India Basin Shoreline Park Acrylic Alla Prima 11×14 I’ve been spending time in the South East corner of SF lately always on the lookout for a good vista to paint. This park is currently in a strange hiatus between a former superfund site and the future home of a gentrified Bay View/Hunters Point development monstrosity so I felt it was pertinent to get down there and paint it as is before it is *sanitized. It’s still pretty wild down there, one of the forgotten gems of the SF open spaces. I am a child of the marshlands back east so I am always in my element in a wetlands environment and though this area was industrialized by the Navy for many decades, nature has crept back in and created a whole new hybrid landscape. The tidepools in the foreground where what drew me down to this spot. They shrank as the tide went out over the course of the 4 hours it took me to complete the painting. I met a nice guy walking his dog out there and a dirt bike wheelie bro came through and waved so it’s a super friendly if obscure spot. Another highlight of my day was when a flock of ducks, gulls and pelicans all came through probaby fishing. It was cool because I had my eyes and attention on the canvas and heard the sounds before I looked up. It was a really interesting auditory experience. I’ve been thinking I want to eventually try cityscapes though I’m a little lazy to restart my methodology and go backwards a bunch of steps so this was maybe a beginning step in that direction with the skyline off on the horizon.
This guy for president? Wow this country is riding a long running all time low. Failed comedian Trump will not be so funny to anyone when he begins his apocalyptic regime spreading hate, fear and violence throughout the nation and the world. We walk an amazing precipice of low mindedness and complete failure of human kindness and common sense values. What is the purpose of government? Well for me it’s about protecting the vulnerable populations from predatory wealth, monopolies and violence. What do we have? A gov that fights against the vulnerable populations and protects the entitled, privileged and aids in the exploitation of the masses by the ruling class. Anybody here think Trump is on your side or that he’s going to help you in any way? Well I hate to tell you, he’s not, won’t and you are wrong and a sucker. Not only that, you just dragged everyone else into your pathetic doom vision. Just wait till you see your neighbors dragged away and put in camps for thought crimes. Just wait because eventually the fascist machine you put in power will come knocking on YOUR door. It won’t be long, clown. OMG 4 more years of complete nonsensical hateful verbal diarrhea, destruction of an already desperate social safety net, full on pillage of the environment and mentally ill and hyper neurotic fake Xtians calling the shots in Washington with all of their terrible white supremacist ideas. We are entering the beginning phase of an Octavia Butler esque hellscape from which there is no return. We have re entered the fucking DARK AGES.
Tom Church/J.Lee, Koret Auditorium, SF Public Library Main Branch Grove @ Hyde Thurs 11/14 5:30 Door 6:00 Showtime
This is the flyer to a very mysterious gig I’ll be playing next Thursday evening where I will be providing a backdrop of modular synth music and sounds to the films, vids and poetry of local SF artist Tom Church. Tom is a very outspoken, ironic and dare I say controversial poet. I really respect him and dig his acerbic works. Total SF character. I’ve never seen his films but I imagine they are gritty and critical like their creator. He gave me a flyer which I almost immediately lost and since he has no phone or internet all I have is this pic of a crumpled up flyer sent over text via violinist Kevin Van Yserloo and a memo on my phone to be there at 5:00 for soundcheck. Hope to see you at this counter-cultural event. Below pic is of my rig for the gig. It’s a simple one voice analog synth with an external sequencer, dictaphone, tapes, KOMA Field Kit and Ibanez analog delay rack. Versatile and quick on the jump cuts for film/zine soundtracking.
