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 jumped out. I put a bottle of peppermint extract into the utility drawer after I found someone had chewed up a matchbox in there. I later found a nest in the engine compartment comprised of insulation and bits of a chenille blanket.
The best remedy so far seems to be jiffy corn muffin mix and baking soda, just enough sugar to appeal to their discerning taste, plus 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 kidney 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 emotional 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.
Eastlake Holstein
I found this OLD chair on the sidewalk, had to have it. It is the same era and style as the Eastlake hardware in the 1900 house I live in. I had to pull out about 200 tacks, stuffing, ragged fabric, 6 iron springs in a metal frame, to get down to the wood. There was a badly repaired crack which I couldn’t extract the nails from, so I glued and clamped it, and hope it holds. Thanks, Art, for cutting the thin plywood for the seat, snapped into place, and just the right amount of flex. This fake Holstein fabric probably cost as much as an actual cow skin, and the fringe . . . Crazy fun project. I am really satisfied and happy at how it turned out.
Safe Home
I have spent months dithering over the possibility of buying into a local community, a 2-floor, 2 bedroom townhouse to the northwest, where a couple of my friends live. There were yard parties to be had, and a view of Mt Tam from the little shed and an upper window. Things seemed so sketchy here in my tiny abode, and it really would have had many blessings and benefits, not the least of which was a place to put my massive work table and garden tools and westfalia and . . . suchlike. It was a goal, a hobby, to design and plan and discover and ponder, while my ankle healed. Seemed like a good idea to have a flight of stairs to climb on a regular basis. In the end, though, I felt a pressure to comply with too much, with other people’s goals and schedules and beliefs. I just couldn’t shake it loose, there were too many what ifs, and ultimately, my sense of home, privacy, autonomy, is here, right here, where I am now.
Patterns
I love to copy these little designs, I love how the brush and watercolor makes little shapes and variations in tone in my sketchbook. Also fun and pointless, painting the patterns on a paper towel while sitting by the wood stove in late autumn.
Watershed
October 20, 2021
Winterizing, getting water-sensitive objects out of the roofing house before the rainy season. Anything susceptible will rust, melt, mildew or be eaten by rats here in the forest. I barely got settled in this April when I fell, missed two months when I couldn’t walk, then hobbled down on crutches. Now I am packing out again. The door- there is no door- is wide open. No fear of theft.
I moved many supplies to Essex. I much prefer to paint watercolor there. I did some framing during a blissful few hot October days. Simple little repairs and tasks are so satisfying. I miss the weeks on end when I could draw every day. Not sure why that skill has not transferred. Muscle memory, perhaps. Distractions. A sense of safety in the world.
I get around on my own pretty good. After 6 months it’s an awkward state of being fragile and also able to drive alone. A real awareness of before and after now, suddenly “sort of”. The illusion of Autonomy. Another watershed, a dangerous threshold, the bum’s rush, time to make tracks. Home. Yes.
moon over truckee, september 2019
August 2021
While on a visit to Santa Rosa we are watching Downton Abbey, looking to get some fashion tips for the 1920’s-themed Cotati Accordion Festival at the end of next month. Leila sent me some flapper dresses to try- Mimi gave me some cowgirl threads for the stage. I’m walking now, stiffly, keeping a cane close by, visiting thrift shops and brewpubs, where folks are not keeping strictly to protocol. Hooray.
Art had the Jobbox moved out of the cabin into the woodshed, and it took him a week to insulate the music room and put up some pretty plywood panels. We plan to hang guitars and banjos and Ukuleles, and tuck accordions under a work bench. We found two bar stools on the street here that will help make the room more visitor-friendly. We head back tomorrow.
art’s wall 
derrick 
steph
I’m back to trying portrait sketches after a hiatus. I took time off to rest my wrist and brain, intimidated by the difficulty of fitting faces to the templates I am learning. I did these two tiny toss-offs of Youtube presenters on a page of sloppy circle-dividing practice. I was pretty happy with them, so I tried another two, still quite small.
Women wearing makeup are easier to draw. Men are a little more challenging. Two issues present themselves, asymmetrical eyes, and too-long noses.
del 
sloan 
v gogh 
black eye guy
Already faster and more assured, I tried working in my big bound sketchbook from the cover image of a local paper- this guy with two black eyes. I need to go even darker, not be so timid with values.
The flatness of a projected image conveniently translates to pencil and paper, so I am shocked when I take a photo of a drawing and there is a further flattening. Like looking at a painting in a mirror reveals unseen distortions and imbalances. It is no small miracle, to think of it, of screens and lenses.
By the way, we just watched At Eternity’s Gate, really excellent movie about Van Gogh. I have always been a huge fan, since he knocked the wind out of me at the Chicago Art Museum. I did this little copy from an old datebook I have from the 1980’s where there is one of his paintings for each week. Not so much thinking of portraits here as just copying his brush work, but there it is.
mid summer 2021
I was watching a video about how trauma-triggering HURRYing is, and how calming it is to turn the dial down. It has changed my studio practice. Today I am going to relax.
