July 2016

When my painting class ended in early June, I intended to keep on painting, but it didn't happen for a while. Much of my attention was on a trip I took in mid-June that took me far from my usual routine. My old college friend, Greg proposed that we go together for a weekend at the Fur Peace Ranch, a guitar camp run by Jorma Kaukonen, lead guitarist with the Jefferson Airplane. I flew to Kansas City, where Greg lives, and then we made the long drive to southeastern Ohio. We spent three days learning to play country blues with Steve James, an excellent musician and a funny guy.

It seems that I was destined to get more involved in music this year, because a few weeks before the trip, I got together with Larry Murphy from my painting class, his wife Cheryl, and a friend, Lynn, to play and sing together. For a few months now, we have been entertaining the folks at ACEB, an alzheimer's support facility in Hayward. Every couple of weeks we spend an hour playing and singing for them.

When I finally settled down and started painting again, I had a hard time coming up with an inspiring subject. I try to tell myself that good artists paint anything they can find around them. I think of Van Gogh painting his bedroom. But without some kind of image in my head that appeals to me, it's hard for me to get started. One day on the way home from taking care of our horses, we stopped at a tiny fruit stand on North Livermore Ave. It seemed to say something to me about things I love about our California environment, so I snapped a photo with my phone. When I got ready to do some painting, I felt pretty rusty and felt like I needed to do something relatively easy that I could throw away if it didn't turn out. It's not one of my best, but at least I kept it and put it here for you to see.

I seem to be drawn to scenes with grass and rocks and tree trunks, and for my next painting I chose a photo that I took hiking on the Ukraina Trail here in Hayward. I did the painting quite fast and loose and I like the results a lot.

The trail is a nice three-mile loop starting at Stonebrae School, and leads to a very interesting historical site. Agapius Honcharenko was an orthodox priest in the Ukraine in the mid-nineteenth century, who was persecuted by the Russians, forced into exile, and ended up with a small farm at the top of the Hayward hills, where he and his wife lived from 1873 until 1916. He continued to publish political literature which was smuggled into Russia, and he held church services in a nearby rocky grotto. Nothing remains of his farm but his grave and an historical marker, but the trail is a pretty walk with great views across the bay.

June 2016

For our last class of the spring session, Ron came up with a photo of an older man working on a wood carving, copied from a calendar. Actually I think he was using something like a soldering iron to burn a design into the wood. Since it was our last class and everyone brought food for a potluck, we didn't want to spend too much time painting, so the idea was to do it in an hour or less. Sometimes we find that some nice things happen when we try to work faster. The work tends to be looser and maybe more unified because we are covering larger areas at a time. I think that worked for me in this painting and I am quite pleased with the results.