A personal project

Almost eight years to the day after meeting this guy we finally made it official.

(Those last three pictures are taken by the incredible Savanah Loftus, who is a professional and you can tell by the way she waited for that perfect golden light. She not long ago took great pictures of us in a park, the kind of pictures that you can be really proud of. Not overly sappy, but tender, and still sane enough to send to the grandparents.

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My mother gave us a membership to the Oregon Zoo for Christmas this year. We have been three times already, often on a Saturday because that's our shared day off. This morning we went early to catch the feeding of the African Slender-Nosed Crocodiles.

I've been looking forward to it all week. Anthony and I would ask each other what it might be that they fed the crocodiles. Spaghetti and meatballs? Children who tap on the glass of the primate exhibits?



It turns out they are quite sensibly fed bits and pieces of rather large fish, served on the end of a very, very long stick with a little grabby hand on the end.

Evidently it takes at least two people. One to feed and one to stand at the ready with what looked like a mop handle ready to poke the crocodile in a special place just at the base of his skull just in case the crocodile got greedy.

I was very delighted to see that the bucket they use to keep the fish in is EXACTLY the same brand and color bucket that I use to cart around my cleaning supplies when I clean houses.

I made lots of quick on-site sketches of the beast as it waited, then drew this value study that I hope to turn into a painting here in the coming week or so. I find crocodiles (especially big ones) creepy on a deep, primal level. Something about that tail I think. I hadn't noticed before, but the tail spikes converge at a point and then the tail becomes flat like a rudder (the better to chase you with my dear), and so it folds over in an unnerving way.

OCF: recycle crew

Monday mornings are marked at Chez Kumquat by the recycling truck’s arrival. There’s a lot of truck noises as it maneuvers in between our building and the parked cars, and then a tremendous crash as the items in the blue bins get hoisted then dumped into the truck -- particularly the glass, which is a bright, unmistakable sound.



It’s the same sound one hears in the early morning at the Oregon Country Fair. The recycling crew starts collecting from the recycling kiosks at six in the morning, but they usually don’t make it back to the dock until the public starts to arrive. The first trickle of people at nine increases to a steady stream by eleven, and all the while that familiar sound of glass crashing can be heard echoing through the trees.

Because it’s the same sound I think people assume that a machine is doing all the work, despite the rustic nature of the fairgrounds. It’s what that sound makes us think of. There’s nothing in that sound to suggest otherwise. I think they picture big truck lifters, conveyors, and automated sorting by weight. Neat boxes ready for the reprocessing center.

But don’t you believe it.



What sounds like objects heading to a sorting-machine on a conveyor is in fact two people dumping a barrel full of cans, glass and plastic bottles onto a slanted grid. This grid sits over a channel, designed to catch all the wet and broken debris. (That’s the idea anyway.) This great pile is then pushed with a rake towards the waiting arms of the sorters, who stand along the sides of wooden chutes. And, armed with not much else besides earplugs and eyeglasses, the sorters pick through the mess and sort everything, one by one.



It’s a lot of material to go through. Material that has been sloshing around with leftover contents and whatever else ends up in the barrels. Soon the dock itself is covered in a wet sheen of “sloosh”, and it is for this reason sorters are outfitted with aprons, to keep at least some of it at bay. (Honestly I found working in a raincoat to be the most successful.)

Each kind of object that is sorted follows different rules. Cans are done by size, roughly, and until you memorize which cans are redeemable and which are not, you must read those little letters on the side. Glass is done by size, one box for this size, one box for that, a special box for sessions and a special box for corona and other Mexican style bottles. These boxes, when full, are closed up and handed off to the people standing up on the dock, who load them into the great big truck bed, to be hauled away at the end of the week.

All this while the surge of cans and glass is pushed towards you. More and more all the time. If you do not help and push the pile down the line things get backed up and crash to the floor, or roll under the dock to the dark inaccessible places -- later to be picked up by diligent individuals with buckets.



Meanwhile, plastics are sorted on the other end of the dock. Plastics are the least uniform and most incomprehensible of the sorted items. Sorted mostly by size (which is difficult to judge at a glance, for all the different shapes), but always driven by whether it is redeemable or not. Just about everything aside from plastic water bottles and soda bottles are not redeemable, with a few maddening exceptions. And until you've a sense for it, each item must be examined. And then thrown to the appropriate bag.

