I dreamt I was being harassed by a peacock who wanted my antique beaded bag that Steve’s mom gave me 33 years ago (where is that bag now?). In the dream I was carrying the little bag inside a big purse. The beaded bag is in peacock colors and that bird was determined he (?) would get the bag. I finally stood up to the big bird and said “Go home!” and he went to the house across the street.
I followed him and knocked on the door, prepared to ask them to keep their dangerous peacock at home. A lovely Persian woman opened the door and I could see the house was full of Persian women and children having some sort of daycare cooperative. I know that Persia is now Iran, but in my dream they were Persian.
I can’t even begin to fathom what this dream was about!
Bedside Table with Coffee & "An Illustrated Life" - Morning
DeLuxe Parked - morning walkPoodle Waiting at Trader Joes, El Cerrito - Midday Busby Annoyed, Trying to Nap - After DinnerFiona "As Seen on TV" (literally) - Evening
Messy Desk - Late Evening
I challenged myself to do a sketchcrawl of my day, making a 10 minute drawing (almost) every hour, wherever I was at the moment. I was surprised by how many times during the day I saw things I’d like to draw. But I waited for my timer to tell me, “Now!” and then started drawing. If I was out and about, I added the watercolor at home in the evening.
Reading Danny Gregory’s book, An Illustrated Life, inspired me to get back to my sketchbooks which I’d been neglecting while I focused on oil painting this past year. As a result of that neglect, I had half a dozen unfinished sketchbooks that I’ve challenged myself to complete by the end of the year. Hence the sketchcrawl above (and more to come as the year draws to a close, or should I say, “as I draw the year (and my sketchbooks) to a close!
St. Patrick's Church, San Francisco, ink & watercolor 8x6"
Shirley (Paper and Threads) was visiting San Francisco this week and Martha (Trumpetvine) and I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon sketching with her in the park. Poor St. Patrick’s Catholic Church isn’t really falling over despite the many earthquakes it has weathered over the years. It’s just my usual wonky drawing. Martha and Shirley will post their drawings on their own blogs eventually but here is a snapshot of our work lined up together.
Shirley's, Jana's and Martha's sketches
And here we are lined up, with me a head taller and trying to take a photo and holding my iPhone at arm’s length.
Jana, Martha and Shirley
We were joined virtually on our little art blogger sketchcrawl by phone from Lisa in Texas and via Facebook (where I posted an update and photo while we were sketching) by Marta (MARTa’s Art) and EJ (Rose-Anglais) .
After sitting on cold concrete steps to sketch we were ready to warm up. We walked back to Shirley’s hotel, and she treated us to a glass of wine on the 39th floor of the Mariott Hotel (also known as the “Jukebox” building because of its unique architecture). Here’s the view from the bar just before sunset.
View from the Marriott Hotel bar
It was such a treat to spend a Friday afternoon with these two very talented and beautiful women. After the sun set in golds and pinks, and the lights of the city came on, I had to leave while they went off in search of dinner. I BARTed to Oakland for the monthly Friday night “Art Murmur” gallery walk where my sister and niece had pieces in a show. Walking from BART I passed the grand old Paramount Theatre and set my camera to “burst” mode so I could capture the changing lights of the neon marquis.
Life Without Coffee, ink & watercolor in sketchbook
This is what I look like far too often these days as I’ve gradually been reducing my caffeine intake. I’m down to one cup of 25% caf & 75% decaf in the morning and then nothing but decaf after that.
My painting ritual had been to make a cup of coffee before heading into the studio and bringing an entire vacuum pot of the stuff when I went out plein air painting. The extra energy from caffeine not only kept me painting when I should have been sleeping, but it also fueled my late night blog visiting and email answering.
It was fun having that artificial boost, but burning the candle at both ends was doing bad things to my health. While I miss the energy, I am sleeping at night now and waking up feeling alive and ready to go instead of feeling like my head is full of mashed potatoes.
It reminds me of something Maya Angelou said her grandmother told her:
“You don’t always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.”
Yes I was squeezing extra hours out of the day but I was paying for them with being constantly sleep-deprived.
I asked a friend who doesn’t use caffeine what you’re supposed to do when you’re tired if you can’t drink coffee, thinking she’d have some other trick for keeping going. She looked at me perplexed at what seemed like a silly question.
