Category: Life in general

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Landscape Life in general Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

Cemetery Painting on Memorial Day & War Euphemisms

View of Benicia from Alhambra cemetery

Oil on panel, 9×12″ (larger)

On Sunday I painted at the small, historic Alhambra Cemetery in Martinez, where we had an amazing view of marshes and Benicia across the Carquinez Straits. An elderly Japanese church group and their pastor were  holding a memorial service for the fallen soldiers buried there but didn’t mind us painting among the graves. Since the residents were buried between 1851 to 1999, I’m sure they “fell” in many different wars.

War Euphemisms
I hate all the euphemisms used about war that gloss over the the sacrifices and suffering. The two that particularly irk me are “in harm’s way” and “fallen” soldiers.

When I hear politicians talking about soldiers “in harms way” I can’t help but thinking, “Yeah, and you sent them there!” “In harms’ way” is in passive voice which removes all responsibility from the phrase. It sounds as if they just ended up there by accident, like “I was taking a walk and found myself on Harms Way when I meant to be on Walnut Way.”

The same is true of “fallen soldiers.” No verb or anyone taking responsibility there either. The soldier just accidentally wandered onto Harms Way and then, Oops, down he fell.

G.I. Joe
When my son Cody was in Kindergarten he desperately wanted a G.I. Joe lunch box. We were walking through the supermarket and he saw them on the shelf and started whining and begging for one. I grabbed the plastic box, showed him the explosive picture on the cover and began ranting: “You see this? That’s a bomb going off! You see this G.I. Joe guy? That bomb is about to kill him and tear him to shreds! That guy has a mommy and his mommy is going to cry and cry forever because her little boy got blown up by a bomb. And no, I’m not going to buy you a lunch box with a picture of someone’s little boy getting killed on it!”

I still have my “War is not health for children and other living things” pendant and poster from the Viet Nam war, which destroyed so many of the boys I knew in high school. I feel such sadness and compassion for the soldiers and their families whose lives are being destroyed by our current war.

This isn’t meant to be a political blog so I’ll stop my rant by offering a prayer for peace and for healing for all those who are suffering because of war, regardless of which war or what side they’re on.

About the painting and the site: To get into the cemetery you have to first stop by the the Martinez police department to pick up the key to the entry gate which is kept locked. Although I ran out of time and hadn’t fully developed the bottom 1/3 of the painting, the sky, or the water, my other plein air group members said they liked it as is and to leave it, so I did. What interested me about the scene and what I wanted to paint was the pinky-golden hills and I was actually happy with the way they turned out — a first for me and hills.

I’m learning to appreciate and treasure the smallest passages that succeed in my paintings, even if the painting as a whole doesn’t work. They give me hope and a glimpse of successful days to come.

Categories
Art theory Drawing Life in general Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Mothers’ Day Bouquet Snippet

Mothers' Day Bouquet

Ink & watercolor 5.5″x3.25″ (larger)

I’m back from my week-long workshop with Camille Przewodek in Petaluma. It was a powerful learning experience and an incredible opportunity two learn from two masters, Camille and her husband Dale Axelrod.  They studied for many years with Henry Hensche at the Cape Cod School of Art and are carrying on and expanding upon Hensche‘s and Hawthorne‘s work with color and light.

We painted in beautiful scenic locations from wetland marshes to the quaint village of Nicasio and the last day painted four models by the river that runs alongside Camille’s studio in charming and historic downtown Petaluma. We also did Hensche’s traditional colored block studies. All painting was done outdoors in bright sunlight and the weather couldn’t have been better.

I’ll write more about what I learned at the workshop when my paintings are dry and easier to handle, photograph and post.  In the meantime, here’s just a corner of the huge Mothers Day bouquet my son Cody surprised me with before we went to Brushstrokes Studio, a cute little pottery painting place in Berkeley. Cody and I decorated catfood bowls while his significant other designed a beautiful cup and daughter M painted a plate with a beach scene as a memorial for her grandmother who recently passed away. Then it was off to Pyramid Brewery for a yummy Mothers Day dinner accompanied by refreshing Pyramid Hefeweizen Ale served with a wedge of lemon.

Categories
Drawing Life in general Painting Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Beauty Parlor Still Life

Beauty Parlor Still Life

Ink and watercolor, 9×6 (larger)

This was my view while I was getting my hair cut on Friday. The beautiful peonies were an apology gift to my hairdresser from one of her clients. I don’t know what the client had done wrong but I thought the combination of the scissors, hairbrush and flowers made an interesting still life.

I’m going to be in a painting workshop all week with Camille Przewodek in Petaluma and may not have a chance to post until I return. It should be an exciting and intense week of painting. It’s also a vacation from work (whoopee) and I intend to enjoy every moment!

Categories
Drawing Life in general People Sketchbook Pages Subway drawings

Worked late, missed train, got to draw

20080430-BART2

Larger

Once everyone left the office I could finally concentrate on a complicated project. By the time I finished and headed out it was nearly 8:00 p.m. I arrived at the BART station just as my train was pulling away and the flashing sign said it would be 20 minutes until the next one. I was exhausted, hungry and alone on the platform with nothing to do.

