Beyond the Hedge

"Beyond the Hedge"
14x19 inches
watercolor
Prints, details, and original available -click here-

There are hedges and fences and walls all around. The world is parceled out into packages hemmed in by imaginary and real boundaries – the rules of respectability, acceptability, ownership, and reality. Towering brambles behind which are what-if’s and maybe’s.

I drive along a side road near where I grew up. A twenty foot sound barrier has sprung up along the right side in the intervening years; separating the snarling I-280 rush hour noise from the neat little houses along the stretch.

I walk with my husband after dinner at night, and from the backyard garden of one house, a fountain plays. The enticing musicality beckons temptingly, “Come peek in!” Ah, but the walls are too tall! And the fences too diligently mended and sealed to afford even a tiny glimpse. I stare at the wooden obstruction in frustration and wonder if this was how Rapunzel’s father felt when his wife demanded that he scale the fence for those wondrous radishes.

I wander through the tangle of Sausal Creek. The blackberry bushes tower with their full summer growth; fed by a stormy and wet spring. The berries have been picked clean from all of the nearby branches, but there – tucked away amidst the thorniest hardest-to-reach spot – that one there is the most luscious berry of all! I pull back from the hedge suddenly as the gleam of little eyes catch a wayward beam of sunlight. Did I imagine that?

Follow the rabbit down the hole. Chase the fox beyond wall. Pierce through to the enchanted heart of the keep where Briar Rose sleeps for her hundred years, and place the kiss upon those expectant lips.

Not missing city life

An evening out with my girlfriends in San Francisco. We're there to watch Eve's Elixir, a contemporary dance event featuring fusions of various traditional ethnic dance forms with a more modern aesthetic and influence. It's showing at Cowell Theater, at Fort Mason. We get lost looking for it, as there are no visible signs along the way. A surly ranger points us in the general direction, and at last we find the right area.

Park the car and hurry along because the show starts in ten minutes. I decide to leave my coat in the trunk because it seems mild enough. It's a decision I regret five minutes later as we pass between the old warehouses and towards the waterfront. The cold tears through the windtunnel of the buildings, and suddenly my warm scarf is not nearly warm enough.

There's a shivering line of well dressed people at the front of the theater, which looks to be an old warehouse that stretches out along a pier. We join in the teeth-chattering to pick up our tickets. After a while, I pull out my sketchbook, and though my fingers are numb, it's a good distraction from the discomfort to scribble a bit as we wait. Almost enough for me to forget the chill that slices through my skirts.

The odd thing about SF is that when you live there, you can't imagine ever wanting to live anyplace else. Nightlife, great restaurants at every corner interspersed with cafes, Golden Gate Park, colorful shopping neighborhoods....

Minor inconveniences are easy to dismiss when you're living in the midst of it. Basking in the golden haze of San Francisco fog that apparently creeps into your mind.

Driving's a pain. Parking once you get to your destination is worse. Monthly parking spot in Nob Hill? $300.00.
Cable cars...quintessential San Francisco. Fun for a visit. Try living along a cable car route that goes uphill. The driver must ring the bell to warn traffic at the coming intersection since the cable cars can't actually stop at any given spot. Every 15 minutes: rumblerumbleding-a-linga-dingdingdingdingDING!!!!
California weather's lovely! The city has it's own micro-climate though. Even in high summer, lugging around a winter coat because of unexpectedly cutting winds. October's really the only warm nice month. Never gets old to see tourists shivering in their shorts and t-shirts in June and wondering where there nearest overpriced souvenir sweatshirt vendor is.
Great dining, if you don't mind crowds.

At any rate, I'm remembering all the reasons I don't miss living there when Roberta asks me that very question. I answer with a very vehement negative.

At first I missed it terribly. I missed my Trattoria Contadina. I missed walking down to North Beach. I missed Golden Gate Park.

The week I was to move out from my apartment, I walked up the street to the top of Nob Hill, on my way home from a dance class. It was a rare warm day. Sky was still bright, not yet dusk. Powell St. stretched out before me, tumbling all the way down to the marina and into the bay. I crouched down on the sidewalk, catching my breath from the steep trek, stood there a while memorizing the sight, filing it away. Breathed in that always fresh-from-the-sea air.

The longer I live across the bay, the more the faerie glamour fades. I find I like living here in Oakland much more. I find places and things here that are more personable; I find the niches that strangely are at once grander and more intimate than anything a city can ever offer.

I can see the city now in the distance, across a glittering finger of water. Just a few miles away. Can touch it easily when I want to, or let it sit there like a jeweled band on the horizon.

