Rigoletto: SF Opera at the Ballpark, 5×8″, drawn in ink then watercolor (and a bit of digital paint) added later. NOTE: Flags at half mast for slain diplomats. Also, appalled by all the corporate advertising, I replaced their signs with generic ones.
My first trip to the S.F. Giant’s ballpark was for a simulcast of the San Francisco Opera’s production of Rigoletto. Our plan was to sketch this annual tradition where 30,000 people attend the opera for free and picnic on the field or feast on hot dogs, beer and garlic fries in the stands.
Public transit was jammed. I stood all the way to SF on the BART (the subway), then we transferred to a SF Muni streetcar so tightly packed my bag got closed in the door and my big feet barely had space to stand.
Northside Sketch – U.C. Berkeley University Library, ink & watercolor 8×5″
Last week Gail Wong, Urban Sketcher from Seattle was in the Bay Area visiting and we had the privilege of sketching with her. You can see Gail’s sketch, story and the photo she took of us that evening on the Seattle Urban Sketchers blog here. I loved getting to see her amazing work and it was fun sharing sketchbooks all around even though I was a bit distracted all evening, because….
As soon as I sat down to sketch I got an emergency auto-dial call on my cellphone from the county with this terse warning: “There is an emergency situation at the Chevron Refinery! Shelter in place. Close all doors and windows and turn off heaters and air conditioners. Do not go outside until further notice.”
There was a huge fire at the Chevron refinery and while I thought it was at least 20 miles away, my house is actually only 5.5 miles south (I checked Google maps). The air was clear where we were so I decided to worry about it later. Friends seeing the smoke or the news kept texting and phoning to make sure I was OK. The smoke could be seen from all over the Bay Area, but not where we were.
Fortunately, when I arrived home the air was clean with the usual fresh sea breeze and everything was fine. The smoke stayed very close to the refinery which was really fortunate (except for those living close by and people who buy gas since the price is going up for the West Coast area supplied by the now damaged refinery).
The county called me back at 1:30 a.m. and again at 2:30 a.m. to let me know it was now safe to open windows or go outside. Gee thanks, county! I would have rather slept through the night!
El Cerrito Natural Grocery, sepia ink & watercolor, 8×5″
I was so tired I almost didn’t go to our Tuesday sketch night but our destination, El Cerrito Natural Grocery, was near home so I pushed myself out the door. I only managed the sketch above, made standing using a shopping cart as my table. Even the colors looked tired. Cathy focused on the meat department and entertained the butchers with her drawings of them. Her chicken sketch is a hoot.
We left at 8:00 when the store closed and then I sat in my car for a few minutes, checking my email on my phone while trying to talk myself out of a trip to the ice cream shop. My phone rang: “Hello, this is El Cerrito Natural and you left your little notebook in your shopping cart.”
Thank goodness I always put a note on the first page of every journal: “IF LOST PLEASE CALL…” with my phone number. I said I was still in the parking lot and ran back to the front door and gratefully took it home.
Outside Peet’s Coffee, Ink & watercolor
This was another drawing while tired. I tried taking a walk to Peet’s coffee to wake myself up. Since caffeine is no longer an option, the walking and an iced decaf had to do the trick. It didn’t. I was just more tired when I got home but at least I got to sketch a bit (and didn’t lose my sketchbook this time).
I watched the blind woman at the next table (in the sketch above) make a phone call by listening carefully to the tone as she pushed each number. Her friend arrived shortly afterwards, also blind, walking a large black poodle.
Two things I wondered:
If you’re meeting someone and you can’t see them, how do you know they’re there or arriving without calling out “Susie are you here…” or phoning?
Why don’t you ever see standard poodles as guide dogs? I live near a center for the blind and also often see people training guide dogs on our subway system. They’re never poodles. Though they do always wear very cute booties–I wonder why?
Burlington Hotel Cafe, Port Costa, ink & watercolor, 5×8″
My sketch trip to the funky little town of Port Costa got off to a rough start. On the way into town I spotted an interesting old school and pulled off the road to sketch it. Literally. Off the road. I didn’t spot the drainage ditch and my car ended up teetering with two wheels hanging and two wheels on the road.
