29 August 04
Rendering Dimension
We all drew as children. The question Peter Steinhart asks in The Undressed Art: Why We draw is why we stop.
Many give up because they think they aren’t good enough, or it doesn’t make any sense when there are so many other things to do. But Steinhart thinks it’s what makes us uniquely human.
The camera, and now the computer, have played their part in destroying drawing as a discipline, yet they have nothing on abstract expressionism. Generations have lost the skill of drawing.
And yet: life drawing classes and studios are filled to capacity.
Reading this book makes me ache to get back into a dusty room with twenty other people, charcoal dust swilling around, looking at a human figure and puzzling how to get it down on paper. I think I’ll try the Davis open studio this fall. If I’m no good it doesn’t matter: there’s nothing else that can get me to see as hard as that.
This post is the 500th on Feathers of Hope, eighteen months and counting.
28 August 04
Bloggers In The Marin Bookstore
Today we travelled to Corte Madera in Marin County to meet Maria Benet who writes the blog Alembic (which we always pronounce “alembique”). We met in the bookstore Book Passage, perhaps the best independent bookstore in Marin County, which as is the bookstore fashion these days, has its own little caf, perfect for long conversation. It was a lively literary conversation: we talked about everything from publishing poetry to the banality of the book club scene. After sitting in the caf for a while, we wandered the store, where we introduced her to Jasper Fforde (we ourselves bought a copy of The Well of Lost Plots, while she went home with the first book in the Thursday Next series, The Eyre Affair). We both left with a copy of the short story in verse, The True Tale of a Tough Tiburon Tabby, illustrated by the San Francisco cartoonist Phil Frank.
Afterwards, we had lunch at Il Fornaio, all of us having eggs for brunch. (Maria’s dinner plans were to have a salad of arrugula, feta cheese, and figs; Pica thought was a very Marin County sort of salad to have, and it inspired us to have our own dinner of arrugula, mixed greens, and blue cheese). We then ferried her home up the steepest hill Nellie has yet to climb. Marin County is a great place to live if you love hills, with Mt. Tamalpais dominating the view from their house. Alas, housing is only affordable there if you happened to have moved there twenty years ago.
Above we have a photo of us three bloggers staring at Alembic on one of Maria’s laptops (the Benets have a geek’s paradise of an home office, with more computers and tech books than one can count).
27 August 04
The Not-Santa-Annas
The Not-Santa-Annas
Hot, dusty winds out of the north is what we had all night and morning, making everyone irritable and crotchety. The cats’ fur is on end; the horses in the paddock across from me at work swish at flies with their tails till they’re blue in the face. If I brush my hair I look like Bozo the clown gone gray and wild.
Bad chi, this is, flying around in an unreasonable way.
We’re supposed to get a hugely hot weekend. I read about people sitting in dripping tents and almost weep with longing.
26 August 04
Cat-mandu
Yesterday we met Richard for a summer picnic dinner (the veggie combo from Kathmandu Kitchen) at the Davis Farmers Market Picnic in the Park. He updated us on all his numerous bird sightings, and I did some sketching of the crowd. At right is a drawing of the not-so-good Irish band that was playing then.
Another cat update: this morning we trapped the orange cat that was in the vicinity of Carlos and Blake when we trapped those two kittens last week. The cat turned out to be male—not the kittens’ mother—and Pica took him in to the vet today to be neutered. Debbie, who’s the goddess of Davis homeless cats (she runs the adoption service Feline Lifeline), saw him at the vet and thinks he’s potentially tameable enough to be adoptable. We don’t have the setup to work with him inside, so our plan is to release him outside and try to befriend him with food. He tested negative for FeLV, and they think he’s about 11 months old. Right now he’s the exclusive occupant of our bathroom as he recovers from his surgery overnight.
25 August 04
What’s Goth?
One of the more interesting (used here as a synonym for frustrating) things about my burgeoning logocentric connection with my mother is her awareness that she lost twenty-five years of American popular culture and language by living in Spain and came back to find that her mother tongue was no longer, well, current. And she assumes mine is. (Even though I lost almost the same amount of time and didn’t even grow up here!)
So, for instance, on Sunday when we had lunch on a figged patio in Sonoma, she asked what “goth” was.
The answer to this question is different now than it would have been ten years ago. I flounder. Do I describe the former or the latter? I try and explain as best I can, but she’s never even really seen one (I decide we should start with the noun goth rather than the adjective). So I’m reduced to selecting body parts like some demented early Renaissance poet, when it would be so much easier just to point one out in the street. They are thin on the ground in Sonoma, though, upscale chichi pseudo-Tuscan hamlet that it is. Goths, even their latest watered-down suburban incarnation, tend to be “urban.” Dressedinblack. Edgy. Or edgy-wannabes. (I gave up trying to explain what edgy was a couple of years ago.)
