LET GO AND TRY AGAIN

"Buvver Fishing" by Martha Slavin

 An instructor once told me not to paint people I know because my hidden feelings about the person would arise as I painted. I don't paint portraits often, but I have followed that advice and have selected photos of strangers to use as models. I like to paint people, but I don't try to make the look exactly like the photo.

The Pacific Art League in Palo Alto offered a challenge this summer to paint something about my own memories. I was intrigued enough to look through old photos of myself growing up.

I found a photo of my sister and me as young children on the steps of the house we lived in until I was five years old. We spent time in the backyard looking for four-leaf clovers, watching the chickens scramble around their pen, or running in a circle playing Ring Around a Rosie with some of my sister's friends. I decided to ignore the old warning of painting someone I know and tried to draw this photo.

I think of myself as good at drawing, but I don't draw children very often. I drew my sister without much trouble, but when it came to me, I got stuck. I drew the outside of the head too large and the features way too small. I realized that I kept thinking that the figure should be child-sized,  so my hand kept making them small in comparison to the space on the paper. I just couldn't get the proportions right.

Once I started painting, I came up with other problems. When I painted the skin tone, I used my usual facial formula of Cadmium Red Light mixed with Raw Siena. I found the tint was too weighty for a toddler, so I added a touch of Permanent Red to make it pinker. That didn't work at all, but nothing I did with my brush or Viva paper towel got me back to a light enough tone.

I decided to start over and drew just the faces and shoulders of the two figures. Again, I had the same problem with proportion. My mind kept thinking of the two as small and so the features shrank within the ovals I had drawn for the heads.

I decided to try again. I drew only one of the figures. She turned out to look like one of those children in a horror movie who you would find hiding in a closet. I decided I needed help, so I looked online for watercolor artists whose focus is painting young children. Going through the examples, I was reminded of the grid system that many use to help them draw.

Lightly penciled grid system

I have avoided the grid system all my life because I can still hear my art school and college instructors imploring us to draw a figure freehand so that we would learn to intrinsically understand the figure. Why I hung on to this belief is a bit of a puzzle. Why didn't I use helpful techniques when I needed them? My ego saying I can draw without these kinds of aids? Belief that drawing without crutches creates a better understanding of that form? A little bit of both, I think. This week, finally, I gave in. It was time for me to try something different. I drew a light grid, dividing the paper into sixteen sections. It worked. In my mind, I knew how to draw the figure to make it look believable, but the grid helped me get the proportions right.

I never know when I am going to learn a new life lesson.

Unfinished painting with work needed on skin tone

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A long overdue holiday, Juneteenth. 

Kevin Levin writes: "Juneteenth is a federal holiday now. It belongs to the country, which I understand to mean that it belongs to all of us...because the story of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom is the central drama of this nation's history."

We haven't reckoned with what Juneteenth represents to this day. Watching the opening ceremony of the Obama Presidential Library reminded me of the forward-looking, kind, inclusive people we can be.

 

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Want some good news? Two websites I read give us all an uplift:

Americans of Conscience:    https://americansofconscience.com/checklist/

Reasons to be Cheerful:    https://reasonstobecheerful.world

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From Jalen Brunson:  "You are allowed to think about the worst possible scenario, 

but you gotta go out there and do something about it."

Masculine or Human

 

"All in the Eye of the Beholder" by M. Slavin

Have you seen the groups of young college-aged men who have been removing their shirts at sporting events lately? They make me laugh with a little bit of cringe. Such a typical, silly stunt for groups of men of that age. By showing off their pecks in this way, are they imitating Pete Hegseth and Putin who may have set the example? In this period of excessive masculinity, I wonder what it really means to be male in a period when many of our gains are being retracted.

I have noticed more and more women who are being fired or removed from political and military positions. In political races, women are targeted for their "bad behavior" (Katie Porter) that slips by or is hardly criticized for male candidates (Graham Platner). Women are losing much of what they have gained in the last fifty years. Why?

What does it mean to be masculine? I think of two brief instances that I observed when I saw men acting at their most natural.

"Leap" by M. Slavin

Riding on the Metro in Paris we came to a station somewhere in the north end where a parade filled the streets. Men in long white caftans, long beards, and turbans were beating drums with such power that they seemed to be shaking the earth around them. I felt like I had been transported to Africa. Their faces reached for the sun; they chanted with confidence. They were in their glory.

I grew up in California and know that many immigrants from South of the Border have lived near me working menial jobs, creating an unnatural inequality between us and the lasting impression of subservience. On a weekend at the beach, I walked on the sand just as a group of Latinos came dashing up from the surf, riding horses with authority and with a sense of security - the vaqueros of another era and place, with no deference to others. They were in command of their day.

