The elephant in the room…

or, as it is known in some circles, pondering the pachyderm…

“When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.”
Abraham Lincoln

I spent a lot of time in front of the elephants at the Oakland Zoo a few weeks ago. Since then, I have been thinking about them often. I have early memories of circuses and zoos as my father would take us as kids along  (with his sketchbook) to any circus that came through town. Many family day trips were to the Griffith Park or San Diego Zoos for him to catch up with his animal keeper friends and get some drawing done. I think I associate sketchbooks with the smell of hay and peanuts. After I entered school and questions like, “What’s your favorite color?” became pressing, when I asked my dad what was his he would say: “elephant’s breath grey.” (When I was an art teacher I often thought that the name should be submitted to Crayola for their boxes.) Even though his name was Charles, my father had gotten the nick name of Chang when he was in art school. The name came from an elephant in the zoo that was his favorite to draw and he was always known by the name afterward. He kept a record of every elephant’s history that was in the United States and wrote articles and a book on circus history. So, when I ponder elephants, I really ponder elephants from a long family history.

My parents on an early date…………….Wait for it…

My dad is just off camera holding the pole. Even though he took her into a lion’s cage, my mother married him anyway!

The “elephant in the room” is always very literal with me because I have so many on my walls…

A watercolor from 1940 of raising a circus tent:

My father also made lithographs.  (During World War II he was stationed in Texas for Officer’s Training School where he learned lithography from Merritt Mauzey.) When he got out of the war, he purchased a lithograph press with a war bond his brother gave him. (I think in celebration of them both having survived the war.) That press was always stored in our garage.

“Circus Sunrise” 1942

Babe and Jenny, 1952.

In the 60′s and 70′s he loved doing acrylic ink dry brush paintings. He used to rave about the way he could build up the tone with layers of ink. He did a lot in black and white ink, but some were in color. He also painted in oil, but I do not have any elephants painted in that medium, lots of clowns in oil, though.

The top of my piano also includes the death-defying Stella griping a rope by her teeth and a porcelain elephant sculpture by my good friend Jan Mrozinski Crooker (before she was a plein air painter she worked in porcelain).

When I was a production potter, back in the day, I often used the circus as a theme, also.

Photos of old porcelain boxes with new application of iPhone alteration.

It was a natural thing for me to use an elephant as the subject of a collage for a class I have been taking on-line from Misty Mawn.

I used every “elephant’s breath grey” paper I could find around here for the elephant plus a photo of a bird house I own that is shaped like an elephant and a photo of an exotic yellow bird I took at the rain forest exhibit at the Academy of Sciences last week. Of course, once I had taken the iPhone photo of the paper collage, I just had to start layering it with other images in my files. First with a photo of a side of a barn plastered with circus posters announcing the date of the next circus…

Then with a photo of a wheel of a circus wagon…

“Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is ‘elephant’.”
Charlie Chaplin

Christmas Eve, 2010…

Last year, on the day before Christmas, I shared some artwork by a master printmaker who had been a friend of my father’s. Each year Harold Doolittle sent a card to my parents that contained a small print he had created and a hand-lettered greeting. In 1958, the card contained a definition of the Christmas Journey and included this print:

and this inscription with its beautiful gold-leafed illuminated letter.

and, again, in 2010 peace and joy on your journey.

iphone Photo Friday…

Earlier this week I rushed to play with the iphone before Terry took off for work and confiscated it from me. I started layering images on top of each other in DXP in this order: a shot up into my backyard umbrella that is a persimmon color (but I toned down the color with PSMobile app), a shot of the decorative iron grille above the door of the Hearst Building in San Francisco, the script from the 1908 graduation certificate of my great Aunt Ethel from University of Rochester, and a fish from a Dover book of copyright free images. All the images were taken with the iphone. It began to dawn on me that the structure of the umbrella was making the fish look like it was up for obliteration and I recalled in the LoMob app there is a filter called 6×9 emulsion which has a dark area at the top that represents the track of emulsion, but that morning it reminded me of an oil slick. I realized I was starting to channel my despair over current events, so I titled the image “The Evening News”.
Rather than put more iphone images here, I am going to list links to organizations that help wildlife. It hurts my heart.