Styles and experiments

For those of you attached to my usual work and who might be concerned for the turn my experimentation has taken this past week, have no fear, I'm not relinquishing my signature style anytime soon. I get far too much pleasure from that to give it up in the foreseeable future, and have many ideas lined up to still get around to.

I offer this sneak peek of the current piece as proof that I'm still at it. (It's just the upper third of a larger piece in the works right now). And besides, there's Dreamscapes II I'm hard at work at too.

However, I am finding myself struck by random urges these days to play around with things that have not even occurred to me in years. Digging through the garage I came across markers and watercolor pencils and once-treasured-Prismacolors that I hadn't spared a thought for in a decade. Pulled them out, dusted the boxes off, scattered the spiders (who seemed to have decided that my discards were their treasures), and lugged it all upstairs to my studio.

At any rate, thank you for the encouragement for these little artistic jaunts I've been taking the past few weeks. It has been interesting to hear feedback to this recent work.

Heavy Skies

Some more mucking around experimentally. Markers, pencil, and ink. Inspired a bit by some photos my friend John Shannon shared of Yorkshire Dales in the UK. Stark oak branch silhouettes stretching to the sky. Somehow not so different in that aspect from where I am half a globe away. The skies have been fickle today, flashing back and forth from spears of sunlight to splattering rain.

A change of pace - strange dreams

A question I get asked often enough that it should be on my FAQ (but isn't) is whether I paint what I dream. Before I can form an answer, the first question is often followed up by comments of how my dreams must be utterly fantastic.

Nothing could be further from the truth. When my brain shuts down at night, it shuts down. If I had to paint the incomprehensible blather that my mind comes up with when I'm sleeping...well, I'd probably put myself to sleep (again) in the attempt. Generally it's prosaic, mundane imagery slapped together with about as much cohesion and story as a three year old would be capable of with a set of refrigerator poetry magnets, and the buildup of a shaggy dog joke.

And so I was as surprised as anyone the other morning to wake up with some rather vivid images in mind that begged to be put to paper in some form. Strangely, even in the dream I remember stepping out from among city streets to see this towering emerald giant, and wanting to pull out my travel journal to sketch on the spot (I suppose I would have been sorely disappointed upon waking to find any dream drawings to have been as ephemeral as the dream itself), but was pulled along through the rest of the journey by inexorable forces. Passage along a thin rocky path that wended its way along the spine of two oceans colliding, lit by the thin torchlight of city lamps.

At any rate, witness the first two images I have ever done from dreams. I guess I can't answer the question any longer with, "No, I never draw from my dreams."

The Maw

There's a neighbor who's garage always stands open, empty, gaping, black. You can see the moss growing on the wood inside, see the rootlets of shade loving plants piercing the walls of this ancient edifice, and the iron struts bearing it all up. It's dank, it's creepy, it's primal, it's just... well... it's the Maw.

And up above, the most glorious birch tree climbing to the sky.

A sunny afternoon in Oakland. Allergies going nuts.

Here's a nice challenge, seeing as I usually hate drawing perspective to start with, let's do a sketch not only that involves perspective, but is done without rulers, pencil, or guides! Sounds great! Well, I suppose I should get myself warmed up, seeing as I intend to go on the San Francisco Sketch Crawl in a couple of weeks. I've been looking forward to it, missed it the last two times due to prior engagements. Not missing it this time!

Potential

"Potential"
size: 12x16 inches
medium: watercolor

As usual prints, original, and all that Good Stuff, available at Shadowscapes.

Painting through the weekend to finish this piece up, since it's not a paying commission, and I've got some deadlines set up for myself to get started on once Monday rolls around. Gotta get back to having a few more chapters hammered out before the end of April.

NPR's "Planet Money" podcast kept me company for the last half of this one. Yeah, I'll admit it's not the rousing source of passionate fantasy inspiration you'd expect me to be listening to. Ironically the dire and materially rooted topics were an odd contrast to painting such a hopeful themed piece. That's the strange workings of my mind. It rolls along several tracks simultaneously. Dryads and tree spirits while listening to economic fiascoes and bailout plans.

Reminds me of how Dana is always a bit disconcerted to see letters and packages in the mail for me from the fantastic company and artist names of people I'm working with, tagged with "Inc." or "Co." at the end, or heading legal papers and contracts. "It's so bizarre!" he exclaims, to see these otherworldy names that conjure magic images in your head...rooted to something so mundane as a corporate and legal identity.