COMING HOME

Photo by Bill Slavin

San Francisco's fog hung back from the City as we crossed the Bay Bridge at the other end of town. I smiled at the fog bank, looked ahead to the City's skyline, and realized I felt happy to be coming home. We spent the last three days in Livermore in the East Bay sorting through storage containers at the moving company where we stored most of our worldly goods. After each exhausting day, we spent the evenings at a bed and breakfast inn in the heart of the Livermore wine country. We looked over vast acres of grapevines and olive trees, ranch houses, harvesting equipment, and barns, leading to the rolling hills in the distance. We saw a bucolic, peaceful scene in front of us, so much different from our new life in the City.

In the early morning, we sat outside the lodge in rocking chairs and listened to the birds singing in the nearby trees. A mockingbird captured our attention with its variations of other songbirds' songs. The grapevines hung thick with clusters of ripened, purple grapes. We didn't hear the sound of a fire engine, streetcar, or plane overhead. The dampness from the night was slowly drying as the sun rose higher in the sky, leaving behind the dry heat that we were used to in our former home.

We drove to downtown Livermore, a surprisingly large town in the middle of farm country. The town is bustling with small restaurants and local businesses along the main street. We stopped once for coffee at Press at one end of town and for coffee at Coffee On First at the other end. We ate dinner at Uncle Yu's, a well-known East Bay restaurant with Chinese cuisine. Wondering around Livermore felt so much like our previous life, with people looking familiar to us because they wore similar clothes and were doing the same things we used to do, meeting friends for coffee, getting ready to play golf or ride a bike, or celebrating a friend's birthday.

Since we bought a condominium in the City, we continue to bounce back and forth between thinking our purchase was a big mistake and enjoying all the activities we can now do because we are so close to parks, museums, ballparks, and theaters. We like the mix of age groups, languages, and cultures that are part of our new neighborhood. We are glad we have had the time to think our decision through even though our 3-day trip was filled with fluctuating doubts. As we drove across the Bay Bridge, I had a spark of recognition that the City has become our new home, the place we want to be right now.  We can always make a short trip to enjoy country life. Nothing is forever. 

Photo by Bill Slavin

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I hope you have all voted or plan to vote next Tuesday, November 5.

I read this opinion somewhere this week but failed to note its author. The person still made an important, thoughtful point:

" This election is about character. It is not about the character of the candidates, but about our own."

CONNECTED BY MUSIC

Sculpture outside of the San Francisco Transit Center

 Did you listen to music when you were growing up? 

My mom preferred musicals so she could sing along. My grandparents had a stack of old-timey sheet music inside the bench in front of their small organ. I still hum "You Are My Sunshine." Their organ was fun to play because of its stops and pedals that varied the sound of the notes. My dad listened to a violinist named Fritz Kreisler. We also listened to Country music. The song, "Ghost Riders in the Sky," a haunting piece, crept into my music memories and influenced the tunes I listened to as a teenager. I loved "The House of the Rising Sun," and songs by Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Judy Henske, who all sang soulful songs that told poignant stories. When the Beatles arrived, their music dominated the airwaves, pushing aside some older styles.

A couple of weeks ago, the Buena Vista Social Club performed in a small theater in San Francisco. They were a sensation in 1996 when their music first came to the U.S. from Cuba. The group formed around solo musicians from the 1940s and 1950s coaxed out of retirement to play together. They recorded an album with their name as the title, which became a worldwide hit. A film about the group followed shortly.

In 1996, their music made people jump up and dance, learn salsa, and discover a Cuba they knew little about since Castro took over the country. Bill and I listened to the album over and over. Eventually, the Buena Vista Social Club slipped from our memories until I saw a notice advertising their San Francisco show. I wondered what they had been doing in the intervening years. We bought tickets and assumed the audience would be fellow followers from back in the 90s, and yes, the audience was full of people our age. Surprisingly, a large number of young people attended too. They were not a crowd curious about the Buena Vista Social Club. Instead, as the musicians, one by one, entered the stage, the crowd rose up cheering and clapping vigorously. I asked myself how we had missed seeing the connection between the young people and the continuing popularity of this group of vibrant Cuban musicians.