Hanging off the roadBurly but nice tow truck guy
The tow truck driver was funny and took a movie of me and my car, dictating the facts of the case at the same time, I guess to prove to AAA that it was all fixed. I waved and smiled at his phone and said thanks.
Photo of Burlington Hotel Cafe
After my ordeal and late start I didn’t feel like setting up outside with the rest of my plein air group. I needed a place where I could relax and this charming café in the 100-year-old, disheveled Burlington Hotel was a delightful place to hang out.
A bunch of 20-somethings had stayed at the rundown, barely-renovated, bat-filled hotel for someone’s birthday and had drunk themselves silly slumming at the Warehouse (biker) Bar across the street the night before. Their hangovers and stories of their wild evening climbing fences along the railroad tracks provided amusement while I sketched.
Wildflowers on Carlson Boulevard, ink & watercolor 5×8″
When the two-year long repaving project on the one-mile stretch of Carlson Boulevard from El Cerrito to Richmond Annex was finally completed, someone planted wildflower seeds in the dirt-filled center dividers. The ugly, urban street took on new life as the wildflowers bloomed into a gorgeous riot of color. There were little white ones and fluffy yellows, brilliant orange California poppies, and my favorites, the blue bachelor buttons and tall lavender lupines that stood (note past tense here) three feet high.
I’m glad I spent a lovely hour enjoying sketching them because the next day work crews came through and HACKED them all down. The neighborhood email newsletter was abuzz with people horrified at the destruction.
Then we found out why. There was a serious car accident and a couple of near misses because the flowers grew so high that you couldn’t see oncoming traffic on the other side of street when crossing or making turns. It was true; even in my sketch you can’t see the street on the other side of the center divider because the flowers completely hid it.
Happily, new, completely different wildflowers have now sprouted, and hopefully they won’t be so dangerous and will be left to bloom in peace.
My mind was as cloudy as the skies when my plein air group visited Borges Ranch for a Saturday paint out. I was mad because a beautiful bookcase promised to me on Craigslist sold to someone else. I needed it badly. After I donated lots of books along with my rickety old bookcase I still had many I was keeping with no place to put them.
I was too grumpy to hang out with my painting friends so I hiked away from the ranch on the Shell Ridge trail, which is beautiful and quiet except for the sounds of birds. I set up my folding stool and sketched in ink with watercolor washes, facing one direction (above).
Borges Ranch Shell Ridge Open Space, watercolor, 5x8"
Then I turned to face the opposite direction and worked directly in watercolor. I was starting to feel better, enjoying freely painting all the gorgeous colors of spring.
Happy Ending
On the way home from Borges I passed an “Estate Sale” sign and pulled over. Usually estate sales just have a lot of crummy, over-priced furniture, ugly knicknacks, and icky used bathrobes. But this home was huge and completely remodeled, with a master bath better than any spa, a huge dreamy kitchen, and best of all (for me) a home office with TWO bookcases exactly like the ONE I almost bought for $100…and I got them for $20 each! The nice estate sales guy even loaded them in my car for me.
I learned a good lesson: Don’t waste time being grumpy! The second bookcase now holds my cookbooks and gardening books just outside the kitchen which makes them much more accessible than they were before and it looks nice there too.
Dawn View from my Scottsdale hotel window, ink & watercolor 5x8"
I was too excited to sleep much during my week at the Scottsdale Artists School, despite my quiet, comfortable hotel room. One morning I woke as the sun was coming up, with the moon still shining brightly. Everything outside my window was glowing so I immediately grabbed my sketchbook and paints. What a great way to start the day, even if on only a few hours sleep.
I promised to share what I learned from Rose Frantzen but after typing up 5 pages of notes, I’m not sure they will be helpful to anyone without having been there and seen her working and guiding us. That said, here is a bit of my notes:
Whew! As soon as I returned from my workshop in Arizona last month, the work on my house and studio began. Then over the past couple weeks I’ve devoted all of my free time to getting the new studio set up and moving in there, while completely ignoring my blog. At last I’m nearly finished with the work (even got to paint in the new studio today) and can begin to catch up here.
