Work and Play

I'm lukewarm about this painting, but I tried something new.  I went to Pasadena's Central Park, where I've managed to produce a run of pretty nice paintings of the Castle Green, and I painted something different.  I can't even tell you for certain what it is, other than a view through the park and across the street to the west.  There's a little slice of playground, and some little painted children.  Previously mostly commercial and industrial, this part of Pasadena has become increasingly residential, and the park, once frequented by transient older folks, now seems to host an enormous playgroup of school-aged small children.  These are the slightly neurotic children of well-educated over-protective parents.  Sorry kids, but it's true.  I imagine the kids will be all right in the end.  No matter how much and for how long your parents protect you, eventually life is going to wallop some experience and character into you.  To clarify: I use wallop in a really figurative way, because I would be the last person to suggest we should return to a time when spanking was the norm.

I've railed before on this very blog I think about the trend toward safe and bland playground equipment.  There I go again sounding like I want children to get hurt.  It isn't that at all, but adventure, fear, risk . . . those are beautiful things.  Kind of almost worth flying through the air and landing hard with a mouth full of sand.  This playground equipment seems pretty safe.  No hard edges or hot metal, or free-fall from ten feet up, but still honestly it looked fun.  These little kids had their own challenges, trying to grow up under watchful eyes.

As it happens, I used to work across the street from this park, also to the west, but slightly further south, to the left and out of the picture.  I was only a few years wiser about the world than the children of the playground.  I used to walk across the street to the park for my lunch hour.  I probably even occupied the swings sometimes - those treacherous swings of a bygone era.  There were pigeons eating things they shouldn't and old tired men drinking from paper bags.

Lost or Stolen

When my hard drive gave out, I didn't lose any irreplaceable pictures.  I learned my lesson about that years ago.  I did lose one partly written story.  I'll briefly summarize it here, not actually the story, but what it was about. It was about collecting rocks for my garden.  I don't like the idea of purchasing rocks, not even precious ones, but particularly not the ones I stumble over - the ones placed by forces of nature long before I stumbled along.  I have purchased rocks anyway, but my car and I really can't carry more than a very few at a time.  Mostly I find rocks and carry them home.  Surprisingly, when you look for something like rocks (or used disposable lighters, combs, hair ties, or flatware,) it appears without explanation in your path.  There are good sized rocks sitting in city streets.  There are rocks in the wild and rocks in gardens.  I try, for the most part, not to take other people's landscape rocks.  Nevertheless, I lift rocks sometimes right from someone else's garden.  I half expect someone to emerge from a house, and shout stop thief!  That's my rock!  I have my rationalizations, but that's all they are.  And I have some rocks.  Not nearly as many as I need, and I still think I may have created a small depression in the surface of the earth.  Things and animals roll down hill toward my home.

The stone structure depicted here was a watering trough, built in 1906 and 1907 and much later designated South Pasadena historic landmark number 7.  It was a place for tired and thirsty horses and travelers to rest and hydrate on their way from Los Angeles to Pasadena.  Before people built lovely structures out of rocks, there were many more rocks just sitting around on the ground.

In Season

I'm pretty pleased with myself that I managed to get a photo in here with the new species of computer.  It only took an hour or so, and I may or may not be able to do it again.  I mean eventually I'm sure I'll be able to do it again.  

By most accounts, the Christmas season has passed.  The are still some lights up and some very dry trees at the curb.  Maybe you haven't started your diet yet - there are still those Super Bowl parties and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates to consume before you worry about how you look in your swim suit.  I painted this just after New Years.  Lots of painters came out to paint.  

It was cold and overcast when I started painting.  This is the Sierra Madre Congretational Church, or part of it.  They also have the white be-steepled church across the street that I've painted before.  I've always liked this building, but since we paint in the morning, it's always backlit and dark.  It wasn't so backlit on that gloomy January morning, and lack of light and shadows made the colors brighter.  And then I guess the sun crept overhead while I still had time to light up the stairs.  

With the fall foliage and the after Christmas wreaths, there's some blending of seasons.  When I'm outdoors, I notice a lot of that.  Leaves fall off and expose the buds of spring blossoms.  And each new spring blossom contains its fruit, its seeds and its inevitable end.  And its beginning.   Those dry fir trees at the curb, they've seen some things too.  Been witness to quiet cold starlit nights, birds and rain, decorations, gifts and holiday celebrations.  The trees aren't going to come back to life, but they will get to be mulch, and in the meantime the dogs like to sniff them.    

