Sebastopol: Muse Group Reunion and a Visit to Lewis Dr

This was my second annual Muse Group Reunion since I moved away from Sebastopol and the group of students/friends I’d known for years. They of course had continued to meet and explore all kinds of new mixed media fun without me and grown stronger as a group. Happily my honorary member status lets me slip right back into the group when I’m in town. That Tuesday last week was one of those now familiar downpour days where you wonder if the puddle will follow you inside. 

It was the second day of Spring and I shared a technique that works so beautifully to channel that inner spring bloom mania many of us get when, after a long winter, the blooms start to manifest. I call it Painting with Water Shapes. It actually works best, I think, when you apply it to shapes from your imagination. So whatever your imagination is full of at the moment (haha!), which for me is leaves and blooms, can manifest in your water shapes.  For some it might be people, or musical instruments, or even cars and airplanes! Here’s my demo from the day.

Higgins waterproof inks blended in water shapes and folded pen calligraphy

There’s a carnival going on in this spring garden, and you’re all invited!

Skip over the puddles or splash through and join us. 

The seeds have teamed up this season and shared their genes

In passionate coupling under dripping trees

Creating in their dye pots wild alien species

Abandoning all rules of floral etiquette

Falling over each other in a dizzying drama of originality

Twining and turning and popping up their heads

Giggling at the absurdity of it all. 

Higgins inks charged into painted water shapes.

If you want to try this. my advise is to start by painting watery shapes with your brush, maybe with a touch of pigment so you can see them. Then just charge the inks or watercolors (with just enough water to make them fluid) into the water shapes. As soon as you tip the paper to watch the colors blend, the action starts! So be on your toes to connect new water shapes, charge in more pure color, stop inclining the paper and let it dry! Otherwise mud has been known to happen.

Another practice painting. You learn from each try!

And here they are, the Sebastopol Muses, (minus 3). Golly I miss em! Always up for art fun together.

 

Laguna de Santa Rosa

Next day, out on the flooded Laguna de Santa Rosa,  the mustard and oxalis were blooming and skies and earth doing that scintillating mirror dance.

And my favorite countryside sketching spots. . .

Those gnarly oaks I struggled for years to paint! 

Before leaving Sonoma County for the Bay Area part of my visit, I stopped by our old home on Lewis Dr., talked to a couple neighbors and got a tour of the property from the current (and exceedingly happy) owner, who is turning my art studio into a guest cottage. 

My mother’s memorial weeping cherry tree was in bloom! The pipevine, long cultivated by me for the life cycle of the Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly, was displaying its signature Dutchmen’s pipe blossoms, and the lemon bush was blanketed with Meyer lemons. 

And then the chicken coop, Bob’s studio, and the interior of my studio was gone, making room for new home owner dreams I guess.

Meanwhile Bob is outside right now securing our vegetable garden here in Olympia so the deer don’t get in when we start planting veggies. The blossoms are popping out everywhere now in Olympia and in my back yard. Changes everywhere every day. Isn’t life a wild ride!?

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The Latest Drip Creatures

I started a new Playful Muse workshop series yesterday with an enthusiastic group of artists. As soon as they introduced themselves I realized that they would have no problem with the Drip Creature lesson I’d planned!

My demo consisted of the usual; painting a water shape and dropping in inks and gesso and then moving it all around with fingers, rollers, splatters, scrapers, etc. making sure to get some dripping off the paper to suggest possible legs. The only thought in my mind was to not make it look like yet another bird. No problem. Mr. Hiveskeeter appeared after a few minutes.

Do you sometimes get a glimpse of something shining with possibilities? I mean an idea, that is not clear to you yet, but holds enough promise to make you want to fly with it? Well Mr. Hiveskeeter did! I wonder what it was he really saw. You can always ask your critter to talk to you and they will answer. Or just speak for them!

painting with water shape, acrylic inks, gesso and collage on watercolor paper, finished with fineliner pen

Looks like you just got a bright idea, one to stick in that beehive of yours to keep for later. And you are so pleased with yourself, so utterly delighted that your bizarre attire is coming to life as well. Soon those buttons will pop and wings sprout and that stick of a body will become exotic and fly you off to not-yet-known locales where your Heaven Bank Notes are worth more than here. And the sages will be sharing the secrets of life, longevity, and more. . . 

I know, sounds a bit like a fortune cookie, but that’s what happens when you find a pack of Chinese blessing money in your collage file!

One of my favorite poet philosophers, John O’Donahue wrote that “The imagination is drawn to what is awkward, paradoxical, and what’s contradictory. For the imagination contradiction is interesting. The imagination can dwell with contradiction and deepen it because it has a loyalty to the deep unity where everything comes together.” So I always suggest to students that they let themselves search out and find that which is a bit strange, in collage or word and see what they can do to find a place for it in the art. Sometimes the stranger it is, the better it works.