Aside from a few dedicated souls there is no specific crew for sorting. Everyone takes a turn. As each truck backs towards the dock, members of the truck’s team hop out to either dump barrels, rake things, or don glasses and earplugs and take their place in the sort line and get to work.

It is the most chaotic, effective little operation I have ever experienced. In a way it’s indicative of how the entire fair works. Very analogue. We may have several powerstrips at the dock for cell phones -- and many of those are future-phones -- but all the real work is done the old fashioned way. With hands and arms and good music and camaraderie.

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I had the blissful pleasure of attending a work party at the Gabriel Community Garden Demonstration Orchard yesterday morning. It meant picking apples and pressing apple cider, right there in the parking lot.



Apple cider. Fall. It's coming. I have so many warm things to say about September and autumn and apple and golden light. For now I will let the memory of apple pieces stuck in my hair and the sticky sweet smell of the juice fill me.

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Connections

Okay kids. Wow. I think I got it.

You remember my recent breakthrough with the easel and the drawing board. Since then I have with a few exceptions begun my mornings with a quick crayon session. Even a couple unrelated scribbles helped me get out of that weighty am I really good enough nonsense you sometimes encounter as you approach your desk, and instead you are transported into that magical observant place where you can just notice the shape of things. And all you want out of life is to copy them down.

This inevitably led to my bringing crayons and the drawing board with me to the Oregon Country Fair, and resulted in those big crayon studies of what I saw. The result was not necessarily better than my attempts to capture journeys in the past -- things were not nearly as detailed as they needed to be to really be accurate -- but it was a LOT more satisfying. What I was seeing and feeling was BIG STUFF. So it was nice to record things in a big way.

I have gone to some really amazing places in the last couple years. Ireland with my Mother in 2008, a two-week camping holiday in Canada a year later, San Diego a year after that. Travel has always been a deep love of mine, and all the while I have secretly hoped someone might pay me money to go places and experience them and then report my findings to whoever would be interested in the sort of things I notice. So whenever I've gone somewhere I always feel that anxiety -- perhaps even more than you do -- to capture the experience.

I say perhaps more than you do only because I illustrate things. In a way that's really my job all the time. I capture experiences, feelings, emotions. All those things cameras do not capture.

Furthermore during the trip to Ireland I learned something -- cameras are not fast enough. My mother and I both had cameras with many memory cards, but we often lamented that the thing we'd wanted to take pictures of was usually just after we got it in our head to press the button. We had internet available at every place we stayed and adequate downtime every evening set aside for emailing loved ones back home to give them a day-by-day account of events. This morning we caught the bus outside the pub in Cork, changed buses in Tralee. Ate dinner at this place outside Bunratty Castle. All true but it somehow doesn't capture what the three-to-five hours on the bus was like. Rushing past rolling hills and stone walls straight out of a storybook. The alarming skinniness of the roads. The thrill of seeing bilingual road signs, placed in places that made no sense to our American brains. The tiny towns passed through, with tiny shop fronts and Easter egg colored houses. Buildings crowded around the road. A man in a check cap and patched trousers walking with an ancient terrier. And these things were addressed in the occasional prosey email, but there was still so much missing. The color of the stone walls and how it matched the man's jacket. The sound of people muttering to each other. How can you capture it all?

The next adventure was Canada, and I tried doggedly to document everything. Snapshots of anything that seemed promising, sketches, painting on the fly. I even had a gluestick and collage paper with me, and I faithfully kept every single piece of paper we were given or came across. It was a mess -- way too ambitious for the timeline we were on. And of course in the end the car window was smashed in and I wound up mostly only talking about that, and it's a shame because that was one of the most beautiful trips I have ever been on.

After that trip it was clear that I needed to simplify my capture approach. In San Diego I only brought my pen and notebook. And with the exception of the Museum of Man, which I badly wanted to sit in front of and paint for a few days, I actually did really well. But I ran into a new problem.



My simple pen studies had a satisfying feel to them all on their own. But whenever I tried to iron them out, or add color, or turn them into a more polished painting, I was somehow never able to capture the charm of the original drawing. I've had this problem a long time actually, in several other facets of my drawing-life. Different stages along the way. It was something I wanted to confront, but something I never got around to. Other things kept demanding attention.

