Scent

Took BART back from the city. Public transit is much preferable to dealing with rush hour Friday night traffic bursting out of San Francisco's seams as the clock hits The Hour. Make my way down those familiar steps, down the hallway that echos with with the discordant harmonics of two warring musicians vying for donations at opposite ends of the corridor. Down the second set of steps to the train and then thunderrumblerattle through the tunnel that takes me across the bay and back to Oakland. There's a funny smell to the car I'm in, but it's too crowded to risk giving up my seat by shoving my way to another car with a less odoriferous character.

The train screeches to its halt at Lake Merritt. My brain is still in the semi-comatose state that a full convention day always seems to leave me in. Spending all day every day alone in my office and painting away doesn't give much opportunity to practice the more engaging social talents. I do enjoy the shows, and while at them there is no noticeable strain. But once I'm alone I feel the drain. Step step step up to emerge back into the night.

The scent pierces through the daze, and involuntarily I smile as the fragrance swims through me. I remember it from when I used to live at Lake Merritt and took BART every other day. The trees near the station exit are in bloom, and their sweet and delicate perfume makes my whole body sigh in relaxation. Like the breath I did not know I was holding while on the train (holding all winter) finally exhaling.

I forget about those trees every time, a day or two later. And then some time will pass. And then I'll take a late night train home. Usually from the city, packed into a car, people and old carpet smells, mechanical station announcements, lugging bags up the whirring escalators....

And then that all falls away when those outer glass doors open and I breathe in the scent of my old friends.

Dana's there to pick me up. We drive back to The Foxhole. A scant half hour to toss my convention bags in a corner, grab a hasty bite to eat, pull my mind back from its drifting orbit, and grab up the flamenco shoes and makeup kit. The day's not allowed to be over yet. Back to La Taza de Cafe for the second show of the evening with Bernadette, Monica, and Garnada. Fusion flamenco and belly dancing show. A wine glass gets overly excited with my footwork during our new bulerias number and decides to join in. It skirts to the edge of the table, and as I execute a turn, it emulates me with a somersault to the floor. Poor wineglass.

Poor Monica who has to continue the rest of the show still, barefoot belly dancer around invisible splinters. She manages to avoid mishap.

It is a small, but appreciative audience tonight. They seem to truly enjoy the show, engaging in it, watching us with the enchantment plain on their faces and in the occasional exclamations we overhear.

* * *

While at Wondercon today, a few pieces completed during the quiet lulls. Sneak peak for some illustrations for upcoming Fantastical Visions IV:

Magical Suitcase of Holding

Friends at conventions always make fun of my "magical suitcase of holding" that I manage to stuff most of my whole booth setup into for the shows. Appearing harried (and usually sleep deprived for time jumps to the east coast) on the day of, frenetically pulling out everything out in a whirlwind of prints and easels and art.

It's a little easier for the local shows. At least I don't have to pack everything down to miniature size and play guessing games with "How close are you to the 50lb. check-in luggage limit?" Not having a bathroom scale makes it a gamble.

"That's 51.5lbs," says the bored Delta check-in agent. "$25.00, would you like to pay that with cre--?"

"Wait a sec," I interrupt, unzipping the bag and hastily trying to redistribute 1.5lbs into my carry-on instead while those waiting behind me shift from one foot to the other in boredom and impatience.

"You're still .5lbs over," says the agent.

Rummage, rummage, rummage. Now the gambling game has turned instead to a game of chicken. The agent breaks first. "Okay, fine," she grumbles after I've been searching unsuccessfully to find that last .2lb item for the past minute. "It's good enough. Here's your seat number, gate number, have a nice flight. Next please!"

* * *

So I'm off to set up for WonderCon this weekend. Local show, so a little less scampering to do. Unfortunately will have to fight my way through San Francisco rush hour traffic to get in and set up later today. Not looking forward to that part. But the show will be fun. It's amazing how much it's grown in the past 7 years. I remember taking a peek at it in 2001 when it was still a baby show in Oakland at the Marriott hotel. Now it's grown to a quite respectable size.

Friday - Sunday
San Francisco Moscone Center South
747 Howard Street
For detailed information, see: http://www.comic-con.org/wc/
"Coming off its biggest and most successful year ever, WonderCon is gearing up for its 23rd year as a Bay area tradition. The comics and popular arts convention returns to Moscone Center South for another three-day weekend run on February 27 through March 1. More than 29,000 people attended the show in 2008, and 2009 promises to be another incredible convention experience for fans from all over!"

