THINGS TO KEEP

 

Some people can enjoy the moment and do not need keepsakes as reminders of their memories. I am not one of them. I may have inherited that trait from my dad. When I first looked through my dad's memorabilia after both parents died, I thought what he left behind was evidence of a man who wanted to achieve recognition. He kept records from an early age, including awards, newspaper articles, photo albums filled with people he knew and places he traveled to, and once he received the recognition, binders full of fan letters.

As a kid, I was encouraged to keep scrapbooks (I think to keep my sister and me out of my mother's hair). The activity became a custom that I've carried in some form throughout my life. Besides the events that went into the scrapbooks up until I graduated from college, I've also kept records of what I eat each day, my weight, blood pressure readings, and several journals full of comments about books I've read. I think of one of my aunts who kept meticulous records of the weather in the middle of Minnesota. As a farming family, those records were important. I can't say the same about my own. They are a habit acquired and never really questioned. They are a moment of silence at the beginning of my day. Some people greet the sun in the morning. My habit is to write down the day and date. My way to acknowledge a new day.

Bill rediscovered a photo album of his ancestors and relatives that I had assembled many years ago from photos and papers handed down from his parents when they moved into a senior living home. Bill, unlike me, is not a saver of mementos, but he has spent time, as we sort through our things, going through this unexpected treasure as well as old yearbooks. We saved all of these things because we had the space and through inertia, but now, finding them again has given us time to reflect on our lives before we pass these treasures on to someone else.

Inspired by a circle. A labyrinth 4 life.
Wander. Wonder. Live.
Life is a series of circles and spirals.
By Martha Slavin

Keeping all the pieces of a life can become a burden. On the other hand, if I hadn't kept some of the scraps of paper, letters she wrote, and her old photo albums, I would not know that my mother tried out for a movie part in Los Angeles or about her young life living in Ohio that she recorded hastily on a piece of scrap paper. Within the photo albums, I found copies of senior class pages from her yearbook. I made copies of those photos on an inkjet printer. I washed the copies with water, which allowed the ink to flow away. What I had left was a bluish-purple faded memory of each photo. 

The young men in the photos would have been the right age to become part of the WWII military. I don't know their personal histories, but I used the photos as a symbol of all the lost boys who go to war. I cut a piece of Hahnemuele printing paper into long strips, scrawled some dry brushstrokes of watercolor across the surface, and glued the photos down. Throughout the book, I wrote a poem about the effects of war on each generation since WWII.

Lost Boys: Lost to real manhood
Off to war
Chanting U.S.A. Stomping cadence.
Brash. Steely-eyed. Bravado.
Immortal, young gods,
Buried in the trenches, in the foxholes,
by one step on an IUD
Leaving
Silence
Some return calmed by their generation's balm:
Alcohol. Cocaine. Meth.
Living on the streets.
Forgotten.

I go back and forth about keeping things. Is it a burden or an opportunity? I've come to the conclusion it is both. Most items are opportunities, but only if I can find the time to sit and think about them. Otherwise, they just become part of the stacks of our lives.

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 Norm Eisen's parents told him:

“Your job is not to finish the work—but neither are you, the child of free people, not to do your share.”

SANGUINE OR NOT

Life Lines #2 by Martha Slavin

 An artist friend sent me a square of ArtGraf water-soluble tailor's chalk called Sanguine, a blood red color. It's a beautiful hue, and the chalk can be drawn on its tip to create fine lines or used on its broad edge and scraped across the page to resemble dry dirt, wood, or brick walls. Brushing the marks with some water intensifies the color.

Mark making with an ArtGraf chalk

"Sang" is the French word for blood. The French extended the word into sanguine, which means optimistic. And sang is also found in the word sang-froid (blood-cold) an old version of keeping one's cool. And recently, the French have added the slang term, Le Sang, a phrase that suggests blood is thicker than water, or slightly differently, that friends are like family. In English, sanguine also means cheerfully optimistic, but also indicates a ruddy complexion. MairimeriBlu, an Italian watercolor paint maker, produces a color called Sangue di Drago (Dragon's Blood) that creates a ruddy skin color for watercolor.

I gravitate to this blood-red, rusty-looking color often, whether in watercolor or book-arts, or calligraphy. I choose it along with Aurelin Yellow and Cerulean Blue as my primary colors from which I mix other colors.

