I was invited to participate in a two-person show for the month of September and the reception is Friday night September 12, from 7:00 to 9:00 P.M. I love the paintings of the other artist, Lin Salamo. The opening coincides with the festive monthly “art walk” called the Stockton Stroll (the gallery is on Stockton Avenue) but the show is up for the rest of the month.
If you’re in the neighborhood stop by for a sip of wine and say Hi!
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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.
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.
The little shoreline park in Rodeo where we painted Sunday is funky like the town itself, but a fun place to paint. Click here to see some of Sue Wilson’s cool photos of the area or her little video of some of us in Da Group painting there. This beach is about 40 feet from the railroad tracks where freight trains and Amtrak trains rumble by, whistles blowing, every 20 minutes or so. One train made me laugh: an engine pulling another two dozen engines which were all riding backwards. It looked so silly.
On the north end of the little beach there’s a broken down old pier and a couple of tin shacks. The shacks and pier are all that remains of the “resort” that a man with big dreams (but apparently little common sense) built there on a former industrial dump. In his later years he allowed a homeless encampment to flourish on his property. When he died his heirs had the vagrants evicted. To get even, they burned the resort down to the ground. The property is worth less than nothing because of the clean up needed due to the toxins under the ground.
Dumps to Cities
Most of the bayfront land in the San Francisco Bay Area is built on former dumps. A combination of ignorance, greed, and “out of sight, out of mind” thinking, led cities and businesses to dump everything from tires and batteries to whole cars; from industrial waste to ordinary garbage into the beautiful bay, eventually creating “landfill” upon which homes, hotels, parks and major freeways were built.
I remember going to the dump at the Berkeley waterfront where you drove up (holding your nose) and dumped your trash in a pile on the ground, seagulls flying overhead. Then the bulldozers would push it into big hills. Now that dump is hidden under Cesar Chavez Park, home of the Berkeley Kite Festival. The park has air vents to allow the methane gas to escape from the garbage dump buried underneath the grassy hills and waterfront trails. Vents won’t help buildings on landfill if there’s a big earthquake and the landfill undergoes liquefaction.
Now trash goes first to a warehouse “transfer station” where it is sorted and then piled onto trucks and hauled to a dump/landfill in another town. (And in my own bit of “out of sight, out of mind” I realized I didn’t know where it went and had to look it up). It’s trucked to Livermore, land of rolling hills and wind farms.
I’ve heard that all the Bay Area dump/landfills are all going to be full within the near future. I hope we learn to do a better job of recycling and precycling before that happens.
Trash and Art
And now to tie this digression about dumps back to art, San Francisco offers an artist in residence program at the Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center where San Francisco’s garbage goes before being trucked away. Artists get 24-hour access to a well-equipped studio, a monthly stipend, and an exhibit at the end of their residency.
Practicing patience while doing for others the past week has meant less time for painting. A dear friend broke his leg and has required 2 trips to the hospital and other chauffering. The computer I gave to my wonderful neighbors came down with a variety of ills, including a dead power supply and a huge load of viruses (or is that virii?). And work was a non-stop series of meetings, trouble-shooting and brainstorming sessions that completely wore out my brain.
Today instead ofpainting I’ve spent hours trouble-shooting and (hopefully) restoring my former computer (the virus scan is still running and zapping hundreds of virus files). Lesson: Never let a 12 year old boy use a PC without first installing virus software! A friend told me about the free (for home users)and downloadable Avast Antivirus and he is right: it is fantastic!
I need to start a new sketchbook. This one is nearly full and I seem to be postponing the dreaded blank sketchbook, instead cramming everything on the remaining few pages.
Another thing I discovered this week is that Amazon offers all sorts of free music mp3 downloads, (click this link then scroll down) from whole albums to songs from a variety of artists. I’m listening to the ones I downloaded yesterday and really enjoying them. Everything from Billie Holiday, the Butchies, and Firewater to the entire album “Very Best of Naxos Early Music,” which is heavenly.
He didn’t really have 3 extra heads. Those heads are the first people who sat in his seat but each got off after one stop so I had no time to finish them. Maybe they are his guardian angels watching over him as he sleeps.
WAITING
I’m getting good at waiting… My very lame loaner computer is teaching me patience because every step takes so long. Hopefully mine will be back from the shop soon. It’s amazing what a difference 2 GB of memory in the exact same computer makes compared the 500 MB in this loaner.
These are some sketches over the past couple weeks while waiting for the subway, waiting for my stop, waiting for a meeting to end….
Version 1: Low Tide: S.F. Bay from Sunset View Cemetery, Oil on panel, 9×12″ (Larger)
I did a little revising on the painting below, trying to work with the suggestions people offered. I think there are some improvements (I like the distant hills better and I toned down the sailboats and removed the sign and tried to make the town look more like buildings). I feel like I’ve taken it as far as it needs to go as a sketch.