Within a few minutes, more late commuters began to arrive, sit down and kill time. I grabbed my sketchbook and the 20 minutes flew by. I drew the people above while waiting (felt pen added at home because I liked the negative space) and the folks below on the train ride home.

20080430-BART1

Larger

Categories
Drawing Life in general Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Living Alone Means Never Losing Your Socks

Socks

Ink & watercolor (larger)

I was folding my laundry and admiring my collection of wonderful SmartWool socks when it struck me: I haven’t lost a single sock since I began living alone. When I was married with kids, socks disappeared on a regular basis and I had a drawerful of one-of-a-kind socks.

My son still comes over to do his laundry but even so, only one sock temporarily migrated but he brought it back (a year later at the insistence of his girlfriend), along with a pair of my undies that had somehow ended up in his laundry.

There’s pros and cons to living alone, of course. One downside is that if you do lose something, you have nobody to blame for it. Even now, when something goes missing, my first thought is that one of my sons must have taken it. But my only available scapegoats are my cats.

Fiona the calico does like to steal my SmartWool socks (maybe they smell a bit like animals, being made of wool?). I try to keep them away from her, since she tosses them around and wrestles with them and when I find them under the bed they are shredded and holey.

At least she doesn’t eat them. My friend Marean has a beautiful Sheltie who eats her socks whole, and has had to have stomach surgery to have a “sock-ectomy.”

Categories
Drawing Life in general Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Greatful vs Grateful & Terrific Tools: Toto Toilet

TOTO WC

Ink & Kremer watercolors (larger)

I’m probably going to regret this post tomorrow so I apologize in advance if you find the image unsavory. It’s just that I was so tired tonight all I wanted to do was curl up with a good book and a big bowl of popcorn. To avoid the carb overload and squeeze in a little fun after a long work day, I tried to inspire myself to draw a bit. Looking for a subject, I wandered through the house and saw my shiny, excellent Toto toilet.

I highly value competence, good design, and well-made tools (from cars to combs, to clocks to computers–anything that helps manage my daily life I consider a tool). My Toto toilet is a terrific tool. It never has the problems my other WC does (which requires keeping a plunger nearby it at all times).

Here are some other tools I use and appreciate regularly for their great design and functionality: Soltek easel, iPhone, Toyota RAV 4, electric teakettle, Canon MP610 Scanner/Printer, TiVo, Canon Power Shot SD800IS camera, Photoshop, caller ID, Cheap Joes Golden Fleece brushes for watercolor and Robert Simmons Signet brushes for oil, ancient Eagle Creek backpack, my slippers, my bed…

Just writing this list makes me realize how lucky I am and how much I have to be grateful for, and this is just in the tools department, not the really important stuff of life, like friends, family and health.

That’s the great thing about drawing. I start out grumpy and tired and end up feeling grateful. So maybe I won’t regret this post after all.

One last thing: why is grateful spelled “grate” and not “great?” Grate is what you do with cheese or carrots. Great means good. Full of great makes more sense than full of grate.

OK, I had to look it up on Dictionary.com, another wonderful tool:

  • Grate in grateful comes from the Latin, grātus, which means pleasing.
  • Grate (framework of metal bars) comes from L crāt- (s. of crātis) which means wickerwork, hurdle or crate.
  • Grate (as in grating cheese or grating on your nerves) originally comes from German, kratzen to scratch.
  • GREAT comes from Groat, which was a silver coin of England, equal to four pennies, issued from 1279 to 1662 and which was larger than other coins in former use.

Oh the poor English learners! What a complex melting pot the English language is!

Categories
Drawing Life in general Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Still Life for a Spring Cold

Still Life for a Spring Cold

Brown Micron Pigma ink and watercolor in homemade sketchbook, 5×7″ (larger)

Need I say more?

I had a quiet, restful weekend, got enough sleep, didn’t stand out in the wind painting, and what do I get for it? A cold! That will teach me to slow down. Maybe if I just keep moving as fast as I usually do, always staying busy, the darn bugs don’t have a chance to take hold. The minute I slowed down they went to work.

Or maybe the cold was already taking hold and that’s why I chose quiet indoor painting this weekend?

With some Vitamin C, tea with lemon, and chicken soup, I’m usually able to kick a cold in 24 hours. That’s what I’m counting on this time.

Categories
Life in general Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Help! My House is Haunted! (A true mystery)

Haunted Bird Clock

Ink and watercolor in Aquabee sketchbook (larger)

When my father was dying several years ago, I flew to Maine to help with his care and say goodbye. I arrived in late October, on a warm, fall day, and he was still eating and talking and trying to finish his last book, which I helped him edit those final days. When I left a week later on Halloween, winter had arrived with an icy blast and everything was covered in snow. He died two days later, on All Souls Day.

Before I left, the only thing of his I asked to take was his bird clock, pictured above. It chimed with the call of a different bird each hour from the wall above his writing desk. Even though the birds are now all faded to pale gray, I’ve had it on my wall ever since. Until this week, that is…when it apparently led to the haunting of my house.

