FRIENDS REACQUAINTED

 Some of us met in kindergarten, many of us came together in high school. Almost all of us went our separate ways afterwards. A couple of weeks ago, some of us gathered together to celebrate a significant birthday for all our class. I looked around at the many people in the room and realized I recognized most of them, even without name tags to help me. We stood together for an afternoon and had a good time reminiscing about shared experiences. 

High school was our last communal stepping stone. I looked around at the people that I grew up with, and I never imagined the paths we all would take. Some of us became teachers, lawyers, business owners, parents, farmers, criminals, adventurers, journalists, or lived unsheltered. My own life took me to unexpected places. I traveled to Peru while working for a fashion magazine, worked in the personnel department of a tech company for a while, became a teacher, married, had a child, served as a community volunteer, lived in Japan and Paris, and returned to artwork and writing once I retired from paid work. A life full of unexpected adventures.

Every person in the room also lived a life full of twists and turns, leading each of us to be the person we have become. Yet, standing in the group of familiar faces, none of that mattered so much as how we now welcome and accept each other. We are eager to see old friends who knew us when we were going through all the trials, heartaches, and joys of being a teenager. We could reminisce about dances in the gym, doing the Surfer Stomp, parties during Spring Break at Huntington Beach or Bal Island. We could laugh at wearing circle pins with their hidden message, depending on which side of your collar you wore it on, being checked for too-short skirts or for not having T-shirts tucked in, and sitting in tent classrooms because our town wouldn't provide the funding for our school to build more permanent classrooms. We remembered driving down Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena to go to Bob's Big Boy for one of their legendary hamburgers, and we talked of one of our classmates who was notorious for funny antics and disrupting classes. And we also spoke of the ones who could no longer join us, taken by the Vietnam War, cancer, accidents, and just the arbitrary circumstances of life.

We were a large group, over 500 students, when we graduated. A core group of classmates organized reunions throughout our lives. Our class has been lucky to stay in touch over the years because of their commitment. Some of us, like me, only arrive for the occasional reunion, while others have maintained their close friendships since school days, meeting weekly for card games or, occasionally, celebrating a birthday, and helping classmates out when they needed support. 

Each year, the list of people who have passed gets a little longer. As we get older, each meeting becomes more meaningful to me as these long-time acquaintances seem part of a larger extended family rather than just classmates.

BEAUTY FROM DIRT

 Raku pottery by R. Kagawa

 Did you ever play in the mud, make mud pies, or squish mud through your fingers?

 Delicious feeling, wasn't it?

Some people continue to work with mud, becoming potters who make extraordinary ware. I tried pottery classes in school. I learned that pulling clay up on a potter's wheel is hard work. It takes practice to achieve thin vessel walls and prevent them from collapsing. One time, as I was pulling the clay up, my oversized shirt got caught in the spinning clay, and I became one with my pottery. Attaching a handle to a pot is difficult. Mine often broke in half during the firing process. Painting glaze on an unfired piece is hard. A friend gave me one of his pots that I still treasure today. He learned to fashion a lid that fit the pot and splashed a dark, matte glaze over his pots. His abilities filled me with admiration. But with practice, more practice than I attempted, you could be like my friend or Korean celadon potters who make extraordinary wares.

Celadon by Bill Slavin

When we traveled to Korea while living in Japan, we visited a celadon factory with a huge warehouse filled with what seemed like miles of celadon pottery of every shape and size. An intensely hot kiln with low oxidation achieves the blue-green celadon color, similar to the color of jade, a stone prized in Asia. But that is the end of the process. To make each piece, a potter spins a lump of clay into a vase or other vessel. The piece is allowed to harden, though flexible enough so that the potter, using a small scooping tool, can carve out traditional patterns, most often hundreds of small cranes around the surface of the pottery. Once those carvings are completed, the potter brushes a slip glaze of a different color clay from the foundation into the body of the crane, and then, using a darker slip color, fills the lines of the feet and beak. Each step is meticulously carried out to ensure that each vessel is identical. Any that come out of the kiln and are not perfect are immediately destroyed.