This event got me thinking of the music we hear at the nearby food truck park. The playlists include music from our early adult years, including the Beatles, the Doobie Brothers, and Credence Clearwater Revival, mixed in with a few rap songs. Some of the songs are over 50 years old and I am surprised they would appeal to the mostly young crowds who gather at the park. When we listened to that music so long ago, we rarely heard music from our grandparents' era, 50 years before. Old-timey music and ragtime were rarities. Why has the music from our early adulthood sustained people's interest for so long? I wonder too what music we are missing now that will still be popular in 50 years.

The 8th-floor view of people walking on Channel Street by Martha Slavin

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FOLLOW THE TRAILS

Collage of Sidewalk Brass Markers

The admonition to look around you implies that you need to be more aware of your surroundings. That would have been good advice for me to follow one afternoon in Chicago as I walked with a group of friends, with my head focused in their direction, totally involved in our conversation until I turned my head just as I walked into a light pole. Luckily, I guess, I have a hard head and no damage came from the surprise collision. I wondered why a light pole was placed in the middle of a broad sidewalk, but there it was.

If I am more careful as I walk, l can make many interesting discoveries on city streets. Much of what I see is just trash, but the patina created by all kinds of fluids on sidewalks and light poles makes interesting textural patterns and could inspire an abstract painting.

San Francisco city street patterns

In San Francisco, I've also found brass plates embedded in the walkways. Near the UCSF sports center are several discs with phrases such as "Subsequently Allowed to Dissipate" that make me stop and wonder what they mean. Outside Town's End Cafe, I spotted a large historical stone marker next to the sidewalk that describes the history of Rincon Hill and why most of the hill disappeared. On the pavement next to the stone sign, I found a marker that read: "Cholera Expected Here," the words taken from a paper poster from 1850,  made me think of the threat of numerous lethal diseases that were routinely present at that time in San Francisco (and still are in areas around the world without good sanitation).

Brass plates with poetry are scattered on the Embarcadero walkway to the Ferry Building from Oracle Park and line the ramps leading to the streetcar stations. The poems speak of whales, picnics, and driving cars in ways that made me visualize the scene described by the poets. On Fourth Street, I found markers with the remaining known words from the language of indigenous people who inhabited the area before Whites arrived from Spain. I drew a collage of some of the poetry markers I've seen. I haven't completely written each line of poetry in the collage to give you the chance to discover these complete poems on your own when you come to San Francisco.

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View from a window on Tuesday, Oct. 15, in Livermore, CA

A quick travel tip:  If you like to taste wines or enjoy staying at bed and breakfast inns, try the Purple Orchid Wine Country Resort and Spa in Livermore. The photo above came from one of the windows at the inn. They serve a delicious breakfast and offer wine and cheese in the evening. It is quiet and peaceful so you can listen to the birds in the trees around the inn.

We had dinner at Uncle Yu's in downtown Livermore as well as a light lunch at Mornings on First.

Check them out here:

https://www.purpleorchid.com

https://morningsonfirst.com

 

ROOM TO IMPROVE

 In last week's post, I included a sketch page about traditions from Japan that included drawings of a Kabuki actor, sake barrels, and a young woman in a kimono. I placed them around the page and quickly filled the space with other traditional Japanese images including a torii gate, a sculpted tree, and Mt. Fuji. I didn't give myself time to think carefully about the placement of these images, but the sketch was good enough. But during the day after posting my blog, I kept thinking back about the sketch and knew I wasn't satisfied with the result. I decided to start over to see if I could be more mindful of design elements drilled into me in art school to create a better composition, using relationships between elements such as color, size, and shape.

 I have always enjoyed looking at an artist's sketches at museum exhibits more than their finished work. The sketches reveal a lot about how the artist's mind works. Showing the steps I took with this sketch could be helpful to help understand what goes into making a piece of art. 

First version with green

My first sketch needed something so I put a ribbon of green and embedded the words, Japan and Nihon, into the green space. The green helped to tie the various images together, but it still felt jumbled to me. I also didn't like the top part of the kimono. It looked muddy instead of the beautiful fabric that a kimono would often show.

Version posted to my blog last week with green ribbon added

To start over, I went back to tracing paper and traced over the shapes from the original. I made the torii the dominant feature in the center of the page. I knew that its reddish color would bring the eye there first. I moved the shapes around so they weren't as randomly placed as the original. I also made sure that each image touched something else on the page.

