Palace Hotel Garden Court detail, Copic Multiliner
After an all day meeting in San Francisco on Wednesday I met art buddy Sonia for some sketching at the Palace Hotel’s Garden Court atrium. It’s a stunning and historical room but detail lover that I am, I chose one tiny spot across the room to draw and then spent an hour on it, while Sonia did 4 or 5 sketches.
Palace Hotel Garden Court
I started with the furthest chandelier and the clock on the wall and just kept discovering more and more fun things to draw. If we weren’t so hungry and tired we could have stayed there all night sketching.
Two Ladies Chatting Over Coffee
The first lady just slid right off my pen, perfectly drawn (as I saw her) but her friend kept moving and I couldn’t get close to a likeness.
Random BART Subway Sketches
More commuter sketches (and one eagle who adorns the top of the Oakland City Hall). My co-workers and I took advantage of a sunny and surprisingly quiet day at the office to walk to Oakland City Center for lunch (ergo the Bean and Cheese sticker) and I even had a moment to pull out my sketchbook.
That messy little boy top right was on a field trip but looked like he should have still been home in bed. And that’s where I should be too. It’s been a rocky week. Glad it’s over.
I went out for a bit of “sketchercize” today, trying to get unsluggish. My plan was to walk 30 minutes, sketch wherever I landed at 30 minutes and then walk 30 minutes back. But 15 minutes out I came across this odd montage and had to stop right there. Up a few stairs just past some lovely native drought resistant plantings, and a miniature pagoda was a full sized authentic teepee in front of a wall of bamboo. Somewhere behind that was a house.
Why would someone have a teepee in their front yard? Is it for houseguests who have overstayed their welcome? A mother-in-law apartment? A garden shed? A kid’s playhouse? An art studio? A meditation room? A dog house? A place to just get away?
One nice thing about living in the San Francisco Bay Area, or at least in this part of it, is the feeling of “Anything goes,” and “Live and let live.” Slightly (?) odd artists like me fit right in. I definitely found my tribe when I moved to Berkeley, and while I live a few miles north of there now, apparently it’s close enough for teepees.
And now off to watch the season five finale of Project Runway on DVD. Since I’ve finished all 5 seasons of The Wire, and caught up on Project Runway, I’m excited to get back to more drawing and reading and much, much less time in front of the TV!
Here’s a few sketches of doors from last week’s North Berkeley sketchcrawl around Euclid and Crystal above the Berkeley Rose Garden. I was really tired and not terribly inspired, but it was a nice evening nevertheless.
Near Berkeley Rose Garden #1, ink & watercolorNear Berkeley Rose Garden #2, ink & watercolorNear Berkeley Rose Garden #1, ink & watercolor
This week we headed to Spruce Street in North Berkeley to sketch “Normandy Village,” a 1920s blueprint copy of a village in rural France. For some reason I did all of the village sketches on one spread in my sketchbook so I’ve separated them to post here. I started with these funny gargoyles on one of the cottages, experimenting with a Penstix Indian ink pen that bleeds a bit when water is added.
Normandy Village on Spruce Street #2, ink & wash
After the gargoyles I walked back into the little village and sketched the towers. While I was balancing on my 3-legged stool on the cobbled road, some residents drove up to unload some stuff from their car. A young man showed me his large pencil drawings he’d done at school that day and said he was an illustrator and a “Concept Artist.” Actually he’s a student at SF Academy of Art but with that kind of confidence will likely go far.
Normandy Village Gnome house, ink & watercolor
While most of the cottages in the village look like Hobbit houses, one of the “Village People” as the residents are known, is a gnome collector. Her kitchen window is lined with small gnomes, and the backyard just visible through the archway above, is loaded with gnomes large and small. This one was resting in a chair.
A friendly couple who lived in one of the apartments in this building came out with a plate of produce scraps to put in the recycling bin near me. We chatted about drawing and which was more difficult, drawing people or architecture. I showed them the trick for getting angles approximately right when sketching.