I am a California native, having been born in Southern California, and I still remember the tragedy of the oil spill off Santa Barbara just as I was finishing my teaching credential in San Luis Obispo in 1969. San Luis is two hours away from Santa Barbara. I had to drive through the city to get home to Pasadena and was acutely aware of the tragedy. The experience formed my opinion of off-shore oil drilling, which has not wavered since that time.

A corner of our backyard contains a 10 x 30 aviary that houses raptors and owls between the time when they leave the Lindsay Wildlife Hospital and they are ready to be released back to where they were found. Sometimes they are recovering from injuries and sometimes they are babies that have left their nests too early. Current residents are four Western Screech owls. (I apologize for this picture, it is extremely dark in the aviary, the owls are very shy, the owls are very small, and the owls like to camouflage themselves scrunching up their faces trying to look like pieces of wood. I used the iphone and tried to lighten things up with one of the apps, but no flash. Three are there, on top of the nest box.)

During the season, Terry also works with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory to band migrating raptors in order to help collect data on their migration patterns. From August to December he makes a weekly trip to the Marin Headlands to band the birds.

When the Cosco Busan tanker hit a bridge tower in San Francisco Bay in 2007 causing an oil spill, Terry took weeks of vacation and drove to Cordelia daily to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in order to wash sea birds covered with oil. Please remember that Dawn dishwashing liquid is used because of its effectiveness to wash crude oil from birds and if you buy a bottle you can register it (the bottle contains a number) and the manufacturer will donate $1.00 to non-profit organizations that are washing oiled birds. Here is Anderson Cooper.

In January we can be found in Morro Bay for the Morro Bay Winter Bird Festival. This highlights an area that is a major stop on the Pacific flyway. I shudder at the impact of an oil spill on that area of the central coast.

We are avid watchers of the nest cam on top of the PGE building in San Francisco. It is amazing to watch the process of hatching and raising young, especially since it is 33 floors above the streets of a major city. In our lifetime, Peregrines have been brought back from close to extinction. What if caring people had not been mobilized to work in that effort. We even heard this year that there were two nesting pairs on Morro Rock with six fledglings, three in each nest. The juvenile birds in Morro Bay do not have to worry about becoming masters of flying amongst high-rise buildings with reflective glass.

Last year at Thanksgiving, I captured this shot of pelicans in Morro Bay.

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One of my first attempts at layers in Photoshop Elements was taken last January during our trip to the Bird Festival:

My niece, Katura Reynolds, created this image using a lino block. (www.pinkmonkeyflower.etsy.com).

copyright: Katura Reynolds

Katura’s sketchblog is here: http://www.katura-art.com

Katura lives near the Cascades Raptor Center. They recently posted this on Facebook

“CRC is sending help to Gulf oiled wildlife response efforts. Assistant Director, Laurin Huse, will be providing her wildlife rehabilitation skills for a month at the Fort Jackson Oiled Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. We are seeking community support to hire interim staff replacements while Laurin is gone. If you would like to help, please visit CRC’s website eRaptors.org and click on Donate Now.”

Please help wildlife…

Excitement in many ways…

It is raining again today, but the pink flowering currant is enjoying the shower. Excitement because spring really is on its way!

February 21, pink flowering currant enjoying itself in the rain

And, other great excitement, Chris Cozen’s new book was delivered to my door. Unfortunately, the rain makes it difficult to get good pictures in natural light, but I cannot wait to share until after the rain quits. It may be days…

More than 25 years ago, Chris and I lived one house away from each other on Olive Ave. in Redlands, California. I was a potter with a kiln in my backyard staying home with two tiny children. Chris was an educator running a non-profit pre-school with her own kids a little bit older. She was the world’s most creative person (everything to her is a springboard to new ideas). Eventually, my family moved to Northern California, her family moved to Memphis and then back to California in Pasadena. We always stayed in touch. The thread between us was creative expression. The week after I retired last June from teaching art at an intermediate school she invited me to her house to spend a few days creating and playing, along with some very talented quilt and dye artists. What a weekend! Enough energy and inspiration to go for another twenty five years. And the result was Chris’s new book:

Front Cover

AND, it includes photos of some things I made after the weekend of play:

This is a fabric book I created that includes my photos from the farmer’s market printed on fabric with my inkjet printer, and silk screen images from photos I took and then manipulated with Photoshop into black and white line images to use to make silk screens. I printed the silk screens on pfd cotton with Golden open acrylics. (I will blog about that process soon.)