I never was able to get the proper birds to chime on their designated hour. The two owl calls were supposed to chime at 6 and 12 but when the hands pointed to the Oriole it played the call of an owl, and when it pointed to an owl you might hear a blue bird or a cardinal. But I digress…back to the haunting.

A week ago, at exactly 4:00 a.m. I was awakened by the sound of the owl calling out from the clock: “Whooo whoo whoo. Whoo whoo whoo. Whoo whoo whoo.” The clock has a light sensor and is not supposed to chime in the dark, and had never done so before. I got out of bed and walked toward the clock in the dining room, but the sound stopped before I could reach it. The next day, groggy from disturbed sleep, I removed the batteries that control the bird calls.

But the next morning at exactly 4:00 a.m. the same thing happened again. I removed the last battery. The clock stopped and I put it on a shelf in another room.

The next morning at exactly 4:00 a.m.: “Whoo whoo whoo…etc.” I lay in bed wracking my brain trying to come up with what else could be making that sound but could think of nothing.

That day I put the clock in my garage, which is down a long driveway from the house. The next morning, 4:00 a.m., the owl was back, singing away from my dining room, without need of clock or batteries.

owl.jpg

(Click “Continue Reading” below for the rest of the story.)

Continue reading “Help! My House is Haunted! (A true mystery)”
Categories
Art theory Landscape Life in general Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

Am I Having Fun Yet? Uh, no.

Borgas Ranch

Oil on panel, 9×12″ (reworked from original plein air) (larger)

Saturday was the first plein air paint-out of the season for the East Bay Plein Air Painters. We went to Old Borges Ranch, a charming historical old ranch with a blacksmith shop, old barns, farm animals, all surrounded by the brilliant green hills of springtime. It was very cloudy and I decided that what I wanted to focus on was trying to observe and paint the effect of the cloudy, cool, diffused light.

After wandering around trying to pick a spot, by the time I was ready to start painting I only had two hours left before our group critique. This is the same painting as above after two hours:

Borgas Ranch - @ 2 hours

Oil on panel, 9×12″ (original plein air) (larger)

I probably should have left it alone and moved on. But I was frustrated with the way I seem to always be painting hills (I’m sick of painting hills!) and they always look flat. So after the critique, I went back and started working on the painting again, determined to figure out how to make the hills not look flat. I stood there painting for 2 more hours and although I made some discoveries about paint application and brush strokes, I hadn’t improved the painting at all (just the opposite).

What I’d planned to do after the paint-out at 1:00, was to take a walk on the beautiful trails and do some sketching of the interesting sights but it was too late when I finally gave up on the painting at 4:00 because I had a long drive home and had to get ready for a dinner party that evening.

Today, even though I tried to ignore it, the painting and my frustration about it continued to bug me. I finally decided to work on it some more until I either got it or killed it. I guess I did a little of both.

The truth is that today oil painting isn’t feeling like fun. I’m missing the watercolor sketchbooking and drawing for fun I did all the time before I took up oils. I’m jealous of all the people I see while I’m plein air painting who are taking a hike in pretty places instead of torturing themselves trying to paint them. I’m missing filling up my sketchbook with fun, wonky drawings and loose watercolors. I’m longing for working from still life set ups or photos where the light doesn’t change and where it’s not always a rush against time.

I also know that I’m persistent if nothing else, and that I’m not giving up the struggle. But it’s time to have more fun with my art. After all, I’m doing this for my own creative pleasure, and as much as I love learning, sometime a woman just needs to play, too.

Categories
Drawing Life in general Sketchbook Pages

Time to Reflect Without TV

Carved folding Buddhas-inside

Ink in Moleskine (Larger)

This is a pocket-sized, hand-carved, portable altar. From the outside, when it’s closed, it appears to be two hands in prayer (see below). When you open it there are two serene Buddhas in meditation. (Unfortunately in my drawing they look less than serene.)

Carved folding Buddhas-outside

(Larger)

I watched no TV today and was astonished by how much more time I had, and everything I was able to fit into the day. Instead of watching TV while I ate my meals I read the art magazines I subscribe to but had barely glanced at. As soon as a meal was done I was up and off to something else instead of sitting and finishing watching a TV show.

After lunch, instead of having my afternoon cup of coffee in front of the TV, I sat on my sunny back porch and reflected on this and that, watching my baby hydrangeas grow. That’s when it struck me how little time I’ve been spending with my mind free to wander and ponder.

When I was a kid I loved to lay on my back in the grass and watch the clouds drift by, seeing different creatures in them. As an adult, I had a Zen meditation practice that got squeezed out of my schedule a few years ago. Somehow TV had gradually taken the place of that kind of open, meditative time. Now, without TV, it feels like there’s time for real relaxation and getting things done.

Today I finally cleaned up the junk I’d piled on the counter in the studio kitchen months ago and had been ignoring. This evening, when I gathered up the sketchbooks that had piled up on my drawing table, I discovered a Moleskine with only two blank pages left. Today’s sketch is of one of the items that needed putting away from the kitchen. Now I’ve finished the kitchen and the sketchbook and a really great day.