When it got too dark and we were walking up the hill to our cars we saw this home below and realized that in the open on the top of the hill here there was still enough light to do one more sketch
Last sketch on Spruce Street Sketchcrawl #4, Ink & watercolor
I meant to take a walk at lunch today but when I saw this old lady feeding the geese I had to stop and sketch. This is a little park near my office in downtown Oakland called “Snow Park” but a better name would be “Goose Poop Park” since it’s home to the many Canadian geese who don’t seem to feel the need to head north or south any longer.
Bart faces and feet, ink & watercolor
I drew the faces of these subway riders on my way to work this morning. I drew the feet on the way home. That guy was holding his juice on the floor with his feet.
I am so not a party girl. But my son’s fiancée is and loves any opportunity to play dress up. I was invited to her birthday party, designated (tongue in cheek) as a swanky cocktail party. I said I’d come but since I don’t own anything swanky and I firmly believe in Thoreau’s wise words, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes” I wouldn’t be too swanky. As it turned out, I wasn’t alone, and it was fun to see the variety of outfits people were decked out in. (My wine-colored blouse and long black skirt turned out to be perfect, as strangely enough nearly everyone was wearing combinations of black and wine or plum).
The Party Girl, ink & watercolor in sketchbook
The birthday girl was the epitomy of swank, with a skin-tight, teensy, black satin dress, long-sleeved black satin gloves, stilettos and lots of chunky bling. She is a beautiful girl, a lithe formal model and dancer, and so pulled it off elegantly and magestically, truly the princess of her party. (Sorry E, that my sketch added 20 pounds at least to your perfect figure).
Several people chose interesting hats to accompany their outfits: from a funky straw rodeo-style cowboy hat accompanying a chiffon party dress, high heels and sun glasses to a young man wearing a strange winter cap with ear flaps and Buddy Holly style glasses. (This was a Berkeley party, after all!)
Most of the people at the party were friends and family of the birthday girl so nobody seemed to mind my sitting on the couch sketching. When the cowboy-hatted drama teacher asked to see my sketchbook and I said I was embarrased at how badly I’d drawn her she gave me a big lecture on not putting down my work and never saying, “Just” as in I was “just sketching”! I could see why her students love her and are inspired by her.
It was a lovely party and yet, in my usual reclusive style, I was happy to depart after two hours and return home to a painting I was working on.
No those aren’t circus dogs stacked up in a doggie pyramid, I just drew them that way as dogs came and went, begging for scraps at the table where the couple was eating lunch.
I’d planned to spend the day in the studio today, but when Barbara called to invite me for a walk at Pt. Isabel, I couldn’t resist. Since it was sunny and not too windy (or so I thought) I also brought along my plein air gear, thinking I might set up to paint there after our walk. But we took a L-O-N-G walk on the Bay Trail with an equally long walk back, and then had a late lunch at the Sit Stay Cafe in the dog park.
The wind had picked up and I was getting cold and didn’t really feel like spending 3 hours standing in the wind (see top left picture with poor bent over tree from the constant ocean winds). So while I was trying to decide, Barbara took out her sketchbook and I decided to do the same. By the time I finished it was already 4:00 and another weekend was nearly over.
But a day with good solid exercise and a little sketching is a good day and it counts. (Unlike some days that just suck and don’t count.)
We had a paintout at John Muir National Park in Martinez today. My painting was complete rubbish, so to leave with pleasant memories of the day, I stayed and sketched these two carts that were on the patio behind the visitors center. I wrote “Transit Then and Now” on the page but the ranger corrected me when I handed him my sketchbook to get it stamped (see stamp top left).
He told me the “Then” wagon is actually a sprayer: the wooden barrel was filled with tobacco juice that John Muir’s farmhands sprayed on the fruit orchards to kill pests. He said that modern organic farmers have rediscovered this effective technique and are using it again. The “Now” cart is a neat little electric car they use to get around the beautiful hilly property. The rangers were so helpful, eager to share their knowledge about the park’s history, and very welcoming to the 21 of us who came to paint today.
Unfortunately I’ve apparently forgotten everything I knew about painting in oils plein air in the month that I’ve been focusing on acrylic painting in the studio and sketching with ink and watercolor. But at the critique several people had helpful suggestions about saving my painting. I’d started with a bad composition (despite trying out several thumbnails first) but they reminded me I could use artistic license and change the scene to improve the composition. (DUH! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that!) In fact, many people in the group did just that, deleting one or both tall palm trees that stand in front of the house and evenly divide the scene.
