Be Here Now
3.8.23
The world has shifted under my feet again. I have been hanging on for dear life. I don’t know what normal is, maybe it will turn up if I just sit here and wait . . . I want to go to the desert, but it will never be the same. I don’t know what I would do there, alone, without my crazy-intrepid companion. In a month it will be ten years since Scruffy was snatched away, I feel no different today. Maybe the pain is a little higher in my chest, almost to my throat, rising in a flush to my muzzle. I am mute.
I have no solace. I want to go back, but there is no there there.
I am back in the cold frying pan. Other memories come crashing in: “This is what I have been dealing with”. And worse. Ya think? Yeah.
A perfect, dismal, miserable day of rain. Tomorrow will be sunny. Let the world spin under me. There is no way out today.
Woke up weary
2.27.23
There is no inanimate object in my universe. I wake up in gratitude to the 500,000 new cells in my body, a new sun rising through the rain. Everything is moving, everything is alive. The sink, the air, the water in my bath. I love you, water. I love my legs, I love that I can still walk. Where would I be without my self, mice elf, who has brought me so far?
Russel Targ said, Above all else, each morning, put your little paws on the coverlet and give thanks for the new day.
I woke with a headache, be it too much popcorn, too much emotional input, sad stories and beloved friends. I went back to bed and took a nap, woke at 1:30 PM to black coffee and a hot magnesium bath, and a bit of soup.
Heading out tomorrow to tend a friend with the saddest news ever.
This week, a breakthrough. How to draw heads, I thought I would never figure this out. In three sketches, my trajectory is visible. Life is good, if you have it.
Who’s house
2.17.23
Abandoned, a house, a shed, another shed, a cat, two greenhouses, a pine tree, an apple tree, clutter and more, and more indeed. A long driveway. Room for a garden. A view of “mountains” and the moonrise. A dream. A beautiful dream.
Manifesting a Work Table
1.27.23
Out with the round black table I bought from Conran’s for my apartment on Emerson Street in 1981. Took off the legs and rolled it into the hallway closet. I had to move out stuff to make room, two boxes of JD and Pearl, et al, into the Underhouse. Also my vintage Ludwig snare and stand. Why not consolidate, the bass drum is out there.
I set up this pine work table I found last year, abandoned on the street by a painting student. I had to scrape and sand off quite a bit of paint to make the surface flat, leaving it pre-loaded with a patina of artistic energy.
I now have about 3 sq. ft more space in the room, as this table is also an inch taller and fits closer to the treadle/printer table. Someone warned me that rectangles are bad feng shuy, but not if it makes more room to ease through the space.
Already I feel a creative upgrade. It was easier to paint from these old photos of Death Valley near Racetrack, 10.03.03; and a view of upper warm spring in Saline Valley, circa 1997.
Also the current view out the back window from the table.
Winter weather
1.16.23
Crazy rains, wind, trees down, houses sliding off hill tops, king tides, cliffs collapsing, beaches eroding, an ant invasion, and me in my little possum holm. Heaven. A bit of hiking the streets between the storms, where I found some cool kitchen things in a free box. A (sweet) potato masher, which I need, a 1/3 cup stainless steel measuring cup, always handy. Several wide mouth pint ball jars, yay, and a red coffee mug I can contribute to the Sunday Salon. It’s a full life.
I made some soup from the meaty carcass of the Christmas turkey, with shiitake mushrooms and fat Italian egg noodles. So good. Also tasty and festive are small chunks of wild salmon, gold potatoes, green beans, broccolini, pink lady apples, coffee and cream, from hikes to B. Bowl.
More little sketchbook play, with opera rose and white gouache, white Signo, micron, Kuretake brush pens, french ultramarine, various greens, yellows, and random watercolors and stains from old messy palettes. Pretty much stolen from screenshots of the sketchbooks of Marina Willer.
xmas haul
1.3.23
Back from the north, where we visited an abandoned, boarded up house with a shed and a garage, and an empty lot on each side. I so want it! Imagine the garden, and the painting studio! How many millions will it take?
The best deal of the season was a stack of sweaters, three turtlenecks and a zip-up cardigan from mimi’s stash of donations. I also bought a long gray skirt at Goodwill. Gift are so unnecessary.
On returning home ahead of the storm (before NYE, which I slept thru) I hunkered down with my new sweaters and youtube, covering up sloppy swatch charts in old sketchbooks, inspired by screen shots from Marina Willer, and previous grid play.
Hermitage
12.7.22
I’ve said too much. Just an image.
