Saints and Angels

I pretty much keep my personal life and family out of my blog, probably more because I am a private person; I don't think they mind one way or the other.  I have absolutely the greatest family.  They usually don't make visual art, but they do make music and joy and acts of goodness.  They are my biggest fans and supporters.  My wonderful husband died last week and my world seems very quiet and almost empty.  It would be wrong not to speak of it.  I showed him this painting of St. Vincent Court; it was the last painting I got to share with him.  But who knows?  Maybe he sees plenty of things from another vantage point.  Maybe he hovers around me and shines in the colors.  Remember to treasure your lives and your loved ones and leave the world better than you found it. 

My Summer

You'll recognize that I painted these guys before using the same photograph as reference.  These were by request, sort of a commission you might say if it didn't sound so pretentious like I'm posing as an actual working artist.  Still, sometimes people who like pigeons will find me.  Shh.  I don't collect or pay sales tax on paintings.  I think it's okay that I don't pay income tax, because I'm pretty sure I shell out more on supplies than I make.  Actually, I pay an awful lot of taxes, and generally feel pretty good about it.  I'm fortunate to live in a wonderful city, state, and country.  All the benefits that I enjoy have a price, and usually it's not the blood of soldiers, but just cold hard ordinary cash. 

I came upon this poem last week.  If I up and quit my job one day soon, this is where the seed got planted. 

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

from New and Selected Poems, 1992
Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver.

Singer

Another hot August weekend.  This is a house at 602 S. St. John Avenue across the street from Singer Park in Pasadena.  I liked the subject for its light and shadows.  With the aid of the internet, I attempted to learn about the origins of Singer Park.  My searches for Singer and Pasadena history led me to the lovely Singer Building on Colorado Boulevard and to Loretta Thompson-Glickman, a former mayor of Pasadena who also had a career as a singer.  Very worthy subjects, but I'm none the wiser about the park.  The house, I learned, was built in 1909 by an unknown architect.  Quite a lot gets forgotten in a hundred years. 

Crowned with Glory

This is First Church of Christ, Scientist in Pasadena.  It is built in a Classical Revival style, which few other buildings in Pasadena are.  It reminds me of Washington, D.C.  White buildings, like white birds or flowers, are pleasing to paint in watercolor.  For the white portions in light, you use no paint at all.  For  the shadows, you may use any color you please.  I strain my eyes to see the shadows as polychromatic.  I was happy here to be able to capture some of the reflected light in the shadows.  I'm pretty pleased with this painting.  It was about 105 degrees out yesterday.  I moved repeatedly just to stay in the shade.  

The Limit

Once I blogged for 90 days straight.  Not continuously of course, but daily.  I've accumulated quite a lot extra photos and little paintings lately, and thought about posting more often.  The fact is I just don't have time.  At least not without significantly rearranging my life - not looking at facebook, not reading your wonderful blog, showering less, skipping work, and depriving my people and animals of my company.  

I practiced painting skies.   I think I'm going to do more of these.  Then when I go out to paint, I'll be able to slap up a really beautiful sky without much thought or effort.  Sky goes with everything. 

Little One

Yesterday, I set out to paint at La Casita del Arroyo.  La Casita was built by Pasadena and its Garden Club in the 1930s as a community meeting house.  The wood to build the building was salvaged from the velodrome from the 1932 Olympics.   The Garden Club maintains the beautiful gardens that surround La Casita.  Matilija poppies were still blooming yesterday.  In addition to some of my regular painting companions, there was a plein air painting class all the way from the Antelope Valley.  Perhaps one day the plein air painters and the roving archers will face off in a competition for scarce Arroyo land and  parking resources.  Speaking of which, La Casita has the most beautiful parking lot - a parking lot only a garden club could dream of. 

It also happened that La Casita had been rented for an event.  Staff arrived and unlocked.  A truck load of tables and chairs arrived.  It was suggested that we should probably vacate the parking lot and go down below in the Arroyo to paint.  I complied, not because I'm an agreeable person, but I hadn't started painting and I had seen some promising views below. 

I thought the event would be a wedding.  I know people who were married here.  Then I heard it was a first birthday party.  Seriously?  I thought, renting a hall and round tables for a first birthday party?  It seems to me that people indulge in some pretty ridiculous excesses these days, especially for small children who have simple tastes and short attention spans.  But after I returned home, I spoke to somebody who is more culturally aware than I.  I learned that first birthdays are huge in many Asian cultures.  An important part of the celebration is when several items are set out before the child, things which may include rice cakes, a spool of thread, a brush, a crayon, a pencil, a book, money, a ruler, a golf club, and a bow and arrow.  The child picks things up, showing more interest in some than others.  The child's choices enable proud and optimistic parents to predict the child's future.  Since I only just learned about this, I missed the chance to try it myself, and I missed the chance to try it with my children.  What would we have picked?  Knowing what I know now, I would pick the crayon.  Or the tree.