Martinez Waterfront Park, Ink & watercolor in watercolor Moleskine, 5x7"
I arrived late and lazy (due to my efforts to decaffeinate myself) for our paint out at Martinez Waterfront Park today and decided to sketch in ink and watercolor instead of setting up my easel and oil paints. It’s a great park, with a marina full of boats on the bay, fields, trees, ponds, an historic train station and old train (pictured above), a nearby river and marshlands and much more. It’s right on the edge of the older part of town and the Amtrak train station is just outside the entrance to the park.
I sat on a very hard stone bench at the old train station about 20 feet from the tracks. On the sketch above, I drew without much of a plan, just picking things I saw that interested me and sticking them somewhere on the page, drawing in ink and hoping it would all fit together somehow. I added the watercolor on site.
The two artists in the sketch were standing between the west and east Amtrak tracks. Every 15 minutes a train would roar by about 2 feet of where they were standing, sounding it’s horn so loudly it was painful, but they stood their ground like the dedicated plein air painters that they are.
Martinez Hot Dog Depot, Ink & watercolor in Moleskine watercolor sketchbook, 5x7"
I turneda bit to the left at the end of the day and quickly sketched this wonky old Hot Dog Depot (named because it’s adjacent to the train depot. The perspective is all wonky but so was the building. It has a weird corner section where that second smaller window is. So the building isn’t a rectangle, it’s a pentagon (5-sided). I didn’t have time to worry about perspective as the group was convening for a critique and I had to hurry to finish this at all.
Coffee & White Socks, 8x6", pencil sketch in sketchbook
Trying to recover from a caffeine hangover headache this morning, and completely out of coffee at home, I walked (slowly) to Peet’s for a latte and a bag of beans to replenish my supply. While I was sipping and sketching this lady, two clerks from the nearby Trader Joes sat at the table next to me and held a training session that provided an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the grocery business for the always curious (and eavesdropping) me.
They took turns reading aloud from a document contained in a bright blue cardboard folder. I learned that the average checker completes about 200 sales per day and that that number is used to compare the productivity of workers. I learned about when and why they have to declare goods unsellable and that they then donate them to food banks, including flowers.
They pondered that one for a while, trying to figure out who would actually want unsellable flowers and what they would do with them. They concluded that food banks probably don’t need flowers so they must go elsewhere. But I was thinking the flowers would be nice to brighten the homes of the needy people getting the food.
The pitcher in this painting is one of the few remaining pieces from my years as a potter, though not a favorite. I’d assumed I’d always be a potter and could always make more so didn’t worry when I sold nearly everything pre-Christmas one year. Then life changed.
I got married, had a baby (who I intended to just strap in a papoose on my back and continuing working at the wheel, up to my elbows in wet mud–Ha!) and we moved to a row house in San Francisco where I could no longer have a kiln. So that was the end of pottery, but the beginning of drawing and painting.
Below you can see the steps I took in making this painting. Although I was working live from my own still life set up, I was also following along with an excellent painting video by Don Sahli. I tried to set up a still life similar to the one he paints in the video but ate the second orange so substituted a lemon.
I’d already watched the video and had many “Aha!” moments with it and wanted to practice what I’d learned from it. This weekend I stayed in the studio instead of going out to paint plein air. I played a chapter of the video, doing that step on my canvas then played the next section. It took Don an hour to do the entire painting but it took me the whole weekend.
Temoku Pitcher & Fruit, Oil on canvas, 16×20″
Don Sahli is a wonderful teacher and painter who was the last apprentice of Russian painter Sergei Bongart. He breaks painting down to these 4 stages and I photographed those stages (above) as I went along:
Drawing;
Abstract stage (where you do 80% of the work, starting with the darkest dark and then continually ask yourself what color, value, temperature and you paint in one color shape after another);
Modeling (where you finish giving the objects a 3-dimensional appearance, delineating the planes using value, and color temperature.
Final details (adding highlights, caligraphic strokes, dark accents).
After watching the video and doing this exercise, I finally understand so many concepts that I’d read about, been taught, but had still been struggling with, especially the one illustrated below that starts the 3-dimensional appearance of the objects by finding and focusing on the dark/light, warm/cool color shapes.
*P.S. I have no financial or other interest in Don Sahli’s videos. Just wanted to share a good resource.