What could be happier than this window full of sky, sunlight and squirrels, me and youtube, old sketchbooks, brushes and paints?
What better than unending days of not watching a clock. Just this.
Landscaping
11.20.22
Took a fun workshop in luminous landscape watercolor with Andie Thrams this weekend. I LOVE the juicy yellows, the square format. Many thumbnails and color tests.
Oops: edit: caveat: didn’t mean to hit the Publish button yet.
Some notes: Engage with your subject: why did I choose this subject? What am I seeking? What is my hope? What is the viewpoint? close, far, big, small, hard, soft, gestures, detail, mood, flavor. Be present. Consider the possibilities.
Shake out the hands, roll your neck, mix little color swatches, then pools of color.
Meanwhile: Complaining shrinks your hippocampus.
Gratitude boosts endorphins to produce a euphoric rush. It can boost oxytocin, the love drug (like rubbing the ears of cats). It can boost seratonin to make you happy and calm. It activates the brainstem to produce dopamine. It boosts the immune system, lowers stress and blood pressure.
“Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible” –Rebecca Solnit
Be peace. Be love. Be here now.
11.11
11.11.22
There is a shock: isolation shifts to all-in. Another fitful night of pain and twitching, I finally got to sleep around 5 AM; five hours later someone lodged a complaint that I sleep too much. It’s ALL too much. A shopping trip left me somewhat disturbed–I need to burrow deeper down in my hidey hole, step away from all the woo woos and turmoil. Just manifest. Don’t advocate. Feeling my connection to the recent past dwindle and dwindle, enforced by a recent spate of coughing up goobers, very unbecoming. Sawdust from sanding, maybe acacia wood. The bliss of working with my hands, painting the roofing house, and then the floor, the stencils. But what for? Just making something real is enough. Activity is life.
Another October gone without an escape to the wilderness. Spending time at home with old photos and memories–attempting to flesh out this other blog–Travels With Stevie–is erratic. Reading how I pine for the desert, how alive and real I feel there, the sublime sense of home, is heartbreaking. And (leaving out the agony and distraction of a partner’s drinking) the perfect life of lavender dawn and morning chorus of my favorite birds, and driving, driving, through open vistas, into the remote fastness of juniper forests, cool mountain air, and brilliant clear desert hot springs.
All the photographs, all the paintings I want to do, sort of a relief that there is a finite number of trips to review and record, that suddenly stops in 2011. Oh, the horror. Do I just tear out pages of pain and misery? Or can I paint over them? Depends on the quality of the paper, I guess, and how it takes to the media, it’s all experiment, discovery, adventure, even now.
Newspapers–what good are they?
No real appeal to the outside world in my present life, but I need a getaway, a private place of my own–Oh! Here it is! At home–total peace and solitude. Not getting bogged down in loss, but true gratitude for purging all, releasing all, and the beautiful core of me, of what I have lived, left inviolate.
Dunno if I wrote that, or copied it from somewhere. Likely, both. Cool.
RATS!
October 25/eclipse 2022
My friend gave me a little Mexican-made chest of drawers as a gift for helping her in her studio. Just in time! because now instead of having my acrylic paint tubes and bottles in open trays, subject to terrorist assault by hungry rats, I can keep them secure. The chest had been left outside for a bit, sufficient to have the drawers stucky and wonky. I sanded them all down and got them working nicely, and touched up the outside with successive grades of sandpaper and a coat of Feed-N-Wax.
Meanwhile, I found four aforementioned chewn-open and partially eaten tubes of paint resting atop a container of some dolls–I found the hair of Pocahantas in the paint-tube tray. Titanium white, Neutral gray, phthalo blue, and for good measure silver, turned out to be just the colors I needed to mix and match the “cape cod blue” I had used on the floor last month. Squeezed what was left into jars, and started mixing; way too much white, so I ended up adding a few drops of carbon black, dang close, I’d say. The rat had also chewn into a bottle of bronze paint, and I tried using that as a stencil color, but it was too faint, so back to the iridescent blackish, and done.
By the way, I had been painting most of the interior in this patchy style, using Zinsser 1-2-3 due to the history with mildew. On the window-well walls here I pulled out some interior latex, which turned out to be what I had used on the ceiling “Summer Sky” almost imperceptibly sky-blue. I love the way it gradually moves from blue to white as it goes from the floor and up the wall.
Banana light
10.19.22
skating on the edge of gouache and watercolor, brush pens, mysteries of light.