In both instances, in Paris and on the California beach, I saw a group of men filled with joy, strong in their actions, subservient to no one.

Roger Tory Peterson, naturalist

Lately, I have been watching several Korean drama series. Their idea of masculinity as presented in film vary from ours. The men seem more in tune to their emotions. The films show how they care about each other. They are not afraid to cry. Yet, they can be strong and decisive as well as humble when they need to be, a more nuanced way to be male in films that too many American males see as feminine. But, they almost always have a scene which shows their bared pecks. 

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This weekend honor our founding thinkers, who brought us the Constitution and our ability to interpret and change its meaning: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King.

And don't forget American women thinkers and change-agents: Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Franklin, Sally Ride, Ophra Winfrey, Gloria Steinem, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. 

And each one of us who values what democracy offers.

BRAIN TRICKS

A special garden

As I get older, I receive more and more suggestions about keeping my memory or my body active. I've found some ideas to be intriguing. Whether they help me age better is another question, but each day, I now stretch my fingers apart. Not just spread-eagled. My left hand starts with my pinky and fourth finger together and my index and middle finger together. My right hand has the index finger separated, the middle and fourth finger together, and the pinky by itself.

Without looking at my hands, I try to switch the positions back and forth, keeping the two different patterns moving so that each hand has a different pattern. Not so easy as you would think. 

Bill and I play Wordle from the NYTimes and other games from the SF Chronicle. I guessed the correct word on Wordle for my first 100 attempts. Since then, I have only reached 70 days. Today it was 19 days before I succumbed to "Next Time."

I've also looked for memory games and found some online though I think they provide a disadvantage to left-handers because I have to use the arrow keys on the right side of the key pad. Well, that's my excuse for never passing more than 76 percent on the different quizzes except the one time I reached 98% for memories. No wonder I remember so much about moments in my life.

I also play a Poker Hands game (I learned to play poker with one of my grandmothers) where I choose sets of poker hands. The first few times I played, I came up with winning combinations and the score included how much money I had earned. I surprised myself when I started thinking that I ought to go to Vegas to try my luck. I'm not, or didn't think I was, a gambler. 

Now as I play both Wordle and poker, my abilities are slipping. With Wordle I think that any common word such as SMILE has already been used long before I started playing and I guess wrong. With poker, the more I play the fewer good hands I seem to create. I wonder if the less I play, the more wins I accumulate or if there really isn't any difference in my luck.

Try Italic, a hand that has been around for centuries.
Remember no one else will see your penmanship. Relax.

Being creative is also on the list of things to do as you get older. Even practicing handwriting is a good way to test my brain. Making a contour drawing of an object is also another way to keep my brain active. Even better, drawing with both hands at the same time is not only tricky, but using all those brain cells we leave fallow too often.

Words themselves can be a good brain exercise. Word Genius suddenly appeared in my email inbox. Each day it offers a little used or little known word such as 

Firth, an inlet or estuary

Someone who is breviloquent is someone who uses few words. 

A word that is monosyllabic or a one syllable word.

or woodshed, which means to practice a musical instrument

or obstreperous: rude, rambunctious, rowdy

or Agelast: someone without a sense of humor

Now the question is write a sentence with one of the words and not make it awkward.

"Each word here is monosyllabic, but not the fifth one though."

or    "Does anyone come to mind when you think of an agelast?"

You can find more at Word Genius:

https://www.wordgenius.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=blog&utm_campaign=3373431755

try your luck at BrainBashers:

https://www.brainbashers.com/showpuzzles.asp?page=2

Luminosity (annual fee to join):

https://app.lumosity.com/login

A walk down memory lane. Take a tour of David Lance Goines' artwork which is now housed at the UC Berkeley library. His work will remind you of life in 1960s and 1970s as well as the food revolution started by Alice Waters.

David Lance Goines:

https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/goines

Window View  May 2026

IMPERFECTIONS

Painting adapted from book cover photo

A close-up of a Siberian husky with one blue eye and one brown eye on the cover of the book Imperfections by Elmo Pievani intrigued me. The book is a treatise, not on how to overcome your own perfectionism, but, how the universe developed because of imperfections.

The book is a short dense academic volume; the kind I need to re-read every sentence to understand what the author said. Telmo Pievani explains how the universe came into being because of a random particle, something that caused disruption, irritation, or anomalies that lead to the creation of the smallest particles that were slightly different from each other. His thesis: if everything had been perfect, nothing would exist because nothing would have changed. His examples rest on DNA which duplicates itself over and over again, but with random errors that generate changes on the DNA threads. What would humankind be like if our DNA did not change over time? Remember that most of us still carry some Neanderthal in us. Without DNA changes there would be no red hair, no blue eyes, no seven-foot tall basketball players. We would all look alike, act alike, think alike, or not even exist because the act of creation depends on disturbance.