Since then when I go on journeys I take nothing more than a pen and that at least solves the anxious burden of Capturing Everything. It helps you let go when your supplies are limited. It also helped me hone in on Which Details Are Important and get a grip on how I saw things, so that eventually I was able to do things like paint that picture of the Tillamook Cheese Factory without taking any pictures or any written notes at all.



So at this point I have these stories I want to tell, these pictures I want to make, about these bigger travels. They are all backlogged in my brain and keep getting pushed behind other things. Added to this we are constantly going on little weekend excursions. Constantly. Remember, Anthony lived in Eugene for two years before he moved in this summer, so there were many, many weekends spent on the road. The baby cooler is in constant use, the roadmap is marked up with highlighters and tattered from the number of times it gets stuffed down between the passenger seat and the gear shifter. Now that Anthony lives up here we are able to explore east and west more often. We go on more walks into the hills and take little mini-vacations to the rural countryside. Make our own minor discoveries. This is a beautiful state and I am pretty strict about not working on weekends, preferring instead to go out and explore.

I guess what gets me is: I am really good at going on adventures. My last trip to Colorado was a 72 hour affair in two different cities with three different groups of people and it was as slick a little operation you could ever hope for. I just wish that my digestion of my adventures was as solid.

So. With all this bubbling around my head, in the far and distant background. This next thing happened.

I have a new cleaning-client who has a house situated near a wooded hill. When you look out one of the upstairs windows, you essentially see what I drew as a crayon study the other morning:



I drew it because it's a beautiful view and I can't stop thinking about it. In fact I actually cheated a little and worked on this crayon-doodle for two mornings. The second morning -- yesterday morning -- I mostly just darkened some things, and colored in that orangey square in the foreground.

In that inexplicable way these things happen, that orangey color got my attention. I thought about it all morning. It pulsed urgently in my soul. I thought about that canvas that I'd played around with a few months ago when I'd thought again about big-scale painting. I thought about those vague scaffolding studies I'd done after visiting the fairgrounds. I thought, I know what I'm doing what I get home..



Thus it was.

And as I was wrapping up I began thinking...what else can I do?




What about that great image of the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport?




Yeah, I thought. Let's try that.



So that's what I did today. It kind of feels unreal.

This of course does not capture the detail that the little gouache paintings do. So there's more work to do. (Happily, there's always more work to do.)

The jury is still out about all those complicated things I was worried about yet failed to articulate about abstract art, fine art, etc. There's so much baggage there. But what gives me hope is that for the first time in a long time I'm not too worried about all that rubbish. What's important to me is that I have finally figured out how to make big things on canvas again. To make with the big colors. And I've connected those little expressive drawings to a way to make them as big and colorful as I want them to be. The static drawings can be lifted out of the notebook and rocketed up to a realm way, way beyond where they started.

It's so satisfying to arrive here. To make that connection. Now I feel like I COULD paint the Museum of Man building. Tomorrow. With nothing but my memory of the place and my feeble attempts to sketch it.

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What I did with my Friday

God that felt good.

In my Farmer’s Market newsletter last week I learned that our own dear mayor proclaimed June to be Farmer’s Market Month. It sort of is anyway, since most markets open just as all the produce gets going, but it’s nice to have things official. They actually enclosed the entire notice, and of course because I used to format legal notices for the newspaper I read every word. And then I thought about what it should have been like. (And WAS like, for all I know.) And then I drew it.



I regret that I don’t have time to paint this because I’d really like to. Maybe if things are quiet after this Cyborg thing I will do a little unit on mayors. I still know practically nothing about what mayors actually do, apart from snippets our own mayor drops on twitter. There is clearly much more to being mayor than walking in parades, fixing potholes and proclaiming June to be Farmer’s Market month.

Speaking of parades: there was a parade of mayors! I can’t believe I missed the parade of mayors! Evidently many mayors from all over Oregon where in the Rose Festival Parade, parading. Considering my interest in city business (esp. in the area of Those Things That Require Notices To Be Published) and mayors it would have been such a treat!

