San Diego, I hardly knew ye

Remember this painting? No? Last time I worked on it was over a year ago, and even then it had been in and out of storage for a years or more. I think I may be setting a record here.

Well, when we left off, it looked more or less like this:



Too neat, too boring. I wanted the kind of haphazard abstract genius that you see on the sides of warehouses that have been graffitied and re-painted a dozen times. I wanted a jumble of markings and blocks of color. So, okay, this happened:



A step in the right direction! I really liked it! It was fun to mess it up! But then I really messed it up:


I was like, oh, I'll work in some other San Diego elements and make it kind of like a collage of my experiences there. Flowers! Hummingbirds! Stucco buildings! Right. How about some fish tacos and a drawing of Jason writing his dissertation?

But now it looks like I over-thought it. Really it's best if I do as little thinking as possible when I paint.

Ugh. It's hard to have a painting sitting in this stage where I don't like it. But then again, when I get back to it I'll have an even better excuse to mess it up some more.

"I think it's funny that you're doing a painting about San Diego now that we're in Milwaukee," says Jason.

What will happen in the next episode? I can never predict! Stay tuned!

goodbye California, for real

Last weekend: taking in the ocean one last time


Next weekend: dipping toes in Lake Michigan...

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goodbye, California...

Sunday afternoon we strapped Auden into the bjorn and went on a long walk in Los Penasquitos Canyon.

It was a typical southern California day: wide blue sky, golden hills, relentless sun. We spent most of the walk with our heads in the Midwest, though.

Jason was offered a post-doc position in Milwaukee, so come August we will be packing up and leaving the Golden State for good.


We are thrilled to be leaving behind high rent and the Santa Anas, and are looking forward to thunderstorms, seasons, Lake Michigan, and living much much closer to all the grandparents. Native Californians think we're crazy for voluntarily moving back to a region with weather of any kind, and I'm sure we'll wax nostaligic about 70 degree days in January when we're up to our eyeballs in fleece and scarves and scraping ice off the car, but this Michigan Girl also remembers a certain romance to the cold months.

And, selfishly, I want Auden to grow up shuffling through Autum leaves, going sledding and eating snow off crusty mittens, rejoicing at the first crocuses to poke through in Spring, and luxuriating at the beach in the long days of summer.



I wonder if he will see these photos of his first months and wonder about the palm trees, the impossibly clear skies, the hillsides electrified by purple and pink bouganvillea, and wonder why we chose the Hometown of Schlitz over Our Dreamy California life.

And we will say, You wouldn't have had any character if we'd stayed in San Diego. Also, you would think it's acceptable to wear flip-flops year-round.



Then he'll giggle gleefully and go back to shoveling the driveway.

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orange flowers

It feels so good to finally have studio space. I can leave my paints and my books strewn about, my easel always set up and waiting, my canvases crowding all the available wall space...

I have about five pieces in progress right now -- one of which is actually four separate 18 x 24 inch panels. It started out years ago as a final project in one of my painting classes, and was so hideous that I covered everything in these fetching shades of gray in order to start over:



I was originally aiming for the sort of pale mottled concrete texture that I find so appealing, but Southern California is so blasted sunny that I felt kind of guilty painting in just gray and taupe. I decided to challenge myself to use some bright contrast-y colors that I don't normally use, namely orange. I was looking through a book of Odilon Redon's works, and was so inspired by his dreamy flower-scapes, and particularly this one, that I mixed up a bunch of paint and set to work:



I have also been inspired by byobu, Japanese screen paintings whose subjects range from the Tales of Genji to seasonal flowers and birds. So I had that in mind when I assembled these peonies, poppies, anemones, dandelions, and nasturtium... though I'm probably breaking all kinds of rules putting those flowers together, dismissing seasons like a Californian.

Once I had the flowers on there, the composition looked too symmetrical, too formulaic, so the next day I scraped the paint off and had at it again, also refining the poppies a bit:



It's moving along now, with some more depth of color at the bottom of each panel. Next I plan to lighten up that gray background and even it out a little more -- keeping the dappled texture, but making it more subtle. Better get to it before I loose my light.

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oh yeah... art

I almost forgot, this was going to be a blog about art, too.

With seven weeks left to go in this pregnancy, I'm trying to make as much of it as possible, since I'll probably have my hands full for a little while.

