Places

I realize there are several paintings I didn't post when I wasn't posting. 

  

Might As Well Paint

Last Saturday, I visited Defender's Park in Pasadena.  It's a small park with some significant monuments, but I believe its main purpose is access to the Colorado Bridge.  Because the mountains looked beautiful, and not because I'm obstinate, I painted with my back to the bridge.  There is a sign posted at the bridge to discourage suicide, "there is hope."  My back was to the sign as well, but not metaphorically or anything.  I started painting relatively early and relatively small, which afforded me some extra time to do little people studies.  They include a couple of painters and some unsuspecting walkers.  

Here is the view that is behind you if you are driving west on the Colorado Bridge or sitting and painting it at street level.

Atmosphere

I painted this on my birthday, up in the foothills.  I kind of like the sky and receding hills.  The shrubs and grass in the foreground bother me a little, but that's the nature of shrubs and grass.  I look at these landscapes sometimes, and think of how pastoral they might have looked before the phone poles.  One of the guys I paint with really likes the phone poles, and observes that they will undoubtedly become obsolete and disappear in a few more years.  People who are young now will be old then and they'll look back with fond nostalgia on our paintings of phone poles.  I consider sometimes how my adult life has been marked by the arrival and departure of plastic grocery bags.

I kind of wish it were a valentine.  Maybe inside the house on the first floor, there's a sturdy kitchen table.  On the table is a half-made valentine, lettered and painted, with scraps of ribbon and lace, and that super-fine sparkly glitter.  Some of the glitter will stick to the tabletop for all time and defy every effort to scrub it off.  Kind of like love itself, and what it leaves on your heart.      

New Year's Resolutions

Then January got away.  I had that (or some other) nasty-assed virus that laid me up for like two weeks.  Very unlike me, taking to bed.  It kind of tore down all my resistance and then swallowed up my new year's resolutions.  Will power does not fare well in the face of chills and paroxysmal coughing.  But you know what?  None of the resolutions pertained to blogging anyhow.  I resolved neither to do it more frequently nor give it up altogether.

I painted at Heritage Square last Saturday.  I usually don't take the painters to places that cost money, but I'm kind of a fan and supporter of Heritage Square.  I also think on a typical Saturday HS has a really great ambiance; like you've gone back in time 150 years, and there aren't any cars or leaf blowers or plastic bags.  It's quiet and lazy.  They have recently installed a reproduction of an old timey pharmacy, filled with a huge collection of  antique pharmaceuticals, beauty supplies, prophylactic devices, liver pills and snake oils that were amassed over the years by a family of pharmacists.  I looked for, but could not find, Colonel Green's elixirs.  But I could have missed it.

There's something a little strange about this painting, and I can't quite figure out what.  Someone suggested the shadows were a little ominous. There's a kind of pointed absence of people in broad daylight.  Suggesting that a shoot out could be imminent. You wouldn't know it if I didn't tell you, but that's my red car just beyond the gates.

Christmas House

My parents moved to San Marino when I was three.  Then, as now, some civic-minded volunteers in San Marino dressed its large bus stop up for the holidays.  We live now in an era of excesses, and this doesn't seem like too big a deal.  There's all kinds of crazy decorations everywhere.  But back in the sixties, this was a big deal.  My dad must have shot a couple of rolls of black and white film to capture this bit of Christmas finery.

Although this is clearly in the style of a church, the temporary structure is known as the Little Christmas House.  It may be San Marino's effort to separate church and state, but it isn't a more non-sectarian holiday house.  Santa Claus used to show up there one day a year, and talk to kids about whether they'd been good and what they wished for.  Maybe he still does, but I don't know.  He gave out Christmas themed Little Golden Books like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Biggest Most Beautiful Christmas Tree.  I met Santa there.  I got my book.  I also sang carols there with Brownie Troop 97 and our dads.  I have a picture.  My dad isn't in it, because he took it.

It was a odd place to paint, sitting out in the middle of Huntington Drive, looking a bit like a hobo and worrying about runaway cars.

Back Home

This was just last Saturday, plein air painting in my own backyard.

