It was an important meeting. The participants were brilliant experts in their fields. Yet I still couldn’t resist sketching my way through the meeting.
I only had my work notebook and a fat roller ball blue ink pen in the conference room with me. During a break I grabbed a black one but it was still weird to draw with compared to my usual extra fine point pen.
I actually captured a likeness on a couple of these little gesture sketches.
I enjoy sketching on BART, our subway system (which has been in the news since New Year’s Eve when BART police shot and killed a defenseless, unarmed young man which was captured on cellphone video and led to protests and rioting in downtown Oakland). BART’s headquarters are in the building where I work in downtown Oakland. To keep people safe inside, the building has been on “lock down” the past couple of weeks, with I.D.s required to enter the building to keep those of us working inside safe. There’s been no trouble though, with way more media and police around than protestors.
On BART this morning, this old man made a great model. He barely moved and had the most gigantic ears I’ve ever seen.
This would probably be better if I darkened all of the area around her but I liked her pointy nose.
On the last dayof vacation before returning to work, the world outside my windows looked raw, blustery and wet after a frost-covered morning. Hibernating sounded good, but I was feeling uninspired and blah and could tell if I stayed home I was just going to mope around. Since I needed to pick up my my sunglasses from the optometrist, I decided to walk up there.
I almost turned back after the first couple of blocks. My ears were cold and my feet were complaining. But I kept going and eventually began to perk up and enjoy myself. By the time I got to Peets Coffee (a mile later and across the street from my eye doctor’s office in El Cerrito Plaza) I was feeling enthusiastic and cheerful. With a hot latte in my hand, I sat at a cafe table outside Peets and sketched this odd chain restaurant across the street.
I ate there once when it first opened (I was curious about the new restaurant in my neighborhood) and enjoyed it, but have never been able to get anyone to go back there with me. With so many unique and trendy restaurants in the Berkeley area, I suppose there’s really no reason to go to a “big box” version of an Italian restaurant, though people do seem to pack the place on weekends.
But I’ve always had an aversion to stupid business names, and the name “Macaroni Grill” irks me. I keep picturing the chef trying to grill slippery macaroni and cheese, with all the noodles falling through the grill grates. When I was a kid I remember being annoyed by a hair salon named “Lipstick Beauty Parlor,” which I thought made no sense.
While I was waiting at the optometris’ts office, I started sketching a stand that holds many pairs of eye glasses. There were too many tiny, overlapping details and I wasn’t really interested. Fortunately the optician arrived with my glasses so I stopped. When I got home, instead of leaving a partially messed up page I turned the page 90 degrees and added a quick sketch of my sunglasses (from memory) and then stuck myself in them.
It wasn’t an easy weekend in L.A. visiting family but sketching really helped me to avoid going completely bonkers. There were some lovely moments: walking on the beach in the misty morning with my sister Marcy, taking a tour with Mom and Marce of an historic house (now a museum) in Santa Monica where a huge retrospective of Milford Zorne‘s amazing paintings were on display (more about that in another post).
My 85 year old mother doesn’t cook much anymore, but she got inspired to make Pracas (sweet and sour meatballs in cabbage). But despite not having some of the ingredients or being able to see the recipe in the cookbook well enough to follow it, and despite the jar of ancient fossilized onion flakes she substituted for the actual onion in the recipe (demanding that I use a sharp knife to break the clump up so it could be extracted from the jar), and the house stinking like cabbage all afternoon, dinner wasn’t that bad, really.
It’s amazing how sketching can calm my nerves and put the whole dysfunctional family thing at a distance while still being physically present.
It’s really good to be back home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Updated: I worked on the painting and tried to make the little girl sunnier (ABOVE). When I compared the finished painting to the original photo I discovered that the girl and the ducks were way too big compared to the actual scene. Oh well.
The original is BELOW:
When I woke up this morning I was feeling grumpy because it was my last day of vacation and I’d hoped to accomplish more in the studio than I had. I tried to think of an antidote to grumpiness so I didn’t ruin my day. I decided to write down everything that makes me happy and was surprised that it took three pages in my journal. When I finished writing I was feeling much more cheery.
I’d be interested to hear what makes you happy.
About the painting: I took the photo when I was painting at Lake Temescal in Oakland last month and cropped it to experiment with a square format. I pretended like the image on my monitor was a plein air scene and tried to paint as if I was outdoors. I must admit I didn’t really fool myself, and knew the light wouldn’t change and the little girl wouldn’t move.
What makes me happy: (in the order it occurred to me this morning):
A nice walk, fun in the studio, a good meal, a beautiful rainy day being cozy indoors, an enjoyable movie, a snuggly cat or dog, comfortable clothes, good art supplies, loving friends and family, a good book, a day to myself, learning something new, a new art magazine in the mail, days off work, a hot bath or shower, unscheduled time, bursts of creativity, being pain free, comfortable shoes.
A warm beach, windows into other peoples’ lives, my guardian angel (don’t ask), great art, beautiful art books, libraries, book stores, art supply stores, wearing colorful bandanas, finding the right shade of lipstick, looking and feeling cute, tall men with strong arms, drawing people, drawing anything, the flow of watercolor on paper, a successful painting.
A clean house, a toasty warm bed on a cold night, doing dishes, scooping the litter box (I know, I’m nuts), a speedy computer, learning to see colors accurately, my framed art hanging on the wall, a good workout, a small garden, smooth stones, shells from the ocean, the scent of the sea, eating fresh oysters.
Remembering my Grandma, seeing my sons happy and healthy, a hug from my sister, a good laugh, a hike and catch up chat with a friend, organizing things, an air conditioner on a hot night, a refreshing drink when I’m thirsty, a latte made with love (and Peets coffee), a smooth road without potholes, competence, a good teacher.
Good news for a change, financial security (someday), walking instead of driving, people who work for common good, generosity, kindness, puppies, kittens, rain, having someone say “God bless you.” My GPS (not getting lost anymore), my spunky little Toyota RAV4, my Soltek easel and plein air cart, my fuzzy slippers and ratty sweatshirt, my closet for storing canvas, my washer and dryer, owning my own little house.
My neighbors, the internet, my iPhone, good healthcare, a nice cup of tea, writing and/or sketching daily in my journal, a fridge full of fresh healthy food, silly kitties, a massage and sauna, my special black-handled cereal spoon (was my mothers from her 1950s kitchen).
What makes you happy?
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.
“You rest!” she said. What a novel concept!
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.
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.
I’ve been sick with a doozy of a cold/flu all week and spent much of the time randomly channel surfing. When I saw the head writers from the satiric “Onion News Network” being interviewed by Charlie Rose I was struck by how each of them had such distinct and interesting characteristics that would be fun to draw.
I set my TiVo to record so that I could draw them when I felt better. Finally tonight I felt well enough to sketch for a few minutes and replayed the show, setting it to pause when I found a pose I liked.
Although initially I thought they all had such long faces, I have a feeling that the show might be recorded in a different format than my standard TV displays. They couldn’t all have such tall heads, could they?
I’ve posted these in the order that I drew them. I was feeling pretty rusty with the first drawing at the top, after not holding a pen or brush all week. But I challenged myself to just start drawing with ink and let the sketches go where they would.
After a horrible week feeling really awful, it was such a pleasure to have a lull in the coughing and sneezing and enough mental bandwith to actually focus and draw.
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.
Jana Bouc, Artist 