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.

Bridges

I'm behind again.  And not just on posting paintings.  There's the laundry and the trash and the bills.  There's my paying job.  Even calling friends and family.  This is a view from Elysian Park, the side of it I hadn't seen before, looking over the LA River toward the Broadway (I think) bridge, and further to County General Hospital.  This brilliant painting location was suggested by another painter who was inspired by a painting by Emil Kosa.

There's a lot to think about as you look out over Los Angeles, down the crooked road, over the strangled river, and the train tracks where people come and go, and the hospital where life sometimes begins and ends.  There's time for doubt and envy, but it's best to let them go.  It is pretty wonderful to be alive and standing and playing with colors.  Remind me of that.

It's Thursday night, and the trash gets collected here on Friday morning.  I send an e-mail to the painting crew, and tell them where we'll be on Saturday.

In Pictures

On August 11, I finally took the oil paints for an outing.   A film crew arrived at St. Luke's Hospital before us though, and thwarted my parking plans.  Filming is fairly common at St. Luke's.  They weren't actually filming as far as I could tell; there was just a security guard keeping an eye some lighting equipment and chasing off painters..

I was able to park across the street and stand in a shady spot and paint this view on a small canvas panel.  I was impatient to start painting, so I didn't do any planning that took the foreground into account, and I think it shows.  

Echo Park

Rather obviously, this is a view of Echo Park looking toward downtown Los Angeles.  The lake was drained for a couple of  years, and has only recently completed restoration and refilling.   People are loving the park, and it was impossible to do any kind of faithful rendering of it that didn't have at least a few people. By chance, we crossed paths with the Barnsdall Park plein air painting class.  

I don't have a lot of really useful knowledge about Echo Park.  I'm not even sure where or if there's an echo.  I don't have any really interesting personal Echo Park stories either.  I ate a machaca burrito there around dusk one time.  The best Echo Park story is the recent one that everyone seems to have read or heard.  A man with a fondness for plants stole tubers from the famous lotus plants and nurtured and raised them.  A few years after that the park's lotuses pretty much died out, probably because of stuff that drained into the lake.  Then the city drained the lake and cleaned it and fixed it, including adding a water filtration system.  But there were no lotuses.  The old ones had been planted in the 1920s.  But the day was saved by the lotus thief.  He didn't exactly give the lotuses back, but he sold them at price of his asking.  There's a awful lot of them, and they are very beautiful.  They are outside the painting, to the left.

Schooled

As you may know, in the midst of all my water-coloring, I've been learning oil painting.  At it's most basic, it's pretty much the same thing.  Two dimensions, brushes, and a limited range of colors and values to express some visual idea.  My class is on Wednesday night, but we're on a brief hiatus while Tim Tien the instructor goes out on the summer plein air circuit.  Since this is Wednesday, I should probably be practicing, but at least I'm thinking about it.  

 So, here's some paintings from class.  I think they're not too bad, but then again I know I thought that before I got even this good.  I think in a bind I could possibly sell these to pay for more classes.  I've learned to draw a little more conscientiously, grouping objects together into big shapes, and comparing size, shape and angle.

 I'm working on the mechanics of mixing color and applying paint, but also on practicing seeing.  I drive home from work now observing where the sky is darker than objects in front of it, and where it's lighter.

I like oil paint.  It has a lovely consistency that changes a little with the weather. Oil paintings look substantial and solid.                                  

Happy Trees

The title Happy Trees is partly an homage to Bob Ross, whom I think you kind of have to love even if you don't like his paintings because he just had this great enthusiasm, like gee whiz life is good because I get to paint.

Furthermore, I think these really are happy trees.  I painted at Cresenta Valley Park, at the suggestion of another painter.  It was my first visit there, and I was very impressed.  It was easy to get there and easy to park.  The mountains are very close and the views are beautiful.  There's a dog park, and while I'm pretty dog park -phobic, it is a clean and happy dog park.  There's a lovely shaded walking/running trail.  Best of all are the trees.  There is a veritable forest of large lush healthy oak trees.  Over the course of my life I've seen countless beautiful oak trees sacrificed to development, utilities, and over-watering.    

In case you don't know, improper watering is about the worst way to treat a tree.  Sprinklers that spray the trunk of a tree cause the bark to stay wet in summer, which leads to rot, which can kill the tree outright, or weaken it so it's susceptible to pests and disease.  These California oak trees don't take well to much water in the ground either.  Lawns and trees don't always coexist well.  So let the grass go brown and keep the trees happy.

Angeleno

Los Angeles was named in Spanish when still it was part of Mexico.  There is some lingering controversy about whether this is Angelino Heights or Angeleno Heights.  Early documentation refers to Angeleno Heights, but current signs mark it as Angelino Heights.  It all depends how much you want to Anglicize it.  I'm not choosing.  I called it Angelino Heights in the previous post.    

I  find this painting slightly unnerving.  It teeters on the edge between realistic and what?  cartoony?  primative?  I start to experience depth and then get caught short by flatness.  Anyway, the slope is pretty authentic.  As you might imagine, a place with Heights in the name is hilly.  I'm going to keep forcing myself to paint cars until I get them right.  Then perhaps I'll move on to people if it's not too late.