Yin & Yang & Rain

You appreciate food more when you've known a little hunger, and love more after loneliness.  It rained this morning.  I woke up at four and opened my window so I could hear hear the rain better, and went back to sleep.  When I went out to walk this morning, the world was so fresh and clean.  Colors looked washed and bright against the darkened wet ground and sky.  I thought about tree roots, close to withering and dying like so many have lately.  But then . . . a cool tickling moisture . . . could it be?  Could there be more?  Roots inhaling deeply, taking precious water in, up their trunks and to the tips of their leaves.  Trees were saved today.  I'm sure of it.  Trees were saved and mushrooms were born.  

I painted the tree in the picture, perhaps a year ago.  I hope this tree is still thriving and taking in the rain of the day.  As I think most tree people can tell, it's a nice big California live oak.  It grows in a curious little spot that is the tail end of the vestiges of a lost nature park.  This spot has been borrowed from the utility that owns the power lines and transformed into a semi-private sanctuary.  I'm going back to paint there next Saturday.  

Friend's House

We all probably think we grew up at the best possible time, back when kids were safe and had freedom, and there were infinite things to do and places to explore.  I think my own kids think that too.  Maybe everybody's childhood kind of shimmers in the distance.  Katie was one of my good friends growing up.  Our friendship probably peaked sometime between fifth and ninth grade.  After high school, she went to college out of state and moved away.  Thanks to Facebook, which is great for just this reason, we reconnected.  When Katie's mother passed away, and the family was selling their old home, she asked if I would paint it.  It's pretty close to where I live, so I gathered a few of my plein air painter friends and made a morning of it.

I love this painting.  A big part of that is probably that it made my friend and her sister truly happy, as well as a little comforted about giving up their childhood home.  Another reason I love the painting is that it's chock full of my own memories.  I'll come back to those.  And then I just think it looks good.  It isn't painted front on from a photograph.  I walked around and picked my favorite angle.  The light is pure Southern California.  It's not a real showpiece house; it's pretty basic, but in a lot of ways that makes for a better painting.  On request I enhanced the orange tree a little.  The tree  was struggling in the drought, had no oranges, and got removed not too long after.  I like the moon, peaking out in in the hot daylight.  And the memories.

Listening to record albums, especially The Beatles, over and over again until we knew them by heart.  Making prank phone calls.  Ditching my last undershirt there, not quite ready for a bra, but for damn sure was not going to wear an undershirt to junior high school.  My first slumber party, pretending I was hypnotized.  Walking to a nearby vacant lot with a tree to climb.  Walking to the variety store and buying candy and gum and wax lips and mustaches.  Puppies.  Looking over the back wall at the cemetery.  Teak Danish modern furniture that required coasters.  Which is what I still think of when I hear Norwegian Wood.  

Hey July

I have intentions of writing more.  I wanted to do a post called The Provenance of Plants, but I don't really have a picture that goes.  But I'll get to it I think, so please don't snitch the title.   I have a short story brewing in my head - really not so much a short story as kind of a memoir with touches of magical realism.  I have made some progress on my habits.  I've been off freecell and sweets for weeks now.

This is a painting made on the grounds of the the beautiful Church of the Angels on Avenue 64.  That's the way the Avenues of East LA are named - not 64th Avenue and not Avenida 64.  This hillside is very interesting, and I understand there are stairs to climb up it.  I will definitely do that one day, but not in the heat of August.

I used to work with a woman who asked me for a ride home one day, or actually only part of the way home.  She put me onto her shortcut from downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena, and I've used her shortcut ever since.  It's the 110 to Avenue 64 to the 210.  I wouldn't swear it's the fastest way, but it's direct and also scenic and relaxing.  That was how I came to notice this view and eventually paint it.  You can decide for yourself, but I like the eucalyptus and cypress trees best.    

Many Days

I participated in an "Every Day in May" sketching challenge.  I just counted up my pictures and I managed twenty days.  Which is not too bad.  There are a few more I might do yet, but more likely not.  I was hoping it would become my new habit - daily sketching - and supplant some of my television, facebook, sudoku and freecell.  Some guy in the 1950s posited it takes 21 days to form a habit.  Current research suggests it's much longer.  I could use some new habits.  And maybe a beer.