Korean Celadon inlaid designs on a vase

In our time living in Paris, we discovered the pottery of Jean Gerbino from Vallauris, a pottery area, who used a similar technique to the Koreans, though all his work is done without a potter's wheel. His creations remind me of working in Sculpy, a non-fired clay dough. He would roll different colors of clay into a long cylinder, cut the roll into tiny pieces, and attach each piece together to make the bottom of the bowl.

A roll of different colors of clay 

Bowl by Jean Gerbino

Next, he rolled out small sections of flat clay, cut out gingko leaf shapes, and inlaid gingko leaves of a different color clay into the cutouts. He attached each gingko medallion to two others, continuing the process until he had numerous gingkoes in a row, then connected the two ends together, and finally attached that to the bowl's bottom piece. I looked carefully at the bowl and could see where each medallion had been connected, but marveled at the amount of work that went into making such a meticulous piece. When I turned the bowl over, unlike with more conventional pottery, I could see the various colors of clay that Gerbino used.  

Because most of us played with mud as children, we often treat crafts such as pottery-making as trivial pursuits. By examining the work done by trained potters, we can see what makes these creations an art form instead. 

Pottery made with inlays or with different colors of clay rolled together

Watch the video here to see how celadon pottery is produced:

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/945/korean-celadon-pottery/

Pottery-making in Vallauris, France:

https://perfectlyprovence.co/vallauris-pottery-french-riviera/

https://www.ceramic-signatures.com/france/vallauris#gallery-25

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"Hang onto your hat. Hang onto your hope, Wind your clock, for tomorrow is another day."

E.B. White

END OF SUMMER READING

San Francisco by Bill Slavin

 August, and we haven't had temperatures above the 70s all summer long. Unusual even for San Francisco. So the coming of August has been a surprise. Schools are about to be back in session. Autumn activities will soon ramp up, but there is still time to get in a bit of good reading and for taking a walk in the town or city we live in. Moving to the City has made our wandering around the San Francisco neighborhoods a different way to go sightseeing. Bill looks up to the skyscrapers and finds interesting photos in the reflections and unexpected views of old and new. I look down and find poetry and artwork embedded in the sidewalks.

I've asked several friends to suggest books that have been good reads in 2025. 

Three books appear on three different lists:

The Women by Kristen Hannah

James by Percival Everett

The Book of Lost Friends by Lis Wingate

The rest of the suggestions sound just as intriguing.

Mary:

An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Mary rates this one the best of the year)

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawson

By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult

The Address by Fiona Davis

The Measure by Nikki Erlick

The Women by Kristen Hannah

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

by Bill Slavin

Marcia:

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

Zero Fail by Carol Leoni

The Women by Kristen Hannah

The Wager by Davi Grann

The Last Russian Doll by Marina Palmer

by Bill Slavin

Kathy:

The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate

Thursday Morning Murder Club by Richard Osman

by Bill Slavin

Bill:

James by Perceival Everett

God's Country by Percival Everett

The Trees by Percival Everett

Me:

Walking One Step at a Time by Erling Kagge

Silence in the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge

The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate

One last list of mine:

Books that I have on our bookshelves that I probably will never read, but I like the author's subject or the author's point of view, are ones that I want to support.

Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Neiman

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt (I'm halfway through)

Lady Bird Johnson by Julia Sweig

One of a series of local bird images embedded on the 20th St T platform 

THE MAGIC OF SMALL THINGS

Two hummingbird nests

 I opened another box and found two small hummingbird nests that I had packed away two and a half years ago. I marveled at their delicate interwoven structure, which included cedar needles and white feathers. Beautiful.

I like small things. I find there is something magical about a small object that has been created by an artist. When we were in England, I purchased four two-inch tin houses. Each opened up to show the house inside. Like a dollhouse, the tin houses could be the start of a story about the people who lived there. 

