I Survived Lake Oswego

This will be another war story to add to the 28 year collection. We have experienced wind, hail, tornado warnings, torrential rains and now 100 degree plus heat during our time spent at art fairs. Our heat this weekend was paltry compared to what Midwesterners experience in the summer but 101 degrees in Portland is extreme. I took some amusing pictures of my neighboring artist friends to share with you but remember it was near the end of the day when we were all deranged by hours of crushing heat; most of the fair visitors had departed for cooler venues and we were left to survive on externally applied ice and laughter.

Here is my friend Betsy Bensen with her feet on a block of ice. She will have a fit over this picture but it is my blog so ha ha Betsy.


Her booth was right next to mine and every day she brought me a bag of cold edible pod peas fresh from her garden so I really should be nicer than to publish this but isn't it great? She is usually very proper I assure you but since I saw her last she has pierced her nose so I think she has some wild-child inside her wanting to come out. Please check out her website and admire her beautifully fabricated jewelry. She is one of the founding mothers of the Village of Willamette show in West Linn and a trainer of guide dogs and the mother of two teenaged girls and a tireless volunteer worker in support of charter schools. In other words, a pillar of the community. With her feet in a bucket.


This kind lady allowed me to photograph her (ahem) top parts so you could see her tats of love birds. She had so many it was hard to choose but these were unusual (to me) so I chose them. Some day I am going to do a BIG painting of a tattooed woman. With a clipper ship somewhere. To show that she has been many places and experienced the wonders of foreign ideas.


Here is my friend Marla Baggetta. She is demonstrating the quick reflexes she has acquired in her Nia class and showing off her springy haircut at the same time. She wins the top award at every show we go to so you can go to her site if you want to but I'll be darned if I'm going to promote her. Dang, can she paint!

OK, OK, she is really nice too and an excellent mother to 2 teenaged sons and has a darling husband who is also a great artist and they are ITALIAN and soooo cool. She has the teaching creds and is off to a fabulous career. We love Marla!


Felix the cat. This lady likes him as much as I do because she has him tattooed on her shoulder. She really makes me want a tattoo of Felix. I am such a chicken. I don't have any tattoos. Maybe I get my thrills vicariously through the young and young at heart who do have them. I love the way society is always changing and letting in new ideas. When I grew up tattoos signified prison time. Now they separate the hipsters from the milquetoasts.


This is Alan McNiel and his wife Debbie. They are both accomplished artists. Alan has taught me much of what I know about oil painting, wax, making my own varnish and moving from watercolor to canvas which is the trajectory each of us has taken in the last decade. We met years ago at a show in Idaho when I fell in love with a poster Alan had created of a band of musicians made up of porcupines. Alan is strange in the best possible way. Now he paints chickens perched on parking meters and cityscapes with ... I can't describe it. Go see. You'll be informed about how the creative mind works and about boldness and risk. His work is quite large and the surfaces are the most beautiful I have ever seen. He constantly inspires me to try new things.


Last picture. Tom Walsh standing with a friend in an ice chest of freezing water. Only 20 minutes until the close of the show when we are all gasping for relief. It was fun. It was surprisingly successful. As the Arabs say, "The dogs bark but the caravan moves on." Four more weeks until Bellevue, my next show.

Visualize

This is the painting I finished right before leaving for Edmonds.

I have been thinking a lot about how we move events in the world and how we affect others for better or for worse. Our thoughts are powerful and each word and act ripples out to touch others we have never even met. Most of my life I have careened around with little thought to the harm I might be causing others; I was only focused on my own needs and getting what I wanted. I think as we grow older and sense the end of the ride we realize that it is just easier and happier to help others and to share the burden when we can.

I think all of this and more was on my mind as I painted this picture.