Each creature yesterday was different and each spoke to us in the writing with unique messages, blessings, and perspectives that the group could enjoy.

This was my warm up drip before the class. Yet another bird, I thought at first, til I saw the dog face emerge! Nothing profound here, just a character introducing herself as Birdog.

A Regatta in Fabric Collage

The students in Tuesday afternoon’s Muse Group arrive early and unpack their paints and brushes and start enjoying each other’s company. We are mostly women of a certain age. An age of experience, of wisdom one might say. And sometimes the conversation veers in the direction of age itself, which we are mightily involved in understanding. After all, aren’t we all, at any age trying to figure out what exactly it means to be 20 or 30 or 50 or 70?

At my age  the discussion revolves around the question of “how much longer”? Small wonder then that issues around this very question arose as I worked on finishing my demo for the fabric collage lesson.

fabric and paper collage, stamping on acrylic monoprint, 10 X 11″

A regatta of tombstones. Jump on and they’ll carry you downstream. On your merry way you will pass the others, the ones who have already passed. But don’t worry. They don’t mean to frighten, though they are a gentle reminder to wake up, enjoy the river’s currents, the flowers along the banks, the flags waving in the breeze. This regatta is not really a race, but don’t dally in the reeds. There’s not much time left for this journey.

Another note I must add. The delightful KQED Masterpiece Sanditon episode I watched on Sunday involved a regatta. That’s all it took for black and white striped ribbon cut outs to become flags and the blank white spaces to become a blue river!

Love is the Cure!

My gift to you on Valentine’s Day is Rumi and a painting inspired by his ecstatic poetry. First, the poem. . .

Love is the cure,

for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain

until your eyes constantly exhale love as effortlessly

as your body yields its scent.

acrylic and collage and gel pens on acrylic textured w/c paper, 10 X 11″

In Muse Group this week we painted larger, on 1/2 sheets of watercolor paper (15X22″), in acrylic and then used cropping borders to find the painting “gems” within the borders. Some of us left the painting whole and others (like me) cut it up.

Here’s the painting before carving.

Now I also have an assortment of interesting “remnants” to put together in another painting, which I may share. . . if and when it comes together.

Now enjoy your chocolate and whatever lovemaking of the emotional, carnal, and/or spiritual kind you have in mind for this lovely non-holiday.

Paint the Rhythms

The Tuesday Afternoon Muse Group just started a new 6-week session yesterday after a 2-month break. We really needed a way to get the Muse juices flowing again. So I pulled out a lesson from years ago which I created with inspiration from Gabriella Roth’s 5Rhythms dynamic movement practice, which I have experienced as a powerful and joyful way to tune up the body and mind.

My studio is a tight space so we had to drop the dance part, but we added our acrylic paints and inks, fingers and brushes and scrapers and misters and rollers and etc. and painted to music of the 5Rhythms: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness. We had about 10min for each of the pieces (I played the music for each rhythm through twice) before moving on to the next. Here are mine:

Flowing

Staccato

Chaos

Lyrical

and Stillness.

We held up all our paintings from the same rhythm to see how we had embodied the each piece of music in color and movement of line.

Not many surprises there. They were all different, yet with some general predominant color similarities, like blues for flowing and more reds for chaos. Chaos rhythm was a favorite of course. We all love to feel the freedom to pull out all the stops and let our hair down!

 

Mixed Media at The Living Room

Ruth and I showed up for the Mixed Media Art play Group we’ve been leading at The Living Room with bags of materials to set up in the dining room after lunch. The group is sort of like the Muse Group I teach in my studio, only with a lot of wild cards. We fill the tables with paints and paper and marking pens and collage packets and watch the women trickle in. Most of them are friends now, known to us through their enthusiastic participation.

V. sits down and starts singing the song she woke up with, her own cheerful song about it being an art-group day. She has brought some aged wood shingles she found and she wants to paint a madonna on them. S. brings all her belongings with her so they will be safe while she paints. She has written a poem about homelessness. Soon the two of them are engrossed in their art and singing popular songs.

The tables fill up. We have 11 people and scurry around to get paper and collage packets to all.  Then it gets very quiet as they cut and paste. Later they do a free write, and then share and laugh and appreciate each other’s work.

The following week we are prepared with the template of a profiled face for them to develop a self portrait on. They are able to jump right in with paint and collage, some tackling the work metaphorically and others with some realism.

As they leave the room we are showered with their gratitude. We are excited and a bit tired, but quite certain that our gratitude for being able to spend this time with them at least matches their own.

Post Apocalypse Self Portrait

Still no rain here in the north San Francisco BAY area, but we’ve just weathered another apocalyptic fire. Everyone’s talking about it – how to prepare for the next one. . .we all believe there will be the next. . .or how to get out of Dodge and go somewhere there will be no environmental disasters. And where is that elusive Shangri La?