"Small Changes"

Pievani also writes about infinity, which is an idea that I have a hard time thinking about. I always want to enclose infinity with edges somehow because thinking of the alternative of space without edges is too hard. Yet Pievani also concludes that within the creation of the universe is its own destruction, which scientists imagine will occur within 400 million years from now. If the universe is no longer there, I have to ask: what will be there? Isn't a void something too? Similar to the concept of zero, which for a long time was not given a symbol by mathematicians because then zero became something, and not zero. And what about considering the idea that there are more than one universes? I could get lost trying to even imagine any of these ideas.

I may never finish this small but heavily weighted book, but it sure has me thinking of something other than the human-made chaos we are experiencing right now.

 

ONE PERSON BOYCOTTS

No, I haven't ridden in a Waymo yet. The driverless cars can be seen all over the streets of San Francisco and our visitors always ask if we have taken one. At first, the sight of a driverless cars was unnerving, but we human can adapt easily, so they no longer bother me. Why I haven't ridden in one is more quixotic: I want to support the people who make their living driving taxis or in Lyft (though not Uber, which is another on my list of personal boycotts because of their donations to a political party I don't agree with). Waymo and Zoot, owned by Google and Amazon respectively, are the inevitable conquerors of our streets. Before they reach supremacy, I won't take one of their cars until they commit to retraining the drivers who make a living driving taxis or ride-hailing cars. The ride-hailing cars made a big dent in the taxi drivers' living, but now many taxi drivers do both. 

I think of Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia and the effect AI will have on that site. Will people stop using Wiki as they have with MySpace or Yahoo? I suppose if I had been alive in the late 19th-early 20th century, I would have boycotted the newfangled motor cars too. I have a quixotic bent in me and take on one-person crusades that inevitably will result in my failure to make any difference in changing people's ways.

Recently I watched a Korean drama called Arthdal Chronicles, a fantasy series set in the Bronze Age. I do not recommend it. It's a slog through 20 slow-moving episodes, but it has an interesting premise. The film tells the story of how one group of people developed sophicated uses for iron that changed the direction of the human race. According to the film, where previously, people lived in small villages, helped each other, and suffered together through natural disasters and battles with other villages, with the making of iron tools, including weapons, some villages were able to consistently conquer others and turned the defeated into slaves. Living in larger groups in towns became more important because of the possibilities of trade. Wealth became more important. In towns, not everyone knew each other. People with wealth became more important than others. You can see where this tale is going, first by somewhat idealizing village life, and then showing the effects of change on large groups.

As human beings, we are essentially curious and seeking, leaving behind outdated ways for new ones that may or may not be beneficial for everyone. Makes me wonder what we would be like today if people from long ago hadn't made those decisions about changing. As Charles Darwin once said, "It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change."

I would rather go by Robert Frost's words in his poem, The Road Not Taken:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence;

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Check out this list of defunct social media sites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services 

HILLS AND STAIRS

San Francisco is well-known for its hills. We marvel at the houses that are built on the steep hills and wonder how anyone gets out of a car parked at a ninety-degree angle in front. On one side the passenger would have to push against the momentum of gravity; on the other, the driver would have to keep from falling out the door and rolling down the hill. Honestly.

A friend and I went to the annual SF Decorator Showcase, which featured an elegant Victorian, like so many San Francisco homes, which was built on a slight hill. Before we arrived, we thought good thoughts about finding a parking space. One opened up for us right across the street just as we came to the house -- an unheard of happening. We zipped in and counted ourselves lucky that we didn't have to walk up the hill to the house.. No problem getting out of the car since we were facing downhill and our tires were curbed. We looked across the street at two older women, one with a walker, slowly progressing to the entrance of the event. We wondered if the two could make it up the hill to the house.

Before we entered the house itself, we had to walk up three flights of stairs that brought us above the garage to the front door. We thought of the two women still slowly progressing up the sidewalk and how they would do with the challenging stairs. The designers of each room had reimagined the house and brought out its beauty while retaining the feel of a Victorian. Still, it was four stories tall and each staircase was a feat in itself to climb.

Once we got inside the house, we could see some of the original stained glass windows and also the curved windows in the bay window in the front of the house that looked out to the Golden Gate Bridge. That view was worth the climb up the stairs. It looked out on rooftops to the edge of the Bay and across to the hills beyond the bridge.

