facing the canvas

After a month or so away....I'm back to the home ground again.

The garden, after weeks of rain, has become a jungle, complete with voracious mosquitoes vying for a piece of flesh.

My dog barely knows me.

My studio is free of the smell of anything creative and looks hollow and lonely.

I have read more than my share of summer books.

And although I'm still in love with fish and boats to paint and draw, I haven't a clue as to what I will do when I can finally paint again next week. Probably I will thrash about a lot and swear and pitch a bloody fit as I face the blank canvas and feel that I don't remember how to paint.

I base this on years of bloody fits. And then I will begin again.

Peace.

mural done, relaxing begun

The mural is finished.

It was fun. It was work. It was good to know that in my dotage I can still climb ladders and swing that brush all day.

I am trading in mural walls for tiny gouache paintings for a while. While the humidity spreads its soggy wings over my house and garden for the summer, staying inside and painting would appear the more comfortable occupation....vs. pulling weeds and chasing the dog.

Besides, someone just told me that there were three copperhead snakes found on our block last week.

Peace.

lost restaurant not on the whiplash road

Finishing up another week in California.....and finding that my patience isn't what it needs to be.

Of course, it is not all the mother/dementia thing....it is also me taking her out for a last day beautiful lunch and getting lost on the upper reaches of Page Mill Road where it nearly connects to the ocean.
That is to say, the restaurant I was looking for was somewhere else and we drove for 90 grueling minutes on a whiplash road with countless switchbacks with me always thinking we'd gone beyond the point of return and might as well keep going.

It is a beautiful road with amazing views of the bay and surrounding hills at the top. And all the way up and all the way down are groves of redwoods, buckeye trees, madrones, oaks and ferns. Gorgeous. And the mothership loved it, except for getting very hungry and a bit tired of sitting and waiting for that wonderful restaurant. And then it started to rain.

Oh well. Back on level surface we had a rather late lunch, more good talk, promises of what to get/bring/remember for next time and a good goodbye. Til next month.

We, of the generation that serves.....elderly parents, overwrought grown children and grand children. We are a self reliant and hardy bunch. In my opinion.

scrim vision

Driving home along streets I have driven so often for decades allows me time to day dream. Even to the point of getting home and not recalling the drive ....but that is seldom, I promise.

What I vision often is a kind of scrim over the current landscape of telephone poles, car lots, fast food joints and gas stations. The scrim is a vision of what used to be there. How the street used to look, how this particular long corridor of cars four lanes wide used to be a lazy two with dirt shoulders and mom and pop stores and a few more trees.

Maybe just overactive imagination.....but when I was a child riding long hours in the car, I would see horses galloping along fence and telephone lines, keeping up with us. I don't see the horses any longer, but my scrim vision can produce an active farm scene where there is now only a collapsing barn....and it even allows me to see someone young in someone old. Doesn't work the other way around though. I don't have any future scrims. Probably a good thing.

Peace.

From potholders to macrame.....again.

Spending time with two of my grandchildren, girls, has my domestic seed pods stirring. I remember making pot holders of cloth strips and glasses cases of leather, wishing wells of Popsicle sticks and the occasional ill fitting doll outfit when I was a kid. Being pregnant at a time when maternity clothes consisted of lime green big sack dresses studded with white dots, drove me to sewing my own clothes for my three time motherhood largeness. At the time I was also doing window display and making/sewing the display things I couldn't find in stores. And naturally, it being the 70's, I also got into making everybody long patchwork skirts and purses. (Awful, isn't it? Can you believe I was also making tons of macrame wall hangings and plant holders to sell....I feel responsible for some of the residue of that stuff still around in the the thrift stores.)

Sooooo, I bought a sewing machine today. I gave the last one away ages ago. This one promises to be somewhat simple....I hope so, because I plan to bring my grandchildren into the fun house of making stuff. They too can learn to make things no one wants but will love because they made it. Another generation of the pleasures of making things with your hands....can't think of a better gift.

Peace.

Mural nearly done....twenty eight cans of paint

Working on the mural. Maybe two more weeks. We are at the point where it seems endless. Especially with the beautiful days outside....and us in the attic room. Big as it is...it's indoors and up very high. We can look out the large dormers onto a beautiful garden and a landscape of large houses with multiple chimneys and slate roofs. We are inside with paint fumes and twenty eight cans of paint. Oh, I know, grouse, grouse.....it's a good job and we're nearly done so shut up.

It is interesting to have two artists who have never worked together on a project before attempt to meld personalities and styles in one mural. Especially as one is a ceramicist and the other a painter. Fortunately the ceramicist used to paint, long ago, and is also the instigator and doer of many public art projects. And fortunately, although the painter is a virtual hermit, and prefers holing up alone, she is also able to be nice and knows how to play well with others. So it sorta works. We are working in an extremely high end neighborhood.....and find it odd that the people we see are all workers...gardeners, dog walkers, maids, construction people......it's amazing really. All I can think of is, at least a lot of people have jobs helping the rich be rich.

Peace.

new garden for the butterflies...and me.

Why is it that the "weeds" (those plants that crowd the ones you actually planted...see, I hate to discriminate against "weeds"....somewhere else, of course, they are not weeds) grow so much faster than the ones you are favoring. Evolution, I suspect. Someone has been weeding them out for eons and they have the spirit of survival in them that says GROW FAST before that damned gardener tweezes us out!

The garden is fabulous this year. I took a hunk of money from the mural project and plunged it into getting people over here to dig and heft and plant for me this year. Digging out the giant ancient gingers was the biggest gift. So now I have even more garden space for pentas, lobelias, rudbeckias, passion flowers (for the swallow tail butterflies), senna (for the sulphurs), butterfly weed (for the monarchs) and much much more. Even something called Kangaroo Paws. So all I have to do is water and pluck weeds. I liked where they put things but I am moving things around quite a bit. Like the furniture in the house.....over there....no here...no over there, might be better.

Sometimes it is quite fine living in a sub-tropical zone.

Peace.