Time Warp to 1988

In an attempt to get me to stop using her house as my extra storage space, and arguing the fact that I had now been living in my own house for over 2 years, my mother settled two large boxes of "Old Stuff" into my trunk the last time I was visiting. She said it was a box of my love letters that she wasn't going to toss. I think she was being facetious.

After driving around with said Old Stuff for a week and having it rattle around every time I took a sharp turn or raced through a yellow traffic light, I finally got around to sifting through it all last week during my Hunt for Prismacolors and Discarded Art Supplies.

No love letters. But I was surprised to come across something that I had thought long junked...some old tarot cards I had started to draw. There's no date on these, but I think it must have been around 1988. I have some vague recollection of learning about this thing called the Tarot in junior high, and being fascinated by it. I was determined to make my own deck (I never got further than 7 cards + 1 sketch). I was always that kind of kid who would see something and rather than want to buy it, instantly start to deconstruct it in my mind to figure out how to want to make my own.

At any rate, I thought I'd share some of these very early attempts. For Laughs, for Mockery, for Encouragement to fellow artists who often find themselves discouraged looking at the finished products of professional artists and wondering from whence they spring (yes, practice does bring about evolving skill!), for that bit of Nostalgia at seeing the seedlings of what eventually led to the project I finished this year.

Winding Wall

"Winding Wall"
size: 7x11 inches
medium: ink

Another ink thanks to John Shannon's photos of Yorkshire Dales in the UK. I loved the way this wall wended a path along the hillsides, weaving through the oaks.

This piece is a bit of a combination of my recent experiments and my usual work. The melding is more noticeable if you take a look at the detail shots for closeups on some of the texture in the trees and shadows. Toying around with ideas of how I can work this type of texture with color as well (not for this piece in particular, but in general).

Although, playtime is over, gotta get back to working on another Dreamscapes chapter before the end of this month. Self-made deadlines. Promised myself I'd start up again on the 15th.

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."