On the bottom floor of the Palace of Fine Arts Legion of Honor, next to the cafe, is a small gallery/room that contains some treasures. Each visit I make I am sure to pop in to see what is on display. Something always catches my imagination and blows my creative juices into the air. Last Thursday’s visit did not disappoint because the small gallery of Illustrated Books was focusing on “Inspired Alphabets”.
I walked into the room and was caught by the word circus…then lithography…if you have read this blog for a while you will recognize some of my favorite themes…
Then there was this fabulous collage book with collaged lettering…
More lithography…
And who knew Claes Oldenburg envisioned buildings and cities made from letters…
There is much to be said for the small book that can be held in one hand…with the power of the fold…
The letters themselves creating abstract art…and the overprint…
The Dada Movement…
Lifted by my interaction with the typography, I got home to a new visual journal I had under construction and had found the way I wanted to create the title page…
Onward and upward…my souvenir of the day was an idea…
If you know me at all, you know that I have a soft spot in my heart for printmaking. After seeing the room with California faience tiles at the Crocker Museum of art, we walked to the gallery room next door and there was another wonderland! Multicolored block prints by an Arts and Crafts master.
William S. Rice came to California in the early 1900″s, originally to Stockton and then to Alameda and Oakland. He was a public school art teacher and art administrator for their school systems. He wrote two books, including Block Prints: How to Make Them and traveled through California making art before population influx had changed it. If you ever look at old Sunset Magazines, you might see his work on its covers.
From the Crocker Museum website:
Rice was a prolific painter of the California landscape but is today better known as a printmaker, one who authored two books on the process and executed every print himself. He applied the classic Japanese art of ukiyo-e (woodblock printing, or “pictures of the floating world”) to images of the West, where he moved in 1900. This exhibition brings to light many of the artist’s accomplishments, including several never-before-exhibited pieces capturing the California landscape before development.
The exhibit had many of his water colors but I was entranced by his block prints.
In particular I enjoyed the demonstration of the multi-block nature of his printmaking work.
Lone Rock-Santa Cruz, c. 1935
Progressive layers of the block printing process for Lone Rock-Santa Cruz
This demonstration of how he went from pencil sketch, to etching, to block print was masterful!
Leona Live Oaks pencil live study etching block print
The block prints themselves swept me away. (My apologies for the reflections on the surfaces, very hard to get away from that when there is excellent museum lighting on glass framed works.)
We spent January’s MLK Weekend at the Morro Bay Bird Festival. We used to be faithful participants, but for the last two years we had not attended. This year we registered early, got all the workshops we wanted, and were set to enjoy beautiful weather (in the 70’s and clear as a bell…January, no less!). Friday we arrived in time for Terry’s 3:00 workshop on identifying seagulls…the whole weekend he kept showing me his knowledge (evidently, they are tricky to identify because there are so many different kinds of them.) Then we enjoyed a lovely dinner at the Bay Cafe soaking in the old sights, the smell of the sea, and having the first of many meals featuring fish. Oh, and there was a sunset.
The next morning, Terry was off early to a field trip looking for Golden Eagles (successful) and I strolled through Morro Bay’s commercial district (about three blocks of that). After lunch, I went to my workshop on drawing birds while Terry went kayaking on the bay.
I walked into the Natural History Museum for my class and the sky looked like this:
Drew for a few hours…
and when I came out four hours later, the sky had turned to this…
What a place! The next morning, we were both up and on field trips by 7:45. I don’t know what Terry saw, but I birded with a group that went toward Turri Road and over to parts of Los Osos. The Central Coast was looking so good…
I met my old friend, Kathy, who lives in Atascadero, for lunch and we drove up to Cayucos for some fabulous salmon tacos. Couldn’t walk on the pier, though, as it is under construction.
Ahh, the hours I spent on that beach in my youth… That evening we ate at The Galley (more fish) and had another spectacular sunset to enjoy…
This is the Townsend’s Warbler that I drew in my class and the block print I made from it when I got home…
I definitely would not mind looking at that kind of sky every day…
The reason that I ended up with two boutiques on the same weekend in December was that I had taken a class last fall through Walnut Creek Civic Arts. If you take a class then you are invited to participate in the sale. I had taken a printmaking class and had a great time. The facility has a large etching press that is wonderful, so, along with block prints I made some collagraphs which I fell in love with doing. It is not like I need to go out and buy any textured papers to create these things, right? I ripped of the back cardboard from every pad of paper in the house and set to gluing. Then I coated the printing plates with layers and layers of gloss medium so the water-based ink could be washed off after the printing was done. Once they were printed I could not leave them alone. You know me, they also got some collage elements added on top and additional printing and coloring. Here is a sampling…
These two were printed on Rives BFK paper with two printing plates one for the background textures and the other with the animal.