All of my paintings from last year had been in storage, and it was curious to see them again. Most of them are unfinished, and I am now in the tricky position of trying to remember where I was going with them when I left off... not unlike trying to go back to sleep and keep dreaming the same dream after the alarm goes off. It's amazing to me what even six months away from a piece will do -- it's great to get the perspective, and to see the painting a little more objectively, but I inevitably think, What was I thinking?

I wanted this blog to be a way for me to post images of my work in progress, because I believe that is the vitality, the life, of a painting. Ordinarily we don't get to see what goes into visual art -- all the layers, all the color choices, all the little flaws reconciled -- and those are precisely the things that I'm most curious about.

So here I am working on a piece whose working title is "San Di Flor," short for San Diego Florist, a big forboding brick building with no windows in my old neighborhood of North Park:



I wanted it to look like a photo that was cropped oddly, so that you just see the design of the letters and don't necessarily think about the words themselves. The side of the building itself was an unlikely mural of different colored paint patches -- you know when the owners try to paint over grafitti and the color is just a slightly different shade of the original gray or yellow or green of the building? I love that, especially if it's happened three or four times and you get all these lovely nuanced color blocks overlapping eachother.




When I started this piece last spring, I was really into that. Being the control freak that I am, though, I jumped right in to the lettering of San Di Flor, and didn't build up a lot of layers first. The result was that the piece was just too tidy and neat -- it didn't look at all like the rough and reckless "art" I was seeing on sides of buildings. So that's what I saw when I hauled it out of storage, and I thought, I need to mess this up. That's always a good feeling.

Here's another piece I'd started last spring, and this one I did lots of layers first thing. Layering with oil paint is a time consuming process, and I think from now on I'm going to start with acrylic to give myself a good ground in half the time. I like to smear paint on with my palatte knife or scumble with a dry brush to get lots of texture in there.



So now it's taken this turn. I was originally going to collage in some paper from an old piano reel, but I decided I liked the paint just by itself. Where will it go from here? Who knows!

I have this quote from painter William Baziotes above my work table: "Each painting has its own way of evolving; when the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself."

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seven circles of limbo

In my version of the divine comedy, there'd be seven circles, all of them limbo.

When J and I packed all our belongings into storage last June, I knew we'd be in for a half a year of living out of our suitcases: of moving from place to place, house to house, state to state. It was the kind of romantic adventure we both love to suffer through.

We took a week-long road trip to Michigan from California, spent two months in a summer limbo with family and friends in the Midwest, then spent three enchanted months of limbo in Kyoto. We returned for another month of holiday limbo with family in December, then re-packed the car a few days after Christmas and drove back out to California in yet another week of interstate limbo. Ribbons of sunset unfurled over Kentucky, blustery winds swept us through Oklahoma, spaceship clouds followed us to Roswell, New Mexico, prickly saguaros greeted us in Arizona, and we descended into San Diego from a harrowing drive in mountains shrouded in fog and rain.

Next we spent five days in limbo in Solana Beach, at the house of a gracious fellow graduate student who put us up while we waited for our spot in student housing to open up. The wide, bright sky, and ever-busy freeways of southern California are about as far from the quiet mossy beauty of Kyoto as I can imagine, but that all seems like a distant dream now.

We are moved in to our new digs at last; all our furniture finds a new configuration, the smell of new carpet lingers.

La Jolla feels like its own kind of limbo -- different from the rest of San Diego, and the rest of the country. We're in a little graduate student village, surrounded by grassy lawns and eucalyptus trees, the sun shines dependably and everyone wears flip-flops year-round. I feel like I'm on another planet, while my pals back in the Midwest are expecting highs of zero...

It is finally time to take a deep breath and relax into this act of settling -- which came none too soon, me in my third trimester. We found a lovely birth center called Best Start, and I'm so relieved that we have a good place to deliver this baby that I want to hug everyone who works there.

While I tend to come undone after too long of neither-here-nor-there-ness, I'm beginning to see that I've got to learn to find the fortuities in those spaces.

We visited with my Grams in Michigan on the day we left, chatting with her about this and that, describing the arc of our past and future travels. I must have said something about how I don't like leaving, because she said, "Life is just a series of arrivals and departures." I didn't really hear it at the time, but J reminded me later and I was struck by its truth, its folksy elegance.

It feels like that's all I've been doing lately, is arriving or departing, but it's only difficult when I fancy that I should be staying.

My friend A, who is a true gypsy, has "home" tattooed on her wrist, to remind herself that she's always there.

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