May

Nine or ten months ago, I painted at Singer Park.  It was an exceedingly lovely day, if I remember.  There was something nice about the people there, and not just the people I was painting with.  There were little kids there, I think, whose mother had just had a baby in the nearby hospital.  I put a person in my painting, and I think it's probably my best painted person  The proportions are nice, and there appears to be some walking momentum.  This is a fairly big painting, and after I painted it, I painted another.  

I still haven't learned who or what Singer Park is named for.  I'd like to know.  Singer must have been or done something special to have the park named thus, but if nobody knows what, then it's pretty meaningless.  We might as well call it Park Near the Freeway, or Park With Nice Restrooms.  I think I'll find out eventually.  After years of wondering, I just finally found the house where Guy Rose was from.  I'm going to see if there is something to paint there.      In the meantime, here's the second painting.  

Finally, I found a thirty day drawing challenge.  Thirty days seemed like a modest enough commitment.  So here's my day one drawing.  

Stepping Stones

For awhile I was painting on this oblong rough-textured watercolor paper.  I bought it, I remember, at a big sale, when all the more typical paper selections had sold out.  The paper ended up working so nicely that I used it all up and have been looking for more.

This was painted at the Self-Realization Fellowship International Headquarters.  It is a beautiful peaceful little chip of Los Angeles, with gardens in which to quietly reflect.  It is so peaceful that watercolor painting seems almost disruptive.  But who cares?

There are bonsai trees with large weights on the branches.  There are benches in the shade.  There are stepping stones.  Stepping stones are like life; at least they are more like life than stairs or pathways.

I was trying to think what might be the opposite of self-realization.  I came up with self-befuddlement.  I almost used that for the title of the post, but finally decided that might reveal too much about my feelings.
I hope people make their way back to my neglected blog.  I could use somebody to talk to.  

Building Momentum

This is a view painted from one of the courtyards at Union Station.  Union Station is one of my favorite buildings in Los Angeles, and I believe I'm not alone in that.  It shows up in movies and television shows very regularly.  Union Station images used to show up on album covers when album covers were a thing.  With a longing more theoretical than real, I used to want to be an artist of album covers.  That desire has been replaced by a desire to paint pictures for bottles and cartons of microbrewed beers.

 

Truck

This was painted on the walkway between the Arroyo Seco and Arroyo Seco Stables that goes under the York Bridge and comes out by this old truck.  I sat on the ground to paint, and even now I can recall the sensation of feeling really dirty.  There was a vinyl table cloth between me and the dirt, but it was some seriously dirty looking dirt.  I will spare you the detailed description.  But there were other painters close by, some nice looking horses keeping an eye on me, and a rooster that crowed every so often.  That truck isn't going anywhere.  Ever so slowly it's crumbling back into the earth.    

Home Staying

I'm going to break from my normal pattern here, and I don't mean my pattern of going weeks without feeding the blog, but rather my pattern of taking things in order.

I've been doing this Saturday paint-out thing for going on five years, since March 6, 2009, if you want to keep track.  This is how it started.  My youngest son was going off college, and I thought I ought to dedicate myself to making good use of my expanding spare time.  I was already drawing and painting, but I decided to put more time into it.  I signed up for a watercolor painting class and joined some art clubs.  I  found out about people going out and painting on location every Thursday, and I badly wanted to join them, but I couldn't shake off my Monday through Friday full-time employment.  So I said to the board of one of the art clubs, I think there should be paint-outs on Saturday mornings.  And the board said, make it so.  I got a little help early on, but soon it fell to all me.  It was going to be a club activity, but the club's insurance carrier could not condone club members being led out into the wilds to paint, so it became its own thing.  Unaffiliated and unsanctioned.  Just a bunch of people getting together and painting.  Sometimes, though, it wasn't a bunch.  Sometimes there were just a couple of painters.  Sometimes only me.  Frankly, I like it better when there are other painters around.  It's more fun and it's also safer.  But I don't mind painting alone.  So I stuck with it.  I habituated it.  I paint on Saturday mornings.  I am constantly on the lookout for places to paint.  I send emails to people who want to get emails about Saturday painting.  