News From Edmonds Show

Today I am catching my breath after returning home late last night from my show in Edmonds, Washington. We had a great time there visiting with our friends and selling the art. The weather was typically cool and damp but the hearty Pacific Northwesters turned out in large numbers to support the artists and to enjoy the great food and music. This is what the festival looked like from up the hill looking toward the waterway and the ferries. You can see the tops of all our booths lined up like a little temporary village. I love my little booth; I have all my comforts at hand there and when it rains (as it did) I am dry and happy. It is a little like camping out only without the campfire.


One of the things that makes this life wonderful is that you travel around the country and make lifelong friends with the other artists. One such friend is Rick Canham who is an extraordinary photographer and who also loves camping. He treks into remote areas with his pack and camera to get stunning nature shots and has great stories to tell of his adventures that include skydiving and foreign intrigue. He is a great connoisseur of people, food, microbrews and wines. He is the Rick from the wine tasting I described in an earlier post. (Sorry, I dont know exactly how to link back to it yet.)


The night before the show we followed a tradition of meeting at Las Brisas for Mexican food and Margaritas. John had chicken mole. No, not mole but moe-lay, a sauce from Oaxaca made with ground sesame seeds, chilis and other tasty ingredients that is served over meat. This is what it looks like.

Our friends Rick and Donna joined us and we kept each other well entertained through too many Margaritas. Great fun.

Donna Doersam is an artist from California who crafts intricate constructions out of paper, wood, string and wire. Maybe some other media too. Hers are fascinating inventions that are just like Donna; deeply intelligent, patiently ordered and endlessly beautiful.


Finally I have a tatoo to share with all my artist friends who love tatoos (as I do). This is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I am always on the lookout for good stuff to show here and shamelessly chased the poor woman down for you. Aren't you glad?

Thank you to everyone who visited me at Edmonds. My heart and head is full of the sweet memories of your faces and words. I am so grateful for the life I have and the people who I have been privileged to meet. I walk among angels.

Garden Update: Why I Moved to Oregon

In 1971 I made my first trip to Oregon in October. It poured rain for a solid week and was cold and gray the entire time. It was a sharp contrast to my home in Arizona. I returned to my life there (working full time at Motorola assembling widgets for the space program) and didn't think much about Oregon until June when I returned for another vacation. This time the weather was sunny and the garden of my friend was like Eden. We sat under her apple tree doing crafts on a picnic table and in the evenings we gathered herbs and greens from her garden for our evening meal. My friend was a maker of wine and a canner of fruit and a baker of bread - we were hippies! And oh my God if I didn't fly back to Arizona and put my house on the market and quit my job that I had held for nearly 8 years and move directly to Oregon. This is why. Raspberries.

And strawberries. (They are a weed that comes up everywhere that I am growing roses and under the peach tree and the fig tree. Hard to believe, I know but the birds eat them and scatter the seeds and they are very prolific.) We don't spray so we get volunteers. It is nature's reward to those who live in harmony with the earth. I picked these on Sunday afternoon, sliced and sugared them and by Sunday evening we had shortcake.


Our friend gave us a pot with a cutting of pinot noir grape. The magic gardener man put the pot in the shade of a rhododendron bush where it took root and grew up through the branches. This is our second year to have pinot grapes. I've made wine out of our other grapes but not these yet. Oregon is famous for her pinot wine.

Next come the onion blossoms. Aren't they beautiful? And so good in a spring salad.


The raspberries started ripening this week. These are growing through a soil sifter that John left leaning against the trellis.


Graham Thomas rose from the famous David Austin. Given to me by friends as a thank you gift for paintings I donated to the Doernbecker auction a few years ago. It is enormous and lusty.


Walking onions. They fall over when the heads are mature and the little babies tumble out on the ground where they take root. These two seem to be kissing.


Foxglove always seems like an ancient and dangerous flower. It came to us courtesy of the same birds that plant the strawberries. Must not be poisonous to them.


Another David Austin from the same source. This one is "Heritage" - extremely fragrant and has that twirling-quadrant form that I first saw in Paris in the garden of the Chartes Cathedral. I just love this one. The color and texture reminds me of a baby's skin.


