Don't sleep through the music
No me toques
It’s nearly Valentine’s Day, a holiday named after some poor martyred early Christian. We don’t even really know who he was. Or maybe there were even more Valentines than just one. We don’t know much about them either. There’s a lot of rumor and supposition.
Safe to say, there wasn’t much romance in their martyrdom.
A whole heart can't hide the cracked shadow
Valentine’s day. Not my favorite holiday. But not my least favorite either. (That would have to be New Year’s Eve, when I feel forced by social custom to be jolly, giddy, and go out and have mindless fun. Eh.)
Normally I just sort of ignore the holiday. It’s hard to make romance fit a schedule; it either happens or it doesn’t.
Perhaps you, dear reader, are not a fan of hearts and flowers fun either. Or perhaps you have reason to dislike this holiday. So to you I give the gift of 7 days of anti-Valentine’s illustrations. One per day. I hope you enjoy them.
After my last post, I was compelled to paint this picture. And I’m also compelled to admit in the spirit of pure honesty, I’ve never really done an Esther Williams-type swim with crocodiles. It was more like, while I was lolling in warm salty water, I heard a muchacho say, “hey, señorita, don’t go swimming in there. There might be crocodiles. ” And then I heard gales of laughter. And one afternoon I swam in a lake where, later that night, I would go hunting crocodiles. Or maybe we were hunting alligators. I’m not sure. At night, in the liquid black water, I could see shining eyes of some large critters. But the only thing we caught was the last round of beer at a local cantina.
But the illusion of danger was still there. And there’s something about that type of risk that makes a person feel free.
I have floated through cathedrals of mangrove roots among clouds of seahorses, I’ve snorkled over forests of coral and scared a baby barracuda. But those toothier denizens of the agua? We’ve never come face to face. But I’ve flirted from a distance.
Ricë Freeman-Zachary, at Notes from the Voodoo Cafe posted the Nadine Stair poem. You know, the one in which she talks about what she’d do if she could live her life over. She’d make more mistakes, be sillier, eat ice cream.
Hmm, well, I was one of those people who decided at an early age to live differently. I climbed mountains, swam rivers (with crocodiles!), and ate a lot ice cream. I didn’t live sanely for the first half of my life. Yeah, it was fun. Yeah, it made me what I am today: A person with a lot of unusual experiences, great memories. The problem was, I didn’t really apply myself to anything but experiencing. So now, well, there’s a lot I do without. So for the last 10 years I’ve been doing the sane thing, with a raincoat and hotwater bottle, trying to make a parachute with which my misspent youth can land more softly into old age.
Sort of.
Problem is, I can’t seem to shake the need to live creatively. I can’t shake the obsessive need to draw and paint, to tell stories, to sing and play music, even if it means I don’t study something useful, like accounting or database design. Sometimes I get discouraged, and vow to stop all that watercolor and charcoal activity. Pack away the flute and whistle.
But then I read books like Ricë’s book, Creative Time and Space; Making Room for Making Art. It gets me going again, makes me realize that there is a place in the world for people like me, and that sometimes some of us can earn a living. It’s like a little jet pack, boosting me to create every time I dip into it.
And I’m trying hard to live creatively, even while I’m wearing a raincoat and lugging around that hot water bottle. I often get to climb, if not a mountain, at least a hill. And I occasionally eat ice cream.
But I have given up the crocodiles. For a while. At least until I’ve got some sort of parachute patched together. Then who knows where I’ll land.
Lately I’ve been trying to get beyond muddy colors in my portraits, both watercolor and pastel. I’m searching for luminosity and clarity of color, as well as building form, hitting a likeness.
That mean choosing colors in an organized way, rather than just grabbing what suits me. And it means making a plan so that I apply color in limited layers.
And it means painting a bunch of versions of the same thing.
This was my first watercolor sketch in a series of three. I painted this in my usual slapdash fashion. The need to slap paint on paper overwhelmed any kind of thoughtful (some might say obsessive) work. But the proof was in the pudding; although it felt nice to slosh paint around, I couldn’t even finish this, because I was so unhappy with it.
This was the second watercolor sketch of the same person. I gave up trying for a likeness. It wasn’t what this exercise was about. The painting is on a buff colored Rives.BFK Arches. (I know, I know, it’s a printing paper. But I wanted to see how it takes watercolor. I can see some possibilities.) I tried to use mainly warm colors—reds, oranges, yellows—and searched for color temperature across that limited spectrum. In the end I had to add some Indanthrone blue in to get my darks. The colors still look muddy to me.
The third watercolor sketch was on bright white heavy Aquabee Super Delux drawing paper. I’ve long loved this paper; it has enough tooth to hold pencil and charcoal, smooth enough to take pen, and is sturdy enough for light watercolor. It’s evidently sized on both sides now.
For this sketch I stuck with ultramarine blue, alizaron crimson (I’ve got a tube I want to use up before moving onto the new Quinacridone substitutes), lemon yellow, and oranges in the cadmium family.
This was an exercise in self control: I limited my palette, planned ahead, and put paint down in an organized fashion. I often spoke out loud, to myself and to the paint, thinking aloud about what I was trying to achieve (This is why I don’t think I could ever share a studio with anyone). I painted quickly but deliberately.