I've had companion painters come and go over the years.   I understand that there are hundreds of other things to do on Saturdays.  Yard sales, cartoons, diner breakfasts, daylight lovemaking, gardening, and hiking, to name a few.   I send emails to seventy people.  Some have never actually come to paint.  I'm glad all seventy don't come, because that is much too big a group to paint with.  I think about 5 to 10 people is optimal, and that is just about how many people come these days.  My painter friends make me happy, and I think I've done a good thing giving them a nudge to come out and paint on Saturdays.  I treasure their friendship and their company and their artistic wisdom and their art.  So once a year I invite them to my house and give them some food to show my gratitude.  Then they hang around and paint pictures of my house.  Maybe someday art historians will wonder why so many artists chose to paint a modest one-story 1917 bungalow with Christmas colored trim and unkempt landscaping.  Like this:

For some more work by some of these painters, see
http://sherryschmidt.blogspot.com/
http://pasadenaadjacent.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAy34LUknd8

Athenaeum

This is the faculty club/private club on the campus of the California Institute of Technology.  It was painted on a crazy hot summer day from a place in the parking lot with a nice shady wall on which to sit.  I had almost forgotten that I did some photographic cropping of the image, and eliminated approximately the bottom one-third of the painting which actually had a vertical orientation.  The bottom consisted of shadows, which probably should have added some pleasing visual weight to the bottom of the painting, but I mucked up the painting of them.  It is one of my better cropping jobs.

I'm still not sure about the palm trees.  But I think the painting has kind of vintagey exotic look to it, and it isn't even too tortured by its drawing errors.  I've been inside the Athenaeum a couple of times - once on a luncheon date with a graduate student, and once for a class reunion.  Twentieth, perhaps.  The Ath, it's called locally by insiders.

For a lot of money, I could become a supporter of Caltech and apply for membership at the Athenaeum.  Then maybe I could sip tea or eat prime rib and possibly cast flirtatious looks at very smart old guys.  Something to think about as I formulate my retirement plan and need some balance for my painting.    

Reflections of Lotus

Sometime around June or July, I went to Echo Park and painted lotuses.  The Echo Park Lake is home to LA's best and most famous lotuses.  When there is a lotus festival, it is there.  I'm a little disappointed in the painting, probably because I've spent years thinking about painting lotuses.  The delicate pink tips of the petals are nice though.

A Painting I Like

Mirroring the human life cycle, my day started all fresh and full of promise and had pretty much fallen apart by the end.  I'm hoping to salvage a little light by posting a painting I like.  August 30, 2014, Grant Park in Pasadena, looking across Cordova at some mid-century apartment buildings not quite obscuring the mountain view.

It's late, but I need to stay up and constantly monitor what will probably be the last load of laundry I can eek out of my failed washing machine.  I need a new washer.  I'm overwhelmed by the selection.  There must be  hundreds of different washers on the market.  Probably any of them would be fine.  They all seem too expensive and too complex.  Seriously, I don't think my clothes and linens could possibly detect more than three different temperatures or spin speeds.  Just more little sensors that will undoubtedly fail long before the motor wants to quit.  My dying washer only lasted ten years.  The repairman and sales people tell me that's not bad.  It seems to me that things like washing machines used to last much longer.  Or is it just that ten years used to seem long?   You, lovely people, can help me.  If you or anybody you know has purchased a washer lately and feels okay about it, please let me know what washer it is.

I don't keep a journal, and I don't see a counselor.  I don't talk to my friends enough.  So sometimes I want to vent here in blog world.  I think that's all right as long as I don't get too personal.  I kind of want to rant about my health and my job and my love life.  But I think the washing machine is a better idea.

Island in the Street

Chelton Way is a South Pasadena landmark.  It is a quiet residential street.  It used to be, in my time, distinguished by a giant oak tree growing in the middle of it.  But despite very heroic efforts to save the tree in the first place when the road was built around it, the oak tree eventually died.  Or probably just came close enough to dying to pose a big danger.  There's a large planted area in the middle of Chelton Way that is shown in the foreground of this painting.  I can't remember if this is where the oak tree was; I think the oak tree was a bit further north where the big Chelon Way sign is.  Anyway, there are more nice trees growing in the middle of Chelton Way.   This was painted in early June, when it was overcast in the morning, and the promise of summer still stretched ahead.

Bridges

The way my thoughts flow these days, literally anything could be metaphor.  Bridges are easy ones.  Bridges get you over obstacles - real or metaphorical.  There are bridges that give teeth to the toothless and bridges that save music from being tame and repetitive.

We travel by bridges to safety, but we also travel by bridges to the new and unfamiliar.  I saw a counselor recently to work through my concerns about life transitions.  I came away determined to exercise daily, make lists, get things done, try new recreation, and stick with my employment for now but not let it be a drag on my spirit.  These things are like a bridge - to get me safely over stuff - to take me somewhere good and safe, but as yet unknown.

