You cannot make this stuff up

For Halloween week ….a spooky hand manifested on my living room wall, just as I was planning this post. (See it as an arm slanted downward, palm of the hand facing you, with big thumb at the top, and fingers curled into the palm).  It's all a trick of the sun's slant and reflection from car windows in the street below but it was kind of eerie, especially as I'd been thinking about the challenges of painting hands.

 

But it's heads we're still concerned with, here in the Zodiac Café, and this time Capricorn has made his own spooky appearance.  Manly P. Hall describes the typical Capricorn qualities as:--

 

"Head long; forehead high; eyes piercing; nose long; lips thin; chin strong but  narrow; body angular; general air of severity."

 

I'd recently been flipping through last year's sketchbook and came across a drawing I'd made of a weird and wonderful guy on the street -- with deep pink hair and a tangerine shirt.

 

Oooohh….irresistible to give him a try.   I whipped up a little study for the Cardboard Club, exaggerating some elements to match the descriptive text.

 

Here's an early stage of the painting.

 

  

As I worked on that bony forehead, I was reminded that Capricorn's symbolic animal is the goat.  Hmmm…..what do you think?  Any resemblance?

 

 

I might have been more successful if I hadn't been so fixated on his improbable hair.   Enchanted, actually.  Despite the problems anchoring it to his head, it never occurred to me to give him a haircut.  Here's the finale, with the hair much darker than in reality.

 

 

Did I say "reality"?  That's not the name of the game this week, is it?  OOooooOOOOoooo.

 

Earth Art -- it rocks!

 

 

One of my greatest joys has always been digging in dirt.  Dirt and rocks go way back with me, from my earliest pre-school days when a big dirt pile in our backyard was the envy of the neighbourhood, to my small first garden the summer that I was 9, to my first real gardens in early married days in Michigan, in Ontario, in successive houses in Vancouver.  Each of those homesteads always gave pride of a place to a rock garden.

 

My rock garden here at The Yellow House received a happy kick-start from friends L & B, who delivered chunks of  Galiano Island sandstone to form its base.   This August, it reached a glorious overgrown peak (as shown) -- complete with volunteer mini-pumpkin vine.

 

Meanwhile, in my back yard I continued my long-term project of replacing the small lawn with garden -- while next door, the young family continued their enduring project of renovating/rebuilding their house.  At last, in a big clean-up push, they decided it was time to get rid of the chunks of cement that had formed their original sidewalk.   Just what I needed for another rock garden base!

 

So over they came, like the Three Bears -- Papa with the enormous chunks, Mama with the medium ones, and Baby Bear (big kindergarten boy now) with the handfuls.  By early August, my dig was under way.

 

Please disregard, as I did, all the surrounding disorder and overgrown grass.  This was a task that needed focus.

 

 

And it was akin to hard labour.   That lusty grass had originally been laid as strips of sod, which is anchored by miserable and maddening plastic mesh -- virtually impossible for the likes of me to cut through with a shovel.  What's more, the soil beneath is an amalgam of dirt, gravel, small stones, rusty nails, and occasional oddments.  The only way for me to make any headway was to get down on my knees and hand-dig every square foot with my trusty trowel.

 

 

The two little pails of stones represent about a tenth of what I unearthed.  And the blue and yellow plastic bags are covering buckets of dirt, temporarily removed to be replaced later.  Did I say this was Really Hard Work?!  I could handle the chunks brought over by Mama and Baby Bear -- but for the big slabs, I had to channel the builders of Stonehenge and the Pyramids and summon up all I remembered from high school Physics class.

 

 

With the base complete, I made a ceremonial placement of L's Galiano inukshuk, still in the configuration she designed.  And planted right next to it is Twinflower -- also from Galiano, another wonderful surprise from L after she viewed Linnaeus' favourite flower.

 

This past week, with great elation, I completed the fall planting,  leaving space for next spring's annuals.   

 

And then I began to strategize about this post.  I've always said it's about "creativity" which most often means my art projects. 

 

WELL..., isn't this (and any rock garden) an example of Earth Art, or Land Art?  Okay, perhaps not as exalted as Christo's massive landworks, but there are small elements in the notion of "earth art" that are tempting. 

 

Most interesting, I came across artist Jakob Tylicki, who exposes papers and canvas to the elements and then "unearths" the results.  I've seen stuff like this before and it's alternately goofy and beautiful.  Irresistible, right?  -- especially with the promising oddments that came to light in my dig.

 

I wrapped these, along with some studio odds and ends, into a scrap of canvas and produced a small tribute to my friend Y.  Her art career has often involved transforming found objects into small sculptures and assemblages with bird shapes.

 

This little bundle I placed in the hole of the cement base of a long-gone fence post (see the right side of the garden as shown in the photos) and partially capped it with a special rock.  It will stay there through the winter and......hmm, maybe at the Summer Solstice 2021, I'll unwrap it and see how the canvas has re-created itself.

