Russian Gulch

Watercolor, pen, collage, stamping, in sketchbook

Mendocino has wonderful art galleries, clothing stores, bakeries, delis, even a good bookstore, but after the first day, I was done with it and nature beckoned. While Bob was still occupied for the day at his workshop I set off for Russian Gulch park, a paradise for hiking and kayaking and caving and camping and probably a whole lot more. First I headed out on the headlands where I found a seagull family with two fluffy little kids looking like they were getting up nerve to fly. I guess I was pretty obvious in my attention because the mother flew over to check me out - got almost within reach and looked me in the eye. I said hello and she answered immediately, moving her strange orange beak with a “Scree, scree!” then circling around for a repeat performance to make sure I heard. I was somehow so grateful for her attention that I laughed out loud and got all goose bumpy.

Next I walked up Fern Glen trail to the waterfall, a 6 mile hike up through the redwoods past bright orange columbines and pink bleeding hearts and big hollowed out tree trunks and beds of gigantic clovers and ferns. Up to the falls where the ground squirrels/chipmunks (pictured above) approach boldly to beg for food, then scamper off to play like children by the stream. Owls hooting through the forest. I held many conversations along with way with all these wonders and felt remnants of my fear melting away in the vast benevolence of this environment.

Check out my husband Bob’s blog for samples of his monoprints from the weekend - cool stuff!

Mendocino musings

Friday morning Bob and I headed out through fire country to the coastal town of Mendocino for the weekend. Seemed a bit illogical to drive toward the 134 wildfires burning out of control in Mendocino County. I could feel an irrational fear welling up and choking me as the air got thicker with smoke and our eyes started to burn. What if a blaze raced across the road as we approached. . .it could not possibly move with the speed of my mind coming up with these fearful thoughts. And so, as we settled into our comfortable inn at the coast and breathed the fresh sea air again, I contemplated the way fear had gotten a hold on me.

Next morning I was seated in the coffee shop sketching (while Bob attended his art workshop) these two fellows, reading the scary headlines of the newspaper over this guy’s shoulder. But my fear had evaporated and been replaced by something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on, until suddenly the tiny shop started filling up with people and conversations. People from the fire-lands come to the coast for a breath of fresh air and hope. I spoke with a young woman who bravely told me about her home on a ridge with wildfires burning on either side and fire crews too overwhelmed to deal with them. The experience of these people in this coffee shop became my own, and with the flow of compassion, the fear just dried up. Later I painted and wrote about it and remembered the poem of Rumi called The Question.

I knew I had to work something out about this experience, so I started with ink and watercolor paint and got as close to it as I felt - holding it in my hand. Then I just started writing what came to mind on the left, ending with Turn the Heat Up.

As I remembered the lines from Rumi, “most people guard against going into the fire, and so end up in it. . .” I recalled my experience of driving through the smoke-filled landscape, my fear providing moments of suffering. But then Rumi says, “whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream. . .” So I added a stream at the bottom of the piece and realized I’d come through to the cool stream side.

Rumi’s poem gets even better. He says, “The voice of the fire tells the truth, saying I am not fire. I am fountainhead. Come into me and don’t mind the sparks.” I couldn’t possibly share with you what I understand of this without Rumi’s words and some paint, but it felt very full.

Red sun

Watercolor and pen in travel sketchbook

We’re living under a smoky haze these days in northern California. The sun rises, a bright red glowing ember in the sky. Wildfires burning out of control in a hundred different locations, sparked by lightning last weekend. Too many to put out, some will burn for weeks. A rosy glow in eery contrast to nature’s capricious destructive forces. I was reminded of the night years ago when I was driving back from the Mediteranean beaches to our rented home in Soreze, France. It was 12:30am and we drove past a conflagration right outside of “our” little town (comprised of 16th century wooden buildings!) and right across the street from a gas station! It was a lumber yard on fire, with of course lots of fuel to keep it going. Yet there was a dismaying lack of rescue personel or equipment. I “slept” that night fully clothed, with eyes open, and passport, money and keys in my pocket, watching for red in the sky outside my window and wondering how I would know to evacuate with my minimal comprehension of French! Next day, crisis averted, I sketched this in my book from memory. And in fact now my memory of the scene is a watercolor painting, not whatever my senses took in that night.

If you want to explore possible philosophical explanations of this phenomenon and see some more cool images, check out my husband Bob’s blog.

Travel Sketch Day 2

Whereas Saturday we worshiped shade and iced drinks, when Sunday dawned, the jackets went on. A new group of students arrived seeking sun for their warm up sketches. Several students wanted to find a way to either overcome “beginner-itis” or to find a way to jump back into an art practice in a non-threatening way. So we focused on sketchbooking as creating a tapestry of shapes and colors building out from the first shape drawn boldly in pen. I had created a simple collage of pieces of map glued onto the paper and simply started drawing what was closest to me, Ann’s foot and then the hat with sketchbooks in it behind the foot. Many of the students expressed relief at not having to master perspective and intricate foliage detail and other challenges of realism, and were quite pleased with their results. This was especially true as the day wore on and they discovered new ways to put shapes on paper.

by Susan

Lunch again at the Union Hotel pizzaria with the red checked table cloths, sketching by candle light. No one at my table could help me spell panini, pannini, panninni? (Definitely not #3) so I just made a stab. There are too many perfectionist little notions that can get in the way of our freedom to create, and there’s just not time for that! The menu might have helped, but by then it was gone!

