NEW AND OLD SURPRISES

Moving back to a city has reminded me how much has changed and how little has changed. The urban core holds people from all walks of life, with diverse ethnicities and economic differences. Suburban towns tend to be more homogeneous. I grew up in a suburb on the outskirts of Los Angeles. At the time, the town was all White, the town next to it was a place for middle-class Blacks, and on the other side, a town for middle-income Hispanics. During my childhood, few Americans of Asian descent lived beyond LA city limits. My hometown was known for having the most swimming pools in the area and for residents who belonged to the John Birch Society, an early far-right extremist group. I moved away as soon as I could.

Going back to the East Bay town in Northern California where we lived for more than 40 years, I realized we had chosen a similar town to my hometown. We selected Danville because we could afford housing there, and it was equi-distance from my job in Fremont and Bill's office in San Francisco, but we also felt comfortable in the community. We loved the green hills, good neighbors, and the simple pleasures of gardening and Sunday BBQs. We connected with people with similar values and beliefs in fairness and equity. During the first Trump administration, the dark side of our town emerged on weekends. We cringed as we watched truck parades with large Trump signs rumble through the town with horns blaring. Groups of Trump fans with signs stood on street corners, yelling at passersby. We couldn't understand what created such fervor, but they exhibited the rising divisions between Americans.

Cities often provide space for new changes in how we live. Waymo cars are a curious and fast-moving part of San Francisco now. Driverless cars don't exist in the suburbs yet. We see them on the city streets all the time, but they are still in an experimental stage in the city. Sometimes they get confused and just stop, impeding traffic behind them. One afternoon, we were driving home, waiting at a red light, and noticed a Waymo car by our side letting out a passenger. Then the Waymo flicked on its turn signal to try to enter traffic lanes again. No one would let the car in. I thought about etiquette rules. Do you have to be polite to a Waymo?

I still take time in both the city and towns to sit and sketch the people I see. Collected together, I wouldn't know whether those people lived in the city or the suburbs. They are all just people. 

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"Oh magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words." Betty Smith

While our son was in elementary school, I volunteered to work with some  students in his first grade class. One girl had struggled to learn to read. One day as we sat together, she suddenly began to read the words. I'll never forget her joy and excitement. If you have children, grandchildren, or can tutor young people, you will understand the magic of learning to read.

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Spring is in full swing now. Birds are nesting and migrating. Check out this website to see the migration all across the Americas.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/when-will-spring-bird-migration-hit-its-peak-birdcast-has-answers/?utm_campaign=Lab%20eNews%202024&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_Sr2-JpRXsf8hibB3KJd2Q0CZ2jS_k2K1hX9qjbYS0pCo_tbALet2gF9jHQw8obNUTEiH_ECUNisvNvQD5z8AU_66Epg&_hsmi=357468445&utm_content=357467838&utm_source=hs_email  

BORROWING ART

During a trip to Chicago several years ago, I stood over a bridge and looked down on the busy street below. The street extended to the horizon and the perspective reminded me of Wayne Thiebaud's city paintings with streets that look like they are hanging off a cliff. Thiebaud doesn't use traditional perspective in his cityscapes. Instead, he abstracts the images into geometric shapes. The streets look like they run straight down a cliff with only a rectangle at the bottom to keep them from falling off the page. I took a quick photo because I thought the photo would help me paint the scene.  I wanted to try something similar to Thiebaud's. but make my painting with one-point perspective. That would be a challenge for me. I've never had the patience to draw street scenes using perspective as a guide. My lines tend to waver and wander over the page instead of making the precise, crisp lines drawn with a ruler. I tried painting this scene several times without much success.

Wayne Thiebaud might have said to me, "An artist needs the best studio instruction, the most rigorous demands, and the toughest criticism in order to tune up his sensibilities."

A friend and I went to the Thiebaud exhibit that is now on view at the Legion of Honor Museum near the Presidio in San Francisco. In my lifetime, I have been to many exhibits of both very familiar and unknown artists. Though I knew about Thiebaud and his bold images, this exhibit surprised me and made me want to linger over each part of the exhibit. Thiebaud was an artist and also a favorite teacher at UC Davis for many years. He believed in borrowing ideas from other artists, learning their techniques by copying their work, and translating those ideas into his paintings.