These are paintings of the Colorado Bridge in Pasadena, a spectacular old graceful curving span that the paintings barely hint at.  It is also known as suicide bridge, for the obvious sad reason.

Metaphors make me think of symbols, and symbols make me think of film class.  I took a film class in college, and recall the wonderful movies I possibly wouldn't have watched otherwise.  I think my taste for good films was timely nurtured.  I remember lectures and discussions of visual devices.  My recollection about symbolism, however, was not from my own film class, but an earlier film class that a friend of mine had taken and told me about.

The way I remember it, my friend told me about Ingmar Bergman films, and how there are children  that aren't so much individuals but are a manifestation of a younger self who is trying to show you something.  He said children like that showed up in dreams as well as film, and that film had borrowed from dream theory.  The other thing I remember is that when the wind picked up in a movie, it meant that change was coming.  So all these years since, whenever the wind starts to blow, I look knowingly at the sky, and say in my best wise-old-farmer voice, " Change is coming."   Of course, wind is wind, and life isn't art, at least not all the time.  But the thing I've figured out is that whether or not the wind blows or whatever the music does, change is coming.  Armed with that bit of truth, I'm a fortune teller.

Sanchez Adobe

So a few weeks ago, I painted at the Sanchez Adobe.  A few weeks before that, I didn't know there was a Sanchez Adobe.  I wasn't at all familiar with its Montebello home, although it is but a few miles away.  I still don't know too much about the Sanchez Adobe.  Apparently it was one of the really early residences in this vicinity in the early to middle part of the 19th Century.  There are actual Sanchez family members who are buried onsite.  There is also a living rabbit.

The painting kind of grew on me.  That post at the corner of the pergola is just so anywhere.

Garfield Park 2

I don't know this for a certainty, but it's a reasonable inference that Garfield Park was named for James Garfield, the 20th President of the United States and/or his widow, Lucretia.  James Garfield had a long and distinguished career in Congress, but he had been President for less than a year when he was shot and eventually succumbed to his injuries.  He left his wife and seven children behind.  Lucretia Garfield lived out the summers of her long life in Ohio, but her winters were spent in South Pasadena.  She had Greene and Greene design her winter home on Buena Vista Street.  Mrs. Garfield entertained Teddy Roosevelt in South Pasadena, she volunteered for the Red Cross and she died in South Pasadena in 1919.  The Garfield House still stands.  For the second half of the twentieth century it was owned and occupied by an engineer/inventer and father of ten including Doublemint twins.  Now the Garfield House is  home to a songwriter musician producer.  

Then there is Garfield Park.  For a while, when my children were in preschool and early grades, Garfield Park was the center of my social life.  Weekend after weekend, there were parties under the pergola, with sheet cakes and pinatas and people dressed like Ninja Turtles and Batman.  There were picnics there with my husband's family, who loved parks in a way that went far beyond anything my parents conceived of.  They barbecued and played Frisbee and bocce and ate and watched the kids.  These days I'm likely to go to Garfield Park for Shakespeare or summer concerts.  And occasional painting.  I brought my dog Frankie with me.  It wasn't my first paint-out with Frankie, but it was the first time Frankie let me really paint.

Topia

Last week at the Los Angeles County Arboretum, it was very hot.  I sat in the shade where it was relatively cool and painted this.  I was approached by baby ducks, but I had nothing for them.  There was an event called Spring!topia going on, and I tried to take it in after I painted, but it was hot enough that my edges wilted and I just ended up going home.

This is the Queen Anne Cottage that I painted once before.  It has a good story that I told once before.  It was featured in the opening scene of a 1970s/1980s television show called Fantasy Island.  The period Fantasy Island ran pretty much paralleled the time when I lived without a television.  Although somehow I knew the show well enough to be familiar with one of its actors, Herve Villechaze, who walked into my pub one night, and walked up to the bar and ordered a drink.  I think I may have helped him, because he was extremely small, and unlikely to be seen from behind the bar.

I was recalling that I don't remember my parents ever taking me to the arboretum.  Which seems odd because my father was such a fan and walking encyclopedia of trees.  I went with the Girl Scouts, and got a bit of training about plants and did some nature-related crafts.  I went back on a regular basis as a teenager.  It was a place to feed ducks, hold hands with boys, and gather feathers to adorn our hippie-girl hair.   That was years before I knew of the migratory birds act.