Log del Capitano

Hah!  I found the journal.  Here are substantial excerpts.  I'm not too worried about exposing too much of myself.  Sort of like the money belt I took traveling, I am never without my filter

So, I took the D bus over the Arno.  I went to Pitti Palace, Boboli Gardens, other gardens, walked outrageous amounts in gardens, climbed stairs, saw views, saw little museum collections of stuff and beautiful interiors.  Have not seen San Lorenzo and Chapelle Medicee.  I do not know where I get my bus to Poppi.
I'm not speaking much, but some of it is Italian.  Apparently Italian people like wagons and hatchbacks as much as I do.  They drive on cobblestones and probably don't whine about potholes.  For a while I was flattered that lots of people asked me for directions in lots of languages, but I think its just that I am a woman by myself and as such unthreatening.  Most of the women I've seen by themselves are walking dogs, and they are certainly not tourists.  Really not alone either, and possibly not unthreatening.  It's easy to smile at people walking dogs, just like at home.

Churches or cathedrals that are hundreds of years old smell just like churches I've attended.  What is that smell?  Marble, stained glass, candles, people, holiness?  It would be difficult to forget God with the church bells around here.  I'm not experiencing Florence night life.  If you pick up gravel here, you might be picking up bits of Etruscan, Roman, or at least Medieval antiquities.

I did mail postcards.  I changed dollars and felt cheated.  I think the ATM is better.  I can't take the bus to Poppi.  It isn't running because of the bicycle race.  The train doesn't go directly.  A taxi will cost 120 euros. It has been many years since I spent this long out of the presence of people who love me.  I am awkward and sad.    

Where did November go?

I've been losing the strangest things lately - like the Christmas lights and the little travel journal sketchbook thingy I brought to Italy.  The latter I was going to use as the basis of this post.  As I sought to explain "lonely and awkward" to the uninitiated, my very raw and unedited scribbles of my awkward and lonely thoughts illustrated with some crappy little pen drawings would help.  But it isn't to be.  I replaced the Christmas lights tonight.  Buying new ones may just bring the old ones out of hiding.

The painting here is my last Saturday painting before I left the country.  It may be the pinnacle of my former quirky style of painting.  I can't quite shake the stuff I learned in the workshop.  I wouldn't want to unlearn it, but it would be nice to use it at will, or at will paint something more like this instead.  I kind of trust it will sort itself out as long as I keep on painting some way or other.    

This is in Sierra Madre Canyon.  It turned out not to be my best day, but it could have been much worse.  I'll say no more about it.  

Tuscany

So I took a trip to Italy.  I had worried about taking a vacation by myself, or with anybody else for that matter, since my husband was absolutely the best traveling companion.  So I got the idea of finding a painting workshop.  I had never been to one, but I knew a little about them.  I thought I'd probably like other people who painted and find them easier to talk to than just the normal run of strangers.  .

 I hadn't really figured on traveling quite so far.  I thought I'd find something maybe in Taos or Provincetown or the Sierras.  But then without looking very hard, I learned about a workshop in Tuscany with instruction by a painter I admire, Michael Reardon.

Encouraged by friends and family members, I traveled far from home and painted.  I also spent a few days in Florence by myself seeing sights.  A lot of it was just wonderful.  Some of it was awkward and lonely.  Plenty of time and space for personal reflection.  New ways of painting.

I think I could like being Italian.  They drive small hatchback cars, and drink delicious coffee with great efficiency.  Their meals are long, and some of the food is quite heavenly.  The wines are affordable and very drinkable.  People are cheerful and competent and good-looking.

On Broadway

I painted this picture in my painting class, but I did it without too much help, just the extra set of eyes noticing that the angle of the windows was inaccurate, and the light in the distance was colored the same as the closer light.  The source was a photograph I took standing out on Broadway waiting for the Last Remaining Seats showing of All About Eve at the Los Angeles Theater.  I think when I edited my photograph of the painting to adjust for the the indoor lighting I may have lightened it up too much.  It's dusk.  The sky is a deeper blue.  The sun is still shining on the tops of the buildings, but night has fallen at street level.

The Last Remaining Seats is a program of the Los Angeles Conservancy, where older classic movies are shown on big screens in the historic movie houses in Los Angeles.  I think my husband and I got onto this in its early years, almost accidentally, because my son, rather inexplicably, fell in love with Laurel and Hardy.  Parents are willing to go out of their way to witness their small boy laughing with reckless abandon.  Broadway in Los Angeles was lined with theaters at one time and some of them still remain, some restored and some repurposed.   Just a few years ago, Broadway was mainly a shopping district filled with new immigrants and cheap electronics.  Trendy hipster restaurants are popping up now.

I'm an older person now.  I don't even wait around for people to ask me what it was like when I was young.  I tell them.  I didn't like history when I was a kid.  The first time I was interested in history, my grandparents were already dead.  And I thought about how the world must have looked to them, as World War I began or as cars took to the roads.