He once said, "If you stare at an object, as you do when you paint, there is no point at which you stop learning from it."

The exhibit explains Thiebaud's thinking about borrowing art. Each section shows work by other artists and then paintings done in the same style by Thiebaud. His painting, Art Comes from Art, is a tour de force of that practice. On four open shelves sit twelve paintings, each seemingly by a different artist. Instead, each small painting was copied exactly by Thiebaud, yet also includes his signature techniques: vivid colors outlining objects, starkness, bold shadows that lend mystery to the painting, and lavish use of paint. The backgrounds of many of his paintings are often bold whites with different undertones.

Art Comes from Art by Wayne Thiebaud

Sometimes Thiebaud is classified as a Pop Artist because he often painted ordinary objects such as gumball machines or a slice of pie or cake. Instead of the flat, printed images of Pop Art though, Thiebaud uses gobs of paint to show the lushness of the cake's icing and surrounds the object with thickly applied colors. Thiebaud spent time during the '60s with Jaspar Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, and other contemporary artists. I am sure all their ideas about art rubbed off on each other.

Thiebaud often painted portraits of people based on a similar portrait done by an artist from a previous time. If you've seen his portraits, you could compare them to Edward Hopper's way of presenting a person starkly alone. Some of his style may have rubbed off on someone like Amy Sherald, known for her portrait of Michelle Obama, who paints portraits using the same strong, intense images and facial expressions and sense of being alone as Thiebaud.

After the museum visit, I pulled out my sketchbook and decided to try the Chicago street scene again. This time I made more of an effort to use one-point perspective. As I drew I thought of Thiebaud's paintings and how in control he was of each image. As I worked, I thought, "Here I am taking a lesson from Thiebaud. I'm copying his style."

Wayne Thiebaud said about this practice, "I believe very much in the tradition that art comes from art and nothing else. Art for me simply means doing something extraordinarily well...."

To see more of Thiebaud's work, go to:

https://www.acquavellagalleries.com/artists/wayne-thiebaud

or tour the Legion of Honor while the Wayne Thiebaud exhibit is on view: today through August 17.

Find more quotes by Thiebaud here:

https://www.azquotes.com/author/43221-Wayne_Thiebaud

Compare Amy Sherald's work to Wayne Thiebaud's here:

https://whitney.org/exhibitions/amy-sherald

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Read the New York Times' informative article about Pope Francis' favorite painting:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/24/arts/pope-francis-caravaggio.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

SUN-FILLED ROOMS

The sun shone over the weekend, which made many people exclaim, "Spring is here!" Wrapped in a scarf, a puffy vest, and a hooded sweater, I felt a moment of bittersweetness. First, because I like the cooler weather where I can bundle up and stay warm against the elements. (Maybe I wouldn't miss the cold if I lived in a different climate.) The sun felt good, even to me, as we walked towards the food trucks on our last day in our apartment. We have given our notice and moved the possessions we lived with for a year and a half to our new place with a different view of the city.

Since we moved to San Francisco, I have taken a photo out of one window every day as soon as I climbed out of bed. I wanted to continue this practice but considered a different time of day in our new setting. I tried six in the evening for a few days, but we were often out of the condo at that hour. I tried several other times during the day. I thought a 24-hour cycle might be interesting. I realized that I would never get up at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning to take a photo. Sleep is too precious right now. 

Different times of the day from our kitchen window

We have not established normal routines in the flurry of our move. We laugh to think we have spent almost two years finding a place and settling in. We originally hoped for a smaller, single-story home with a small yard in the suburbs. We thought six weeks would allow us to find a new home and move in. Instead, we spent two years reflecting on what we need and want in a home. That idea changed once we moved to San Francisco and realized all the city has to offer. We are grateful that we can make these kinds of choices.

We don't have a table yet to eat meals on, and our living area is still covered with boxes of stuff that we are unpacking, sorting, and/or giving away. Every morning as we walk towards the kitchen we feel like the boxes have duplicated themselves overnight. We declare small victories when one small corner is cleared and only filled with a purposeful choice.