I am not fastidious, but I love organizing, and for years beat myself up for time spent arranging materials vs actually drawing and painting. Looking back at my life I am astounded at how my younger self prepared the creative space for the person I am now. Like a sorcerer’s apprentice, I set loose a flood of every sort of wonderful art supply I could wish for.
Brushes, paints, pastels, pencils, drafting and calligraphy supplies, the Winsor-Newton tin and Kolinsky brushes I bought for college in 1984 . . . journals, sketchbooks, etc. in different formats. Slightly-used oddities passed on to me over the years—I learned early the difference between quality and crap, to my own creative detriment.
What took me longer to learn was that cheap materials can be used creatively, enjoyed with abandon. That is a breakthrough for me. The limiting fear of doing a good drawing on bad paper shut me down for years. Or-worse??-bad drawing on good paper!! Or, horrors, having someone see my mistakes and misuse–This is all gone now.
Last year as music gigs and jam parties evaporated overnight, my social life disappeared. Aside from a few gardening jobs, I spent hours a day watching artists’ videos, stacking up and sometimes taking classes online, puttering aimlessly with paints and brushes; but so much inspiring input was often overwhelming.
Suddenly I was incapacitated with “a bad sprain” and there was nowhere else to go. Scrounging through half-used sketchbooks for ideas and empty pages to fill, nibbling around the classes with no real plan, nuthin else to do but draw little toy animals from around my bed . . . now every day something appears on a page–even in this super-scrappy old sketchbook.
I put these guys up before when I hadn’t had x-rays and didn’t realize I was in for a long haul. I didn’t mention that they have a story. This little ptero was made of felt by a friend of mine- bass player in a band I played drums in. I am not pushing them, or hurrying them to tell me what that is. Maybe this is all I got.
As far as I know so far, a pterodactyl out cruising for a small animal to snack on snatched up a little critter who turns out to love flying, and is so adorable and fun and tells good jokes that it would be a waste to eat him or her, yeah. They fly over desert and forest and town and riverbed and become best friends, and have a wonderful life together.
It turns out that the little puppy snack is actually a red panda, the two of them grow old together, and seems they have a business as an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas.
July 2021
I had to get a new phone, and I bought a used iPhone 6 because of memories I have of the big billboards all over San Francisco when it came out touting the excellence of the camera. I had set up the old iphone as a dedicated camera in the Roofing Haus, but the update on my laptop means it is suddenly no longer compatible. This makes for some new and complicated photo-sharing shenanigans vis-a-vis what I thought would make things easier, still have to figure out the wifi and cloud situation.
There are drawings I don’t have photos of, photos on my two phones that aren’t on my laptop that I guess I have to email to myself–things disappear into the cloud–it’s so confusing. I draw and paint something nearly every day, I don’t know where all the photos are.
Here is a recent batch that came through. The standing cat was from a video of feral kittens being fed by a spoon to get them used to humans. I get a lot of ideas from videos or stills I find online. I am taking classes on Domestika, and screenshot pages from videos of my teachers’ sketchbooks.
standing kitteh 
adolfo serra landscape 
flapper dresses
We are booked for the Cotati Accordion Festival September 26. The theme is roaring back to the 20’s, so I am planning to put together a flapper look. I am walking everywhere now, may be able to dance a bit, zydeco for sure, polka, maybe. I used the BIG sketchbook Leila and Sara gave me for Christmas 2009 to draw these flapper girls, from an unattributed photo on reddit.
I continue to glean random images from old scrap and image files, using various sketchbooks and materials in multiple ways. One thing that stays steady is my increasingly relaxed brushwork, to the extent that I am doing more freehand waterbrush-and-ink drawing, rarely penciling in a preliminary drawing.
On the other hand, I spent about four days completing this color pencil copy of a mysterious photograph I had stapled into a landscape format bound book years ago, from a fashion/food/flower art show??
cute jacket 
picasso 
Wm De Morgan tile
And at random- this big sloppy painting of a cute jacket I saw in a movie; a copy of a Picasso that I did last October for one of my Domestika classes, just before wet weather drove me out of the Roofing House for the winter; waterbrush and ink on mustard paper of someone else’s sketch of a William de Morgan tile.
Summer 2021 Landscapes
I keep my old iPhone 4 in the Roofing House as a handy little snap-camera to document my daily sketching, and can easily download images to my laptop there.
I have tasked myself with filling my partial sketchbooks. The challenge increased when I was given two small spiral books with tinted paper in olive and mustard. I shouldn’t randomly start a new sketchbook with so many undone, but the colored backgrounds are too tempting.
Haven’t been to the desert in such a long time, I decided to copy a postcard from Mojave National Preserve using caran d’ache watercolor pencils and white Posca pen on mustard sketch paper. I used a waterbrush with a water-black ink mix, pulling dark blue shadow lines from inside the tangles of rocks, cholla, junipers and sage. The photograph loses some of the subtlety of the yucca leaves and shadows.
In mid-June I sketched little copies of 2 paintings by Andie Thrams, using watercolor, white gouache, and color pencil on olive paper. These shots from my bed in morning light, with the refurbished-iPhone 6 camera.
