For our Monday night sketchcrawl we met at the Berkeley Rose Garden, sketched a bit, and then took a stroll along Euclid Ave. At sunset we sketched at the foot of the Rose Walk Path steps where two women residents of the cluster of Maybeck cottages there had a cheerful chat in front of a large Japanese maple while we sketched them.
Hollyhocks, ink & watercolorBerkeley Rose Garden views, Ink & watercolor
Inside the rose garden I sketched the trees and the person reading in a bright spot of sun. The hollyhocks on the right were our last sketching stop since it was totally dark by the time we finished them.
The Squid Boat, ink & watercolor, 9x6"
On Sunday I spent the afternoon on a beautiful sailboat on the San Francisco Bay. After our sail my friend Barbara and I found a dockside bench near a cafe to sketch before heading home. This funny little fishing boat was docked there and was a perfect subject for a quick sketch.
Monday night Cathy and I did a little sketching around San Pablo Avenue between Albany and El Cerrito, not the most inspiring of locales it turns out. It amused me that the palm tree above had an Available for Lease sign just in front of it, though it was actually a space in the building behind it (that I didn’t draw) that was for lease. The other pics above are of the Albany bowl and inside Peets Coffee where we ended the evening.
Old West Gun Room
We started at the Old Gun Room, a still-functioning, historic gun store that is terribly out of place and time. I was having trouble paying close attention to detail last night, and drew the N in “Guns” on the sign backwards, as well as adding an extra wagon wheel in the fence. I think I did a better job last time I drew and painted the Gun Room when I painted it on site.
Hotsy Totsy Club, Albany
I like the way the Hotsy-Totsy sign came out, though I’m not sure what happened to the perspective: I KNOW I couldn’t have seen the top of the sign. But I was really hungry at that point and was having even more trouble paying attention to details. By the way, the Hotsy-Totsy Club is anything but! It opens around 7 a.m. (need I say more?).(UPDATE: the club has new owners and a new clientele and a fun retro vibe; see my newer post here).
Cathy likes to sketch on site in order to capture more images, and then adds paint at home. I don’t usually do that, preferring to paint on site, but tried it last night. After I’d done all the cross-hatching on the windows and door area, trying to shade them, I looked at what Cathy was doing and saw that she just does the outlines without any cross-hatching when she’s going to paint the images later. I think that makes more sense and allows the watercolor to do the shading rather than the incongruous scribbly ink that was too dark.
We decided that next week we’ll go somewhere pretty and away from traffic, like the Berkeley Rose Garden.
“Da Group” (Benicia Plein Air Painters) met to paint at 3:30 today at a private boatyard in Benicia. The owner of the boatyard is a professional house mover so along with the numerous old boats docked there, his property also contains two wonderful old Victorian houses that he moved by barge to his property and will eventually fix up, planning to live in one, and use the other as an office. (The office is currently home to a huge flock of pidgeons, so he has his work cut out for him.)
He generously allowed us access to his property to paint. It it was so windy that I decided to sketch instead of hauling out my oil painting gear, even though there was a plethora of tantalizing painting subjects. This old paddlewheel boat was really fun (and challenging) to draw. I had my 9×6 sketchbook, a teeny weenie watercolor set (6 colors in a miniature Altoids tin, about 1″x3″), one paper towel, a water bottle, and a water brush. It was tricky holding onto everything so it wouldn’t blow away.
The other painters were braver, found more wind-sheltered spots to set up, and then painted whatever was in their line of sight. They were still at it when I left at 6:00 p.m., my eyes and ears stinging from the wind.
Here are some of the sights around and near the boatyard (click images to enlarge):
Hidden away behind the new, massive Oakland Cathedral of Christ the Light is a “Healing Garden” for the victims of sexual abuse by priests. I knew it was there because I’d read about it when the cathedral was opened to the public, but had a hard time finding it.
I was having a stressful day at my office, which is just across the street from the cathedral, and had gone looking for the garden at lunch. I thought that a few minutes in a healing garden would be restorative before tackling the afternoon’s work.