Mussel Rock Park, Daly City Acrylic 11 x 14 Marina and I were traveling down to visit our friend Tammy Fortin last weekend. It was the golden hour as we descended Highway 1 down to Pacifica. Sunset stretched out across the hills, ocean and waves vibrating my senses. Two days later I was heading back down there looking for a good plein aire spot. There’s that big hill you go down on the way to Pacifica before the highway embankment. I hit the first exit, took a right and tried to hug the coast hoping to find a vista which I did called Mussel Rock Park. I walked along the vertigo cliffs and found a spot at the very edge. The point of view is mostly looking down below the horizon line. Off in the distance is Mt Tam, the Headlands and Bolinas. I was attempting to capture the dynamics and vibrational kineticism of this place (as always). The painting ended up a little more on the abstract side which is ok with me since I’m an abstract artist posing as a nature artist and am just using the contours, planes and vectors of nature to guide me in my slapping on and mopping around of paint. As I was wrapping it up a couple construction guys on their lunch break gave me the thumbs up. That’s one of the cool things about painting outdoors. Strangers already like you and are supportive.
Baker Beach/Sea Cliff, Acrylic 11×14 Ala Prima Marina reminded me we used to go to this spot when Maizie was little. You actually park in the Sea Cliff neighborhood where there is a beach access trail. It leads you to the far western side of Baker Beach. It was an interesting day of painting and I was encouraged by a gang of elementary school aged kids who would stop over and check in with me every so often and tell me they liked it. One of them told me her dad can really draw and she is into experimenting with painting too (probably an 8-10 year old kid, so I was quite impressed). One of the neighbors who was one of the kids dad came up and showed me some old pics on his phone of this very “motif” circa turn of the 19th/20th century and 1950’s Baker Beach. A senior woman also came up to me and we chatted for a while and she gave me some ideas for possible music gigs, so it was a very social day of painting. As for the work, I think I found a good mixture for getting the ocean color. Ultra marine, quinacridone magenta cut with a lot of titanium white and from there add some raw umber which pulls green. This entire painting consists of those three colors plus Cyan for the sky and a little Sap Green for the plants. It’s all a work in progress but I’m picking up little methods every time.
Alpine Meadows Backside Bowl Oil/Chalk Pastels 6″x 8” When traveling I don’t bring all the painting apparatus. I take my box of oil pastels, a few chalk pastels (white, earthtones and grey blue), some small painting knives and a small bottle of Orange Terpene for texturizing, a pencil for sketching out the guidelines and a pad of 6″ x 8″ mixed media paper. It’s a cute little to-go kit. The small post card size paper is low time commitment and the entire kit fits easily into my travel bag or suitcase. Oil pastels are similar to painting with the richness of color and ability to blend using the “Rule of Threes” where you take one zone and use three colors then blend them with white then transition to the next zone. I also love them for their immediacy and quick clean up. I always use a snap shot from my phone as a reference photo so when on an excursion I rattle off a few pics to choose from. Later I’ll sit down at the kitchen table, desk, airplane tray table or cafe and get to work. This piece is of the backside bowl at Alpine Meadows up in Lake Tahoe. The weather there is so dynamic depending on your altitude and the wind direction. We got stuck in white out conditions and blinding wind mixed with some blue sky and nice tree lined leeward spots of calm. It’s a very pretty mountain scape probably about 9,000 feet up.
Third Hand Collective presents Spirits in the Static live at ATA’s Other Cinema/Incredibly Strange Music hosted by Craig Baldwin. The Third Hand Collective: Marina Lazzara, Stephanie Baker, Nick Fowler and J.Lee with Jason Morris. THC was founded by myself and Nick Fowler. We made a mix tape of thrift store sounds mixed down at slow speed. Nick distributed the tape at some comic meets. We started doing a live show with myself primarily on modular synth and Nick doing light art on the overhead projector. I’d seen a lot of synth shows and the visuals are always pretty cool, but I wanted to put something together where the visuals can be part of the performance, so we did this gig at Adobe Books where I was the surgeon doing an operation theater with biological synth sounds like heartbeats, breathing, laughing and screaming and played the part of a sadistic surgeon and the patient with the subtext being a critique of the US healthcare system. Nick played the lights, blood red oozing. It was here we decided to add more theatrics and include some acting into the show. I had the idea for the 19th Century Light Show and Seance for the Et al Gallery but they didn’t bite. Craig Baldwin emailed me a few months ago to play organ to films and I pitched the seance idea. He and the Other Cinema folks were down. Marina was supposed to be involved with another possible version of the show that never happened so she was on board for vocalizations and shadows and when it came time to work on this show, she became organizer and stage manager as well. I then asked poet Stephanie Baker who’s work is ethereal, surreal and experimental. She has a great cadence to her work and is into the esoteric. She performed words, foley and shadows. Nick and I have gotten together and worked out several light art “riffs” including the matrix (scroll down for pix), the exo-screen, and the submersible pump/fountain among others. The idea was to re examine the overhead as a light source and not use as a Janis Joplin 60’s clockface color scape. Nick has got it down to a fine art as you will see in the above video. I was pleased to add the Farfisa into THC this time. I’d been using it in Warm Spell and it works really great for “live AV cinema”. Craig’s buddy Bob opened the show on the Farfisa and I was a little intimidated because Bob can really play! Craig told me it’s not about musicianship it’s about transcendence, so hopefully I pulled it off. The sold out multi generational audience seemed to like it. Jason Morris agreed to be a plant in the audience and read a poem about the liminal divide. I was pleased. It was a good night. Thanks as always to Tom Scharff for cam op and audio recording.