 

What did NOT go into the wrap was a special find I made coincidentally on this same day as I dug deeper in a less creative vein in my front garden -- a 1913 Canadian penny!!  Had it been buried in the earth since the year after The Yellow House was built in 1912?  It felt kind of like striking gold -- even if only corroded copper.

 

Not quite hitting the mark

 

 

I ought to be good at this.  Archery was the one sport involving interaction with a projectile at which, surprisingly, I excelled in school.  I realized that my arrow consistently hit the target about 8" off-centre towards the 4 o'clock position -- so all I had to do was aim consistently for 8" off-centre towards the 10 o'clock position and -- bull's eye!  There's a lesson here, I'm sure, but I haven't figured it out yet.

 

Meanwhile, at The Zodiac Cafe, it's been time for the arrival of Sagittarius -- a female archer, in keeping with my plan to alternate guys and gals in the series.  I flipped through some old sketches as I reviewed Manly P. Hall's typical characteristics of the sign:--

 

"Head long, forehead high and well-rounded; eyes dreamy; nose long; lips somewhat full; hair sometimes auburn."

 

Maybe this was my opportunity to re-do a painting from exactly a year ago -- "Ringlets," the first in my Denizens Series. 

 

I've been gradually painting over some of the Denizens, and I *have* improved somewhat in the past year...haven't I?  So I decided to work on adjusting her features to accord with Hall's description and give her another try.

 

Except:-- That nose.  Those lips.  She really didn't look like anyone I wanted to have coffee with.  And I should have known; I've always heard that renovating is harder than starting from scratch.  So I started from scratch.

 

I hadn't considered, though, what it would mean to work directly on my last sheet of a delicious textured paper that's really meant for mixed media.  It was like painting on a dry sponge.  Usually when I finish a painting, I like to bring it upstairs from the studio and hang out with it for a while, liking the good parts and thinking over the bad parts.

 

Neither of these gals did I feel like hanging out with.

 

 

What to do?  I didn't want to cast off Sagittarius completely.  Its related painting from my long-ago "Astrological Plants" series is one of my favourites -- and my backyard bush, just two years old, has produced a few snowberries this year, blooming right now.

 

One evening, still undecided, I worked on the mindless task of filing and paper shredding.  Remembering how much fun I'd once had collaging a figure from the scraps of patterned paper from inside security envelopes, I did an updated model.  I had fewer designs now, with so many transactions on-line.  Her pendant even says, "Go paperless."

 

From this repetitive task came the solution to my unattractive Sagittarians.  Just as a mask has covered the healing scar on my nose, so too a mask could cover the nose and lips I just couldn't get right.

 

Right on target!  I could bear to bring her upstairs and smile at the outcome.  As for what she looks like underneath, just don't tell, okay?

 

Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?

 

 

 

Right now my "progress" seems a tangle of lines and coils -- but one day, I'll take flight!  

 

So I'm back at the Zodiac Cafe, this time aiming for a Scorpio who meets Manly P. Hall's description of the typical features:--

 

"Head long; features small and regular; teeth good; nose Grecian; mouth and chin well-f0rmed; hair fine"

 

I'd been thinking about re-doing some of my "Denizens" portraits and singled out "The Filmmaker."

  

 

 

I'd always liked the first study I did for him --

 

But I needed to start afresh for Scorpio, keeping in mind the European-looking guy who'd inspired "The Filmmaker":

 

Okay...promising...for admission to the Cardboard Club... so I took out a fresh canvas and got started.  Here's the midway point, when for a day or two he seemed to suggest Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein.

 

No?  I guess not.   Here's the real Picasso.

 

Up to this stage, I'd been working on my small portable easel.  When I'd booted the Art Students off my larger table easel, I moved Scorpio over.  Oh, wow! -- When I saw him against my bulletin board in the background, I suddenly realized I was heading towards another Ferdinand Hodler spinoff. 

  

 

Hodler is an artist I really like, but I'd been aiming for something different, and it began to look like I wasn't going to get there.  So I wrapped it up.  Here's the final:  "Zodiac Cafe - Scorpio".

 

At least that tough-guy Cancer has someone to hang out with.

 

Double-chai latte, you guys?   You could even have a browse at the artwork on the wall, like Scorpio's contribution to the "Astrological Plants" series.

 

 

 

 

"David Douglas, with Complements"

 

Okay, I know that you're wincing at that "-e".  My readers are a discerning bunch, to be sure.  But in fact, it's complements-with-an-E that we're concerned with, as hinted in the previous post's colour wheel.

 

Colour theory can get complicated, and my camera hasn't helped with its tendency to blue a lot of the tones.  But we're after terminology here, of the kind commonly used by artists.  Red-Yellow-Blue are primary colours.  Orange-Green-Purple are secondary colours.  And colours opposite each other on the colour wheel are...ta tum!...complementary colours.

 

Placed next to each other, colour complements will "pop", emphasizing each other's quality -- even though, if mixed together, they might resemble mud.

 

That explains complement with an "E" -- and as for the "I", I have no compliments to bestow on explorer David Douglas, the third of the botanists honoured in VanDusen Garden.