I’m going to give their ideas a try and who knows, maybe I’ll be able to rescue the painting. But not tonight.
For our Monday night sketchcrawl we met at the Berkeley Rose Garden, sketched a bit, and then took a stroll along Euclid Ave. At sunset we sketched at the foot of the Rose Walk Path steps where two women residents of the cluster of Maybeck cottages there had a cheerful chat in front of a large Japanese maple while we sketched them.
Hollyhocks, ink & watercolorBerkeley Rose Garden views, Ink & watercolor
Inside the rose garden I sketched the trees and the person reading in a bright spot of sun. The hollyhocks on the right were our last sketching stop since it was totally dark by the time we finished them.
The Squid Boat, ink & watercolor, 9x6"
On Sunday I spent the afternoon on a beautiful sailboat on the San Francisco Bay. After our sail my friend Barbara and I found a dockside bench near a cafe to sketch before heading home. This funny little fishing boat was docked there and was a perfect subject for a quick sketch.
"Lovers Mongrels Curs #1 M.H.", Acrylic on canvas, 28x22"
It’s not what you might think, based on the above work in progress. It’s that I finally started the series of paintings that I’d been waiting on for over a year. I hadn’t realized it, but I was waiting for the painting to tell me how to paint it (see below about intuition and broccoli).
I’m just having so much fun with the series and haven’t wanted to use time I have for painting being on the computer. Also I wasn’t sure if I was ready to post what I’m working on yet. I’m also not sure how much I want to share about each painting and the series as a whole, except to say that it’s sort of auto- and bio- graphical, about the men who’ve played a role in my life, hence the title of the series: “Lovers, Mongrels and Curs.”
This painting is the first in the series and it is still a work in progress; a little sketchy but I like it that way and may just leave it…or not.
I followed the saying, “If you don’t know what to do, just wait until you do,” instead of forcing the start of the series. It just took some down time to conceptualize how the series needed to be painted and for the ideas to bubble up (literally: I was on vacation, lying on my back on the deck of my little, private, open-roofed, hot-tub room at Albany Sauna, watching the clouds float by overhead while the hot tub bubbled beside me when it came to me that the series needed to be painted large, in acrylic.)
I wanted to work on two paintings simultaneously, side by side on the wall so first thought of using gessoed paper or unstretched canvas, finally settling on stretched canvases. But how to hang them?
Using Velcro to Hang Canvases on the Wall for Painting
After some brainstorming I found an easy way to mount two canvases side by side on the wall without harming the wall or making holes with nails.
2 canvases mounted on bulletin board with Velcro
I applied a few strips of Velcro along the top rail of my 36×48″ metal framed bulletin board already hanging on that wall (the cork is covered by a sheet of paper pinned to it). Then I measured and matched the other half of the Velcro strips to the backs of the canvases and stuck them together. To stabilize the canvases a bit I put a few large push pins along the bottom and sides. It’s working great!
Listen to Your Broccoli poster, colored pencil, 16x14", created after reading Bird by Bird in 1994
“There’s an old Mel Brooks routine, on the flip side of the ‘2,000-Year-Old-Man,’ where the psychiatrist tells his patient, ‘Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.’ And when I first tell my students this, they look at me as if things have clearly begun to deteriorate. But it as important a concept in writing as it is in real life.
It means, of course, that when you don’t know what to do…you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside. It will tell you what to do. The problem is that so many of us lost access to our broccoli when we were children. When we listened to our intuition when we were small and then told the grown-ups what we believed to be true, we were often either corrected, ridiculed, or punished. God forbid that you should have your own opinions or perceptions–better to have head lice.
. . . So you may have gotten in the habit of doubting the voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential that you get it back.
. . . Get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side.
. . . Get your intuition back and make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. . . Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.
. . . If you don’t know which way to go, keep it simple. Listen to your broccoli. Maybe it will know what to do. Then, if you’ve worked in good faith for a couple of hours but cannot hear it today, have some lunch.”
Jana Bouc, Artist 