Assemblages #s 1-8 wire, newspaper, screen, plastic bits, ace bandage, metal scraps, tissue paper, leaf, bark, painting scraps, inner envelope patterns, toilet paper rolls, cardboard, 1/24
I’ve recently been putting together these little 4″x 6″ assemblages. I collect little bits and scraps of color, texture and shape. Sometimes this collection overflows and starts taking over. When that happens it’s time to deploy. There is a random mystical cut up element to assemblage that excites me and at the same time puts me into some kind of trance state. There’s also a design composition arrangement element that I enjoy. These are all such little pieces with a minimum of time commitment and before you know it there they exist. The 3D collage/assemblage using screen and newspaper layers creates variable viewing possibilities and viewer participation. Different light/times of day create shadow combinations. The viewer will find obscured substrates beneath under or around the topmost layers.
Dead Mans’ Point, SF Acrylic on Canvas 1/2024. With my last 11×14 canvas I headed over to China Beach, SF but there was a massive construction site going on probbly to do with it looked like updating the bathhouse. Sometimes I can get into the musique concrete of concrete mixers but I was thinking something more surene so I went up a half mile or so to the entrance of Lands End and hit the trail. Of course I can not be contained by trailmarkers. I mean, what am I supposed to do? I have set up on main trails a couple times but you sometimes can’t get the framing and you have to be in a more social mood as people come up to you for a looksie. This can be fun and performative and a general positive engagement but on this day I had just eaten a gummie and was feeling internal. I came to a side trail down the cliffside which was roped off with signs Warning! Steep Cliffs/Unstable. I discovered another entrance to the trail so I popped over a branch and scrambled down the path where steps where roughly carved into the side of the cliff. Some clever and amazing person/people built a couple platforms in the trees and had ropes hanging for ease of climbing. I had my trusty easel on my back and my small camping seat so it was a little clumsy but I ended up finding a good spot perfectly discrete with a clear and open vista. The cliffside rocks comprise what is called Dead Mans Point. There are a few shipwrecks along that stretch of the Golden Gate so I imagine some awful deadly crash on a thick foggy night of yore. The piece was done in about 2 and a half hours, textural, pointalistic, vibratory, marbleized. Always a practice for next time. I feel like it captures the rugged Nor Cal Coast, a mini SF version of Sonoma/Mendo. As always it was great to be in the ocean air with the sounds of the waves breaking on the cliffside. On my way home I stopped into a cafe in the Outer Richmond for some caffeine. There’s these two kinda freaky guys in front of me in line and one of them asks me if I’m a painter cuz I had paint on my face. He’s an artist too and they invite me over to their very cool studio/gallery/sound lab. Very on the level guys, we totally hit it off. I hope to follow up with a visit to one of their upcoming shows and if I do I will report back to you. Another perfect day of painting!
