In Hilo!

 It's been four long years, and a circuitous route to get here, but I'm finally back in Hilo!

I arrived yesterday, on Tuesday, after a bit more excitement than I prefer in my traveling when I missed my original flight on Monday. (It was a combination of unexpected slowdowns in Bay Area traffic and the fast pre-flight COVID-19 check needed to avoid quarantine in Hawaii taking longer than advertised online; either alone would probably still have been surmountable, but together they torpedoed my chance of making my flight. Thankfully I was able to reschedule for almost the exact same flights the next day.) Yesterday was overcast with intermittent showers, but this morning dawned bright and clear as you can see in the photo above (at least over the island, it was pretty cloudy off to the east). I'm temporarily in the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel, right next to Moku Ola or Coconut Island, so I popped down to take a look before breakfast and was greeted by the ever-breathtaking sight above of Mauna Loa, Maunakea, and Hilo nested between them all around the bay.

I've got plenty to do now that I'm finally here before I start my new job with Gemini in a week and a half (finding a car and a place to live, finishing and submitting my thesis, etc.), but it feels...relaxed. Non-stressful. I even saw that just today Kīlauea's started erupting again in Halemaʻumaʻu crater, so who knows, there might be some interesting volcanic activity to investigate soon! For now, however, I'm feeling the effects of jetlag, so I'll keep this short. A hui hou! I mua!

In transit

As foretold in my previous post, I'm currently cooling my heels in a hotel next to Sydney airport, from whence I'll depart tomorrow on the second leg of my journey back to the US. Thankfully, everything's been going smoothly so far, which is saying something in a global pandemic. I got my second COVID-19 shot on Thursday, then a travel test so I can get on an airplane to enter the US. Friday was a helter-skelter race to get everything I'm bringing with me packed so that I could hand everything else off to the movers (who were really efficient, by the way, taking just about an hour and a quarter to get everything packed up and loaded). Then I spent the night with friends, got a ride to the airport bright and early, and flew out of Melbourne at 6:30am. (I've seen some less-than-busy airports in my time, but Melbourne airport at 5:30am during a global pandemic takes the cake.)

Here's the view from the hotel Gemini put me up in, looking out over the Sydney airport.

I could think of several things to say here, reflecting on my just-shy-of-four-years in Australia, but I'm rather tired from sleeping poorly the past two nights, so I'll leave this post short. Hopefully I'll have time and energy to get something more substantial up in the next week or so. A hui hou!

An idealized Australian afternoon

As of today, it's one week until I fly out of Melbourne. Seven days from now at this time, assuming everything goes swimmingly, I'll be in Sydney, followed—at some point afterward which times zones and the International Date Line make more confusing to calculate than I feel like doing at the moment—by being back in California to visit my family for a week, before flying on to Hilo. This next week is going to be a whirlwind of activity as I get everything ready to move.

For today, however, I wanted to share a painting—well, two paintings—which I'll be mailing to my grandparents this week as a souvenir. I've been informally calling this the “Grandparental Diptych,” but let's go with “Australian Afternoon” as a formal title. I'm almost certainly not going to have time to paint this week, so these'll be the last paintings I finish here in Australia.

“Australian Afternoon,” 60×15 cm, acrylic on canvas.

It's an idealized Australian landscape rather than a specific place, with a few eucalyptus trees in the foreground (and a few Australian animals in them). To represent the hundreds of species of eucalyptus trees in Australia, I painted all three trees with different techniques for the leaves and different combinations of colors make them unique (though trees in general and eucalyptus in particular are still something I could use a lot of practice on!). I've discovered I really like doing these multi-panel pieces, such as to explore more extreme aspect ratios than you would normally find, like the 4:1 ratio here. I've got a few ideas for future works utilizing such techniques squirreled away in the back of my mind, though I'll probably have to put any painting on hold for a few months while my art supplies make their way across the Pacific.

I thought for this work it'd be interesting to try to create two pieces which could each stand on their own as an independent composition, but also work combined as you see here. I'm not entirely sure how well either aim worked out, but it was an interesting learning experience all the same—I certainly still have much to learn about composition! Anyway, time to get back to the million and one things to do before I leave. A hui hou!