I must not be a very good Portlander because I’ve never managed to make it down to the key attractions of the Rose Festival. The first time I had the chance I’d just moved here, and I sent my family down to the shore to see the big boats mostly to have some time alone with the moving boxes for a few hours. Last year no doubt I let my knee get the better of me. This year I was shepherding Anthony’s family around for the Big Big Graduation Celebration. It’s still fleet week so maybe I will get down there and draw boats tomorrow evening. A change of scenery from all these robots in my brain.

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Things are ramping up to an insane scream here. I have plans for the next four weekends, and even for someone who plans her menus two weeks in advance this seems like a lot of scheduling. It is mostly geographic: I have to be here for that event, there for that event. There is also an unusual amount of stuff that remains unplanned, and indeed is unplannable because of circumstances beyond my control. (For instance: Anthony’s graduation is the second week of June and we still don’t know how many members of his family will be in attendance -- the number seriously changes every time we talk to them.) Separate to this there are a lot of art-related loose ends back stage, most of which are not fixable until I hear from other people.

To prevent the top of my head from coming off I have been knitting like crazy in the evenings. I took this picture Sunday night and I'd say the sweater is now about four inches longer than what is pictured up there. I am secretly hoping tp finish by the end of this week but I think that’s a bit ambitious. It's nice that even my down time right now is productive, it makes me feel less like I'm being blown about by all this uncertainty and more like I'm in control of something, even if it's just this string.

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Pistachio

Oh my dear, beautiful pistachio color. I wish I could remember how I arrived at you.

You were buried under so many other layers in my "muddy greenish stuff" space in the little pallet. But after the grey stuff in that square was used up in that street in that painting, now YOU have surfaced. I'm wondering where you've been all my life. You are different from that yellow-green color (though you maybe can't tell from this photograph). You are much richer in appearance. More subtle. You have Magic. Grey certainly, just a lingering whisper. Also possibly peach, lavender. You are benefiting from so many colors all mixed up. I know there's a yellow-green is the base -- the one I purely mixed though, not the one I tweaked from the bottle.

I used to mentally scoff at one of my art teachers who fastidiously made a color key every time she mixed a color, because she didn't always use the colors she mixed and she must have had hundreds of color keys she never used. And the most common colors ("white" skin tone especially) were mixed so often you quickly ceased to rely on the recipe. So much of it was flying blind anyway. One was always adding a touch of this, a touch of that, to get something to look just right for a particular project. So why bother?

Well. You bother for this very reason, right here. I am actually kind of bewildered now as I realize almost all of my colors on the pallet right now, while not straight up mixed from process yellow, red and blue (I am not nearly that talented), is all tweaked from what comes out of the bottle. Some of it I am not happy with, and am relieved that they are slowly disappearing. But some of the others, the major standbys, are dwindling and I have no idea how they got there.

And still others are like this gorgeous pistachio color. Serendipitous accidents that I will use everywhere until I can pinpoint the formula. And then I will write it down, so I don't lose it again.

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There is a friend-of-a-friend going through knee stuff -- stuff that makes my little procedure last year look tiny and insignificant. My friend is receptive so he gets lengthy reports, some of which get forwarded to me as I deeply empathize with a sad patella in a way that my friend probably does not. For a while I was drafting a book about what it means to be put back together, and how difficult getting back together truly is. Other projects have popped up and I'm very, very, grateful. But I gobble up these physical therapy reports because it's all good stuff, and I may yet come back to my knee book one day. It's in that stewing-place at the back-burner of my mind.

OTHER THINGS

I recently had a very rare thing happen: a book sent to me by a used-book person got lost in the mail. Amazon’s file-a-claim page is fairly straightforward, and features a cute little explanation of claim process in pictures. Reminds me of Ikea’s instructions, which are strictly pictures. At the beginning it always depicts your options if things are overwhelming:

A little guy looking at the instructions with a wavy mouth of concern. Is it confusing?

The same guy smiling on the phone, the phone with a little word bubble with an Ikea store inside. Don’t worry! Call us!

A guy trying to lift one side of a long horizontal object. Is it too heavy?

Two guys lifting the same horizontal object Don’t worry! Get a friend!

Pictures make it better.