Heavens’ Dread is the first completed of my new batch of homemade acoustic songs. I wrote or perhaps a better word would be I channeled a bunch of new stuff that isn’t ruckus enough for the rock band and would be more suitable as their own stand alone cycle intended for an intimate coffee house experience. All my music is a tribute to those who came before me and I try to hold up the standards of artists who have imprinted and inspired me. Sometimes it resembles one of the masters, sometimes it’s such an amalgamation of influences that it may seem as though it’s original (it’s not). Heavens’ Dread is a 70’s Neil Young style song/arrangement with stripped down acoustic guitar and wistful feelings.
Warm Spell Live at the Make Out Room, SF
Warm Spell performed their immersive improv soundscape at the Make Out Room on 12/10. The show was recorded by Tom Scharff and is available for stream/download at the WS Bandcamp page HERE. Thanks to Brooklyn goth cabaret duo Charming Disasters, SF songster the Slow Poisoner, Martin, Kenny and staff at the Make Out Room and of course our friends new and old who came out and supported us! Rumor has it we will be back in February.
The Crane, wire, hoop, fireplace screen, lens, plaster, thread. The Crane is a stabile and minimalist lamp/projector. The armature wire was applied as is. As I recently mentioned, I appropriated a bunch of wire from a nearby construction site. The wire was used to wrap rebar and was cut by the workers and left in unusually shaped twists and knots. I only really fabricated the part where the lens is held. The rest kind of just stood up on its own. I poured a base which is a hoop filled with plaster for extra support. The piece works both as a daytime sculpture and as a night time lamp. Part of the thesis is the creating of multiple Moire patterns with the lens, wire screen and backround screen as well as the projection of the spiral that surrounds the candle. This is a prototype of more 19th Century Lightshow pieces in the works.
Bobcat Trail, Marin Headlands Acrylic, Ala Prima 11″x14″ 11/23 I headed over the bridge to the Headlands once again searching for a good plein aire vista. I was thinking “terrain” this time and decided on hiking into the valley on the right hand side of the road. It’s a rich riparian area, especially dense with life and color this time of year. I ended up on the Bobcat trail which was pretty empty of humans on this weekday save a few bikers, horseback riders and hikers. I found a nice spot off the trail and out of the way under some eucalyptus trees. It wasn’t a spectacular spot at all besides that fact that it’s all kind of naturally spectacular. I mean, it wasn’t extremely spectacular. This is a good thing actually. It’s up to the artist in most cases to transform the not so spectacular into something vibrational and interesting. At any rate, most spectacular sights have probably already been painted by someone else, so find your niche, kids 🙂 In the foreground were a lot of coyote bush and many plants were going to seed. The thicket was pretty intense and there’s no way I was going to paint it realistically. My smallest painting knife was not “cutting it” lol so I pulled out a tiny paint brush for the first time in a long while (maybe ever?). The brush enabled the entire pointallism of the foreground. All day I was visited by birds and on the way home I met a coyote on the trail who popped up into the bushes before I got too close. I was please how this one came out. My Marin Headlands paintings all have a similar composition, energy flow and style without even thinking about it. Below is a short documentary video I made of this excursion for my CCSF BEMA Digital Skills class. It’s been great going to City College this semester and combing over the gaps in my media skills. The class inspired me to finally begin this very website. CCSF is free to SF residents so I recommend all my local friends to sign up and take advantage of this amazing institution. Enroll and motivate your creativity and skills. Below the vid is a link to the song “It” which I used as the soundtrack to the video. It was recorded at home in 2010 and soon after went on to become a full fledged Rabbles song.
Venusian Tears, 11/23 I left my synth patched from last time and hoped to add to and improve on what I was doing but as most synthesists know, this is not what happens. As soon as you power down, you will never again be able to capture what you had just created. It’s a bit like the Tibetan sand mandala, the energy sent whirling back into the cosmos. My sound source modules were left hard patched with suitable modulation partners and routed to mixers. I ended up building on ideas I had used in the past that I knew would work and took them a little further. This music reminds me of Kitaro, one of the worlds’ great ambient synthesists. I sat there for a while with my face melting just like the first time I heard Kitaro (probably the Silk Road lp). The shimmer of arpeggios from the Rings/Beads combination was controlled with a Lorenz Attractor chaos modulator so it would never ever repeat and left a nice koto impression. The puddle documentary videos were shot last year during our rainy season. I’m glad they found the perfect soundtrack. I find it really wild we are living on a ball in space. There are so many beautiful moments always happening in the most subtle ways. I like bent light, circles of drips, the drama of weather and the empty streets and foot paths of a good rain.