My trusty man Hermanito taking a break out on the deck. He is old and sometimes grumpy with arthritis but most of the time a darling who asks for nothing more than constant attention. What a sweetheart.

That's the end of the Garden tour. I'll try not to do this too often but how can I resist when it is all so awesome and changes so fast? As I sit here I wish I had included my moss rose and the beans Kay and I planted the last time she was here. She soaked too many for herself so she brought a bunch of them to me and I poked them in and now I have bush beans coming up in my flower bed. My little green babies.

Collaborative Book; 2nd Entry

Had a great time Saturday afternoon working on the mermaid pages in Bee's book. I think working this way (participating in collaborative books) makes me think harder than anything else I do. Because I am not very experienced as a collage artist so I don't have a lot of past knowledge to draw on. What I do have, however is a large body of work and a feverish passion to create so I ran to the collage drawer where I have tucked away stamps, prints of my work, fancy papers and just plain trash and I let the materials guide me.


This is the first page. don't know if you can see the 2 pearls in the vinyl container but they are there tucked in with a piece of a map from the south Pacific. The little pearls represent mermaid seeds - Bee and myself as little glimmers in the eye of creation before we emerged from the deep fathoms of the sea. I attached the clear envelope with a green eyelet, strung a tag with fish on either side and started stamping away. The mermaid is an acrylic transfer from one of my paintings and the tape is aluminum plumber's tape. The postage stamp with the man's head is from Indonesia and was given to me in a trade at Artfest. My best ephemera came to me from total strangers at Artfest; given freely and generously. It is a place of many miracles and has had a profound effect on me and on the way I think about my art. I have learned not to take myself so seriously and that the goal is to have fun, not to be a genius. Once you get that you are really free.


On the next page I made two mermaids in Photoshop as opposing twins and added some writing from India that was left over from the painting with the Indian miniatures. For awhile I wanted all my writing in the book to be illegible so I did it upside down and backwards. Of course you can read it with a mirror. When I was a child I kept several diaries in this handwriting believing that my mother would never go to the effort of reading it. Ha! I was wrong about that.

The homesick mermaid is a page I did for a fatbook that was returned to me as an extra. That page was created from an actual wooden mermaid in my collection that I photographed against part of one of my paintings containing water. She is dreaming of her little grass shack on a desert isle; my secret place.

Most of the artists I know have a homesick quality to them. We squirm in our skins and our brains run too fast. We are not quite like the other fish and we know it. We feel most at home with the other free thinkers. Our imaginations are always supplying us with new material and we know how to make stories and objects and use metaphors and how to make our dreams materialize. All our lives we are apprentices; learning the secrets and formulas we need to do what we do even better. For the most part we keep our methods to ourselves; not because they are a secret but because we know that the fun is discovering things on our own and adding to our little bag of tricks all the time. We don't need fame or fortune. What we have is better than any of that.

This is the 3rd page with a transfer, a piece of tarleton that was left over from printmaking, and a vellum envelope with copies of atc's cut up and tucked inside. I collaged bits of my paintings around 2 sides and scribbled with the end of a paint brush into wet bronze paint for the center part.

I believe that every able bodied person has the ability to make art. It is not a specialty or a talent. It is something that is available to almost everyone and it will fill the hours with fascination and transcendence. There is something magic in it.

Working Without a Net

I probably get more questions about painting faces than any other single subject.

I think it helps to have been raised in a home where your survival depended on reading the faces around you. I learned quickly to automatically gauge the slightest change of expression to determine how I could help my mother. She was depressed and moody much of the time and there was no prozac or therapy for mothers in the 50's to turn to (thank God she did not drink) so ours was a household of emotional, hormonal women trying to find balance. My father on the other hand was volatile. His anger would take him to his bedroom to cool off (sometimes for hours) during which time the household hung suspended in helpless misery. We loved him so much and it crushed us to make him angry. I think our culture has made wonderful strides in the decades since then in dealing with depression and the anger it provokes. The only tools my parents had was their church which did give them a sense of community and support. But I wish my mother had been able to have more help than that. I wish she could have been happier.

