Mostly lately, I’m working on things behind the scenes and haven’t gotten around to posting any updates. The main culprits include my new print Wild Ozarks Musings journal, figuring out a similar template to make real estate booklets for our listings, helping with our greenhouse project, and moving all of my course materials over to a password protected area of the website here.

I thought I had made a post about the new print journal, but I don’t see it so I must have overlooked that. Anyway, here’s what that’s all about.

Wild Ozark Musings – a monthly journal

This is an analog version of my newsletter that goes out by email. My little print zine is meant to be like reading one of my blog posts, but in a half-page print format. The plan is to create these and find outlets in the area to carry them for tourists to pick up.

It’s one way to reach an audience I might otherwise never reach. And we do get a healthy stream of tourists through the area on their way to surrounding destinations.

My ultimate hope is to lure some of them down a really beautiful long dirt road ride to come out and visit my studio when it’s finally ready for visits. If you’d like to get a copy of the first issue, send me an email with your mailing address: madison@wildozark.com.

Wild Ozark Greenhouse Project and Garden Update

We’re still working on the pad. Weather and unforseen circumstances have slowed us down from the beginning, but we’re finally almost ready for concrete. Then it might be later in fall before we actually put the building together.

Online Course on Making Paint

Remember when I said I was going to start a course at Skool? Well, that didn’t work out. I didn’t realize the bulk of the work on that platform was ‘building a community’, and the effort was spreading me too thin. I’d rather build my community here on my own website, so I moved the paint-making course here:

This sort of endeavor involves a LOT of behind the scenes work. Just getting it set up at Skool was a lot of work, but at least most of that was easy to bring over here. Eventually I’ll make some new videos, once the studio is set up. For now there’s still references to the Skool platform on the videos I’d made earlier.

Studio Progress Update

It still hasn’t been delivered yet and I’ll have to trim the trees along the driveway again now before they do show up with it. Someone is supposed to ride out and preview the route before they bring it. That should be any week now.

Once it’s set in place, then I’ll start on making it useful. First will be some steps to go inside. We have some really nice large flat rocks that I’d like to stack for that. But moving and placing them will definitely require tractor assistance so it’ll have to wait until Rob can help with that. So in the meantime there will be a less creative cinder block or two, lol.

Painting in Progress Update

Here’s where the owl stands now. Probably no progress since the last time you saw it, but I may have forgotten to post that too, so adding it here now.

There’s still a lot to do, but I just haven’t had time to work on it regularly.

Finding a Little Peace

When I feel overwhelmed, I take a walk in nature. On this walkabout I went to a location along the creek I don’t know if I’ve ever seen. There was a large boulder sized rock on the opposite bank in a deep shady spot. The rock was covered with liverwort, mosses, and maidenhair ferns along with some wild hydrangea.

While the creek isn’t very wide there, it’s too wide to step across without getting wet. I took a little video there. It’s on the far eastern end of our property not too far from the seep.

Old rock walls exist all around our land from when the first homesteaders moved here and cleared fields. The thought of trying to plant anything in our ground is mind-boggling, though. There’s so many rocks it would be impossible to plow a straight line. However, the walls indicate they must have done so and carried each rock to the bottom of whatever hill and placed them into the wall. It amazes me.

Those old walls represent a LOT of behind the scenes work that went on here in the early 1900’s.

And when I walk around, I often find fossils. I didn’t have to go far to see this one, though. It’s a fairly large rock embedded in the driveway. I saw it on the way to the creek. To take this one out, I’d have to also fill in the hole it leaves behind. LOL, I just haven’t take the time to pry it up yet.

That’s it for my updates. What have you been up to?

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Author/Artist Info
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In the summer of 2018 I began making watercolor paints from the rocks, clay, and other resources of our land here in the Ozarks. In 2023 I began experimenting with the same pigments in oils. I love this medium and now paint in oils almost always. I call them Wild Ozark Paleo Paints, because they’re made in a way very close to the same way paints were made when man first put a hand-print on the wall of a cave. I use very small amounts of outsourced pigment for blue, white, and sometimes yellow to offer a greater range of hues built upon the earthy local pigments. My specialty is painting nature, specifically the nature that surrounds me here in the remote hills of northwest Arkansas.

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Madison Woods
@wildozark (Instagram, Twitter, Threads and FB)
madison@madisonwoods