A thoughtful friend gave me two origami cranes, both about two inches in height, that she had made from clear plastic. Look again, and you will see  ½ inch cranes inside both of the larger ones. She also put a small piece of paper with the inscription, "The Invisible Peace That Holds Us," referring to the Japanese legend that the cranes represent peace, hope, and longevity. When we were in Japan, I discovered that students there learn origami at an early age. The practice helps them to develop hand-eye coordination. I wish that I had that precision when I attempt one of the origami cranes. I am just off-kilter enough that the last fold doesn't quite create the shape out of a piece of paper that I want. Once again, I remind myself that, like most things, origami takes practice.

Origami cranes

This morning I went to the UCSF gym. In the building's lobby, whose ceiling reaches 80 feet, is a statue of four giant people by Stephan Balkanhol, carved from a single trunk. The statues seem life-size in their setting, but they are gargantuan and tower over anyone walking through the space. They surprise me by their size every time I stand near them. They remind me of the moment when I was about five years old and walking with my family through the agricultural section at the LA County Fair. I had moved ahead of my dad as I looked at all the wonderful fruit and vegetables displayed. I reached up to take his hand, grasping a hand beside me, but as I looked up, I saw with horror a stranger staring down at me in equal surprise. My dad, right behind me, spoke to the other man for a second, they chuckled, and then my dad clasped my hand and we walked out of the building. Serenity returned.

As part of my artwork, I create small books using color and hand lettering to express one idea. My college senior project was a book about the sun. When I started doing letterpress, I turned my printed pages into small books. I find that mixed media collage also gives me the chance to experiment with design and lettering. Some of the books I've made are big enough to fit in two hands. Others are no more than two inches and feel delicate just because of their size.

"What the Sun Said" by Martha Slavin

A one inch book with Lao Tsu quote, "Every step is on the path."

A yet-to-be-finished triangle book (2 inches tall)

At 5 feet 2 inches, I have spent many times looking up at people, especially now that people over six feet are more common. And I'm shrinking. Maybe that is why I like small things, something that I can hold in my hand, turn easily, and marvel at its ingenuity.

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This summer is the 80th year since World War II. Many sad events happened during that war that we cannot forget. Please read Ellen Newman's thoughtful post about her trip to Hiroshima.

https://hidden-insite.com/2025/08/06/hiroshima-a-survivors-story/

 

RAIN

It's the end of July when I look out our front window down onto the circular driveway of our building. The pavement below is wet. Since we are in our dry season, the normal summer fog has persisted all through July, but I was surprised by rain on several mornings. It wasn't a hard rain, just enough to dampen the concrete driveway and the street beyond. Some days the fog cleared by noon; other days, fog hung like wet laundry over us. It was still a treat to feel the mist on our faces as we walked up the street.

A drizzly day seems like a good time to discover an unusual museum. When I have found other small museums, they were typically dedicated to one person's obsession.  One of my favorite museums in Tokyo was the Kite Museum, started by Shingo Modegi in Nihonbashi. The rooms are crowded with many beautifully hand-painted kites created in Japan and other countries. They show 300 at a time, but there are many more in their archives. Another small museum in Asakusa was the Taiko-kan Drum Museum, an interactive place that allowed me to play with most of their collection of drums from around the world. Nearby is a new interactive museum called the Samurai Ninja Museum, where you can try on samurai armor and practice ninja moves. If you have seen the TV series Shogun, you know how fierce and menacing the armor can make someone look. The Japanese still honor Takeda Shingen, a powerful daimyo (leader of a group of samurai) from Kifu, with a festival where they re-enact events in his life.

Designing a typeface

Paris is crowded with museums, but my favorite places there were the antique clock shops, such as La Pendulerie in Rive Droite, which displays extravagant, intricate clocks made for wealthy families of bygone eras, and the auction houses at Hotel Drouot at Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The auction houses allow you to view items that have been tucked away in someone's attic for many years. Just don't raise your hand while you are looking.

In our San Francisco neighborhood, we walked to the Letterform Archives, a hidden gem that began with Rob Saunders' collection of numerous examples of typography, graphic design, and lettering. In the last 10 years, the collection has grown to 100,000 items. As their website states, "We're open to all who love letters." The space is both an archive of works that emphasize type design and classrooms where students can learn how to design an alphabet/typeface. We wandered through the exhibit, "10 X 10 for 10," and found 100 examples of letterforms, including calligraphy from centuries ago and present-day protest posters. 

