I'm Back

I've been around but have been busy with a few things other than my garden and paintings lately. The mural needed some changes which became apparent once it was installed. So much silver and black on a large scale was looking a bit cold so I have been adding more branches of cheerful green leaves and happy pears. I go in after the cafe closes and stand up on the ladder in the big dark space, listening to music, reaching higher and higher with an extra long paint brush that I made, hoping that if I fall off the ladder some of the baking staff in the back rooms will find me.

During the day I have also been painting up on a ladder, and having lots of fun. My front porch is finally finished and now has red railings, gold columns, a robin's egg blue ceiling, and other rich shades of olive, brown and navy blue. OK I got carried away, but I figure my neighbors know that I am an eccentric painter already. There is no hiding it. I love color. (I kept the colors dark in general so as not to make my house look too much like a circus) I mix my own paints, buying them in quart sized cans and muddling them together with additions of acrylics until they are just right. Yes I am very particular about color.


And finally, I have been in the studio getting ready for a show of my oil paintings. The show will be at the new Macrina and I am excited to see my small pieces in such a big dramatic space. This is an important show for me since I have never before shown my oils of plants and animals, though I have been painting in this style for years now. I have been saving them for the right time to expose them to the public. I use the word "expose" since it feels a little like I am exposing my most personal thoughts and feelings. Most of the paintings are about how emotionally vulnerable we are in this beautiful and treacherous world. There are paintings of my son and paintings of small creatures. There are also paintings of weasels, who dance in defiance of uncertainty.

You are invited to join me at the opening of this show. If you see me there, and I have the same wary expression on my face as the bunny of honesty, it is because, like the honesty bunny, I am not hiding anything.

Installation

The mural was installed at Macrina's new headquarters yesterday! The building is huge and the front cafe has been beautifully designed to emphasize the historic warehouse architecture and materials. They will open for business tomorrow so today is my last chance to touch up the painting. There is a very tall ladder propped against the wall this morning waiting for me climb up and do the do my best Michelangelo impersonation. A little scary with everyone watching me...I like being in the building though, with the hustle and bustle of last minute activity. It has the feeling of a play about to open. The baristas are huddled by the espresso machine for intensive training. The electicians and carpenters rush around with hard hats and tool belts. The architect pops in and out looking worried. The owners linger in corners having important conversations. And all the while I can see the bakery staff through large glass windows making magical tempting smells with enormous mixing bowls of raisins, chocolate and spices. The production area of the building has already opened.

I got a call last night from the carpenter who is installing the mural telling me that one of the panels didn't fit and they were forced to take a slice off one side and glue it to the other side. This should give me pause...but he seems like a careful and skilled person so I am sure it is not as drastic as it sounds. I will just have to deal with it today. I have also asked him to put screws through the face of the mural to secure it to the wall really really well. We get earthquakes around here. He seemed reluctant to damage the painting but I know that I can camouflage the results. Looks like a busy day ahead of me.





I painted some chickadees in the branches of the tree in honor of the chickadee family that nested on my front porch this summer. There is a parent feeding a fledgling but everyone thinks they are kissing. Kind of nice, I guess.


Several people asked if I would include a weasel in the mural so I have signed my name in the lower right hand corner with one. This picture shows how the grain of the plywood tempers the shininess of the aluminum leaf. I was worried that the mural would glare as it reflects a lot of light but now I can see that it is ok.

Applying Leaf

I couldn't wait to get into the studio yesterday to start applying aluminum leaf to the mural. The leaf comes in 5.5 inch squares and is about as thin as one layer of a double layered kleenex. I had to close the studio door to stop the draft from blowing the leaf around the room.

I paint glue wherever I want the leaf to stick, which is tedious, but pleasantly doesn't require any brain power. Thank goodness for NPR keeping me company. Then the leaf is stuck all over the painting and rubbed with a cotton ball. Where there is glue it sticks and where there is paint it rubs away. Or that is how it is supposed to happen...

Oh no. Oh no. The plywood is rougher than I am used to working on and its tooth grabbed the leaf leaving it stuck to the paint in about a quater of the painted surface. There is nothing I can do but repaint on top of the unwanted aluminum. Very very time consuming. This may require more than the comfy voice of KUOW's Steve Scher to get me through. I might have to hit the books on tape... All this with a deadline of 15 September. It is going to be quite a week.

Still it will all be worth it in the end... Grrr.

Moving Outside

Henry and I took advantage of the sunshine today to move the painted panels outside into the alley allowing us to see them together. (One was left inside as it wasn't painted yet.) Once we had blocked the alley with the panels we ran up to the studio roof deck to look down on them. This meant that I could see if the angles and placement of the branches matched where they crossed from panel to panel.