Falling Up-
October 5, 2022
Playing with my new gouache in a small sketchbook of olive green paper, portraits and anatomy from photos and screenshots. I took photos of some of the images in the book Natural Fashion, Tribal Decorations from Africa (wait–I can’t underline?? wth?) that I bought Vikki for Christmas, at last getting around to working from them. Also a screenshot from Vania Bashur, who teaches classes on Domestika. Nothing inspires me more than new materials.
I was telling the story of how I keep buying classes (mostly around $10 each, special discount) but can’t work in the linear structure of the courses. I get hooked on the trailer, and then am not happy with how the instruction plays out. So I am just taking screen shots from some of the video introductions and copying them, then clearing them off my computer.
Also about copying, judgement, what is art. Ok, here we are. This week’s work, so far.
Studio Floor- blue
9.29.22
Finally found an image I could cut a template for, to stencil the studio floor. I had smeared some of this deco-color cape cod blue from a tiny bottle on the deteriorating plywood to see how it would last, and heck, good enough. That’s how it happens, after months (years) of a blue floor rattling around in my head, i just started in. Cutting the printout I stuck to a sheet of bristol board with tape, I used a stiff acrylic paintbrush in different intensities to dab Daler Rowney FW iridescent acrylic black ink through the stencil. So satisfying! The more i used it the more water resistant the stencil got, pretty permanent now. Finished with a coat of Golden acrylic soft gloss medium, supposedly waterproof. Too late, I realized I could have extended the blue a bit with the medium. But I’m happy.
Tiny Haul: Late September
August was so busy. Every weekend we have been out of town, festivals, campouts, and visiting friends; San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Felton, Cotati, Pescadero. (check out photos at possumfamilysingers.com).
I’ve decided to stop worrying and love the new Berkeley, after finding a huge new art supply store on 6th Street. Been wanting to replenish my gouache supply for ages, and the fact that they are not behind locked doors was a temptation too great to resist. I went on a tiny shopping binge: a minimal array of six colors, a micro palette, Daniel Smith mineral watercolor dots to try; a 2.3 mm eraser pen and refills, a purple glue stick. All laid out on the tablecloth as I waited for a slice and a pint at soon-to-be-demolished North Beach Pizza.
I chose six colors of gouache: spectrum red, spectrum yellow, spectrum violet, phthalo blue, chromium oxide, van dyke brown. Add these to my big tube of permanent white, and opera rose.
So many colors, I wanted to document the swatch display for future reference and further investigation. Now, back to work.
deck chairs on the titanic
9.7.22
I have wanted to do this for so long. I tried white, ow, my eyes. Green, hideous. I really thought the blackish, chalked, charcoal gray would be awesome, but too hot to be practical on the sunny porch. But then, one day, looking out my window, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had seen some gorgeous patio chairs in black and they were perfect. I’ve had these great stackable chairs since the John and Linda times–that would be circa 1990, at the latest, and they were used then. The table was abandoned by one of my clients some ten years ago because it had a screw loose. Don’t we all, at some time. I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out. Plus, Vikki’s birdcage.
p. s. The first can at my local hardware store, $6.49. The second can, at a 3-letter chain down the road, $13.99. Wth?
Stalled in the Fall
9.3.22
So busy, music wise, not much time or energy left for the pencil and brush. To see what I have been doing in August check out my site possumfamilysingers.com. Every weekend has been a gig, a festival, a campout, from Santa Cruz to Santa Rosa. I plan some downtime for September, yessirreee.
RATHELL
8.24.22
The Wood Rats are unrelenting. Weird little people, they chew into tubes of vaseline, olive oil, bottles of silicone 3-in-1 oil, home covid test kit fluid, they secret away dirty sponges, strips chewn off an empty milk bottle, baseballs, tennis balls for nesting, a rubber ducky, a massage ball—chewed all the points off looking for a way in. They chew holes in anything they think will have a viscous fluid inside, chew all the way around a plastic jar lid hoping to get it open. I don’t know what the attraction is. Alternatively there are some rats that eat all the leaves off anything I plant, a camellia was eaten to the ground, a french prune tree was nearly decapitated, a grape vine, a wood betony, tiger lilies, celery, onions, three blueberry bushes were eaten to death. A Winter Banana apple tree was stripped of its fruit and demolished.
They get into the cars. While driving the van once, bits of Kleenex began blowing out of the heater vent, followed by carpet fluff and some colorful threads. When I opened the door a mouse ran out. I put a bottle of peppermint extract into the utility drawer, after I found someone had chewed up a matchbox in there. Later I found a nest in the engine compartment comprised of insulation and bits of a chenille blanket.