Rough draft on tracing paper

 

I used black markers to outline the images as well as the space around them. I painted most of the images with watercolor. I made sure that I limited the number of colors and had each color placed somewhere more than once on the page. Once I had finished that, I looked again and still felt that something was missing. I used a black marker to connect the images together within the rectangle. I think it looks better, don't you?

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This week in San Francisco is Fleet Week, a pageant celebrating our sea and air military. While I am writing this, I am also listening to the roar of jet planes as they practice close maneuvers in the sky. They are amazing to watch. The birds are silent. Usually, the birds scream after loud noises such as fireworks, but maybe Fleet Week, which has occurred for more than 20 years, is already on their calendar and they have found respite elsewhere.

FINDING YOUR WAY

I participated in Sheila Delgado's September challenge.
Here are some of the pieces I did for the daily challenges.

"Each of us comes from somewhere with blossoms."  Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang's thoughtful idea graced the back cover of Poetry Magazine recently. Reading the sentence reminded me of our move to Toyko. We joined with numerous expats from all over the world in a city crammed with over 21 million people. Bill's company gave us lots of move-in information, but the best was a booklet titled "Bloom Where You Are Planted." Most of the expats, like us, stayed only for three or four years and moved on to another expat assignment, while a few put down roots that went deep into the Japanese soil. In either case, a move out of our own country changed and challenged us.

In the first few weeks after moving to Tokyo, we spent almost every day walking our neighborhood, trying out the subways, and looking for something familiar. We lived in Minami Azabu, a district near the center of Tokyo where many expats lived. National Azabu, the local grocery store carried some Western products such as muesli, but many Americans shopped through the Foreign Buyers Club, an early delivery service, to acquire flour, American cereals, and Pop-Tarts. On nearby Hiroo Shopping Street, we found La Jolla, a Mexican restaurant that gave our son something familiar. The staff embraced him with joy. We slowly found other places that became our go-to places, a creperie on a back street off of Omotesando, an elegant tree-lined shopping street near Meiji Shrine, an Italian restaurant around the corner from our apartment, a cafe with dense hot chocolate, much better than the kind we made at home, and Itoya, with its bookstore and floors filled with an array of art materials and office supplies. Those simple connections to our previous life allowed us to step into a world we grew to love, and which challenged our beliefs and values.

Traditional Japan

Learning the language became the biggest hurdle in Tokyo. We came from a country with a language based on the Roman alphabet with 26 letters. We faced a language with 2136 characters in daily use and drawn with a brush, read mainly vertically instead of horizontally, and based on Chinese kanji symbols. We lost our literacy when we arrived as we tried to decipher signage and documents written in kanji and the two other Japanese alphabets (hiragana and katakana). Nothing was familiar. We began to understand how difficult it is for someone to move permanently to another country while trying to learn a different language and culture. An expat has choices: to hide from the overwhelming, to grow bitter, or to embrace the challenge of learning and adapting to a new life and new standards. During our learning curve, we went through all of those phases.

When we returned permanently to the United States after almost six years in two different countries, our son, who was entering high school, said, "I wouldn't be the same person that I am if I had stayed in Danville."

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September Window View

While diving down a Rabbit Hole on the Internet, I found this intriguing challenge, which offers activities close to water in the winter. Bodies of water are appealing to me and I find it calming to be near the ocean. Does water have the same effect on you?

Blue Mind Challenge:

https://www.bluetonic.org.uk/winterchallenge

SURPRISE CONNECTION

Heart sculpture at Salesforce Park, 
one of many scattered around San Francisco

One of art's purposes is to question your understanding of what you see around you. SF MOMA recently installed a thought-provoking exhibit of the work of sculptor Kara Walker called "Fortuna and the Immortality Garden." The garden includes 8 metal automatons embedded in obsidian rocks. It takes a moment to realize that each figure moves. One lifts its arms up and shakes the bells attached. Another strums strings along its belly. Each moves slowly and is mesmerizing to watch. The surfaces of the statues and the rocks are dark and foreboding. The information plaque about the grouping explains that the exhibit "considers the memorialization of trauma, the objectives of technology, and the possibilities of transforming the negative energies that plague contemporary society."

