this point my brother and I completely lost sight of Henry. The trees were too huge to get a good line of sight all around and it was easy for him to fly out of one side of a group of trees without us seeing him. I ran through neighbors backyards, knocked on doors, all the while swinging Henry’s lure, which conveniently happens to be attached to a freakin’ 12′ pole. Nothing. No crows alarm calling, no robins alarm calling. No one had seen him. I was sure he was gone. The house is on a high hill with a valley below and surely the valley and air currents were too much for a curious little falcon. But then I heard Steller’s Jays alarm calling a block away. My brother and I run as fast as we can, find the jays and eventually decide they are not talking about Henry. I’m at my wits end by this point… I trudged home kicking myself for possibly taking the wrong lead and trying to think of what to do next, though nothing seems like an option. A 300 gram falcon with no telemetry who is fat as can be in 90F heat in a neighborhood on a hill with heavy tree cover all around. ALL the odds are against me I felt like. I near the house, which looks out over the small valley (the road starts to go downhill just four houses east of my house) and there, buzzing above the slope of the hill, across a busy street, is HENRY. I take off, narrowly avoiding traffic on the busy street and try desperately to catch up with him.

I catch up with him and although he isn’t flying away, multiple times he flew around me and half-heartedly came in to the lure but never touched it or landed. He landed quite a few times in the tall trees and just looked at me. He would dive bomb my head, buzz over me, disappear and reappear multiple times. He even came out of nowhere once when I yelled his name and wasn’t even swinging the lure. It was an emotional roller coaster! Again keep in mind that by this point Henry has probably moved 20 times and each time it’s a MAD DASH to keep up with him. There are so many trees and houses in the way. When he would take off my dad would go one way, my brother and mom another and I would start swinging the lure yelling his name. There is absolutely *zero percent chance* we didn’t look crazy. How did four people escape from the looney bin in one day?

At this point it was obvious he wasn’t too into the lure so my mom called Wendy (bless her soul a million times) who was at work quite a ways south of our house. She drove from her work, north of our house to get pigeons at another friend’s house and then back south to my neighborhood with two live pigeons. Granted this is all in horrible RUSH HOUR SEATTLE evening traffic. Did I mention bless her soul a million times?!

Henry had been sitting on a certain cedar tree for about 10 minutes at this point when Wendy pulled up. My brother had my Jack Russell x Beagle Otis because Henry is somewhat imprinted on Otis (a story for another time) and will often try to steal the lure or food from him so I was trying everything at this point. Anyway, Wendy whips around the traffic circle, tosses me a live pigeon on a line without slowing down and I toss it out under Henry. He comes into it immediately but won’t commit, almost lands on a transformer, then goes by it multiple times but still won’t commit. Otis loses his mind seeing this happen and slips his collar and runs across the street, into traffic, almost gets hit by two cars (seriously, centimeters away), my brother and I are screaming at the top of our lungs for Otis to stop but he makes it to the other side safely. Now I have my dad call all the pet shops in the area to ask for finches as the pigeons are apparently a bit big for Henry. Our friend Ron has been called who works at a bird shop but they are closed and also have no finches. My dad is on the phone down the block, my brother is on the corner as a lookout in case Henry flies that way and out of sight, Wendy is on the street with two live pigeons flapping and I am in some stranger’s front yard swinging a lure with a nasty, dead, in the heat for four hours quail with hornets buzzing all around when a hornet flies up my shirt. I scream and dance up and down (I have bad reactions to hornet stings) and whip my shirt off, Wendy is yelling “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?!” and howling at me like I’ve gone crazy but I don’t even realize how utterly insane I must look..shirt back on and Henry now is pretty much ignoring us (how???!!). Hour four of this ordeal arrives and I am at my wit’s end. My dad has driven to Petco at this point to pick up parakeets (absolutely awful, I know but we were going to put them in a BC and hope for no death to parakeets) and Henry has flown up higher in the tree with his back to us. He is utterly and completely ignoring us. There’s now a dead and bloody pigeon on a line in front of some random person’s house and I’m still on another person’s front lawn swinging the lure, contemplating how I might climb their roof even if they aren’t home to give permission. Thirty minutes before sunset. I literally feel like crawling into a black hole and dying and with everything that has just gone on (I had just lost my beloved aunt, who I was very, very close with, to breast cancer and she loved Henry) I can’t imagine losing my little buddy to such a stupid mistake. In one last ditch effort I wiggle and throw and toss the lure and dead quail around on the sidewalk across the street from Henry. He turns around, leaves the tree and flies directly to the dead quail, lands on the ground next to it, hops on it, I crawl slowly, shaking, on my knees and pick the little turd up.

I learned a few things that evening after getting Henry back: family and friends are priceless, persistence pays off, Petco will take parakeets back, your friends, after hearing the story, will tell you they just saw you on YouTube topless swinging a lure…”the neighbor’s must have been filming with their smart phones after all” (don’t believe them) and my brother’s “half marathon?” Yeah… he wasn’t part of a marathon. He just ran a bunch of miles by himself with no water and called it a marathon. He didn’t realize his “half marathon” was just the warm up.

I slept like a bag of rocks that night.

Simone Lupson-Cook