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Interdependance, or, one good turn diserves another

For Easter I treated myself to an old sweater I'd found on etsy. It was one I had been eyeing for a LONG time, for the color and for the fact that it was not a strange shape that would be difficult to wear a jacket over, but seemed to be something a librarian would wear. If a bit frumpy. In a good way. I labored for a long time over this. I’m trying to learn to make sweaters after all, but something about this one called to me. When the shop owner marked down everything for a “moving sale” it seemed like fate.



The sweater is indeed frumpy, almost exceedingly so, but it is also beautiful and very well made. My learning-to-knit brain loves the different textures, the different types of stitches all running down, and the fact that there are smaller stitches around the cuffs so I can scoot the sleeves back gently and they stay put. It is made from a what is probably chiefly wool, though pre-blocking it feels a bit like that pink house insulation. However I only say this in comparison to my standby cardigan, which is made of almost...silky yarn and machine-made, therefore no real comparison at all.

The two biggest problems with the sweater were the lame buttons, which is a problem easily fixed.



Goodbye generic plastic buttons, hello beloved pearly buttons. I've found a home for you at last.

The other problem is this sweater has no pockets. And a heavy cardigan with no pockets is a drawback indeed if you constantly want a handkerchief at the ready, as I do. But! Now I can knit! So this means I can make pockets for the sweater! Knowledge is power!

Even without pockets I already get a lot of mileage out of this sweater despite the warming weather. Mornings are still a fairly chilly time, and I've been spending a lot of time next to the open window during my new morning activity: Stand At The Easel And Draw!



This easel is a cornerstone fixture in my making-things life, standing proudly at the window. When I found out I was moving into this particular apartment I set about building my art-making space from scratch. I was happy to see that the easel could at once benefit from the natural light of the window and the lamp light attached to the desk.



I used to do a lot more painting on canvas than I do now, so for the last couple years the easel has mostly just taken up prime real estate next to the window. Most of that time it's displayed a single painting/collage that I keep meaning to work on. We also used the easel last year during the philosophy class for Research Club, when we walked down to the river and Anthony essentially performed a famous lecture by Friedrich Nietzsche whilst I painted a portrait of him. (Of Neitzsche that is, not Anthony). Mostly though the easel just sits and waits. It has been niggling at me because I hate having something I don’t use, particularly something so big.

Separate to this I am having incredible difficulty staying seated and getting work done lately. I think it must have something to do with the gorgeous weather we are (finally) having. Once I am warmed up it is fine, but it’s that initial getting-focused part I struggle with. Particularly with this project, since so many things involve looking things up online. What does an old gas pump look like? Can I have a telephone wire with just one wire coming out? If I illustrate that concept this way, am I still basically on topic? How did she word that again?

Let’s solve the puzzle. I need to do a lot of drawing. I have:

a.) drawing-boards I take with me on outings

b.) an un-used easel by the window, and

c.) way too much energy for sitting.

Let’s see, how might we solve this problem?

Why, we could put a drawing board up on the easel of course!



Why this has not occurred to me before last week is anyone’s guess. The important thing is that it HAS occurred to me, and every morning since this connect-the-dots game I get up, make a thermos of coffee and stand at the easel and do warm-up doodles. Usually with crayons, which adds to the giddiness, and also helps me feel a lot less pent-up about letting go. No pressure -- you're not making Great Art here, you're just playing with crayons. It has made me feel ten times more productive, somehow. Because doing this opens up the drawing-things part of my brain and without meaning to my mind wanders into the puzzles I had worked on the previous day. And I wonder about them. And I get them out and put those up on the easel. And then I look at that color I'd been doodling with and wonder if that could work for that ziggurat. And just like that I'm working without realizing it.

To have a crayon in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, next to an open window listening to the birdsong, feeling the cool spring air, and watching for the sunrise is (for me) about as close to nirvana as one could hope to get. And as luck would have it I've found a way to get there each and every morning, just by rearranging a few things.

And the only threat to this bliss was the bite of the morning air, but that was solved with that NEW SWEATER. Life is uncanny sometimes. I'm glad I get to be part of it.

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The big rhododendron plant in front of my building is in full bloom right now. This hot pink color is one of my Aunt's favorite color, and it always makes me think of her.



I usually don't go in for pink personally, but I've noticed it mixes well with the teals and oranges I've been into lately, so it's cropping up all over the place.



(Though in this picture's light I admit it looks a bit more like red.)