We would rather be out adventuring, taking pictures, painting or writing to our representatives, or standing on a corner with a sign of protest. We are heartened to see the crowds lining roadways and gathering at capitol buildings. We will join them on Saturday. Right now, we have put aside our adventurous, patriotic spirits to complete our personal task of making this space a livable one. If anyone has seen the small manual that explains how to program our furnace thermostat, let me know. It is here somewhere. We may not need it in our sun-filled rooms in a city where the temperature averages between 40 and 73 degrees. 

I look out the window by my desk and see the soft light that clouds create and watch the branches of the Japanese maples outside. Their leaves are just beginning to unfurl. In a few days, the leaves will fill the trees with the special Spring green that I remember from our time in Japan. Spring is here!

Some Japanese maples with leaves already flourishing

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President Dwight Eisenhower, who also served as president of Columbia University, said, ""The true purpose of education is to prepare young men and women for effective citizenship in a free form of government."

CYCLICAL LIVES

I picked up my copy of the book, A Living Room of Our Own, while searching for stories written by a friend who recently passed away. The book is an anthology of stories written by the Wednesday and Friday Writers groups led by Elizabeth Fishel. I have belonged to Wednesday Writers since 1993. Until the pandemic, the group met every Wednesday during the school year at her home to write memoir pieces. When I joined, I was the mother of a young son. Being in the group has been a way to reconcile my life as a mother and my life as a woman with dreams of my own. From Elizabeth's house, I could see the young mother who lived next door, and I fantasized about what she was feeling and thinking while she tended to her children. I wrote of the moments when young mothers can feel overwhelmed by the caretaking of small children. But I also came to realize that women have cyclical lives and that motherhood and dreams are not mutually exclusive.

THROUGH THE WINDOW

Our writing class sits in Elizabeth's living room in her Arts and Crafts style home in Rockridge. About a dozen women have met together for the last three years to write about our lives. We are all ages, but we share common experiences as mothers and women trying to find our place in the world. Our group sits intently reading each other's writing or discussing pertinent ideas regarding our shared pieces. Next door to Elizabeth is a dark brown shingled house. Elizabeth says, "There's Tera with her two babies," and we turn to see a young woman busy with her children through an open kitchen window. The mother is intent as she feeds, diapers, dresses, and talks to them.

Elizabeth has asked us to write about her neighborhood. I looked out the window and wondered what I could write. Today is the first day of spring and much outside is changing. The plum trees that line the street burst with blooms. Each house has a small front yard with many flowers ready to appear. The yard next door wraps around the front, up the driveway, and cuts to the back. It is filled with new plantings with seeds sprouting in straight rows their shoots carefully protected with copper caps to ward off the snails lurking in every California yard. A new drip system has been laid to sustain all the plants, and the dirt is dart and crumbly, ready for plants to surge forth.

I look again at the window and see the woman standing there with her baby. She reminds me of the many times I walked, cradled, and hugged my son when he was that age. We look at each other and I smile slightly and nod in recognition of the time she is spending. But then I go back to my writing about Elizabeth's neighborhood as the morning passes us outside.

TERA IMAGINED

Tera had two babies right in a row. She had been part of the more free-flowing world, teaching painting classes, taking long treks around the world on her own, and getting involved in the political games that circle Berkeley like mad yellow jackets. Now her life was different. She was a full-time mother -- an often isolating existence of diapers, baby food, naps, and play groups. She hadn't painted in months. When she went out, she met other mothers at the park and other places where babies were welcomed.

Her next-door neighbor led writers' groups for women. They showed up in the neighborhood every Wednesday morning, briskly walking to the grey stucco house that squatted so closely to her own. She often saw the women stop to talk with one another before they went inside. Their faces lit up in animation, their arms filled with papers and notebooks. How she sometimes longed for the carefree, yet purposeful days before her babies came.

Tera looked down at her clothing. She had been wearing the same things for the last three days. Colin, her oldest, had a cold and she had been up all night, comforting and rocking him. Tera stood in the kitchen, leaned against the sink, and quickly ate a graham cracker before she walked to a chair so that Salina, her youngest, could nurse. She looked through the small kitchen window to her neighbor's and saw the women writers sitting in a circle in the living room. Their heads were bent over, busy writing. When one woman finished, she looked up expectantly as though what she had written had given her a natural high. Then the woman caught a glance of Tera in the window looking at her. Their eyes locked in recognition of their many roles as women. The writer was the first to turn away.

