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.

11.11.22

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.

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.

10.19.22

skating on the edge of gouache and watercolor, brush pens, mysteries of light.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.