September 23, 2024

I’m planning on skittering up the coast again, thinking time is running out, how many trips do I have in me, how many times can I do this? My health has been a little sketchy lately. I had a very bad reaction to a polenta overdose shortly after the last trip, and it took me almost a week to recover. I am removing grains from my diet for now, to see if that is the trigger.

In between trips to Oregon I have been copying art, grabbing screenshots from Youtube videos. I’m currently fond of a so-generous artist named Helen Wells, who does vivid, stylized trees and vses of flowers on large paper and on panels. Copying these is transfixing, fills pages in my very large 11×14″ sketchbook, two at a time, often in the space of a day. I’m using watercolors, caran d’ache water soluble crayons, inks, whatever. The brushwork and color mixing are so satisfying. I have released my sense of dismay that I am not doing anything original–it’s an atelier, it’s a salon, I am copying art I enjoy, oh well. It’s hella fun.

August 2024

I’m just back from a near-week in a far place, I am ready to go again. A stack of paintings, a sense of freedom, practice, stability, direction . . . well-fed, and wonderful friends I may never see again.

On the first, very hot day we did a nature walk-and-talk through the red fir/mixed conifer forest, stopping to check out the name tags on many alpine plants. I was mildly alarmed by a huge pyrocumulus cloud off to the north, which turned out to be above the nearby Gold Complex fire, ignited by lightening. On day two we woke up to dense smoke, and N95 masks were handed out at breakfast. Several people left camp; it was pretty unnerving. News was hard to come by, not only because we were off grid, but the enormous Park Fire, still raging as I write, was just taking off. No problem for us, though, because we headed out to hike to a nearby lake, Sand Pond, to paint, swim, eat lunch, and paint again. On our return the smoke was much abated, and the wind had shifted, though the fire appeared to be 0% contained for the first two days. It was Taco Tuesday, and after I snarfed my meal I went back to the classroom to fill several sheets of paper with washes of ink and color, and then to bed. The moon was orange that night.

The next day we hiked from Gold Lake to Big Bear Lake, to paint, swim, eat lunch, and paint some more. I did a picky version, then after lunch I did some quick studies of the same scene that I like better. A lesson! Study first, then paint. I was worn out from the excitement and tucked in early.

Some evenings we would paint with acrylics, inks, on canvas, with stencils and materials we gathered. Fire was a constant theme, some people did deep, moving studies of the devastation.

Up at Yuba Pass we hiked through a forest decimated by drought and pine bark beetles, so extreme that the campground had been closed due to falling trees. We hiked to the ridge, where high winds and falling limbs had us turn and leave before we had a chance to get settled. The sad sight was cheered by the crops of young and baby trees, hopefully adapting to the severe conditions.

The last day we took a hike to Grassy Lake, and I painted the view from where I sat near a dry creek bed. A side trip took us to beautiful Red Fir Trail, where we saw a pair of Goshawks overhead.

I stayed an extra day, one more night with Westy in the quiet forest. Heading home Saturday morning after some goodbyes, and back into the traffic, with a pile of paintings and some new ideas, I was happy to see my plum tree still full of fruit.

This week I have been back at my sketchbooks, filling pages with owls and birds and copying ideas from screenshots of painters on Youtube. More about that in coming episodes. Also this week I pulled out my flat files and reorganize them: ancient archives, a portfolio of 14×17 photos and large prints, calligraphy, watercolors. It makes sense, for now.

Meanwhile, I’m heading up to the River tomorrow for a couple of days, hope to continue painting there.

July 2024

Planning to head to the mountains for a painting retreat, seeing how many unfinished sketchbooks I can cram into my luggage. How much will I share? I feel like I struggle to be original, I don’t know why. I don’t post images that are basically renditions of other people’s ideas, hence the lag time between postings–yet isn’t that how one learns? Is anything original? I’m just trying to fill pages.

My goal is to paint faster, looser, brighter, louder. I’d rather copy than not paint.

These are my brushstrokes. Sometimes I work from photographs. Maybe the key is to do the same thing over and over until the sense of your own being is the only thing left, like repeating a mantra, saying your own name until it becomes something foreign. I’m just not there yet. I’m still gathering.

June 2024

Here at my work table I am frequently of the illusion that I am at my old “penthouse” apartment on on Emerson Street. I had a three-bridge view there, before that big Y-shaped condo tower in Emeryville blocked out part of the City. I picture the little kitchen nook behind me, the parking lot out the window to the west, and the big redwood tree Wilson the Escaped Amazon parrot used to visit. I was there the night of the 1989 earthquake, watching the Marina burn, and the lighted tree on the blacked out hills to the east. I was there the day of the big fire, before it was a thing, I saw smoke at 8 AM, when it was 80 degrees and windy., and called 911. 