The “garden” is hidden away in a little corner behind the church, and consists of a small patio, about 10 feet in diameter, ringed by wooden benches arranged in a circle around what looks like a big cracked rock. The only greenery in the “garden” are some small hedges in cement planters that support the slatted benches.
The healing I found in the garden came from sunshine and sketching, not from sitting next to the huge concrete cathedral, on a hard wooden bench, gazing at what turned out to be a sculpture of a big cracked rock, not an actual rock.
The plaque on the bench: “This healing garden, planned by survivors, is dedicated to those innocents sexually abused by members of the clergy. We remember, and we affirm, NEVER AGAIN.”
The plaque beside the sculpture: “Some day, 11, 2000. Masatoshi Izumi. Basalt.”
I get that the sculpture might represent how hard, broken, and cracked apart the lives of the victims must be. What I don’t get is how this could be called a “Healing Garden.” Where’s the garden? Where’s the healing?
I hope that survivors who visit and are able to find the garden do find it a healing experience.
It was 86 degrees but quite comfortable in the shade of an umbrella, on the patio at Peets Coffee in Pinole, where I sipped my iced latte and sketched this view of the parking lot and hills behind it. I’d dropped off a key at my son’s house nearby and then done my grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s and decided I deserved a delicious icy reward next door at Peets.
Mr. Fidget keeps moving
This guy never stopped moving, feet up on a chair, knees up, leaning sideways, feet under chair, flip-flops on, off. I was so happy when he put his feet back on the ground so I could finish the sketch. It felt good to slow down on a busy day and sit and draw, but when I checked my watch I realized my groceries had been baking in the car for nearly an hour. I packed up and added watercolor at home.
Finding Tina (top from memory, bottom from yearbook)
I was sketching and looking at my high school yearbook in preparation for a series of paintings I’m starting. I was surprised by the low expectations so many of the girls in the yearbook had for themselves compared to today’s young women. I started counting how many “hoped to eventually” to become beauticians, secretaries and airline hostesses (flight attendants). Even my high school best friend Tina’s yearbook entry said she aimed to be a beautician (not to denigrate those important jobs, but there are so many more options for women now.) Maybe it was the elaborate, sculptural hairstyles back then that made so many of us want to be hairstylists?
When I read the tender, poetic inscription Tina wrote in my annual, I decided to try to find her again. We’d lost touch with when I moved away a year after high school and have unsuccessfully searched for her for years. Today I found her 86-year-0ld father, just by typing his last name and the city where we lived into the people finder on YellowPages.com! He promised to give her my phone number and then filled me in on her life over the many decades since we last were together.
Jana's senior picture and yearbook entry
When I filled out the form for my blurb I was trying to be funny: “Hopes to marry a millionaire…especially liked the people, weekends, and vacations.” But there was some truth in it too. I was so done with high school and wasn’t looking forward to having to grow up and get a job, either.
OK, so maybe I was procrastinating and avoiding the nice blank canvas waiting for me… but, (not counting the girls who said they just wanted to be happy, or didn’t mention their goals at all), here is my tally of career goals for San Diego’s Crawford High class of ’66 (I put the odd outliers in red):
Teacher: 67 (90% said elementary teacher)
Graduate from college: 55 (and then get married: 30)
Cathy and I met at Monterey Market on Hopkins Street in Berkeley’s Northbrae neighborhood for our Monday night sketchcrawl. The scent of ripe fruit was heavenly in their screened fruit patio, but the store was closing so we were soon out on the street.
Cathy sketching
I stood behind Cathy while she leaned on a bike rack to sketch the signs on the corner. Then we walked up Hopkins to the Country Cheese and Coffee Market.
Country Cheese, Sepia Micron Pigma, 9x8"
The scents were quite different here: damp cardboard and wafts of the day’s refuse from all the now-closed food sellers on this block including Magnanis Poultry and Monterey Fish Market. My butt fell asleep from leaning against a large metal box on the sidewalk while I was sketching. I could have sat on the chair but decided to sketch it instead. It felt good to start moving again. We walked around the block looking for inspiration at Berkeley Horticultural Nursery but since they were closed there wasn’t enough to see through the fence.