I met a very quirky 76 year-old woman artist who has made her home, her car and her self into a wonderful, crazy work of art. I’ll share more about her next time, but today wanted to post this self-portrat she inspired.
I’d been feeling discouraged about oil painting after doing a terrible plein air painting on Saturday but meeting that woman on my walk today, I was inspired to braid my hair and decorate myself with make up and do a self portrait in oils.
I started by setting up a mirror but found it awkward to paint while having to keep looking in a mirror to my right and making the same face. So I took photos, shooting into the mirror, and then displayed the best one on my computer monitor and worked from that. Here’s the photo I used:
Reference photo of me
I started by drawing with white pastel pencil on an already toned canvas (actually a reused canvas: the first painting I did when I picked up oils a year or so ago — a portrait of my sister that was so terrible that I scraped it and covered it in a warm brown oil paint to be used again). I like sketching with a pastel pencil because it rubs off easily from a primed canvas and disappears into the oil paint without streaking or smearing.
Pastel drawing on toned canvas
Then I photographed the drawing bove and pasted the image as another layer in Photoshop on top of the reference photo, adjusting the new layer to 60% opacity. That allowed me to see where my drawing was off and make the adjustments on my canvas. You can see in the overlay below that I’d missed in many places, despite my attempt at accuracy.
Drawing overlapping photo
I’ve learned the hard way that an incorrect drawing just leads to a bad painting. I could have just enlarged the photo and traced it right onto my canvas, but I love drawing and wanted the challenge of drawing myself somewhat accurately. I think the final painting does look a bit like me and it was definitely fun to do.
I’m going to wear my hair like this to work tomorrow. And I’m not going to give up oils.
Pardee Home Museum Out-Building, Ink & watercolor 8x6"
Driving by Preservation Park in downtown Oakland today I noticed this odd little structure on the grounds of the Pardee Home Museum and pulled over to sketch. I have no idea what this little building was for, but it’s in between the carriage house and the main building.
The museum is available for tours by appointment but had the nicest “Closed” sign I’ve ever seen. It says something like, “If you find yourself on our doorstep without an appointment, try phoning our office as we may be able to assist you with a tour on short notice.”
Their office must be located in the neighboring Preservation Park collection of Victorians, now homes to non-profit organizations. The Pardee Museum offers a full house tour for $5, a “Tour and Tea” for $10 (tea and scones), and more elaborate teas, with as many as eight dishes, can be combined with tours for $25 per person.
The tour and tea sounds like fun and I’m trying to think of an excuse to schedule one. There are four parlors, four bedrooms, the billiard room, the curio room, and the hallway lined with cabinets of Mrs. Pardee’s antiquities and the cupola, or tower, to admire the views.
Memories! Everyone I know is losing theirs including me. Ater repeatedly walking into a room and then forgetting why I’d gone in there, it occurred to me that if I carried clues with me, I’d save lots of time and extra steps.
So I invented the “Get a Clue Necklace” complete with a key ring, a tiny flashlight, sticky notes to jot down reminders, an attractive small pen to write them with, a magnifying glass for small print, an optional “My name is…” tag with a reverse side note “If found return to…” should I ever get REALLY forgetful, and a little pill box for those vitamins I always forget to take.
Below is the full page which you can click to see bigger to read some of the funny quotes about aging, as well as my list of the pros and cons of aging back when I made this.
Get a Clue Necklace; Mixed Media, 12x9" (click to enlarge)
Here are a few of the choice quotes from the piece:
I’m at the age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.
Whenever I meet a woman over 55 who’s just fallen in love, I always ask, “Are you taking hormones?” I tell her, “If it turns out you’re in love in a way that’s not good for you, stop taking them.”
[Addendum: Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon who once dismissed marriage as an institution that destroys relationships, became a first-time bride at the age of 66, a few years after that quote was printed.]
Peg Bracken, 81 at the time this quote was printed, said:
“These are your declining years and you can jolly well decline to do what you don’t feel like doing!”
Right on Peg, wherever you are now!
P.S. When I saw Illustration Friday’s prompt this week was “Memories” I had to share this, even though it’s from my journal several years ago.
And one more Pro to add to the Pros and Cons of aging is that when your memory goes, everything old becomes new again. Stories and jokes you’ve heard (or told) before sound vaguely familiar but since you can’t remember the punchlines, they’re good for a whole new round of laughter.
Jana Bouc, Artist 