I will be set up in the exhibit hall artist alley area with prints, books, and originals. Booth AA105, listed in the program book under Shadowscapes. Please feel free to drop me a note if there are any special requests for any prints or originals you wish to see at the show.

The Flamenco Bug

It's evening, close to midnight. I've just come home from La Taza de Cafe after a show with Middle Eastern band, Garnada. Muscles ache with a pleasant twinge of exertion. A slight flush to my skin from the one glass of sangria I drank - the gift of Asian genes that turn my cheeks bright red with the mere scent of alcohol. The blush makes people think I'm drunk even when I've barely had a few sips.

Scrub the makeup from my eyes. I hate wearing makeup. Bern (the other dancer) and I both. The two of us wiping the lipstick off as soon as the show is over each time. The musicians laugh when they see us doing that. I think of shellac when I touch that crimson stick to my lips, painting a red "O". I think of the shellac Stephen showed me once in his studio, that he coats on the guitars he makes. It turns the rough sheets of wood into gleaming and beautiful instruments, coated in a layer of clear honeyed gold.

An old friend showed up this night to watch; from my software programmer days. Another lifetime. Sometimes it feels I have many lifetimes compartmentalized into this one existence. Can all the people of those disparate identities coexist in the same space? Or would that cause an implosion?

He got a nice front row seat. Not in the "poor people" section as we call the back side of the restaraunt, behind the pillar where the late reservations are seated. No, it was front and center, in the "our footwork will rattle the silverware right off your plate" (and sometimes right off onto the floor!) table.

He knew I danced, though he'd never come to see it before. Having seen it now, he had questions: How long have you been at it, where when what?

Dana loves it when I tell people of the Berkeley days - when I first caught the bug. It's an addiction I was warned by someone, by multiple someones, right from the start. You'll catch the bug. The first classes I took whetted my appetite. Then I met a guitarist, just starting out as well. There was an old house on the lot that he rented; squeezed right up against the main house with barely any space to breathe between them. This is the Bay Area after all. A quarter acre for a lot is huge. Most places...much smaller than that. The landlady ignored that second house, letting it fall to disrepair. It had no electricity, no water. The carpet (where there was any) was old and dingy, and the wood stripped.

We started to use it for practice space - me, the guitarist, and another dancer. After classes and homework and studying - computer science, biology, chemistry, anthropology; we'd meet there, slip out the back door of the main house and into that run-down shack. Candles and matchbooks in hand. Set the tea lights all along the windowsills. The light flickered up at the bare and useless bulbs in the ceiling, and glimmered in the black mirrors the windows turned into.

He'd play his guitar. Seviannas, Alegrias, Solea (my favorite), rippling through the small space. Anything, everything. We'd dance. Sometimes we'd practice what we had learned. Sometimes we knew the styles from class. Sometimes we made it up. It didn't matter, there were no critics present. The shadows shattered across the walls from the multiple light sources, shivering with the surreal aspect of it all. And then sometime after midnight - 1AM, 2AM, there would be mutual consent that the night had to end. Blow out the candles, and head back out into the cool night to our apartments scattered across campus.

I have romantic notions at times. Like wanting to take my sketchbook out to sit on the rock beside the pond in Tokyo to sketch the koi. Within fifteen minutes the mosquitoes dissuaded me from that fancy when I realized that in the time it had taken me to get situated and dig for my pencils I had acquired at least three golf ball sized bites along my legs. And that rock was not nearly as comfortable as I had imagined it would be! Or wanting to just close my eyes and drift when floating in that wonderfully buoyant salt water embrace of the ocean...but self preservation says you idiot, you know how dangerous that current could be? Eyes open, watch out where you are. Or the magical garden I dreamed of having when I was bouncing around rented apartments, for the house I would one day own...but that garden is now at the mercy of my less than green thumb, paired with relentless allergies.

Maybe it's just memory that alters and paints those flamenco sessions with a gloss of romanticism, but I don't believe that's the case. By contrast to those ill-fated notions of what I think I want reality to be, this actually was. I think even then that I knew it was a strange reality I was participating in that was an odd disjunct from the daily routines of studying and programming and stressing and exams; an odd gleaming thread in the fabric of that time.

My rehearsal sessions these days have a much more mundane veneer. Though now there are no longer candlelit jaunts in forgotten houses, that memory for me is linked with flamenco forever. Ingrained memory of exhilaration, abandonment, freedom, and utter immersion in movement and music.