We moved out to a perfectly positioned picnic table with a view of Howard’s cafe and a white church steeple. Soon we were approached by a man looking for the Obama Bake Sale. One of the students said, “No, we’re sketching for Obama” and the man went away very pleased.

My demo of the cheater’s way to do perspective without understanding a bit of it, wet-on-wet backgrounds and colorful shadows with bounced light. (oh, and permission to draw lines that aren’t very straight)

Again the day ended with me wanting to take all my new friends on a sketching trip to Europe with me. Now there’s an idea. . .

A real travel sketch warm-up, and I mean Warm!

Saturday’s workshop students doing their warm up sketches

This is sketching boot camp. Do you see students standing, perching and squatting, bending over and balancing, with pens and paints and water and paper? And on top of it all, a sun so merciless that people were clinging to their spots of shade in the midday sun. And to make matters worse, the Nurse Ratchet-like teacher (me) timed them and gave them only 15 minutes to do the sketch and paint it before ringing an obnoxious bell. But in this amazing group there was not one complaint, only lots of laughter and fun and amazing sketches.

Eating happened alongside sketching all day and often the eating became the sketch. THis clever student, Judy, designed her own little travel palette with Altoids tins and plastic bottle caps - one for cool colors and the other for warm colors.

by Judy Rowe

We lunched in the cool candle-lit interior of the Union Hotel Pizzaria in Occidental where the chianti bottle candles and red table cloths appeared in the most of the colorful sketches done during lunch. The waitresses were so tuned into our sketch mentality that they wouldn’t move a single glass or plate without permission of all the people at the table who might be sketching it!

by Ann Buell

On the restaurant tables we prepared our sketchbooks with collage and stamping for afternoon sketches. The blue lines in this sketch were done by painting onto corrugated cardboard and stamping. Later Ann saw that it was perfect for her placement of the steps in her sketch! and later glued on a suitcase cut out.

by Susan Cornelis

In the afternoon we found a comfortable shady spot and I did this sketch to demonstrate how a little detail goes a long way (and that’s all you have time for anyway when you’ve got a lot to see and your travel mates are ready to move on). And later I added the words about a very old, bent over man who approached me while I was eating my ice cream in front of the grocery store. “Do you need a ride to Windsor?” he asked, and then got in his beat up truck and drove away? ? ? leaving me to ponder. However, that evening my family went out to dinner and ended up in Windsor (the first time in two years!) so do you think the man was psychic? Anyway, I always encourage people to write things like this in travel books, anything relevant to the experience of the moment. Then the book becomes a recording of sensory experience which makes us recall the immediacy of the experience even years after.

There’s a beautiful quote from Wandering by Hermann Hesse which relates this aspect so powerfully:

I leaned on the fountain and made a sketch of the rectory with its green gate, which I really like best, and with the steeple in the background. Possibly I’ve made the gate greener than it really is, and I may have made the steeple taller than it really is. All right. All that matters is that for a quarter of an hour this building was my home. Some day I will think of this rectory and grow homesick, though I just stood outside and looked at it, though I knew no one who lived in it - it will make me homesick as if it were really my home, one of the places where I was a child, happy. Because here, for a quarter hour, I was a child, and I was happy.

Many thanks to the wonderful artists I spent this happy time with on Saturday!

Tomorrow - a cooler Sunday sketch workshop.

Coming up: Travel Sketchbooking

Watercolor and pen in Arches Travel Book

I have sketchbooks filled with menus of meals eaten in restaurants. You’d think that’s all I do when i take trips! Not so. It’s often the only time one has for sketching though, because you’re sitting down for a few minutes. You have water in your glass for the paints, and napkins to use and you can even sketch on your lap below the table top level if you’re sketching that fascinating fellow who’s just a few feet away at the next table. These are the kind of on-the-spot lessons we’ll be having this weekend when the sketchbooking classes will be eat-sketching at the Union Hotel Cafe, and then around town. One on Saturday and one on Sunday. I can’t wait! I did the above demo sketch three years ago at another Travel Sketch workshop in the same spot.

Metamorphosis

Ink, acrylic, pen, collage on sketchbook paper

These butterflies have been with me all spring - in my garden, in my belly and on the paper. They get me all fluttery with new ideas. I didn’t get new baby chicks this spring, figuring I had enough to do with a big high school senior to launch. But then came the fluttering of butterfly wings to distract, or maybe to help me with my own transmutation.