 

It's unreasonable of me, I know, but I don't think it's fair that his name is assigned to the Douglas Fir when it was Archibald Menzies who first identified the tree for a European audience when he travelled to Vancouver Island.  Douglas didn't even make it to BC, for goodness sake.

 

 

Menzies gets the credits in botanical nomenclature, with the official label that also reveals a little-known fact -- the species is a "pseudotsuga" -- not even a real fir!!!  Nonetheless, those pesky art students who have been roaming around VanDusen for over a year now couldn't leave without a nod to the renowned Scot.  Earlier in the year, they asked Dr. Menzies to hold his pose and then put Linnaeus in perspective.  What art school pranks could they play on David Douglas? 

 

I spent weeks, it seems, making suggestions -- like "the rule of thirds," a nifty compositional device, or putting him in a frame, both to no avail.

 

 

Then it happened that I made another visit to VanDusen when it first opened this June -- and saw Douglas again, basking in the rose garden. 

 

When I looked at my photo later and saw the rich green against the vibrant red, I knew that colour complements would be the theme.  I tried this out in a tiny colour study.

 

 Okay, this just might work....so I did a slightly larger study as a baseline for scaling up to my 20x26" paper.

 

 

Truth be told, this is where I should have spent much more time, on both the layout and the colours.  The final version is not what I'd hoped for, but it's been somewhat instructive.   Can you spot the pairs of colour complements?

 

After all, this has really been about having fun splashing paint around.

 

 

Watch this spot

 

What can I say?  The usual mid-month posting didn't happen on the 15^th.  And it's not going to happen on the 16^th.  And, well, maybe it will make it by... the 21^st?  Or maybe not.  It's not that I haven't been working on it, but....the mood of the Dog Days of Summer has had its effect.  See you soon, I hope.  (Did someone say, "In your dreams!")

 

Veering to the East and (very) slightly off course

One of my shutdown losses that  can't resume for a while is the weekly "ESL Lesson."  It was the brainchild of my wonderful Hong Kong-born friend Anita.  She and her husband Stephen have been lovely neighbours from our first days in The Yellow House, with Anita's knock on the door and occasional deliveries of Stephen's baked goods. 

It didn't take me long to recognize that he was not just a guy who likes to bake but is an accomplished and inventive professional baker.  They were charmed that I recognized this and that I eventually dubbed them "The Royal Bakery".  If Queen Elizabeth ever came (again) to Vancouver, Stephen would have to do the catering, I proclaimed, and to confirm their status I presented them with a Royal Warrant.   

Researching the symbols for the Royal Warrant, I learned that the Dragon and Phoenix together (the two figures at the top) are a symbol of marital felicity.   Perfect!!!  Meanwhile, realizing my interest in learning about Chinese culture, Anita came to suggest that I might help teach English to a friend of hers, fairly recently arrived from mainland China.  Well -- these two women are both so smart and already so accomplished that our weekly "classes" turned into the Three Ladies' Nights (-Anita) -- laugh-fests fueled from the outset by a group enthusiasm for pandas.  We can still have neighbourly sidewalk chats, but the focussed indoor sessions are in abeyance.   

And this has been a long non-explanation for why Stephen came to mind as I thought about a Virgo male portrait for the next customer at The Zodiac Cafe.

Manly P. Hall lists Virgo characteristics as:

"Forehead full; shoulders broad; nostrils wide; eyes frank; mouth small; lips full."

Well...some of that would work, some of it wouldn't.  But why let that stop me when I became totally carried away and decided to try the couple together, with Anita kinda sorta maybe fitting Libra's characteristics?

"Head long; features small and regular; teeth good; nose Grecian; mouth and chin well-formed; hair fine."

There were big reasons not even to attempt this:-- Cultural mal-alignment, for a start.  The Chinese Zodiac, after all, has nothing to do with the western Zodiacal belt. Also, I'd never even attempted a drawing with the characteristic Asian eyelids and am so used to looking at my own increasingly droopy eyelids in the mirror.  And, regardless of anything else, it's well known that smiles are tricky to draw and paint -- and these friends have two of the best smiles in the world.

So what?  Let's get started.  Here are some preliminaries:

It was downright challenging just getting them on the same canvas.  I went broader/narrower about three times with each of their smiles and shorter/longer about three times with each of their faces.  Here's an early stage:--

And for better or for worse, the grand finale:  "Dragon and Phoenix, Virgo and Libra"  (copyright 2020).

Now, to reassure my readers who might be concerned with what I'd do with a photo I might have of them...... never fear.  I guarantee that I won't be pursuing  this direction -- of trying to make a realistic and fairly conservative portrait of someone I know.  And while there is so much room for improvement in this work, I decided to tell the subjects I'd done another "Dragon and Phoenix" and if they wanted it, they could have it.  Of course, they said yes -- and when they saw it, Anita burst into tears and Stephen said, "Oh, she is always so young and pretty."  A magic moment.

In other neighbourhood magic, another congenial twosome a couple blocks away is in full summertime mode.  Cheers and keep cool!