78 cards later

Here's life after the tarot --

Well, backtrack a bit.

June 2004 I started on a project to create a tarot deck. 78 pieces of art. Not for any client, just for my own pleasure; though I soon found embarking on a long project like that, regardless of whether there's someone holding purse strings on it, sets its own terms.

It had to be cohesive: in style, in tone, in color. Concerns about the first item on that checklist did give me pause. I knew that without someone actually paying for the project to happen, it would necessarily take several years to complete. Over the course of which my style and skill was bound to change. At least...I should hope skill level would change (One could wish for the better, right???). And the second two items, well, those are the parameters for the pieces really. The boundaries I'd have to work within.

When I got down to #71 and the end was in sight, I started to wonder what it'd be like when I was done. For so long now (over 4 years) my "free time" has been dictated by "the next card." I have the paying jobs I do on commission. And when I'm not working on those, it was the tarot.

72, 73, 74 slipped by in between conventions. Then paying project deadlines and holidays took over briefly. Signing with Llewellyn to publish the deck. Hurry up finish the rest now that there's an actual deadline for THIS too.

75, 76 between mouthfuls of Thanksgiving turkey. I can see the end.

77 with my brother's dog running neurotic Australian shepherd circles around the table and around the Christmas tree. Reluctance a bit...what will I do when this is done? Don't think about that too much. Write the book.

78. Send it all in.

Done.

Now what?

Do I have to learn what this thing is called "artist's block"?

I think artistically it has pushed me to be a better artist in numerous ways (forcing me to paint male and female figures in equal number, facilitating gradual experimentation of perspective, size, and color). I can see the differences from the first cards to the last, and could bore anyone with the details of the progression.

Even though the project was my own from start to finish, dictated by parameters I set myself, it was still a boundary. A safe zone for me to fall into easily. While it may have stretched the technical and craftsman's muscles in my brain, there hasn't been need to really push and brainstorm wild concepts and subject matter. Or even color schemes for that matter; since for the sake of cohesion I focused on matching color sets for each suit.

So now I sit here for the first time in years and with a bit of "free time" again... and there's no "next card" to work on. No fixed color scheme to match. Any subject, any colors. It's a bit daunting. My paper seems too big, too white. My palette seems too varied and overwhelming. Green. No, purple. No wait...green with purple shadows!

It's a lovely feeling to do a piece of art again "just because I feel like it". Not that I felt the lack before, because I loved every minute of that 78 card journey, and am very proud of it. But it's a feeling of freedom you don't really notice until it it's there with you again.

Ink drawings of the nearby ravine have been sprouting under my hands; with a profusion like the greenery that they depict (rain rain rain this past month). And some dragons; with any colors I feel like painting!

Tomatoes, Poppies, and Art

My husband and I went to Home Depot yesterday on a plant-buying mission. Our garden was in need of some additions after a horde of invading oxalis weeds had been forcibly removed. The battlefield of raw upturned dirt and stone that resulted called out for something to cover it.

California poppies, he suggested, and I agreed instantly with the idea. The image of golden orange flower cups swaying the breeze was tantalizing, a romantic image, reminding me of some paintings I’d done in the past. Reminded me of bicycle rides as a kid along half-wild pathways under the freeways. An added bonus: a drought-resistant native plant so that we wouldn’t have to wrangle with a sprinkler system and pull out the instruction manual to figure out watering schedules.

It was looking to be a dry year. Midwinter already had already passed, and not nearly as much rainfall as we should have gotten by this time. It felt like spring already, and we were just edging past January. The jasmine had been fooled into flowering - a fact which the onset of my pollen allergies was adamantly reminding me of every morning. So there we were at Home Depot, in the gardening section, scratching our heads as we pondered the racks of seeds. Finally we settled on a packet, grabbed it, paid up, and headed out.

The next day, Dana admitted to me sheepishly, “You want to know a really stupid thought I had yesterday at Home Depot?”

“What?” I asked.

“I was looking at the tomato seeds, and I thought, ‘Huh. Those look a lot like the seeds of tomatoes.’”

I laughed. I walked away to the kitchen. Did some chores. Watered some plants. Took out the poppy seed packet. Laughed again at Dana’s tomato seed naivete. Then stopped laughing as I realized the thought in my head the previous day when I first picked up the packet of poppy seeds was, “Huh. Those look a lot like poppy seeds.” As in, the poppy seeds on my bagels.