We headed up Rose Street and through the King Middle School play yard where people were throwing frisbees for their dogs in the sunshine at 8:00 at night. It was really starting to feel like summer.
Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame, helped start an “edible garden” on the school property and that’s where we did our final sketches, surrounded by beds of vegetables, flowers and fruit.
Edible Garden "campfire", ink & watercolor, 9x12"
We felt like we were at camp, sitting on hale bales arranged in a large circle under an arbor made of rough hewn posts and branches woven together. At the center of the circle, a huge “campfire” of flaming pink and red poppies blazed. I imagined how rewarding it must be for a class of young gardeners to gather there for lessons with their teacher, the beautiful results of their work growing all around them. What a wonderful learning environment!
Except for doing these sketches while watching the NBA Basketball Finals last week, it was a pretty rough week, with no energy for art or blogging. I kept putting the TiVo on pause to sketch, enjoying drawing with a Pilot fountain pen and then adding a bit of water to make the line bleed and turn into an ink wash.
NBA Finals: Aiming for a free throw, ink
Then I started trying to capture a little more action, drawing in pencil.
NBA Finals pencil sketch
I enjoy watching basketball playoffs and seeing these 7 foot tall, extremely buff, and mostly really cute guys with charming smiles, maneuver their massive bodies like ballerinas, leaping through the air, dodging and dancing around each other, or just storming down the court like a locomotive, charging the hoop, hanging from it when they dunk the ball in, or tossing the ball from across the court and watching it swish right in (or not).
I took so long with pausing the game to sketch that I had to fast forward to the last five minutes to see who won so that I could go to bed before midnight.
Sunday was a glorious day in the Bay Area; sunny, breezy and in the 70s. A perfect day for some “Sketchercize.” I packed up my sketching gear and hiking poles and headed on foot through my hilly neighborhood and up to the El Cerrito Memorial Grove and the Hillside Natural Area above it; nearly 80 acres of nature with spectacular views.
I intended to walk for at least 30 minutes before sketching but was stopped after 10 minutes by some seed pods hanging from a tree, glowing red and green in the sun that I had to sketch. Next stop was for some California poppies along the road. Then the view of the giant hill that I’d be climbing came into view so I added that with an “X” marks the spot where I was going, all on the same sketchbook page.
View of SF Bay and Golden Gate Bridge from hiking trail, 5.5x9"
At last I reached the top of the hill and hiked along the skyline trail until I reached a bench where I could sit and admire the 180 degree view–a great reward for the 2 mile, mostly uphill hike. I ate my apple, sketched and then began the trek back home, which just happened to pass by Payoff #2: Baskin Robbins, where I got an ice cream cone to eat on the way (a bit counterproductive, I suppose, but quite yummy). I pasted the cone wrapper in my sketchbook when I got home.
The first hydrangeas of the season provided an opportunity to try out ink and watercolor in the Fabriano Venezzia sketchbook I posted about yesterday. First I drew directly in ink and then tried painting the flower on the right by wetting the paper there, and painting into it. I didn’t like the results and tried lifting off the paint with a tissue and was pleased and surprised that it came right off, leaving only a slight stain. Then I painted back into the damp area and got the results I wanted and completed the rest of the painting working very loosely.
The painting was easy compared to trying to get the image in the sketchbook scanned or photographed for posting. The image above was the result of clamping the edges of the sketchbook to photograph it (see below) and then using Photoshop’s Clone Stamp tool to “erase” the clamps and then using the Levels and Dodge tools to clean up the shadows caused by the paper buckling and some reflections from the light source.
Ready to photograph
I also tried scanning the page in the sketchbook but encountered the same problems I had yesterday with severe blurring plus shadow from the seam. I (want to) like this sketchbook, but preparing the images for posting is really a hassle. Even if I wasn’t working across the spread and just painted on one page I’d still have the problem with the shadow and blurring since it happens on the righthand page.
Scanned version, after major touch-up
Have you had this problem and solved it? I’d be so grateful for suggestions!
Jana Bouc, Artist 