I thought of the people who lived in the house when it was first built in 1887, which means it survived the 1906 earthquake. The people must have been in good shape to live in this house with all of its stairs and with no dumbwaiter that I could see to help carry supplies to the kitchen on the first floor. Or they had a lot of help. The thought of the dumbwaiter reminded me of the one we had in our Paris apartment which went all the way from the basement or cave where the inhabitants stored their wine. The apartment had two sets of stairs: one for the servants' entrance that led from the basement to the kitchen and to the garret at the top. The other staircase off the entry wrapped around the tiny, rickety elevator with its folding doors that didn't allow more than two people in at the same time. The stairs were lined with several stained glass windows and broad enough to carry small pieces of furniture. Otherwise, any large pieces came in through the French doors at the front of the apartments. The top floor of the building had rooms originally used by servants, which have become storage or bedrooms for older children when they come home. The windows on that floor looked out on the rooftops of Paris. What a sight.

Geraniums on rue de Lasteyrie

WHAT TO DO WITH MONSTERS

by Martha Slavin

Did you ever imagine that there were monsters under your bed? As a child, did you have that creepy feeling late at night as if a monstrous creature could be lurking near you? I remember listening to our neighbors' rooster crowing in the morning, leaving me with the chilled feeling that something mysterious was going to happen. One afternoon, while our parents went to the market, my sister and I put on the record player Sibelius' "Finlandia", with its sections that sound like ponderous bears rumbling through the woods. The music scared us silly. We ran to our neighbors and waited for our folks to come home. Our imaginations run wild.

Before a meeting at the San Francisco Main Library, I rode the elevator to the 6th floor where the Rare Books Room is located. The sixth floor is a quiet place, perfect as a place to study old maps, rare books, and calligraphy from the Richard Harrison Collection. As I stepped out of the elevator, I found a surprise, an exhibit called "Under the Bed," featuring the work of artists who have written children's books about the monsters we imagine residing under our beds. What a delight for me to look again at the work of Maurice Sendak, Edward Gorey, William Steig, Graham Wilson, and Japanese artists from the 19th century who protrayed monsters battling with each other.

Libraries represent one of our best places. In smaller towns, they are often of the hubs of the community, places where children can safely come after school hours to study, read, and receive tutoring. My family would make a trip to the library a special event. We all would come home laden with books. My mom, germ-phobe that she was, placed our books out in the sun before we could take them to read. My parents allowed me in elementary school to check out adult history books. My dad and I would talk about those books, which helped me develop my opinions about what I had read. As parents, Bill and I did the same with our son. Librarians have been in the news since groups who wish to ban books and censor what we can read have grown across the country. Librarians, once again, have had to confront new monsters, those people who fear the unknown and think that by banning books they will be able to control our thoughts.

In San Francisco, the main library on Larkin Street offers many opportunities besides finding a quiet place to study. The children's book area is lively when kids are there for story hour. The library has an extensive collection of historical photos of the city. On the ground floor level along with community meeting rooms is an exhibit area, which right now displays the modern photography of Hamburger Eyes magazine. The Robert Grahorn Collection, housed in the Rare Books Room, contains many books about the history of printing, which show the progression of type design from the early days of printing to the modern era.

Two pages from
The Life and Times of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman

We think of books from past centuries as formal, with pages of nothing but type and perhaps an illustration or map at the front, but I had a chance recently to look at one of the first English novels, Tristam Shandy, on display at Letterform Archive, a small gallery, class/workroom, and archive of type and graphic design. The exhibit showed the original version of the book, printed in 1759, as well as numerous copies printed since then into the 20th century, which is when I read a version in college. The latest edition is available through Project Gutenberg, an online library of 75,000 free eBooks, which has digitized the original. The writing is a stream-of-consciousness novel about one character from birth to death and his views of the world. The book is filled not only with pages of print and humor, but Shandy also plays with the pages. He turns a page black to mourn a friend, pastes a marbled paper across another and doodles throughout -- an unexpected precursor to book arts artists like me and an example of how the imagination can devise stories and images of even monsters under the bed.

Japanese woodblock of monster

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https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1079/1079-h/1079-h.htm#:~:text=%26c.—and%20a%20great%20deal%20to,upon%20their%20motions%20and%20activity             

Exhibits at the San Francisco Main Library:

https://sfpl.org/exhibits/2026/03/27/wood-engravers-networks-fifth-triennial-exhibition   

https://sfpl.org/exhibits/2026/04/01/under-bed-monstrous-selections-schmulowitz-collection-wit-humor

https://sfpl.org/exhibits/2026/04/23/continuing-story-life-earth-25-years-hamburger-eyes

calligraphic skills can be learned through the library's program of ebooks found here:

https://sfpl.org/locations/main-library/book-arts-special-collections

https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/list/display/379727478/2674125947

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Window View April 2026