Cover of Fabric Book

This is a wall hanging/quilt that has paper-fabric in it along with E-Z Screen Prints that I will tell you about soon.

It was so exciting to open this book! Thank you Chris! (The book is at Amazon.) Also see Patt Blair’s blog.

Good Will Toward Men

December 24, 2009. When I was growing up in the ’50′s in Pasadena, my father was president of an organization called the “Print Maker’s Society of Southern California”. This group had been very active during the ’20′s and ’30′s during the heyday of Craftsman and Art influences in Pasadena, but my Dad, being the youngest member, was president by virtue of having the energy to do the job. The membership had become older and there were not a lot of young printmakers coming up through the ranks. (Growing up, the lithograph press in the garage was thought of with awe, rather than thought of as strange. Although, nobody else really had one.) The group had yearly meetings that I remember even though I was less than ten. My mother would do the refreshments. Fossilman’s was a South Pasadena ice cream store where she would make a special trip to pick up punch. (I can still remember the taste of it-citrusy, with foamy stuff floating on top and a gorgeous pink/magenta color) and there were always lemon cookies with lots of powdered sugar on them. The meetings were held in a building overlooking the arroyo near the Rose Bowl. It was called the La Casita del Arroyo. Why do I remember that the ceiling of this building was made from the velodrome wood from the 1932 Olympics? It was glorious to play outside around this building and jump from stair to stair down its exterior staircase. This being the arroyo, those stairs were large stones and boulders from the same area. I was so happy that I did not have to stay inside and watch the old man with silver hair demonstrate how to make and print an etching.

Turns out he was the renaissance man named Harold Doolittle. He made craftsman-like furniture, his own printing press, and made beautiful etchings. (He is referenced in California Design, 1910, the catalogue of an exhibit at the Pasadena Center in 1974.) And my parents received Christmas cards each year from him and his wife. In the things my mother gave me after my father’s death, were three years of cards. I matted and framed them and they stay on my wall year round. (Where I live, you plan what you will throw in the car if you have to evacuate during a fire. They are right by the front door, and they will be the first to go. oops, Cliff is rubbing against my leg, reminding me that he and Katie will be the first, but these prints can be second. Second oops, Cliff and Katie, pictures when the kids were young, then the art from the walls.)

He made an etching each year for his cards and then hand lettered a greeting. Yes, and a little gold leafing, also. I want to share this one with you even though it is hard to get a picture because it is framed behind glass:This is what it says: (envision hand-lettered script)

“I wish there were some new way to say Merry Christmas.” Twice today I have overheard that remark. And each time I have said reverently to myself: “Thank God, there isn’t.” The spirit of Christmas is as simple as the heart of a child. It needs no new slogan & no special sales effort. No advertising agent can lend new glamour to its ancient magic. It is as elemental as the sun & the wind & the rain, as the stars that glowed on Galilee one holy night & now shed their same steady light on an older and perhaps a wiser world. No, there is no new way of saying Merry Christmas. Nor would we want one. The tree you will deck is the same as all the trees of its kind that have stood on all the hills since the world was young. The joy in a child’s eyes on Christmas morning is the joy that has filled the eyes of children since Christmas became an annual institution. Back of the gifts and the gaiety is an immemorial spirit of good will to men. Christmas is still Christmas. In a world awry with changes let us give thanks for One Precious Permanency. -Merle Crowell. MERRY CHRISTMAS Vestina & Harold Doolittle
This was probably sent around 1955. The ampersands are exceptionally beautiful.

So for 2009, may your heart be like that of a child.

Here is a bonus picture for Terry’s children, siblings, nieces, nephews and friends: Terry talking to Santa, c. 1949.Merry Christmas!