Woke this morning and met Martina to give her a ride to the garage, they were fixing her Jeep which topped working the other day. I guess the battery went dead. She and I went for coffee and then to the pharmacy because she knew of a spray to put on my mosquito bites, it helped. After meeting with Martina I went to Saline beach, which has now become my routine. I saw a cute guy that was alone, I was hoping he would say hello as I don’t have any friends on the island, but he was keeping to himself. I snuck a photo of him, see above. I don’t need any friends here anyway, I guess I was just feeling mischievous. I got a little sunburned at the beach today too.
Jonathan will be so mad at me. He’s always pushing sunscreen on me, even in the city. I put some on before I went to Saline today, I swear, but the thing is, I can’t reach my upper back, so that’s what got burned. Not too bad though, not a crisis. I’ll just have to be more careful tomorrow. I think I stayed in the water a little longer than usual, in hopes I would strike up a conversation with the cute guy, but instead, alls I gots was this sunburn. When I got back to the house, I drenched my tee shirt with water by throwing it in the pool and put it back on while it was wet, which helped sooth my sunburned back. It’s a nice technique, works well.All I did today again in ‘the studio’, was to paint black onto paper. Ever since I thought of the yellow painting idea (see blog entry for ‘day six’), all I want to do is work with yellow. I saw another bright yellow house today and thought it was a sign to go through with the yellow paintings:
Since there are very few art supplies to be had on this island, and absolutely no acrylic paints which I am looking for, I asked my friend Nancy in Chicago to purchase some yellows for me and to Fedex them. Nancy is my oldest friend and one of the best painters that I know, so putting her on the case to find just the right yellows that I needed was perfect and a big help, thanks Nancy! The Fedex place in Chicago told her they can’t arrive here any earlier than Wednesday, which is five days away. It can’t be. I have a feeling they may show up Monday, I really hope they do. If Fedex takes five days, I can only imagine how long it would take to send a letter here using the postal service - they probably bundle the mail from here to the States in a waterproof pack and strap it to the back of a dolphin and have it swim to Miami and then disperse it from there by mule. I think I’m still going to name any yellow painting that I do here, Fedex Yellow. I kind of like having to wait for something to arrive that I can’t readily get here. Overcoming obstacles make things more precious once you overcome them. Who knows, maybe once the yellow paints arrive and I start working with them I’ll think, what a stupid idea, but I have high hopes for the yellow paintings. If the drive to use yellow does sour once I start working with it, I’ll still follow through with them, out of ‘spite’ or ‘work ethic’ or ‘following through’, because the concept of making these yellow works is more interesting to me now than the actual paintings themselves and when that shift happens - decoration and form taking back seat to concept - that’s when the good art starts happening.
I got into further mischief today when I went exploring and found an abandoned building, high on a cliff, right on the ocean, see here:
I was taking pictures of some plants along the beach when I saw and old road or driveway. At first I thought there is no way I’m walking up that just to take pictures when clearly there must be large iguanas lurking and ready to attack, or a pack of insane, island monkeys hiding in the bushes. I know there are no monkeys here, but you never really know. Anyway, I eventually got the nerve and started walking.
The path circled around to a staircase that went up to a house. I have no idea how this place could exist on such prime real estate, with nothing surrounding it except for an overgrown landscape, and an impossible drop down to the ocean over what looks like that kind of rock that forms when lava cools. The staircase looked like the façade of The Munsters, but the tropical version.I didn’t know if I should go up the steps, but how could I not? I was a little nervous because I really didn’t know what to expect; wild animals, larger lizards, drug addicts or sassy teens hanging out....maybe even the Manson family - now in their mid-sixties, relaxing and hiding in the Caribbean, avoiding extradition back to California to face the grizzly murders they committed back in 1969. If this had been New York, all of the above would have been inhabiting this place, and instead of lizards it would be rats. But this being St. Barths, even an abandoned building was astonishingly beautiful. As I walked up the stairs, and wandered about, I found, three separate buildings that at one time must have been some extravagant home. In the middle was a sunny courtyard with a huge boulder in the middle.
There were trees growing up through some of the empty rooms, so this place must have been uninhabited for quite a while. I Googled it thinking there must be some info on it on the internet, I searched; ‘abandoned homes, St. Barth’....’old homes, history, St. Barth’....and found nothing. So who knows what it is. 
It was surprisingly devoid of any trash or garbage, I figured the exposure to high winds must keep it clean, blowing the used condoms and Coke cans off the cliff into the rough ocean below. The roofs were falling down on some of the structures and all windows were gone. I found some great paintings on the walls and graffiti which I couldn’t read since it was in French:I tried using my Mac to translate the graffiti from French to English, but no luck. I took some pictures pretending it was my new studio. I may go back. I think it would be a nice place to work on a secret, permanent painting on one of the walls, but I’d hate to be up there and run into someone, a wild monkey, Manson, or worse, the police. Maybe I can do a painting ahead of time and go back up and adhere it to a wall. It would be nice to actually work there though, the views are freakishly amazing, and it’s sunny and quiet there, actually quite nice.
After being there for about ten minutes it was almost relaxing and I
figured I was alone. I was thinking, gosh, if you were homeless and could stow away on one of the tiny planes to get to St. Barth, you could live here in this place, set up shop, and no one would know, the weather’s great and you’d have a lot of privacy. When I was in grad school at UC Davis in California, I thought the same thing. There were so many buildings with empty rooms and corridors one could live in, although modestly, and no one would ever know. In New York, every crack and crevasse is owned and patrolled by the fuzz, so squatting isn’t what it used to be back in the day, like in the East Village when there used to be tons of empty buildings one could set up shop in and no one would care. Now New York is so wealthy, there’s nowhere to hide if you’re poor and looking for a place to make a home on the cheap. Oddly enough, St. Barth couldn’t be any wealthier, and there’s this abandoned mansion ready for the taking! Course if you’re homeless, you’re hungry and depressed, so even if you did find yourself squatting in a gorgeous ocean front, abandoned home, you’d still be pretty fucked.
Anyway, I would really like to go up there again, and maybe do some work on the wall, but I wonder if I would get busted. I’ll have to do some more research on the place. Obviously some graffiti projects have been completed there, that must have taken more than five minutes to finish, so maybe I can get away with it, but If I do go back and work on something and insane island monkeys show up, or sassy drunken teens, it could get awkward.Finally, here is a picture walking back down the drive from the Munster’s tropical home, and below that are photos of the landscape around it. At the very bottom is today’s sunset, which was the best one yet.....