Dunes Beach Hillside, Acylic 16×20, ala prima, 11/23 I took a drive down to the Half Moon Bay area looking for a good vista.The plan was to hit Moss Beach but the spot I was thinking of was closed off for the seals. I continued down to Dunes Beach and checked out a few spots. I decided to hit up this view looking north east towards the coastal hills and discovered a good spot in the meadow where I could hide out from human passers by on a nearby bike path. This painting came out a little less figuratively than recent paintings but the pointalist effect asserts itself creating a subtle eye op energy field. It took about four hours to finish and I probably rushed and could have carved out more details and added more psycho-perspective effects but I’d rather have got it down while on site. I was a little tired at the end and the November air stated to chill later in the afternoon. Life on earth is rich with subtle stimulation and often times we are so in our heads we walk right past it. Here an ordinary snapshot is turned into a sentimental art piece, the underlying motive behind this excursion being the focalization of radical peace, a slowing down of time and the journalistic document of free movement. I got lost on the way down but in doing so found a few more sites of interest for future paintings.
Warm Spell had the recent privilege of recording with Elton at Light Rail Studios. We hope to have a substantial document of our work together for your listening pleasure in the reasonably not too distant future. Warm Spell will be performing our technicolor soundscapes at the Make Out Room on Sunday, December 10th. Showtime is at 6:30. Warm Spell goes on at 8:30 so plan on getting there by 8:15. We are pleased to be sharing the bill with the SF Goth folk duo Charming Disasters and indie-surrealist balladeer the Slow Poisoner so please come early to support and open your minds to the live sounds of these fine local acts. Stop By. Make New Friends.
Skies in Flux 11/23 It’s been about ten years since I got into modular synth. I used to make ambient/experimental/noise via other mediums like feeding a delay into itself on a mixer and using the tone knobs to create oscillations/feedback, recording a bass at high speed on an open reel tape and playing it back at 1/3 the speed to create a subsonic bass bath, tape loop cassette collage from old Code a Phone answering machines or just plain straight up treated guitar with a myriad of effects and feedback. I feel like in all creative pursuits its good to get as far out there as possible with the hopes of bringing something tangible back that can be useful in a more universal sense. When I got into modular it was like the Cadillac of mind music mediums (with the exception of a live band of course). I was always jealous of my painter friends who worked alone and didn’t have all the logistics of collaboration to deal with. Synthesis is similar to the art studio workflow and like visual art making, a journey into zen nowheres. This vid is an ambient patch I made using my three eurorack cases. I usually use one big case and a case with my sequencers/controllers, so it was cool to use them all. Many of these modules never “talked” to each other before. I have a lot further to go with this patch which will probably grow a drum beat and some granular vocals. I was pleased with the three sub patches here including the Interstellar Radio oscillations, tELHAMONIC/Clouds and Rings into Beads. Of course there is a LOT of modulation driving this music as well. The vids were shot on my phone in my neighborhood using a welders glass filter. I wish I could just stare at clouds all day, but alas, capitalism says no.
Starry Skemes live at Winters Tavern 10/17/23 When I was a kid I often saw my future self as a crusty musician pulling up to an old Highway 1 roadhouse on a full moon lit night and laying down some heavy guitar rock with me mates. That prophecy was self fulfilled this night at Winters in Pacifica. No and Knower is a song from the Rabbles that I feel still had some performance life left in it and was a good starting point for the first Starry Skemes setlist and gig. Thanks to David Lovato for the videography. *not pictured is Dave Mairs on drums who I promise was there.