In the event that you were not schooled in such a household I will let you look over my shoulder while I correct a face in a painting that is not quite right. You will have to look closely as the change will be subtle. I don't always fidget so much with expression in a painting but in this case it was important to the story and so I made some changes.


This is the face that needs correcting. I have painted a woman balancing on a tight rope. I want her to be concentrating but I think that in this case her expression is slightly too startled. She appears to be on the verge of falling (slightly fearful) and I don't want her to look like that. So I am going to make her eyebrows look less questioning and concerned and make her lips look more relaxed. These are the changes I make to take the fear out of her face.


Ahhh, that pleases me. I don't want her to look like she is falling. She has to work for it but she will keep her balance. Here is the painting in its entirety.

Paintings and Poppies

I thought it would be interesting to show a painting in progress and to describe the choices and struggles that face the artist as she chooses direction. I began by gluing images of Indian Miniatures around 3 edges of the painting. I have always been drawn to Indian Miniatures because that is the way I think when I paint. Tell a story. Lovingly describe all the details. Let it proceed slowly and with much thought. This painting is still in progress but at least it has arrived at a point where there are fewer decisions to make. So let's go.

After gluing down the miniatures I penciled in the drawing. On second thought I felt the drawing covered too much of the background as one of the inspirations in doing the painting was to have a particular pattern on the wall behind the flowers. So I ignored the pencil marks and redrew the idea directly on the canvas with black paint. Then I scumbled in the major areas of the flowers (changed from tropical to poppies), vase and fruit. I want this to be a love story between a man and a woman but subtle. I'm not entirely sure how I'll work that in yet but many of the little images depict lovers.
I continue working in the broad areas. Just getting the major composition sketched in.
Loose outlines added and trapping in the objects with black lines. I get bogged down and paint pale yellow over the pattern on the wall. That was a mistake. Now everything looks tight and unpromising. If I were a beginner this is where I would quit and throw myself on the bed. But I am a (ho ho) seasoned professional and so I merely have a snack and return to the fray.
Ack, could it get any uglier? I decide the flowers are constipated and too small so I draw them larger and fill in with color. Now I am hopeful.
That yellow has to go. I look through some art books and fiddle around awhile. I decide to try a grayish green on the background and I continue to refine the fruit and cloth.
I go outside and eat about a hundred strawberries and raw asparagus out of the garden. I come back in and put some strawberries in the painting. I dont know if they have them in Persia or not but they probably dont have bananas either so I keep going.
I put the background pattern back and refine the cloth and make it into a magic carpet. I have some Persian stamps so I collage them on the rug. I am probably going to make the wall more atmospheric and sand the border images and then tone the edges of the painting with a pale umber glaze. So it will change somewhat but I think I am almost there. I decide to blog the photos I've taken as a reward for finishing.

Edit: Wednesday afternoon. Finished the painting (I think) and decided to post another photograph. The adjustments made were minor, just a matter of fine tuning.
My purple poppies are blooming. They are everywhere, even after pulling out hundreds of volunteers this spring. The seeds are good in desserts and on breakfast rolls. The rose is Dainty Bess, one of my favorites and a gift from my youngest several Mother's Days ago.
This is a 36"x48" diptych I finished for a couple in Seattle. They asked for a ferry in the distance and that was fun to paint. The women are blue stockings - literary types discussing great books. Both the woman who ordered it and I are avid readers and I have done several paintings of women reading.
These are the poppies that volunteered from a planting done by our neighbor who raises the goats. A couple of years ago he planted wildflowers all along his fenceline and now we have the hearty red poppies. What riches accrue to us when we pay attention to all the beauty that surrounds us all the time. What's outside your window that is breathtaking and free? I hope something that gives you pause and helps you appreciate your miraculous existence.