The Play's the Thing

 On Saturday, I visited the Mission Playhouse in San Gabriel.  Those of you who have extensively poked around the blog or my house might recognize that I painted this view once before.  It was easier the second time.

The Mission Playhouse was built in 1927 by John Steven McGroarty for his Mission Play.  The Playhouse was designed by the chief architect of Riverside's Mission Inn.  It is fashioned after the Mission San Antonio De Padua.  I know the latter fact because of my son's fourth grade mission report.  I recognize McGroarty's name because of the McGroarty Art Center in Tujunga.  That was McGroarty's home.  During his life McGroarty was famous as a poet, politician, and journalist, and perhaps most of all because of the Mission Play.  The Mission Play was a pageant that told a history of California, in highly romanticized and euro-biased terms.  Next year, for its centennial, City of San Gabriel will be staging a revival of the Mission Play.

And here are some pertinent internet grabs.  
 

Fork In It

You know how much I like the Coffee Gallery Backstage.  The wizard behind the Backstage is Bob Stane.  And this is a picture of Bob Stane's fork.  Bob dreamed of giant piece of flatware placed at an actual fork in the road.  His friends made it happen.  It is Pasadena's quirkiest public artwork, found between Pasadena Avenue and St. John, south of Bellefontaine and the snooty tea shop.  The fork stands, ever poised, as kind of a tribute to light-hardheartedness, and flatware, and dreams.  

My painting is nearly as busy as Pasadena Avenue.  It really wasn't quite finished, but here you have it. 

Over and Under

Saturday's painting location was the Lower Arroyo Seco in Pasadena.  I found some shade just a short walk from archery range.  I always thought the archery range was the coolest place (at least since I was 19 and a boy took me there at night and played his flute for me.)  So I was pretty surprised to hear a year ago that the range was in danger of being shut down by the city.  What gripe could anybody possibly have with this marvelous old lightly used archery range among the oak trees in the Lower Arroyo?  The archers who use the range seem largely a good bunch.  Out of generosity and love of their sport they offer free lessons.  This was all for the good until the Hunger Games phenomenon.  Now every little girl and boy in Southern California wants free archery lessons, and their indulgent parents pack the parking lot starting at 7 a.m.  I arrived a full half-hour early for painting, and I had to park way up Arroyo Boulevard, and trek my wood easel and painting paraphernalia down the road, down the long driveway, and through the entirely full parking lot.  All the while muttering to myself as the curmudgeon I'm becoming.  It's summer for heaven's sake.  Those children aren't even in school, so couldn't they play out their bow and arrow fantasies on some other day?  Couldn't they leave some open space on Saturdays to those of us who are stuck in office buildings all week, and, when Saturday comes, just want to paint bridges, walk dogs, cast flies, or sleep in before archery?  It will pass I suppose.  Just like the casting pond boom after A River Runs Though It.

In spite of the difficulty arriving, painting was good.  I painted the Colorado Street Bridge.  I was distracted from my crankiness, and the walk back to the car seemed easier, even though it was up hill and much hotter.  In the evening I went to Pasadena Heritage's bridge party and celebrated the bridge on the bridge.  The bridge is 99 years old, spans 1486 feet in a graceful curve 150 feet above the Arroyo.      

Public Chambers

This is a small bit of the Richard H. Chambers Courthouse that houses the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Bankruptcy Court.  Built as the Vista del Arroyo resort hotel, this building also served as the McCormack Army Hospital in the 1940s, and later - rumor has it - mysterious military intelligence went on there.  The Pasadena area does not have any of California's beautiful historic courthouses.  Possibly Riverside is the closest one.  But thanks to the vision of Richard Harvey Chambers, an architecture-loving federal judge, we have a beautiful federal court.  And this lovely building perched on the edge of the Arroyo Seco overlooking the Colorado Bridge belongs to the public.  I was inside not too long ago - not for a bankruptcy, thank goodness - and a saw an exhibit of furniture made by a Pasadena craftsman from fallen Pasadena trees.  Tree artist, I'm sorry I don't recall and can't find your name.  I learned on Saturday that the grounds of the courthouse are not fully accessible.  Still, the garden was beautiful and the parking lot open and free.  

As for the painting, I'd give it slightly mixed reviews.  The drawing is a little off in a distracting way, with the bowed archway and wrong angle of the doors.  I tried and failed to get the beautiful warm reflected light inside the archway.  To be honest with you, I cropped off some of the right side, which was just more of the same distracting dapples of green.  There's some nice technique in the agapanthus, ubiquitous purple flowers I'm glad I painted.  I'm fond of the shadows.  I chose to paint this view because of the the interesting shadows, and because it has a face.