Practice pages of different type designs

The Letterform Archives is housed in the American Industrial Center, which is a blocks-long rabbit warren of mostly small creative companies. Bill and I got lost when we got off on the wrong side of the elevator, but discovered in the building a small eatery with an outdoor patio, people busy working in a bakery's kitchen, a cooking school, a clog manufacturer with a store at the corner of the building, and a grocery store along with several architectural firms.

Saunders' inclination to collect letterforms mirrors my own decades-long collection of type and graphic design, some of which I have kept even after downsizing, just because they inspire me. What inspires you to be creative?

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Check out the Kite Museum in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan. The website shows an array of beautiful kites from all over the world:

https://artscape.jp/artscape/eng/ht/1008.html 

Check out the Tokyo Samurai Ninja Museum:

https://mai-ko.com/samurai/

Shingen-ko Matsuri celebrating samurai:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingen-ko_Festival

Check out La Pendulerie in Paris:

https://drouot.com/en

https://www.lapendulerie.com/en/

Letterforms Archive in San Francisco:

https://letterformarchive.org

Walk through the American Industrial Center to see small businesses in action:

https://www.aicproperties.com

Don't miss Kalligraphia at the San Francisco Main Library until August 31:

https://sfpl.org/exhibits/2025/06/07/kalligraphia-2025 

KEYSTONES

 

When our son was very young, we would walk up our street after a rain, and I would pick up every earthworm I found wiggling on the wet pavement. I'd place them back on the yard on the other side of the curb. Our son was more interested in the trucks, graders, and backhoes that stood on empty lots that eventually filled with houses. No sign of earthworms on the packed, damp ground there.

Recently, Scientific American called earthworms keystone species that are necessary for human survival. They do the work of churning up the earth to allow something to grow. Taking the walks up our street made me more aware of what's beneath our feet. It was almost easy to miss the rattlesnake up against the curb. A car had run over it and left little life in it anyway, but I still jumped away when I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye. 

I've been reading Walking, One Step at a Time by Erling Kagge. He describes walking as a way to slow down the passage of time. I agree. Traveling by car or plane makes us rush time. On a plane flight, we begin in the morning and quickly pass from morning to afternoon or night. Sitting in a small cafe in a small town on the other side of Mt. Diablo, I noticed a swarm of bees buzzing in and out of several flowering trees. Walking along the streets of San Francisco, I discovered brass plaques with snippets of poetry engraved on them embedded into the street. Who would have thought that poetry would be planted in our streets? In a car, I would have whizzed by the bee-filled tree or been the one to run over a snake. Instead, as I walked, I could take a moment to realize what else was around me.  I would not know what it feels like to walk on volcanic rock or wet sand or pebbly beaches either. 

During my childhood, my family took trips to Minnesota, San Diego, Northern California, Lake Tahoe, and the Sierra, all by car, but slowly. We didn't rush. We didn't have hotel/motel reservations. We would stop in a small town when my dad grew tired of driving or when we clambered to stop at a souvenir shop to buy postcards or found a storefront "museum" filled with pioneer treasures. We explored places we deemed "mother's shortcuts," ones that my mother discovered on a map or that my dad had read about in his many Western novels. 

My parents chose three different routes to Minnesota. They all started on Route 66, but took other highways to get through Arizona, Utah, or Colorado. On our most southern route on Highway 40, we passed through Hopi and Zuni reservations with towns named Tohatchi, Chinle, Fort Defiance, and Window Rock, which piqued my interest in our shared and bloody history during the great migration west in the 19th century. On our most northern route, we drove to Salt Lake City and turned to the northeast to cross the Rockies. We descended to the prairie, where the borders of reservations appear on maps as mere fractions of the land that was once all Native Tribes. We stopped in the Black Hills to see Mt. Rushmore, with its depiction of four of our best presidents. We also heard the stories of Sitting Bull and Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and of Red Cloud, whose alliance with other tribes resulted in the only defeat of the U.S. Army until modern times. We made a stopover in Pierre, South Dakota, to see one of our relatives, and then we traveled through the Badlands with its stark landscape. When we reached the border of Minnesota, the landscape changed again with cornfields lining the road. The earth in Minnesota is rich, dark brown, and fertile, and crumbles in our hands. In the mining areas in the north, the ground becomes deep iron-red, full of minerals and ore. We wouldn't have noticed any of these sights from a plane.