THe words above say “what would you do for love?” I imagined going into a pitch dark cave on a rescue mission, armed with nothing but Love. There’s a monster in there, but no, the monster turned into me in a mask with butterfly wings.

I’ve been reading Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight, so full of new insights for me, and contemplating the hemispheres of my own brain and how they work (or don’t) together. Then I ran across this creativity test on the internet, and while I scored 60% right brain, 40% left brain, my scores pointed to a lack of balance. Maybe I had a stroke and didn’t know it. Or maybe I’m just cursed to live a life where all problems get solved by my circling around them several hundred times first. I’d gotten used to this about myself, but it sure drives my family crazy. So take the test only for a good laugh, and whatever you do, don’t let it tell you you’re not creative. We all are creative. We all have right hemispheres, and our brains have the plasticity of Silly Putty (well, not that much maybe).

Oh, you simply must see Bob’s latest post titled “Stroke”, such an interesting sort of abstraction, which almost seems like an illustration for Jill Bolte Taylor’s book.

Post graduation

Me, Ben-graduate, Andy

Ben is post-graduation, post-all night party today. And those eagle wings seem stronger and less in need of a mother bird today. I even caught myself saying “Maybe you should take a nap before you go out tonight.” Then stopped and said aloud (so I would hear myself) “But you don’t need me saying this any more.”

I didn’t even cry at graduation! Even when the choir sang sweet good bye songs, and the kids I’d known since 5th grade marched across the stage. But that may have to do with the 90 degree heat and worrying (like a mom once again!) about the graduates sitting in the direct sun in their black caps and gowns and dress clothes underneath, while the parents sat in the shade fanning themselves and drinking cold drinks.

Now my 89 year old mom is here making her way slowly and happily through the high school yearbook, reading the boys’ research papers and looking at art projects, drinking in their youth like a tonic.

When the eagle spirit appeared (last post) to carry the diploma, I realized it was Ben’s guardian. Later I remembered, that when he was a child, I painted a large eagle in a baseball cap and tacked it on the wall in his room that I’d painted blue for the sky, with white clouds. It seems that eagle has been there all along.

The clatter of mortar boards

I can hear the flutter of wings amidst the clatter of mortar boards.

When did my baby bird with downy wings grow these eyes of keen focus and far seeing vision,

these lustrous wings to carry him far away to the north country?

He is becoming the eagle, ready to perch in high places,

survey the four directions, use his keen perception and great speed

as a creative force in the world.

This is my vision, seen through tear filled, age-dimmed eyes, with a mother’s love and with an anxious knot in my stomach. Ben’s high school graduation ceremony is Thursday and I will surely embarrass these men in my family with a pitiful display of tears, maybe even sobs! (heaven forbid!) I am after all the one who cries while listening to the TV news stories, at every single wedding and funeral I’ve ever attended or the telling of any moving story. There are other land mines awaiting me this week. I’m so swelled up with pride about my oldest son (youngest too, but that’s a different story) right now I can hardly see my feet. But somehow that confidence coexists in the same bosom with that anxiety (about sending him unprepared out into the world) that can give me heart palpitations in the middle of the night! Deadline is end of August when we send him off to U.B.C. Vancouver. About every day lately I come up panicked with some life lesson I must get him to learn/understand NOW! When his eyes do the rolling and glazing over number that every parent knows so well I go a bit ballistic. Then come to my senses, take a deep breath, and. . .well the art helps.

Eggsistentially speaking

Acrylic, ink, collage on sketchbook paper

Out of the ashes (or clippings from) failed paintings new works are born! or rather perhaps they will be born when the eggs crack open. Maybe that’s what these paintings of birds and their eggs are leading toward - a cracking open and rebirth? I try to paint a series and what happens is that the series paints me. This week I struggled to finish paintings I started days and weeks ago. There’s one that’s died and been resussitated so many times. I’ll walk in and see it out of the corner of my eye and a whole new figure will jump out at me and demand to be seen. Right now it is sitting there screaming at me that the shape of its head is too round and must be fixed. Irritated, I reply “but then I’ll have to change lots of other areas as well”. It responds “Yeah, your point? Did somebody tell you this painter thing would be fun and easy?”

Well this makes me feel pretty sheepish, because this is what I tell my students all the time “Painting should be fun!” while I watch them suffer and paint themselves into corners. Then I switch around on them and talk about painting as “process”. Very slippery of me. My personal solution is to do a “contemplative sketch” or “soul sketch” like the one above. It really is play or at least starts out with the open invitation. And it doesn’t have to ever be FINISHED!

I can tell you this little sketch that took 1/2 hour lifted my spirits enormously. My son Ben will be going off to college in August. He’s majoring in Engineering Physics and he’s so into it that he goes around trying to explain the principles of physics and math theorems to me. Good luck, I say! (and try to listen and look like I’m intelligently understanding). So here I have my own formula for enlightenment, 0 + infinity. When you feel like a zero, you’re closest to the infinity of enlightenment. Maybe it should be 0 = infinity