I’m happier with this result (I wish it translated to a low-rez jpg), although I still feel I have a long way to go. Yeah, yeah, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey that important. Right?
It was one of the best Christmas gifts ever, a family outing to Teatro Zinzanni in San Francisco. The tag line is “Love, Chaos, Dinner.” And it’s true.
It’s like dinner theatre/circus. Every act is spot on, funny when it’s supposed to be funny, amazing when it’s supposed to amaze, and always entertaining. All this and they feed you too!
Marina Luna
There was juggling, trapeze, singing, dancing, clowns, even hula hooping. All the artists were phenomenal. The professionalism, energy, and grace with which they performed was amazing. It was so enchanting and fast paced that I didn’t have time to do any sketching, so I had to sketch from memory when I came home.
My favorite act was Marina Luna, an aerial artist who has a terrific dance on the rope. I would love to sit and draw her as she worked on the ropes, and would love to get her to model for a portrait.
If I were younger, beautiful, and talented, I’d run away and join a circus.
I worked on the image from my St. Stephen’s day post, and made another, more solid watercolor sketch. I don’t have a real wren to draw, so I had to cobble together an imaginary wren from an identification book and several online photographs.
When I lived in Mexico, a little wren lived in the trees next to my house. Every day at about 2:30 she would come in through the always-open kitchen door, make a circuit of the living room (she loved the indoor garden), and after about 30 minutes she would exit through the living room door. She was quite unafraid of me and the dog, and after I caught her killing a scorpion by beating it to death on the metal window bar, I always graciously bade her welcome into my house.
Unfortunately I didn’t draw so much then, so I lost my chance to sketch that little bird. I shall have to figure out how to invite a wren to my home in California.
Debbi Kaspari, at Drawing the Motmot, has several blogs on drawing birds. Two of my favorite pages: 5 Steps to Better Bird Drawing and How to Sneak Up on Your Subject. Now if I can just get a little wren to move into my backyard…
To kick off the New Year in the right way, I always try to go hiking on January 1. So I convinced my other half (the patient, easy-to-get-along-with half) to go out to Hidden Villa for an easy jaunt on the “Bunny loop.”
But I must admit, I had ulterior motives; there are farm animals at Hidden Villa, and Roz Stendahl’s New Year’s Day post lit a fire under my lazy rear end to get out and draw. She said, “set an intention this year to live your life applying your energy to your passions.” This is something I try to do anyway, but it’s always great to have a reminder, especially when I get tired.
As we were leaving the house, The Man spied the sketchbook under my arm, and, rolling his eyes at me, he grabbed one of his mathematics books. “To keep me company,” he muttered. We all have our own strange passions. Right now, his is linear algebra. Go figure.
After we’d clambered over the Bunny Trail (a trail that turned out to be not an easy hike, but a trail for rabbits who think they are mountain goats), he sprawled in the front seat of the car to admire hieroglyphic equations while I hiked back up the trail and sketched until dusk.
These silly cows decided they didn't want to be drawn and headed into their stall. All I could see were their tail ends!
The Goose in the Moon © 2009 Margaret Sloan
The painting with this post was from a doodle I made after hiking out at the baylands and watching geese fly across an early moon. It’s a small painting, and destined for a friend of mine who’s in need of some magic.
It’s a lovely synchronicity that this last night of our year 2009 there’s a full moon. And this full moon is special: it’s a blue moon, the second in the month. A regular full moon is often a symbol of the peaking of power, clarity, and general psychic hubbub, and some folks ascribe even more special powers to this bonus full moon.
And this moon’s a triple magic bonus because it will succumb to a partial lunar eclipse (that most of us won’t be able to see, darn it).
According to a 1998 Old Farmer’s Almanac, each moon has an attribute. The December full moon is the Cold or Oak Moon. The January full moon is the “Wolf” moon, “After-Yule” moon, or “Old” moon. But for all the 12 months on my old Almanac calendar, there’s nothing about any geese in the moon. So I’m going to call this last blue moon in 2009 the “Goose” moon.
I just received a little note from Paul Sinasohn, the actor who sang the role of the Mikado in the short, funny, and sweet version I saw and sketched at the Great Dickens Fair. He was also the stage manager. He sent me the names of the other actors I sketched.
So here they are, to get their fair notice:
The Lord High Executioner (Ko-ko) was played by Lee Presson, of Lee Presson and the Nails, the jump-swing band from hell (really from the Bay Area). From what I can tell from their videos, they have a pretty high-energy show. (it’s a little frenetic and racy. Maybe you wouldn’t want to take your mother-I wouldn’t want to take my mother. But then again, I could have kids old enough to see this show, so I take it back. Watch their videos. Maybe your mother would really like them.) Lee Presson has some nice Cab Calloway moves. I’m going to have to get to one of their shows.
Yum-Yum was Erin Balabanian. You can listen to her podcasts about science fiction, steampunk, and knitting at Brassneedles.
Nanki-Poo was Miguel Evangelista, a local singer and actor.