On recent trips to Minnesota, we've stayed on a lake in the middle of the state and listened in the early evenings to the loons' call and the wolves' howl. The wolves, making a resurgence in the Great Plains and keeping the herds of elk to a size that doesn't destroy other natural habitat, are another keystone species, just like the earthworms.

Summer flowers in Minnesota

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Don't miss the documentary, "Sunday Best, the Untold Story of Ed Sullivan," on Netflix. 

As a kid, I would watch the program with my family, but I never thought about what Ed Sullivan brought to TV. The leaders of CBS and Paramount of today should remember this show and Edward R. Murrow's See It Now as shows that represented the best of our culture and of standing up for principles of democracy. 

BACK TO BASICS

By Martha Slavin

After spending most of spring dealing with our possessions and only making time to sketch when I sat in a cafe or on a park bench, I can finally return to my daily art practice. I always call what I do Practice to allow myself to relax, not worry about mistakes, and to know that the piece in front of me is not so important that I can't try again. My life as an artist would be different if I depended on an income from my art. As a commercial artist, I would need to meet the buyer's requests and not be focused on my own expression. Instead, I'm free to experiment and to fail. With watercolor, I have a host of those failures; not every piece is worthy of a show or to be framed. I cut my discarded paintings into either strips or one-to-two-inch squares, which I adhere to a larger piece of paper. Sometimes I align them like quilt pieces; other times, I let them fall and glue them down where they land. Every watercolor has some parts that work very well, and there are always parts that don't. Cutting them up and re-purposing them has given me the freedom to see new possible pieces. I find I use them as a base for calligraphy too. I haven't figured out a good phrase for the Squares & Circles below. Any suggestions?

Squares & Circles by Martha Slavin

I'm once again an active participant in watercolorist Leslie Wilson's watercolor class. She teaches the direct painting technique, which is quite different from how I originally learned watercolor with built-up layers of paint on damp paper. Her techniques are adapted from Charles Reid and make use of hard and soft edges, mixing colors directly on the paper, and contrast between darks and lights. My first attempt in class turned immediately into one-inch squares as soon as it was dry.

I've gone back to basics by doing small watercolor sketches instead of the half-sheet watercolor paper that I use in class. With the smaller paper I can let go of any fear of messing up and just concentrate on small parts of the sketch. Notice I say sketch, not painting. Sometimes those sketches develop into a good-enough painting; other times, they just become part of my sketchbook that I can close when I'm done. Like creating a palette of colors, small paintings allow me to think to myself: "Practice, practice, practice, with work that I hope I can carry over to larger pieces once I have my 'watercolor mind" back.

Two different palettes from two different watercolorists,
Leslie Wilson and Ted Nutall

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Charles Reid died in 2019 and doesn't have a website that displays his work. Check out his book on Amazon instead:  https://www.amazon.com/Watercolor-Basics-Common-Painting-Problems/dp/144030131X/ref=pd_bxgy_thbs_d_sccl_1/147-5429064-3243507?pd_rd_w=D9L2N&content-id=amzn1.sym.dcf559c6-d374-405e-a13e-133e852d81e1&pf_rd_p=dcf559c6-d374-405e-a13e-133e852d81e1&pf_rd_r=RH22FWXKXCHSGCTVBF9N&pd_rd_wg=i4R2B&pd_rd_r=8ce8f234-5c35-4cd3-a3c5-70b8d2d87006&pd_rd_i=144030131X&psc=1

Ted Nutall:  https://www.tednuttall.com

Leslie Wilson: https://www.lesliewilson.net

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Calligraphers are not like what you imagine them to be. Check out the examples produced by the Pacific Scribes guild:

https://pacificscribes.org/gallery/