The best remedy so far seems to be the cornmeal and jiffy corn muffin mix, just enough sugar to appeal to their delicate sensibilities, plus enough baking soda to give them gas. They go to their little holms and to bed with indigestion, and wake up demised. Rats can’t burp, a gift from the gods, as they are the only creatures for whom jiffy corn baking soda is lethal.
Another oddity, I suddenly stopped drinking alcohol sometime last summer. I’ve been very careful about what I consume since the possible food poisoning incident early this month- woke up with excruciating back pain at 3:30 AM–I dreamed I was herding cats, tigers, leopards, in and out of a cage tied together with plastic shopping bags and string and wire.
There has been a lot of trauma going on in general, and I am very skittish, can’t sleep, too much light, too much noise. I think it is manifesting in my body as sudden pain. Lots of writing in the book of Grrrr, trying to find the new normal. Fun is barely fun, I am disentangling myself from where I am not needed, which is just about anywhere.
Think I’ll have a corn muffin and a bicarb, take a nap and check you later.
moth crochet
7.29.22
when I was a kid there was a corner store with a screen door that had been painted with an ad for orange juice. It was magical to me how you could see through the paint, but also see it as an image floating in space. It lead me to try painting on screen, and to copy a crochet moth with tinted acrylic medium on this 1/2″ hardware cloth.
Bighorn Sheep
7.2.22
Hmm. This is all I’ve done this month. in the realm of 2D art.
I have been doing a lot of physical work in the yard, uncovering an old flagstone path, rebuilding the grape arbor, cutting back the wild growth everywhere. I have been hiking about 3 miles every day or so, downtown and back, up to College or Telegraph Avenue, in search of pizza or gelato, and miscellaneous free items on the street. I found a circa 2013 gaming PC with Windows 10 that I named Curby–found it on the curb, had to buy a 19-pin monitor cable, transferring all my old photos and some music via thumb drives. Really fun to have a random project appear, just after I rearranged my office to take advantage of the summer sun.
Instagram Spring
6.14.22
I started an instagram page quite a while ago, following on my massive output of last summer. I have been remiss, neglected to share them here, until now. Oh deer. Never feer. They are not that square. Oh well, we shall see.
The Power of Words
May 26, 2022
What is real? What is fake? I did not get a Birthday Cake.
How amazing that we can hear pictures–other people’s words- thoughts- language. I credit this discovery to the stunning book Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, which I have read twice.
I write and write- there is a picture here. Seems right to write, to catalog difficulties, to see a pattern of options, of solutions. The failures, the don’t-do-that-agains. Looking for space that is my own.
Chose one survival strategy. Embrace what is raw and vulnerable. Find an ally. Or maybe–Walk away from pain. Come back later, or not. Be sensitive. It’s not a crime.
How do I set boundaries? I “just go” as a defense mechanism. Don’t judge me, I’m Irish. I get overwhelmed. I am drowning. The solution is to swim sideways, out of the current.
What is the “secondary gain” of self-silencing? Bold Creative Non-action. Actually, it seems to be a Primary Gain. What am I hiding from? Anger? Judgement? Mis-characterization? Staying Silent may protect me from facing my own shadows. I seem to have made an Art of it. Don’t reach out. Don’t explain anything. It gets you nowhere. That picture is already stone.
piedras blancas, anza borrego, march 9, 2006, 11:16 AM photo credit Laurie A. Miller
Birthday flowers
5.4.22
Art wandered the neighborhood today and brought me some flowers that fell into his vicinity.
Don’t know if I posted these critters or not. Sometimes I find things I have photographed twice, but I don’t want to go back and edit pages, so inconvenient and random for my fan(s) out there.
What the heck. Orange trees, undated, painted 20 years apart in the same sketchbook.
Roofing House rustic do-over
A year since I tripped and broke my ankle . . . The jarring peachy yellow was so inappropriate for this redwood circle/compost heap environment. I had thought for months about how to fake a log-cabin effect, then found I had a can of Oxford Brown Acry-Shield exterior paint that was a perfect semi-gloss aged-wood color. I tried several greens that showed up too blue against the warm brown, until I hit upon a tube of Winsor Newton permanent sap green acrylic. I just used a couple of artists brushes, a 1-inch flat, and a #10 round for getting into the corners. I left the side facing the tracks in the original puke-y pink/yellow so as not to alert the neighbors, or be crashed into by the UPS van. I have since painted over the white poetry patches. Still debating what to paint the upper trim boards- green or brown . . . ?
Bonus points to Art for the ramp, help with the foundation, and relocating the extension ladders.
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