These were printed on rice paper more like a block print would be rather than with the press. They were embellished with water color and colored pencils along with collage elements.
This had a background made with a collagraph on the etching press but then had silk screens added on top.
These were carving blocks I made and stamped on background paper. In the bottom one some of the paper had been sent through my inkjet printer but the paper tore. What to do but tear it some more and emphasize it.
Had so much fun I am taking the class again so I can use that wonderful press and make more collagraphs!
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”—Jack Kerouac, “On the Road” (1957)
Yes it is true, we are hitting the road again. This time to Umbria and Venice. When I return I will finally use the book I made in the “Ticket to Venice” class I took many long months ago. It will hold all the ephemera I collect and photos I take. (Classes are on sale right now, hurry, before Mary Ann Moss gets back from Amsterdam!)
My journal turned out too big for a suitcase (or I am getting smarter about packing), but in the interim what will make it into my valise is this:
The cover is laminated paper I made (lots of scraps layered with gel medium) and it has a soft, flat binding.
The inside has Fabiano Artistico paper and inserts from Gelli prints I have been making. (We will be quite near the Fabiano factory!)
Some pages have stencils gessoed on them (you won’t be able to see it until I watercolor on top. I have been a virtual dervish of rubber stamp carving so there are stamps put on with StazOn ink and then water colored inside.
A pocket on the back cover holding extra watercolor squares and tracing paper.
The next few weeks will not be filled with nuages, wine labels, and Deux Chevaux. Instead they will be filled with nuvoli, wine labels, and Fiats. Two weeks near Spoleto and then a week in Venice. The really fun part is that we will be meeting old friends Chris and Darrell from Pasadena (we met more than thirty years ago when we lived one house away from each other in Redlands, CA.) The last few months, every time we have communicated we have signed off by saying, “See you in Orvieto, in front of the Duomo at 10:00.) It will be this coming Friday. Excitement! (Oh, the best thing ever…TM on this, our fifth trip, has given me the gift of Economy Plus…the BEST 5 inches ever!)
Busy packing, but here is a collage I made after our trip to Italy two years ago (that time it was Florence and Tuscany, but we hopped over the border into Umbria for a day trip so we could see Orvieto.) Think of us on Friday, standing here in front.
I will be blogging, hopefully a little easier this time as both apartments have Wifi. You will be happy to hear that I have new music selections for my movies…I know, I know…relief!
One of my favorite columnists in the San Francisco Chronicle (Leah Garchik) has a section called “Public Eavesdropping”. I leave you with this item from her column:
“Do you speak English?’
“Why yes, certainly.”
“Oh, good. I wonder, could you direct me to the Renaissance?”
—Conversation between two female tourists at the Piazza di Santa Croce in Florence by Roberto
While in Provence, we went to the factory where Les Olivades fabrics are printed. These are the iconic “Pierre Deux” fabrics characteristic of Provence. I was excited to see the silk-screen process. (You may remember that when I entered my first Duomo in Italy I decided my goal was to become the intern sitting on the floor cleaning ancient mosaics with a tooth-brush; when I marbled paper in a paper store in Florence I wanted to hire on to be their “marbler”; and Paris made me think I could get hired to paint walls the colors that the Musee D’Orsay has chosen.) Now that I have returned from Provence I want to follow in the steps of the many Cheesemen I saw in the marches (my friend Lisa and I have signed up for a cheese making class in August) and I keep wondering why I spent so many years in that classroom when I could have been learning how to be a master-printer at Les Olivades? The process is very similar to EZScreen printing which I love because its cleanup is with water. Here is my iMovie of the process: (You can make it full screen by clicking the square to the left of the word Vimeo.)
The pillow I bought at the factory store. (Any one else have a husband that hates pillows on the couch? geez, I felt like I was bringing back contraband!)
Patterns for a class with guru Mary Ann Moss here and an inkjet transparency of a photo I took of the clock at the Musee D’Orsay ready to be made into a silk screen. Fun is happening here!
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
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.
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:
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.”
Lois Reynolds Mead 