Pt. Bonita, Marin Headlands, Acrylic on canvas, 16×20, 10/2023 I haven’t painted outdoors in over a month so it was good to get back out into the sea air on a perfectly sunny autumn day. I’ve been hitting the Marin Headlands a lot. It’s one of my favorite spots. There’s a lot of different hillside terrain and of course, a great place to expereince the seascape and bluffs. This time I went through the 5 minute tunnel and drove almost all the way to Rodeo Beach but hung a left up the hill to Point Bonita, famous for its lighthouse. I also discovered some cool army installation ruins that would be a great place for an eventual en plein aire synthesizer generator session (which I will vid/post here). I parked and hiked to the end of the northward vista trail, went under the barricade, down the path and found a spot to set up my easel. I always look for off trail spots so hikers can easily get past. I came to a fork in the trail and I was able to set up right on the cliffside with an interesting perspective of being able to look down a couple hundred feet and out over the bluff so my horizon was uninterrupted ocean. Off in the distance is Pt. Reyes and Bolinas. There is a lot of foreground, not my forte, but I thought it would be good to get out of the usual comfort zone. I am not a figurative painter so when it came time to paint the ice plants right in front of me, I had to defer to my abstract methods. Also in the frame is a magnificent sandstone cliff that I gave the impressionist treatment. The rock jutting out to the left is the same one I’ve painted from different angles. It always somehow looks like an elephant and so it happened again! Do rocks have spirit animals? The painting took about 4 hours to complete. I’m a little rusty but I generally like the piece and it was good to be out there hearing the seagulls and watching seals pop their heads out of the water. As always I hope this painting puts you there.
Mothers’ Embrace, lampshade hoop, wire, plaster, craft hoop, votive candles 10/2023. Mothers’ Embrace is part of a new body of work the 19th Century Light Show. These kinetic sculptures use internal candlelight, generating shadows from within There are two different effects happening, the first being an abstract mixing of perpetually random spiral lines, the second, the shadows generated. The circular disc creates an ongoing day/night/eclipse. Nick Fowler and I plan on staging this electricity free light show to accompany a theatrical seance. We hope to eventually show these objects de art in a dark windowless art gallery space. I like art that works on the folk level and has some sort of household aesthetic usefulness (marginal as that may be) in this case creating calming hypnotic ambience. These pieces are my reaction against the sameness of million dollar multimedia art, all juiced up on rainbow LEDs, void of human connection and intimacy.
Starry Skemes is Dave Mairs (drums), Jamie Kimmel (bass), Derek Petrillo (guitar, bk voc) and J.Lee (guitar, voc). Their music is influenced by baroque 60’s psychedelic garage rock and built on an 80’s/90’s indie rock foundation. Their musical pallet is wide ranging from sonic intensity to melancholic delicacy with songs that are melodically and lyrically purposeful and arrangements that hypnotically weave. Band members have played together over the past several decades in many incarnations including the Rabbles, Puffy Weeds, Aerosol Species and Mighty Kong.
