Hello friends!

I’m currently on sabbatical from jumping following a couple surgeries I had to have on my hips. All is well and I shall fly another day but in the mean time, since I can’t catch any new sky, thought I might dish about some of the originals.

So I wanna take you back, not way back, but back. To a bright, warm Thursday in June of last year. The sun was beaming and the sky was scattered with small puffy clouds. Perfect conditions for catching! The first two attempts I’d made to this point were both with small square canvases strapped to one of my arms. I had some longer narrower canvas though, so I decided this time to again take two but strapped to either one of my shins instead. I was fortunate enough to have Frank at the drop zone with me that day so he would follow along to take video and to take stills…and to remind me to pull. So we threw on some gear, I stapled some straps to canvas, Frank turned on his cameras, and off we went for our third sky art attempt.

We rode to altitude in Skydive Dallas’s caravan, my favorite of their aircrafts because of the view, its cozy feel, and because it’s the plane I made my very first skydive out of!! Who’s bias? I’m not bias. Anyway, we climbed to altitude and the green light flicks on. Frank climbs out on the camera step and I flip out the door into the big open blue. The wind was cool and refreshing as it rushed over my body.

Given the length of the canvases I had thought the whole strapping them to my shins thing would be a good idea…it wasn’t. Turns out they were exceedingly difficult to reach way down there, like trying to bend over and touch your toes in a torrent. I flipped over to my back and struggled to get the black and silver paints I had brought to release towards the canvas. I had a pretty fast fall rate because of my body position so break-off came sooner than expected.

Frank waved me off and I rolled to my belly and deployed my parachute. Of course I had been so frantic during freefall I wasn’t sure if any paint had even made it to the canvases. Under canopy I reluctantly looked down towards my feet to see what was there… BEHOLD! Two new pieces of sky captured on canvas! Similar to freefall, I has having a hard time seeing just what exactly I had caught, but it was clear that there was definitely some new treasures looking back at me from my shins.

After landing, Frank helped me cut the t-shirt straps holding the canvases to my legs and we admired our catch. On my left leg was Skid and the right, Rorschach. Both painted on the same day, on the same jump, with the same paint, but both completely different and unique from one another. One was streaked aggressively and full and the other spotted and splattered.

Neither one picked up much of the silver (skid picked up a little here and there) , but as such have a stark, contrasting, monochrome appearance instead. Having had so much success on this jump, the old adage seemed to hold true; third time’s a charm.