It seemed like a good time to pull out the old zany self portrait lesson in Muse Group. To avoid having to look at ourselves in the mirror and trying to draw ourselves, we just clowned in front of the computer to capture our very own comic strip character and went about painting and collaging the marvelous emotional entanglement that is our lives at the moment. Just that. Nothing deep and analytic or prophetic. Just one in an infinitude of selves we carry around all the time.

Here’s what popped out on my paper this time.

Collage on acrylic painted background with a Photo Booth Comic Strip-filtered selfie.

Post Apocalypse Self Portrait

Aargh! What a place to call home.

So beautiful it makes your heart ache

so treacherous…… it makes your heart ache.

I want to move and I can’t bear to.

I want to stay and grow old – er, but can I bear it?

the fires the floods and heaven forbid the earthquakes

But the bees and butterflies, they stay

as do the birds

and our cats

and the flowers and trees bloom and fruit each year

and. . .

we will not leave

Windows

I pulled out all my dry media materials last week for Muse Group; pencils of all sorts, pastels, crayons, charcoal. Lots of those things which I normally stay away from so my pieces don’t get all smudgey when I put them in the loose leaf books.

But there’s something so satisfying about delineating with texturey marks or coloring in, not to mention, smudging on purpose. I pulled out a piece I’d begun weeks ago, and then played around on it with a charcoal pencil.

acrylic, photo transfer by Bob Cornelis, collage, charcoal pencil on w/c paper

Windows have eyes on the world

Everywhere. Stand still and gaze out. Or

Stand outside. Pick a window that has movement beyond it. Now

You’re a peeping Tom, a busybody. So

Be discreet and tell yourself you’re just an artist, a storyteller,

A poet, a blogger looking for “material”.

Privacy no longer exists.

Perhaps it never did

For the artist.

Ah! such a one am I. Not a snoop by nature. But there’s something about looking closely at things, people, landscapes, animals – looking at the details – which leads to a growing fascination and a curiosity. And that leads to words and paragraphs.

Oh dear please. I am not a busybody, am I?

Meditation Garden and Art at TLR

Once a week for the past month I’ve been entering through the gate at The Living Room (TLR) laden with art supplies for the mixed media expressive art class. Ruth from the Muse Group meets me there, also laden with fun art stuff. This week she found me in the garden sketching a lovely corner of the day shelter compound that I hadn’t captured in sketches yet – the Meditation Garden.

I was well into this sketch when the subject I would have liked to sketch – a woman who is the owner of the bike – showed up. In the shade of the arbor she unpacked a loaded backpack, got it organized and repacked before heading out on the bike. There’s always a great deal of packing and unpacking going on here at this place where women come for day time respite and services before heading out again, to manage lives that are often lacking in secure housing.

On the day of our art group the resource room where we meet is a bustling place with women using computers for email and phones for inquiries about jobs, housing and a million other life concerns. As they finish up and file out to the hot lunch which is being served in the dining area, we turn the room into an art room with watercolor paper  and colorful inks and acrylic paints spread around the tables, along with stencils and stamps and squirters and scrapers and rollers for application. At noon the women start wandering in, up to seven or eight of them, and soon the small room is full of artists who have no trouble figuring out what to do with the paints!

Ruth and I quickly realized that what these folks needed was not an art class but an opportunity to play with materials without being encumbered by performance expectations. (Don’t we all need that!?)

This past week the room filled with a happy, raucous energy that was reflected in the paintings.  It was the last of our meetings in this series. (The regular Expressive Arts team returns with their wonderful program this coming week.) I think we were all a bit sad to have to draw our time to a close, possibly even especially Ruth and I.

I’ll be back this week though and probably for years to come, helping out with the meditation group, sketching stories and best of all, seeing my friends.

Nests and Eggs and Musings

The eggs that are hatching in my garden now are the Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly larva. But for many years I had chickens behind the studio. And I’ve always been a bit enthralled, especially in spring with the way nature reproduces itself with the wonder of eggs and nests. My own wonder has led to incompetent to efforts to make nest-like constructions in my art. I suppose this one is the spring 2019 version, “hatched” in my Muse Group last month.

Suspension

hanging on by tendrils

threads woven of plant fiber

married with that animal matter of fertility

eggs colored pastel in dyes for the season

warming under feathered bodies before their big break.

mine are remembered each year in flat painted form

they have no smell, no thickness even,

but they will never crack

frozen in memory, always perfectly as they were/are

reminders of tadpole hunting in ponds

with little boys two decades ago

Ah, over two decades ago I haunted ponds in Tilden Park with two little boys who loaned me their wide open eyes each new day. Pollywogs and chrysalids came home with us from those expeditions, and frogs sang to us at night from our small backyard pond on Albany hill.