I almost didn’t make it to the airport (sketched above) because my usually reliable sister not only forgot she was driving me to the airport, but spent the night at my niece’s and left her cellphone at home. Returning from a nice walk the next morning, and just in the nick of time, my brilliant niece Sophie said, “Hey, aren’t you supposed to drive Jana to the airport this morning?” Yikes!
Superbowl at the Scottsdale Holiday Inn, ink & watercolor, 5x16"
When I arrived at my hotel, the Holiday Inn Express in Old Town Scottsdale, the Superbowl was on TV in the lounge. They served a big free breakfast there every morning and hosted happy hour from 5-7 every evening, with free beer, wine, chile, nachos, and just for the Superbowl, free Subway sandwiches.
I sipped my beer, ate some chile and had fun drawing the people who sat still. There was some kind of betting game going on that I found incomprehensible, but the woman in blue sitting on a bar stool at the tall table won $20 from the nice men sitting at tables near me.
Volunteer Lilly Amid the Pruned Hydrangeas, ink & watercolor, 7x5"
All my time and creative energy for the past few weeks has been given to sorting, discarding, organizing and moving things as I downsize my living space and move to my new studio. All the studio furniture and most of the painting supplies and gear are in and I’ve emptied and removed almost all the big plastic bins on my steel shelving in the former garage, readying the space for art stuff and still life objects.
One bin was filled with 70+ old paintings on panels that I’d saved over the past few years after my annual January review-and-dump sessions. I’m keeping just 20 of the old ones and another 20 from last year that I like and dumping the rest. One cool thing about this process is that I could easily see where each reject painting went wrong, whether it was drawing, values, composition, and/or color choices. Hopefully that knowledge will help prevent making those mistakes so often in the future.
The Reliable Lilly, ink & watercolor, 7x5"
I also emptied a huge bin filled with family photos that never made it into albums. I filled a trash can with negatives and pics of pretty places and blurry faces. Now all the photos in their envelopes fit in one large file cabinet drawer. Those photos are still in great shape, but the ones in the family albums (with the sticky stuff behind the photos) are fading badly. Later I’ll pull those photos out of the albums and put them in envelopes or boxes too, as they suggest on Small Notebook, a great organizing/simplifying website.
My house is pretty much sorted out now, and in a week or so I should be back to “normal” life, painting and sketching regularly again. The rental unit still needs some finish work, but that can go on behind the scenes, without messes in my living space or cat-terrorizing-power tools and men in boots stomping through the house.
Earthquake emergency water supply jugs that sit beside my bin of earthquake supplies along the fence outside my kitchen. Ink & watercolor, 5x7"
This sketch and the next few I post are from back in the good old days when I used to just sketch, paint, and work. Now I live in construction chaos and once that’s over in a week or two, I’ll still be in sort/discard/move stuff mode as I downsize my living space.
I’m preparing to rent out the half of my duplex that was my studio and move everything I haven’t discarded into either my smaller (but quite comfy) living space or new studio. Meanwhile I’m trying to maintain some semblance of order while everything from my kitchen is in my living room (new kitchen floors in progress) and the wall between the two units has been replaced which means I have to continually go outside, unlock the door, lock it again to get to something that is in the other unit.
Ceramic bowl that Barbara made that I use to hold my phone and it's charger.
I love working alongside my carpenter or just watching him work because he is so smart, competent, serene and cheerful and always has a solution and a tool for every problem. On the other hand, I’m no good at all at transitions. I like things to be done, but nothing is finished because he can only work for me a few hours each day, after his full-time job and before it gets dark. The biggest chunks are done but the finishing touches can take just as long.
It’s all for the good though since the rental income will help support my getting to paint full-time within a year or so. Meanwhile, sketching saves me when my topsy-turvy world makes my head spin. Just looking, seeing and drawing anything calms me down and restores my sanity.
Jana Bouc, Artist 