I had never seen the panels all together before and it was a shock to see how big this thing is. I am trying not to be freaked out by it.

I took notes and photos and moved them all back inside again.

Gnarly, Dude

Maybe something like this, sketched in Photoshop, will give more interest to my tree. After painting so many botanically accurate plants it is hard for me to add imaginary branches to this tree painting. A little voice in my head keeps saying "what if pear trees don't really twist like that..." Shut up voice. This one does.

Mural Update

I am having fun with the pear tree mural. While my studio is only large enough to see two panels at a time, I have figured out that I can photograph each panel and Photoshop them all together to see the composition. Cool!
The red background is distracting and rather pretty, like a Pompei mural, but will be covered with silver (aluminum) leaf.

Here is the great Vincent Van Gogh's beautiful painting "Almond Blossom" from 1890

Gustave Klimt painted this pear tree in 1903. I don't find it as interesting as his later, more graphic work.

A few years later Piet Mondrian started his journey towards the famous paintings of colored grids by looking at the patterns of tree branches Piet Mondrian Red Tree 1908
Piet Mondrian Grey Tree 1911

Closer to home here is a lovely painting by Canadian artist Garry Kaye who lives on Salt Spring Island, just around the corner from here. It is acrylic, measures 36"x48" and was painted last year.

While all these tree paintings are useful references for me I think that I need to draw more inspiration from the work of Arthur Rackham who illustrated children's books in the first part of the 20th Century. I want my tree to be twisty and fabulous like his trees. My daughter wants me to include fairies too, but I think I will stick with pears and maybe a few birds. So hopefully I can add more gnarly-ness to my tree. It needs viens and muscles and wrinkles.

Fun on a Bigger Scale

I have started on a new adventure this week! Macrina Bakery and Cafe will be opening a new headquarters in Seattle soon and I am painting a mural as part of the interior. It will be based on this small painting I did last year of a pear tree but, instead of measuring two feet accross it will measure 16 feet! Yikes!

The mural will be made up of eight panels, each one so heavy that I can't move it by myself.

Henry helps me sand and prime the panels.


I have started with the trunk, which so far looks like a shiny disco ball. Oh dear. A little more work needed I think. Even though the trunk of the real tree looks like a basic grey color, I am including many different colors in the painted trunk. Why be boring when we can make something rich with color. Click on the picture to see the colors up close. The red background will be covered with silver leaf.

Painting for Obama

I am donating this little painting to "Art for Change", an Obama campaign fund-raiser. The event will be held in Seattle on Thursday evening. Fifty artists have donated small pieces and patrons will each pay $150 to choose one. For more info please check out the web site and come down on Thursday and support us. I think the web site says that the event is full, but I know that a few more people would be welcome.


If you live in Seattle you will know that it is blackberry season. All along the road sides and in every abandonded lot or neglected field the Himalayan Blackberry has taken over. Bad for the environment. Good for pies and muffins! Eat up.

Andy's Summertime Picnic

I have taken a little time off to enjoy summer and am now back in the studio - still enjoying summer. I love geraniums and have some very fond memories of my Auntie Kathy's house where a large indoor geranium plant stood in its pot on the floor with fallen petals decorating the polished wood all around it. Leaving the petals on an otherwise well swept floor was a striking embrace of accidental beauty that has stuck in a happy place in my mind. Kathy is also the only person I have ever known to cut the buds of red geraniums and put them in a vase. She lives in New Brunswick, Canada, where she makes her extraordinary paintings and where she and her daughter Sue share their teaching and their beautiful garden with students at Hooper Studios.

I have called my geranium painting "Andy's Summertime Picnic" because of the soup can. It is a nod toward the Pop Art movement of the 1960s which had, as one of its iconic starting moments, the 1962 introduction of Andy Warhol's "32 Soup Cans". (Now at the MOMA in New York) My work is not very much influenced by this movement but I appreciate the message that explored popular culture as a subject. It was also a much needed breath of irreverence in the intellectual world of abstract expressionism. Some of my current work can be categorized as "Pop Surrealism", a largly West Coast American movement of the past 10 years or so which uses images of popular culture in a surrealistic way. From one pop movement to another this painting is a little hello.

(My painting measures 8x10 and is oil on canvas. Click on any of these images to see them bigger though my painting will appear larger than it actually is in real life, which is kind of weird. The Warhol canvases are worth seeing bigger though. Their actual size is 20"x16" each canvas. The soup flavours are fun to read and I am surprised to find a vegetarian option in 1962)


Blueberries in my garden with Jolly Joker violas and thyme. Photographed today - before I eat them. Yum.