Tera walked to the overstuffed chair with Salina in her arms. She lifted her blouse and Salina went for her breast, and Tera began to float away in her mind to that place where nursing mothers go.

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Wednesday & Friday Writers now meet on Zoom

We all have stories to tell. Julie Cameron's book, The Artist Way, and Natalie Goldberg's books on writing are excellent sources to help you get started writing. 

Or join a writers' group. Check out Elizabeth Fishel's website here:

https://www.elizabethfishel.com

Though A Living Room of Our Own is no longer available,
these two anthologies are available on Amazon.
All proceeds are donated
 to two breast cancer centers in the Bay Area.

 

A BILLION BIRDS

"Crow Stories" by Martha C. Slavin

Our views are so different from the lush greenery of our former suburban neighborhood. As I look out the window, half of the view is the roof of the building below with all of its machinery securely positioned and some of it steaming. Occasionally workers congregate around a mechanism, adjust pieces, and walk the ramp that leads to the exit. Crows like to cling to the edges of the roof and preen themselves. In a strong wind, they seem to be holding on to the roof edge for dear life. I often see them and the seagulls flying by at my nose level. They land on the deck above us, but mostly they glide in free flight. Once in a while, a hummingbird hovers at the window looking at me as intently as I watch it. Those moments with another being remind me of our need for empathy in this tumultuous world.

The view from our windows will never see the flocks of billions of birds that used to fill the skies. Bird populations have been decimated in the last centuries because of hunting, pollution, habitat destruction, and our lack of empathy for other living beings. I have been appalled at the news of migratory birds being killed when they fly into buildings at night. They can't see the glass and hit at full-flight force. The birds get confused by the glass and the artificial lights and thousands hit the glass and fall down to the ground to die. The American Bird Conservancy estimates that in the United States alone upwards of a billion birds are killed this way each year. Yes, a billion. It is hard to visualize that many birds.The deaths are not just by flying into skyscrapers. Single-family homes create traps for birds too. We can protect birds by adhering film with random patterns or dots onto the house windows, by keeping window coverings closed at night, and by turning off lights between 11 pm and 6 am. Making these attempts can be a way to develop empathy and to understand the effect our actions have on others.

Canadian geese arrive at Mission Creek while migrating in the Spring

Watching the birds in the morning reminds me of taking John Muir Laws' drawing classes at the Lafayette Library with two good friends. Laws offered free classes about drawing animals. The three of us would spread our papers, pencils, waterbrushes, and colored pencils on the table so we could share our supplies. We watched as Laws demonstrated drawing techniques.

Drawing the class members as well as a hummingbird

I am good at drawing people in motion. I know how bones and muscles move in a human body so I can make a quick gesture drawing. In the class, we attempted drawing the animals that moved in the video that Laws projected on the screen. I discovered, that even though animals have similar bones and muscle structures, doing a gesture drawing of one was not so easy. I needed to fully understand what was underneath the skin and spend time observing how each animal moved. For instance, have you ever watched a cheetah sneak up on its prey? Their shoulders, unlike humans, rise above their lowered heads and move like two wheels connected together. At home, we watch PBS's Nature series, which has given me more time to study animals in motion. Eventually, if I practice enough, I will master their movements too.

Trying to capture how a bird flies

"Cherish What You Cannot See" Martha C. Slavin

This post is written in memory of Joan Stevenson, an artist, writer, and dear friend.

Want to know what is flying over you at night? Check out this migration tool:

https://birdcast.info/migration-tools/live-migration-maps/?_gl=1*1fx49mi*_gcl_au*MjAxMzkwNzY2OS4xNzQzMDMxODk2*_ga*MTA1NzgyMjQ2LjE3NDMwMzE4OTY.*_ga_QR4NVXZ8BM*MTc0MzAzMTg5Ni4xLjEuMTc0MzAzMTkwOS40Ny4wLjA.

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MARCH 2025 View from my window

Janet Reno. In her farewell speech, she said of democracy, “It is a fragile institution. The rule of law is fragile. The rule of law is based on people, and democracy is based on people.”