Version 2:
Below is my painting buddy Peggy’s painting of the scene (the title is a reference to the view from a cemetery). She painted the clouds and water as they were at the end of our session. With plein air painting you’re always painting what you remember or what you anticipate.
Peggy Anderson: “Angel Island from the Afterlife”
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What I really wanted on the Fourth of July was a quiet day at home but I’d made plans with a couple of painting friends to go up to the nearby Sunset View Cemetery to do some plein air painting. It was a typical July morning in the San Francisco Bay Area: cold, windy, foggy and cloudy, and even more so on top of the hill where I decided to paint, a spot called “Viewpoint Garden,” with a widescreen view of Albany, El Cerrito, and, shrouded in fog, Angel Island and Marin County across the bay.
Before I got my gear out of the car, a large Chinese family arrived and started heading up the path to the viewpoint. I asked if they were having a service there, and they sent their only English speaker, a young man, to talk to me. He said it was just a small family service and they’d be done in half an hour.
Flowers for the Dead not the Deer
While we were waiting at the edge of the garden, an elderly Asian man came up the path carrying a basket of flowers which he was putting in holders at numerous graves. I asked him if he worked there (thinking people paid to have flowers maintained at gravesites) and he said, “No, these are all my friends and family…over there is my wife, that’s my brother, that’s my best friend, and back there are my parents and two of my other brothers. They all wanted to have a nice view.”
He said that he was 91 years old and grew the flowers in his garden. He showed us how many bouquets were scattered around the grass, having been pulled out of their holders and chewed up my the local deer. He only grows flowers that deers won’t eat to bring to the cemetery on his weekly visits.
Burning Stuff for the Departed:
Meanwhile, the Chinese family were lighting things on fire (possibly paper models of stuff the deceased might need or always wanted in life but didn’t get, according to this article) in a large trash can, creating huge amounts of smoke, as well as burning incense, and taking turns bowing numerous times before the grave of their dearly departed. I asked the elderly man if they were his family too and he exclaimed loudly, “NO! They’re Chinese, I’m Japanese!” (Oops.)
I suggested he talk more quietly so we wouldn’t bother the family but he continued speaking loudly (despite his two hearing aids), saying, “Oh, we’re not bothering them. Those Chinese people are always burning stuff here and I don’t like it!” Then he regaled us with his (mostly) interesting life history. By then the Chinese family had put out the fires and packed up and headed out, thanking us for waiting. We looked at the grave afterward and it was a man who’d died a year earlier.
Buried standing up?
We were trying to figure out why the graves were so close together in that area—just little placques in the ground a few feet apart. We decided it must be urns of ashes that are buried there, although at first I wondered if people were buried standing up to save space. While that’s unlikely, given the way we think of the dead resting in peace, it did strike me that it would be a perfect metaphor for my life, since I’m always on my feet, on the go, trying to fit so much into every day. It made me tired just to think about spending eternity doing the same.
Catching a Rapist:
Then Peggy told us about a friend who’d helped catch a wanted rapist. She’d been hiking in a park and decided to use the Porta-Potty. The door was unlocked but when she opened it there was a man inside who gleefully exposed himself. She ran and called the police once she was safely away. The police arrived, arrested him and told her he had a history of multiple rapes. He’d been known to watch a woman park her car and go into the woods. Once she was out of sight he’d disable her car and then offer to “help” her with it when she returned. Yikes!
About the painting:
Despite a very good start, after several hours I’d made a mess of the painting, and eventually got so mad at having lost all of the good beginnings (and the whole day) I rather violently scraped the panel down and threw it away. I’d taken photos of the scene and decided to start the painting over again at home. A migraine on Saturday delayed it another day, but finally on Sunday I gave it another chance and finished it today.
What attracted me to the scene originally was the way the low tide left little stripes of water over mud in the little harbor but by the time I set up and did the initial drawing, the tide came in and it disappeared. I’d never tried to paint an urban view like this before and couldn’t figure out a good way to do it and scraped it off several times, after either getting too detailed or too vague.
Finally, working from the photo, I decided the only solution was to TURN THE PHOTO and the PAINTING UPSIDE DOWN and just paint shapes upside down! That seemed to help. I also really wanted to capture the look of a gray day with some sun and clouds and fog. This was definitely a tough one and I don’t think I completed succeeded on any of my goals.
That sign sticking up at the bottom in the middle is for 99 Ranch Market, a Chinese supermarket in Albany whose sign really does reach that far above everything else. When I looked closely at my photo there was also a giant red gorilla balloon advertising a carpet store to the right of the sign, but I didn’t put that in the painting. It’s one thing to “Paint the dog before the fleas” but entirely another to paint the landscape before the red gorilla!