Warm Spell Live at the Et al Gallery, San Francisco 9/16/23 When I first walked into the Et al Gallery I knew it would be the perfect environment for a Warm Spell gig. The gallerist is a great supporter of the SF art, poetry and music performance community aesthetic. The space has great reflective Gregorian chant-like acoustics that are ideal for our style of soundscape music. So… thanks Aaron Harbour for giving us the show date! Booking Et al also gave me the chance to bring in the Third Hand Collective to perform experimental light art projections on their massively tall walls. THC is myself and collaborator and underground comic artist Nick Fowler (more on THC in a later post). The date coincided with the art show of one of my friends and favorite visual artists, Will Yackulic. The combined human energy field was strong with creativity and mutual appreciation. Opening the show was Ghost Dub who feature one of my favorite synth artists Thomas DiMuzio performing on his Buchla. For their set, Nick and I rigged up a submersible pump in a Pyrex casserole dish on top of our overhead projector. From there we used small convex glass clock faces to redirect the water creating bubble and drip ripple patterns for what I like to think is a new take on liquid lights. It went nicely with the bubble and drip sounds of Ghost Dubs’ hard and angular sonics. After that Nick took over lights and I proceeded to join Warm Spell for our set. I really got a laugh at how informally and unprofessionally the gig started off. Richard was blowing the trombone seemingly getting a feel for the room as the rest of us slowly stopped chit chatting and started the drone, bouncing between Dmin and D mixolydian with various textures rising to the surface like a whale coming up for air. There were moments of intensity and I felt like we were channeling the Plastic Exploding Inevitable era Velvet Underground. Marina and Brian locked into a slow motorik dirge foundation as Kevin teased super sonic tones through his Mooger Fooger ring modulator and sunk into Tony Conrad esque repetition. Tammy contrasted understated riffing with violin bowed beds of ambient delay. I was barely hanging on, not quite knowing what I was doing which was a thrill. I got a few church fague riffs in there ala Richard Wright. Nick spun circular screens hanging from a matrix grid over the projector for multiple moire effects. There must have been some kind of Einsteinian time relativity spell hovering over the collective consciousness. Even though this went on for over 40 minutes, it was over in a flash. I always get a little self-conscious when performing extended music that peoples butts will start to hurt sitting there for that long. Luckily there was enough stimulus, spectacle, variety, excitement, tension and release as the audience were transported through inner space. It was a very socially and creatively dense day. I’m glad I had the privilege to have been a part of this communitizing event. The show was recorded by Camper Van Beethoven archivist Tom Scharff with Tony Jenkins, both brothers of mine at the Local 16 Stagehands Union.
San Gregorio Beach from the Hillside Trail Ala Prima, Acrylic, 11×14 9/9/23 My 16 year old daughter Maizie and I travelled south down Highway One looking for a good En Plein Aire vista. We pulled into San Gregorio State Beach and looked around. It was pretty crowded with picnickers and beach combers. There was a lot of human stimulus with people and music. We wanted a quiet, less distracting spot so we climbed the very steep hillside trail and discovered this view overlooking the bluffs. We agreed this was the place, set up our easels and began painting. As always, I exclusively used painting knives. They are much easier to clean when changing colors and for resetting a messy pallet. Another reason is I don’t have to hike in or pour out any paint water. I try and not leave any traces of art residue when in nature. I occasionally use brushes but only in the studio and only for tiny details. It was a little windy and overcast that day and after about 2 1/2 hours, Maizie started getting cold. When I’m painting alone I normally take between three and four hours to power through cursing the elements out loud in a mad and desperate attempt to finish the painting on site. It’s like a sport. I don’t want to have to touch it up after the fact. That would be cheating! In a fury I finished off all the green of the hillside and we packed it up for the day. Maizie’s painting came our really great. She’s more into still lifes, portraits and figure drawing and not really into landscapes so I was really glad she agreed to come out with me. We had a nice drive home up scenic Highway 84 through La Honda and the redwoods on our way home.
Nude Ascending Aircase Wire, Thread, Fishing Line, Cement, Craft Hoops, 8/29/23 I often design and create kinetic art sculptures, the desired artistic effect being an hypnological slowing down of time. The circular bodies and spiral armature create an elegant yet homemade improvement on the hypnotists’ pendulum. The orbiting discs are always interacting with the wind and each other. The components are in a perpetual ever changing relationship. My mobiles are “of” my backyard where the wind conditions are perfectly random. Our yard is bordered by apartment buildings to our left and rear which creates a windbreak from our strong San Francisco winds. What we get are the reflective winds from the right side of our yard which are perfectly not too strong as to not destroy or tear the piece down (unless a rather large storm passes through). A few build notes: This is my first mobile using the bowline knot for tying the moving pieces, hooks, fasteners and armature wire. The bowline has vastly improved the integrity and quality of my work. I found and collected the armature wire discarded at a construction site near the Panhandle. I source my craft hoop circles from lampshades these days mostly found discarded on the sidewalk. I like to think my sculpture style is neo-modernist, minimalist, kinetic and reactionist to found/recycled materials.