Oaklawn

This painting is a part of the Oaklawn Bridge in South Pasadena.  The Oaklawn bridge is designated a National Historic Landmark.  It stands in some great company, with such bridges as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, several Bridges of Madison County, and the Natural Bridge in Virginia.  The Oaklawn Bridge leads in and out of an elegant planned neighborhood of the early 1900s.  The bridge spans train tracks and a tiny waterway.  It is presently used only by pedestrians.  The bridge, along with other Oaklawn features, was designed by Pasadena architects Charles and Henry Greene.  It is Greene & Green's only bridge and their only concrete structure.  It was among the first reinforced concrete bridges built in the United States, and the very first in the West.  So here is a drawing of the bridge, presumably by the Greenes.

It does and doesn't look like this today.  There is a lot of stuff in front and around it, including trees, power poles, buildings, and cars.  The residents of Oaklawn resisted the placement of a marker, and the designation as a significant site on old route 66.  You kind of can't blame them. Tourists and sightseers are only really welcome when they are spending money.  A newer resident is looking at the upside of Oaklawn's monument status, and attempting to replace a large oak tree that presumably once gave Oaklawn its name.

I cannot help thinking of the Florida International University pedestrian bridge that collapsed on March 15, and killed six people.  My heart goes out to those who were injured and those who lost loved ones.  Life is so fragile and precious.

Challenged

One of the things I like best about the world is that there are many little worlds within the world.  There are worlds that are very familiar to me, and many more I don't even know.  The worlds I dwell in include painters, dog-owners, and people who blog.  We have our own language, tools, ways of meeting, and things other people just wouldn't get.  I once was a band parent and a folk-dancer.  There are wine-drinkers, golfers, bingo-players, sailors, motorcyclists, swap meet people, runners, bookclubs and birdwatchers.  Families are little worlds, as are religious communities, schools and neighborhoods.  There are millions of online communities surrounding games and other interests or shared experience.  There are groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Weight Watchers that come together to support their members.  

When you do things alone, you can challenge yourself and set goals, but you can't compete with yourself, and, even if you could, you could still cheat with impunity.  You can affirm yourself and encourage yourself, but when you need encouragement and affirmation the very most, you will find it the hardest to deliver.  So in the online art world, there are challenges.  The challenges foster community and competition.  There are a few different challenges I've participated in and shared here.  One is the Every Day in May challenge, where we receive 31 drawing subject prompts, one for each day, and each day we prepare and post a sketch.  These are some of my favorites from 2016.

I am aware of challenges for writers and fitness buffs and beer drinkers.  I've no doubt that every stripe of community has (or could have) challenges to encourage greater levels of experience or accomplishment.  I checked, because I was curious, and found all sorts of challenges.  Typically, challenges last for a set duration of time, often 30 days.  I found this collection of 30 challenges  and this collection of 100 challenges.  The latter also references a book with 500 challenges.  I think if you wanted to do them all, you would have to overlap significantly, or you just wouldn't have time.  I think I could use a good challenge.  Anybody out there want to make a challenge?  I'll  take it, but you have to try it too.  

 

Wrigley's

This is a less recognizable view of the Tournament of Roses House, or Wrigley Mansion, on Orange Grove in Pasadena.  The mansion was designed by architect G. Lawrence Stimson for his parents and built starting in 1906.  The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 brought about an unexpected shortage of building materials, and the construction wasn't complete until 1914 - the same year Wrigley's Doublemint Gum debuted.  William Wrigley Jr. and his wife Ada then bought the home in 1916, adding to their already significant collection of mansions.  The Rose Parade was already a thing, and the Wrigleys enjoyed a fine view of it.  The Wrigleys bought and razed the house next door on Orange Grove, and made room for the roses in the foreground of this painting.  In 1958, the Wrigley family gifted the mansion to the Tournament of Roses.  Rose Queens are crowned here.  Many months out of the year, there isn't too much going on at the Tournament House; during those months the roses are at their best.  There is an enormous front lawn, and I think if I had power or sway or organizational skills, I would found a bocce tournament at the Tournament House lawn.
This was painted slightly less than two years ago, so don't be tempted to draw any conclusions about current trends in my paintings.

Nothingness

Teachers hear so many things from children that it is difficult to surprise them.  But every so often a student says something so remarkably insightful or so incredibly stupid that a teacher’s face shows palpable amazement.  I put that look on a teacher’s face once with a statement that was not really clever or silly.  My seventh grade history teacher Mrs. Eddas (I think) had just finished a lesson.  There was some time left before class was over.  Mrs. Eddas asked the class what we should do next.  I don’t remember what our likely choices were.  There might have been some kind of history trivia we played.  Maybe quiet study time; maybe a quick film; maybe a preview of the next chapter.  I said, “let’s do nothing.”  Mrs. Eddas claimed she had never heard of a child wanting to do nothing.  Apparently children were constantly in states of motion, noise and need.  I probably didn’t mean literally nothing, which is basically impossible to do.  And while I recall Mrs. Eddas’s reaction, I don’t recall exactly my motivation.  Was it just my laziness?  Or was my mindfulness advanced far beyond my years?   Now that my time is all my own, I think I spend far too much time doing nearly nothing. 

I think nothing is one of those totally illusive things.  Where you think there is nothing, there is a vacuum, or space, or a back hole.  There is silence or inactivity.  There is a secret or something you forgot. 

There are all kinds of rules about composition, applying to photographs as well as drawings and paintings.  One must have a focal point.  The focal point can’t be dead-center, and it can’t be falling off the edge of the page.  There will also be visual elements of secondary interest.  There must be contrast, particularly in values, but also in shapes and edges.  The composition must lead your eyes back into the picture.  Artists, however, are rule-breakers.  Furthermore, there aren’t really art police.   There are only other artists and observers of art.  So you will see works of art that depict nothing identifiable, works of art that are as minimal as a single dot or line, and pure White Paintings.  Paintings of nothingness.

 A picture need not be a picture of something.  When I stare into space, and someone asks me what I’m looking at, I respond “nothing.”  Much as you might catch me thinking of nothing.  But of course there’s something in front of me and my eyes are open and the image on my retina sends signals to my brain.  I think this painting is a little of the nothingness I might look into.  Not to say I don’t think it’s beautiful; I do.  It follows rules of composition, I think; the focal point is an empty space.  Honestly I didn’t even remember where it was, although I do remember sitting on a slope beneath a tree.  I think it was Deukmajian Park, but it might be Devil’s Gate Dam.  The sky looks like any kind of weather could happen, and the grass could be tall or minute, the hill slope steep or tiny.  I think I know why I painted it, but there’s nothing that you would guess at.