If you have any suggestions to improve the painting, I’d be interested to hear them. Here’s the original photo (click to enlarge it):
Old Boat on Rails, Oil on panel, 9×12″ (larger)
Blazing hot sun on the beach made plein air painting a challenge Sunday at China Camp State Park, an historic site where Chinese immigrants lived in a shrimp fishing village in the 1880s. It is a fabulous place to paint, with a small ghost town and old boats, (many with Chinese lettering) beautiful views of bay and marshland and hiking and biking trails that go for miles.
I was painting with the Benecia Plein Air Painters, a wonderful group of painters led by Jerry Turner. Many painters stayed until sunset, capturing the sunset and late afternoon glowing light. I painted from about noon until 3:30 (minus a break for a suprise birthday party lunch for Jerry) and after a little splashing around in the water, headed home to the fog belt to cool off.
I’d been given my own surprise birthday party the day before by my wonderful neighbors. I was completely stunned and delighted to find all my dearest friends and family and coworkers standing there throwing confetti and yelling Happy Birthday!
What a feast my neighbors made for me, with all of my favorite traditional Mexican foods that C & A are famous for, plus a beautiful cake and decorations galore. Their backyard was covered in balloons, and signs and banners and a banquet’s worth of delicious food. What a special birthday treat!
One of my party favors was a purple hat that says “At my age, Happy Hour is a NAP!” I love it! My yearlong birthday celebration continues….
I did this painting before bed last night, giving myself just an hour or two to complete an oil sketch. The panel I was using was a bit slick so the paint wasn’t sticking as well as I’d have liked but I was reasonably pleased with the attempt.
While I was painting my wonderful next door neighbors brought me a huge bouquet of flowers for my birthday. For some reason, as each of the three kids and their parents said “Happy Birthday!” and gave me a hug I said “Happy Birthday to you too!” It wasn’t until I’d said it three or four times that I realized it made no sense. Since English is their second language, maybe they thought that’s just another odd American custom (or another odd Jana-ism). They already thought it was weird enough that I was spending my birthday evening by myself in my studio.
But of course painting is what makes me happy and I get to do what makes me happy on my birthday. I told them I’d paint the flowers the next day (and then realized I’d already started painting them as I’d answered the door with several painty brushes in my hand, and the paint was getting all over the bouquet wrapper.
I started the day with my annual tradition of a hike to Fat Apples Restaurant for a French Apple Pancake with my sister, my niece, and my best friend Barbara. We’ve been doing this every year for at least ten years and it was great spending time together and the pancake/souffle was perfect.
About the painting: Oil on panel, 10×8
Oil on panel, 6×8″ (larger)
It felt so good to get outside and paint this sunny afternoon, even if it was only for an hour on the side of my house by my trash cans where this small hydrangea is finally starting to blossom and grow.
I was interviewed by Creativity Coach, Liz Massey and she posted the interview on her blog today. If you’d like to read about my creative process, thoughts on inspiration, overcoming artistic blocks, etc., please stop by her excellent blog. While you’re there, check out some of her other interviews. I was especially intrigued by her post about “clutter-busting with one sentence journaling.”
This week I’ve been mucking about in the studio trying to fix the compositional problems with my painting of the ladies at the farmer market. Today I gave up on it and moved on.
The struggles I had with it were a good reminder for me about how important it is to resolve compositional issues before starting to paint (like the area where you couldn’t tell hands from plastic bag from shopping cart handle). Also a good lesson that if a painting’s initial framework isn’t working, it’s better to start over than to spend hours and hours trying to fix it. Although I really liked many parts of that painting, it just wasn’t working as a whole.
My sister and I joined my vibrant and adorable 87 year old aunt and her two sons (our cousins) who I hadn’t seen for 30 years for lunch today. It was so inspiring to see how youthful my aunt is — she drives, goes bowling with her girlfriends, and takes long walks several times a day with her Border Collie.
Larger
The kids next door brought over a plate of delicious Mexican-style barbeque tonight courtesy of their Papa who’d cooked it. I invited them to come back after dinner to join me in the studio. Now that they’re a little older (2nd grade and 6th grade) I decided to let them try acrylics instead of just watercolor.
I covered the table, put out the supplies, including gloves for each of them (I get Costco’s “Nitrile Exam Gloves” in quantity). Then I turned on some music and went to my drawing table to work on this little sketch.
The next time I checked on them, Y had painted my cat (I mean a picture of my cat), a rainbow (standard little girl stuff) and then made a paper airplane which she was painting while E was decorating a little wooden car he’d made in school. They both made Father’s day and birthday cards for their dad too.
They really liked the acrylics since they were brighter and bolder than the watercolor, but what a mess! Fortunately kids, floor and furniture cleaned up easily.
About the painting:
Pentel Pocket Brush Pen to draw, then watercolor and then some Schmincke Chinese White to tone down some of the shadows. I’d be happier if I’d stopped before it need to be toned down. This is in my 6×8″ handmade sketchbook on Fabriano Artistico hot press paper.
Jana Bouc, Artist 