Now I’m not a complete gardening novice. I’ve got my little herb and vegetable pots with tomatoes and fresh basil every summer. Long planters filled with strawberries along the edge of the terrace. But I’ve never tried growing anything from seeds.

That moment of realized stupidity was a bit of a reminder of how far removed we are from what we eat. The fruits and seeds we shove into our mouths…are just faceless supermarket product, magically engineered and appearing in our refrigerators and pantries. They have no link in our heads to a real life cycle, to a natural world of seed, germination, flowering, fruit. Of course I know how it works intellectually. But the connection of that knowledge to the supermarket tomato in my hand, or to the poppy seed Bagel I get from Noah’s, has been severed by our food culture (or lack of). Without that link, they’ve lost their meaning, shoved from hand to mouth without appreciation.

And what’s the link of all this to Art?

Does artwork that revels in nature also suffer this disconnect? If at such a basic level of what we intake three-plus times a day, there is a removal from the life cycles of the world, how can there be any true appreciation of what nature means, and the beauties and intricacies of it? The painting of a tree, no matter how faithful, is just a painting of a tree. It is as manufactured as that supermarket tomato with its hybrid genetically engineered suicide genes to prevent any of its seeds from ever even dreaming of becoming a real actual plant. What a dire thought.

Or maybe that painting can be the jolt of realization that makes its viewers remember the shadow of the oak tree that used to hang across their doorway, or the scent of the jasmine that would waft through open windows in the summertime. Maybe that painting can be the link to re-forge an appreciation of our connection to the world around us.

Only if the artist who created it had the eyes to see. I try very hard to open my eyes to see.

Trade Secrets

Over the past few months of plugging away on this project, the conversation has frequently come up:

"So what are you doing these days?" I am asked.

"Working on a book."

"Oh?"

"A tutorial book on how to draw and paint fantasy creatures."

"Oh..." Interest, and something else in the tone. Hesitantly, "But...aren't you concerned?"

My own brows lift questioningly even though I already know what the inevitable next question is.

"Aren't you worried that...you know...it'll reveal all your secrets? Won't everyone be able to do the same thing then?"

I laugh at that point. That's when I try to explain, though I get the feeling my words don't sink very far.

Confusion on the face.

Polite nod, sometimes with genuine interest.

Topic change. “So what are you doing these days?” I ask.

And things go on.

There seems to be the belief that technical explanations can transcend the mere transfer of knowledge. The transfer of inspiration. And there is the heart of it: Where is the kernel of inspiration? My words and images can help guide someone to find that core within themselves, but it has no meaning until it has been internalized and explored and remade.

Drawing and painting is a technical exercise. The eyes have to learn to truly see. The brain must be trained to analyze without preconceptions. And then the hands learn through trial and error to manually create what the brain wants to have materialized. From eye to mind to hand. The disconnect has to be bridged, and there is a mechanical aspect that has to be learned with practice.

This is what can be taught: Tricks to ease the transition from mind to hand. Pointing out ways of looking at the world and seeing color and light, that get ignored by minds and eyes that only need to see the world as a space to move and interact in and not as visual canvas. Shortcuts on paper that simulate reality. The physical behavior of water and pigments on paper. This is how a wing is structured. This is how you can paint it. This is the lore of angels, and examples of the masters of the past who painted like subject matter. Here is how composition works, and how the human mind works to follow the flow of movement.

One can learn all that, master all the techniques and copy imagery flawlessly; but it’s just an architectural layout, graphical manipulation, glossy and flashy until it has a heart.

I am frequently asked, “How do you find inspiration?”

There’s no roadmap with directions I can give. Inspiration begins from an external source, unique to every person. The eye-catching imagery of a favorite artist, a glimpse of breath-taking nature, a song whose melody winds through and will not let itself be forgotten, a story that grips the soul. Something that just burns in your mind until you must create in order to transform that energy into a piece of art wrought by your own hand. It is the process that external source of inspiration undergoes within an individual that marks it inexplicably with an artist’s signature.

I believe that if you just draw and paint what you love, and do it day after day, even if it is just copying direct from another artist – eventually your own style cannot help but start to emerge. Paint what you love, what comes natural, and the pattern of your inspiration will show through.

I don’t claim to be the master of my art, and at times during the past months I have wondered, “What gives me the right to dictate how to draw and paint like this! How arrogant and presumptuous!” I feel I am on a never-ending road of self-improvement, discovery, and evolution.