She tries so, so hard to find all this out on her own, surrounding herself with reference books and, when she gets really daring, online resources. There’s just one problem: all the definitions use words that themselves need defining in relation to the culture. She feels at sea in the country whose passport she carries, an immigrant from a past where words meant what you thought they meant. I’m sympathetic but ultimately can’t really help her; she tends to listen hard and then decide this, too, will elude her.
It was much easier when she asked me later on to remember specific sweeties from my grandmother’s sweetshop in Lancashire from the early sixties for a story she was working on. That was easy: Smarties. Sherbet fountains. Jelly babies. Dolly Mixtures. Gobstoppers. Liquorice Allsorts. Toffee. The smell of that wood-panelled paradise came flooding back, mint mixed with tobacco mixed with citrus sugar, along with assorted memories of inedible things in the boarding house where we were staying, such as blancmange in the shape of a bunnyrabbit (poor bunny, said my four-year-old Californian self, refusing dessert). Memories of double-decker buses filled with the warm fug of cheap cigarette smoke and wet umbrellas, everyone going somewhere in the rain that never stopped. Memories of grandma in her hospital bed, breathing, breathing…
24 August 04
Psst!
This is one of many hundreds of words in the Dictionary of All-Consonant Words, part of several such collections at the Strange & Unusual Dictionaries home. After all, you never know when you’ll run out of vowels.
(From LibrarianinBlack)
23 August 04
Precept
Forty-five years ago today, I was born not too far from here.
My mother and I have grown closer over the years; the connection has been writing. I send her a poem, she sends me one, kind of thing.
This is the one she sent me for today:
Precept
Even then,
our little girl
saw beauty
in a snail on the move
whose disguise
lies in doing things
slowly.
She painted one,
not in camouflage
but strident walnut taupe,
for its journey up
a sturdy turquoise blade
that dared to stab awake
the lasting
blue.
Her work hangs,
now in a wood frame,
part of this empty house,
and I’m seventy.
22 August 04
Leaps And Bounds
Diego is by a good bit the most agile of our two kitties. He’s always leaping up on things, mostly just to check out what’s happening. (Charlie is getting better at his leaps but often it seems has to pull himself up by his forepaws.) Yesterday evening he gave a prime example of this. One of his favorite spots to sit is the trunk bag that sits on top of the rear rack of our tandem. This itself is about a yard off the ground. Anyway, I was changing the 5-gallon water bottle on our water dispenser—glug, glug, glug it was going, filling the empty dispenser. Diego leaps in one bound from the tandem rack to our couch, then without missing a beat, leaps in a second bound from the couch on to the countertop, and then steps over to the water bottle to check out the commotion. He’s a regular scientist, our Diego.
21 August 04
Another Sketching Jaunt
Today Numenius and I took a trip to a zoo we hadn’t visited before: the one in Folsom. This was a refreshing change from previous zoos we’d been to; the focus is entirely on providing a safe home for mostly California-native animals that would either not have made it in the wild or would have had to have been destroyed. There are several camp-marauding bears, injured raptors, foxes, wolves, wolf/dog hybrids, tigers rescued from an illegal breeder (who apparently had 60 large cats in an area maybe three of them could have lived in comfortably), bunnies and chickens rescued from overzealous Easter gift-bearing relatives, ferrets, and so on. Peacocks, including an interesting male albino, supervised all day. The reason we went, though, is so I could do some studies of mountain lions.
I wish I had access to an inexhaustible warehouse of high-quality photographs of wildlife I could use whenever I needed an image for a project at work. We have a couple of good shots here and there, but you don’t want to overuse these. Plus, I could never get a photo of what it is I want—a mother looking out, two cubs playing—in the order and so on. I’ll have to do it myself.
My illustration teacher used to tell us to be sure to get a variety of pictorial references before starting a project. Photos should be a last resort. Live was always best, she said; video’s pretty good (funky pause buttons make an animal almost seem to be in motion); taxidermy and skeletons have their uses. But live is certainly best (and most challenging). Although the Folsom Zoo currently has no mountain lion cubs, I was able to see things in these animals I’d never noticed before. Our kittens are structurally similar but there are important differences; the mountain lion, though small for a large cat, is massive and moves heavily (though a couple of pounces showed us how little chance you’d have to get away if one decided you were somehow superfluous).
Above is a group of sketches I reworked when we got home this afternoon, a combination of watercolor pencil and watercolor.
20 August 04
Bears Prefer Microbrews
From Richard Hall comes a story giving evidence towards the general superiority of microbrews over mass-market beer.
Kitten update: We took Carlos and Blake, the two feral kittens we caught yesterday, to the vet today where they were neutered and both tested negative for FeLV. A co-worker of Pica’s is graciously fostering them temporarily over the weekend.