It is only 2-plus blocks, .2 miles, though thirty years away.  The sensation first came up some months ago when I suddenly realized that I was not on the third floor, in what was actually my bedroom there. The second time it happened i couldn’t dispel the vivid sense of the kitchen behind me, the memory of my little closet, and the niche that was a perfect fit for my LP’s and audio equipment at my elbow. I never actually had a table in that room.  I think the refrigerator backed up to the foot of the bed

One day I got up from the table here, and almost walked through the doorway to my current kitchen.  In my mind’s eye the bathroom was through a door to the main room and to the left. Even writing this I stop to switch tracks, the memory train wants to take that familiar option. I’ve become really fond of it, not looking up from my journal or painting, imagining myself there, another episode of timeline jumping, making a foray into the past to upgrade and heal some past trauma or imagined inadequacy.  Even now I can clearly conjure up the illusion that I am there.

That was another dump I moved into and transformed into a glorious mirage, the tall victorian windows and the fireplace with a huge mirror that reflected the moon rising over the hills, walls I painted to match the glazed green tile, circa 1906.  I had my cat Betty there; where is that drawing of the mouse-mouth? 

What is the purpose of that memory? It was a previous time when I lived alone, not the first, relationship free–after Ed moved back to The City.  I had the same sense of complete centeredness and fortune in my choice of home and surroundings, OMG to the extent that I once had my drums set up there! Poor neighbors!

5.2.24

It’s not my birthday, but the sun crosses 13 degrees 01 minute of Taurus at 4 PM today. It’s Thursday, Ganesh has brought cake, so we are planning a celebration in the garden. It’s the peak of the season, the yellow orchids are blooming, tiny Violette just opened, Joasine Hanet is covered with buds, the grapefruit tree and the mystery pink rose are perfuming the air, the apples are cross-pollinating. Since rain is predicted for my actual birthday (again) I will do an end-run by celebrating today.

I have been inspired to putter in the garden, and have worked all week since the rains stopped. I have a space of time after Texas, Petaluma, Page Street, before I head out for a week re-treat, a gift of a parkup at a “cabin” in the Gold Country, where I hope to reboot my watercolor practice. I bought a thick pad of Fabriano watercolor paper and some Pitts pens to add to my pile of unused materials, sigh, so busy.

I have been productive in other realms–the template of the backyard is decades wide, a sort-of miracle. Somewhere around 1994 I salvaged flagstones from the yard at Emerson Street, and we laid them around the legless Weber grill we used as a portable fire pit. There is another patch of flagstones near where the shed used to be, where the propane grill Peggy gave me lives. There is a rectangular brick spiral floor Steve installed in the corner to make a little room for the clawfoot bathtub we had found on the street. He also built the bamboo fence and gate I patched and stablized a few posts back.

I have a number–nay, a plethora–of patio chair frames, and have tried several means of reweaving them. Some have not been successful, like the neon pink landscape tape that wouldn’t hold a cat, and faded instantly, and the multicolored strands of landscape twine that were too stringy and unwieldy. I tried a couple of methods of restoring the hoop chairs, including copying the original canvas–I now recall that I got those from Grif in torn condition–that had to be 35 years ago. They have been wandering around the yard as ghosts, even as the rope-on-wire contraption I attempted sat un-damaged through many years of sun and rain exposure. The clothesline I wove onto the foot stool has also stood the test of time, but I haven’t found that exact type since.

Last week I stopped into O’Reilly’s looking for some 80’s era 8 amp fuses for Westina’s cigaret/interior/stop light circuit, after replacing and rewiring the socket, and in the sale bin I found a 50′ roll of orange cord for a measly $3. I have bought cord before, wildly unsuitable, uncomfortable, or worse. This was all I needed, appropriate materials in neon orange, to inspire a new attempt. Stringing, unstringing, restringing errors, it took bits of two days to get to this point. I left the hoop and the center ring (where did that come from?) in its current shade of rusty metal, which took on a satisfying purple tone against the green and orange. Might still move that knot to the left . . . right leg. Why knot?

Late yesterday I pulled the old rope-and-wire version apart and reworked it, 12 loops instead of 16, with a salvaged plumbing slip-nut, or whatever it’s called, as the center ring. Oddly, I had begun to paint the rope orange at some point. It has been living in the elements, poorly attached to the hoop chair frame for many years, and the rope is still strong and not too shabby (chic).

I remember Steve’s comment that inspired me to start my garden business over thirty years ago: “You’re never happier than out here with the worms!” Yes, we are.