“Painting is dead,” declared the modernists, thirty years ago, echoing a sentiment that has been proclaimed every half century.

Nothing new to be done. It’s all the same, they say. How dreary.

I’m an optimist.

Here is A Truth: If I were to lay bare all the knowledge and skills I have; if someone were to take those up and emulate it so well that there was no technical difference between mine and hers.... Even then, the soul of the paintings would be different. That core of inspiration would shine through. This, or so I believe, is the reason of every artist to Be.

A Drawing of a Tree

“Come visit Kentucky,” Larry says to me, and I laugh and refuse as I have often refused the casual invitation. I’m an urban girl -- born in Manhattan, transplanted to the bay area suburbs of California. Suburban sprawl already edging out the persimmon orchards and ranches as they rapidly became a faded memory of the land.

Even that was not enough for me though. I left for San Francisco as soon as I finished college. San Francisco, jutting out into the bay, with its diversity of ethnic cultures and restaurants and shops and liberals and hills and ocean winds and two seasons (Spring, and Cold) and screaming trolleys (full of screaming tourists) and seven square miles of paved streets and houses crushed together wall to wall, floor to ceiling, endless endless endless.

What keeps it all from being claustrophobic is the sight of the ocean. Stand at the top of Nob Hill and gaze north, out towards the sea and it is like a breath of life to remind of something beyond.

Kentucky? Why would I ever desire to go there? And so I laugh when he suggests it, and he drops the subject.

But a few moments later when he bores of the conversation among the others at the table he turns to me again and with all seriousness asks me, “Have you ever been among the backroads? Have you ever seen wild forests?”

I shake my head no at first. “No I haven’t.” Then I pause and think, “A few times. Yes. I have.”

“How can you not have?” he presses. “You draw it. It’s in your art. It’s in your paintings, but you’ve not ever seen it? I’ve invited other artists and writers to come out and let me show them back country. You forget about it, living in a city. The woods and rivers, and the mist that rises off the fields in the early morning when the sun first rises and the call of whippoorwills. Have you ever seen that, heard that? Or at night, when it’s so dark the Milky Way glows in a path across the sky.

“There’s something in us that knows about that landscape even if you never see it. A woman at a show once looked at a painting of mine rich with the Kentucky landscape in its background. She started crying. She had tears streaming down her face. She told me then that she lived in Manhattan, had done so her whole life. And she told me it just touched her so deep, reminded her.

“When would she have ever seen those forests and fields? She had never seen them. But her soul knew them.”

I’ve never seen his forests and fields, but as he speaks the forests and fields and oceans I have known suddenly well up in my mind. I DO know them, though I’ve seen them only rarely relative to the rest of a scrambling busy life.

I’ve been among the giant redwoods of California. I’ve rowed a scull on a lake on an isolated island upon Lake Heron, gliding like a silent water bug at dusk when the surface of the water was still as glass, and seen loons wing across the horizon with their eerie cry skimming across the waveless waters. I’ve seen that same lake at midnight when the sky was so clear and unpolluted by the wash of city lights that the Milky Way was reflected in the black glass.

In the repertoire of memory, I have images of Japan in the Autumn when the leaves of the maples and gingkos form a flaming carpet of color, and the foliage that still clings to the trees let the sunlight through like cathedral glass.

Kalalau Valley in Kauai – I stood there for what seemed and endless time. The walls of the valley slip down in a jade green cup to a beach. 4000 feet above the sea, and yet in the stillness of the air from that lookout point, you could hear the sound of waves crashing on the distant strand. Enormous dragonflies were my only companions as they defied the dizzying heights to perform acrobatics.

These and other images are the precious bits that flow into my art. Even to just stand at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco and gaze north to the sea – though it’s a far cry from Kalalau Valley, it has its own spirit, its own terrifying beauty.

Does every artist have these still and silent places that they draw from? We must. I cannot bear the thought of generations of us only knowing what our predecessors have drawn, and reinterpreting their imagery of nature without ever truly internalizing it.

Redrawn, reprocessed, recycled, like the children’s game of Telephone where the first person whispers a phrase a sentence to their neighbor who in turn passes it on to the next and the next and the next, and at the end of the chain the last person announces what they heard the message to be and they all laugh because it has nothing to do with the original.

Is a drawing of a drawing of a drawing of a tree, still a tree?

I reflect then that I do have a yearning to visit Kentucky, to hear the call of, “Whip-por-whill, whip-por-whill!”