Part of Kara Walker's "Immortality Garden" at SF MOMA

We stood in front of a 20-foot female figure, who very slowly spit out a piece of paper. The slips of paper covered the ground around her and looked like the paper from a fortune cookie. Each one had a different proclamation. Ours said:

A hopeful proclamation

We sat down on the wooden staircase leading up to the main part of the museum and watched as the automatons moved. The exhibit is planted on the ground floor at the back entrance to the museum, which is a foot or so below street level. We both looked out the window behind the exhibit as a 6-foot tall rabbit, a Star Wars character, and a tiger-like being strolled by. Were they part of the exhibit?

No, they weren't, but the people had costumes so well created that we gathered ourselves up, walked out the door, and followed the strange costumes down the street. We found at the corner the entrance to the How Weird Street Faire at Howard and Second, which unbeknownst to us has roots from the Be-Ins in Golden Gate Park in the 1960s. We discovered that to enter we would have to hand over $40 each. We turned away wondering what the whole thing was about. We weren't dressed in costume and we felt bombarded by the too-loud music coming from the fair. We watched as more and more young, costumed people entered the fair. Later, after Googling the event, we discovered that its purpose is to encourage the union of art, music, and technology and to promote peace. I thought back about the two events, Kara Walker's Immortality Garden and the How Weird Faire. Their themes connected them together after all.

The fair is something to put on our list for next year. And don't miss the Kara Walker's exhibit either.

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Find Kara Walker here:

https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/fortuna-and-the-immortality-garden-machine/

The How Weird Faire here:

https://howweird.org/about-how-weird/ 

FINDING GOOD NEWS

This drawing of a Japanese maple in autumn
is a reminder that trees are a symbol of hope.

I have heard from people who say they take time in their day for a cup of coffee and a few quiet moments to read my Friday blog post. That is a thrill to me, especially with the repetitive news that is getting more intense the closer we are to elections. I've been cutting down on cable news, and not reading opinion pieces that say the same thing over and over again. I know whom I am voting for and I want to put my mark on my ballot as soon as I can. 

When people ask me what my blog is about I pause to think. Originally, my main goal was to combine my writing and art together. I wanted to show how my artwork has influenced my life in many ways. The practice of art has taught me a lot about failure, persistence, and "getting up, dusting myself off, and starting all over again." Making art and focusing on something in the moment has been a good way for me to let go of tense emotions to find some measure of peace. I am glad that other people have found my blog to be a place to find some serenity as well.

So often I hear people say that they can't draw. My answer to that is to practice. Would you expect an engineer to design a building without the study necessary? Neither should you expect to be an artist in a quick minute. Doodling is an easy and meditative way to begin. Start by learning contour drawing. With just a pencil and paper pad, you can study an object and draw its contours. As you slowly follow the contours of the object with your eyes, draw a line on your paper. Only look down at your drawing when you change direction. You will find you have created a drawing that is not an exact likeness, but rather one that has given you an understanding of the shape of the object as well as allowed you to let go of perfection. Neurographic art and Zentangle designs are two other doodling techniques that help you focus.

Drawing the inside & outside of a face
without looking except when you change direction

Use contour drawing while looking at the page

Zentangle design

Neurographic art

I have turned off the news that runs through my head (have we really learned anything new about the candidates in the last couple of weeks?) and I look for something to read that is positive. The newsletter, Reasons to be Cheerful, was created for that purpose. The articles are filled with hope and the positive actions of people who are trying to improve our lives. Scientific American has an article called "Being Empathetic is Easier When Everyone's Doing It." Wouldn't it be good to remember that idea in our daily lives? If you, like me, are tired of the race-baiting, bullying, demeaning of others, and lying that is the hallmark of Trump and the MAGA movement, I hope you will join me in voting NO to their cruel behavior. Vote on November 5 like your country depends on you!

Autumn Bounty -  watercolor
The first day of autumn is this Sunday!

Reasons to be Cheerful here:

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-london-first-baby-beavers-400-years/

If you are intrigued by the importance of beavers, read Beaverland, How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip

Have you noticed how much empathy has disappeared from our public places?

Read this Scientific American article about empathy:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/being-empathetic-is-easier-when-everyones-doing-it/