Late June 2021
Mimi’s toys, thrift store acrylic paints on 9″x12″ canvas panel
On the occasion of our second visit, I did a painting of Mimi’s toys as a thank-you gift. Very limited selection of paints, a fun challenge.
June 6, 2021
Some drawings of Reality, drawing from photographs, and portraiture.
I’m still not walking, so I am focused on cementing a near-daily drawing practice.
I did get my boots on, though, and went to town last week to get my new phone set up.
I did these drawings in my bound sketchbook of Carlos (my portrait sketch teacher), and a profile from the Sketchbook Skool workshop. Wow, really difficult.
Muffin memories
Years ago — I remember Clamity Jen handing me the sticker on the page that says XXXV, so that is the year 2000 — I started a drawing of the big oak tree at the Browns Valley Aerodrome campground, site of the not-quite yearly Memorial Day weekend music party known as Meadow Muffin.. Layers later, it is finally done. Trees are hard! Until you know how.
Started in 1975 as a birthday party/music festival, MM2000/XXXV was the first year I attended. The Cavepainters played, it was 10 years into my relationship with Stevie, I was not in the band then, and he was singing lead but not playing guitar. The recording of this gig (engineered by Matt Parker) was/is the quintessential Cavepainters recording, with Stevie in fine voice, John Havard and Ed Wray trading leads, Rick Purcell on keyboard bass, Scott-T on drums.
Photo, to follow, somehow. I would put a link here to Travels With Stevie, but there are no photos there, either. Somehow I have to get back into my photo flow, archives, old PC, whatever it takes.
Late May 2021
I copied a series of fox and owl studies from my animal character Instructor Kevin W. Marvelous expression of demeanor and life.
I am working at putting together the animal band. There are some jazz cats that live next door when the Brementown Musicians end up moving into a house after a confrontation with some ne’er-do-wells in another town, which is how the story goes. It is a mis-translation, they are actually a singing troupe. I have never seen an indication that they played instruments. However, once they start hanging out in this house there is a porch, and a banjo, and bongos . . . etc. And a white mouserat, with wine. Why not.
May 17-23, 2021
week 3, Santa Rosa, CA
Here I am in bed in the guest room at mimi’s house, resting and drawing; or walker-ing to the bathroom, or the breakfast room, to the couch to watch movies, or out to the garden. Mimi likes to take care of us–and Art gets a break from running up and down the house bringing me things.
Did I mention I got x-rays? oy. Two fractures, minimally displaced. What a shock . . after three weeks in bed.
We are the Wholeness. Love, Beauty, Creativity.
CoQ10, Vitamin C, homeopathy.
I asked Mimi for some toys to draw, so she put them all over my bed. I drew the Japanese porcelain cat, the longy-leggy doll, and the bendy frog with Derwent watercolor pencils, in the messy, wrinkly, spiral bound sketchbook. So fun to draw in..
My Instructor KW suggested the Brementown Stuffies should play instruments, so I drew up Alliger pretending to trumpet like a cartoon elephant, and added watercolor, brush pen, white signo pen.
Kids books have alligators.
Here are some Richard Scarry illustrations from, I think, 1951?
Books and toys from Mimi’s collection, except for Aliger, from my imagination.
may 2021 week 2
I am still immobilized by my bad fall and sprain, so celebrating my birthday month in Canyon, passing time with toy animals and cake. We expect to go visit Mimi in a few days so Art can get some downtime. He has been running up and down the stairs to bring me frequent snacks and coffee and other attentions.
Here is a portrait i painted of the new birthday possum I ordered from Mr. Mopps and had Art go to town to pick up–taking umbrage at being asked to play an instruments for Brementown. We are singers, he say, mistranslation.
Here are ideas for a puppy crittur, some cats based on Kevin W. sketches, and two origami pterosaurs to use as models for a predatory character.
Early May 2021
On Monday April 26 at about 11 AM I lost my balance, pivoted 180 degrees, and fell into a hole, badly spraining my right ankle. Suddenly I am immobile, and more isolated that before. Luckily I was in Canyon- I tried to crawl but couldn’t move. I yelled and yelled until Art heard me, and came out to lift me up and carry me to the house.
I have been laid up in bed, being taken care of, well fed with healthy food; and, obviously, unable to work. Pluto stationing, heading back into my 11th house, Mercury and Venus piled up on my natal sun- Whew, I just narrowly escaped having to plan a 70th covid-tinged birthday gathering.
I am sketching a bit in my (s)crappy sketchbook, and it is really fun and soothing. I just found this little metal case, very handy for a small drawing kit. No drugs, no pain killers, I just here with my tools and a big freaking cake . . .
April 2021
My sentiments exactly
I have a number of online classes I signed up for and not done much with. There is one that I have found approachable because the instructor’s demeanor is approachable, mild, funny, not at all intimidating . . . creating animal characters for storybooks. I have some critters around that I am drawing- little bigfoot, my stuffed animals as the Brementown Musicians, and some random animals around the studio.
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