Merchant by Martha Slavin

After many weeks, my desk is finally reappearing from under the layers of art supplies that cluttered the surface. While sorting through my art supplies, I haven't had the energy or space to make art. But tomorrow, with a clean work space, I will be taking a color pencil class. I was sent the supply list weeks ago, just after I made a donation of art materials to a local non-profit that provides materials to teachers. I gave away my last box of wax-based color pencils. I figured I didn't need the wax-based ones because when I use colored pencils, I use water-soluble ones and have a jar full of them.  Checking the class supply list the other day, I found the request for either wax- or oil-based colored pencils. I sighed. Oh, well, I told myself the kind I have will have to do. I'm sanguine that what I have will work.

Sanguine colors the X

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One of the best things about knowing talented calligraphers is that, occasionally, when I open our mailbox, I find an envelope in the mail that is as exquisite as this one. Thank you, RM.

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Mark Twain: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

SHARED VALUES

One of my favorite quotes

 We are seeing the end.

That short sentence stopped me in my tracks as I wrote it. What did I mean? Are we coming to the end of our lives? Have all the chaotic events raining down on our country been halted? Has disrespect for the rule of law won, and is what we know as civilization coming to an end, to be replaced by a cruel, dog-eat-dog world? Those thoughts grew larger and larger as I stopped writing, when I only meant to say that our two-year vagabond quest to find a new home is coming to a close. We are unpacking and sorting the last tidbits. We are doing normal, everyday chores. Art supplies are stored in boxes, writing implements are tucked into drawers, paint jars are bundled into carts, kitchen equipment rests behind cabinet doors. We feel more rested and think of new adventures as we start this new phase of our lives. Still mindful of the news around us, we draw support from friends and let our voices be heard when we can.

Two thought-provoking books

I've picked up The Righteous Mind, a book by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who wrote The Happiness Hypothesis. In this new book, he suggests that we are born with an innate sense of morality and justice, that our normal tendencies for those values rise up when we are confronted with their opposites, that we naturally collect in groups, which can lead us in different directions, either to grow and change or become hide-bound in our beliefs. His thoughts identify much of what we have experienced in the world today. I recall that as a young teacher, my principal reminded me that not everyone shares the same values. I remember being taken aback by that statement, even though I had lived through the 1950s and 1960s, marked by wars and the civil rights movement, and seen tremendous strife between people. I still believed that deep inside, we had the same core values. I was taken aback again when Trump was re-elected. I was confused and stunned by other people's choices. I know we all have the dark side within us, but I thought we had evolved beyond those negative reactions. I was wrong. I need to remind myself of what I hold dear.

Haidt's book reminded me of an exercise I found to determine what I value. The exercise starts with three categories: The Individual, Those Around You, and For the World. I sorted the ideas from most important to least for each category. Like the sentence, "We are seeing the end," I found each phrase had a deep meaning, which made it difficult to put them in order of significance. None of these include the negative values that have risen again. Here are the choices in random sequence:

Justice and morality                Beauty and creativity               Knowledge and truth

Love and compassion              Respect for the environment     Health and well-being

Joy and laughter        Appreciation and contentment         Faith and forgiveness

In what order would you place these concepts? 

Does each category make the order of the concepts different for you?

We are seeing in the world today what we value most.

A PAUSE FOR ALL THINGS ALIVE

Robin's Nest by Martha Slavin

Crows, seagulls, sparrows, pigeons, an occasional hawk, and one robin couple congregate in our neighborhood. The robins chirp at each other with their distinctive cry, perhaps while they are looking for a good nesting site outside our window in the cherry blossom tree, whose leaves have begun to unfurl, the last of the trees in our area to flourish. One morning, a crow swooped down into the courtyard, and the robins took wing and haven't returned.

This morning, we watched as a crow made sweeping circles around the roof and windows of the building across the street. At first, we thought this unusual behavior was the crow having fun, but then the crow descended behind some ducting on the roof, only to appear moments later with two other birds to fly behind another rooftop ledge. A moment of quiet, and then a hawk, a crow's natural enemy, burst out, diving and swinging out of the crows' attack. The hawk rose and flew away with the crows in hot pursuit.

We have Pacific Madrone trees on our block. Around the corner, magnolia trees line the street. The courtyard outside our window is full of Japanese maples, cherry trees, and red maples, which give us color in three seasons and bring birds, including the parrots that have escaped into the wild. We can hear the parrots' raucous chatter but find it hard to see the groups gathered in the dense foliage of the street trees. Occasionally, we enjoy songbird finches trying to find a place in a city that doesn't welcome them.

A ride on the N Judah Muni line from its beginnings at the end of Judah Street in the Sunset District to the Embarcadero gave me a glimpse of the entire city. The Sunset District near the edge of the Pacific Ocean used to be all sand dunes. Builders constructed modest homes in the early twentieth century, and the area continued to be developed until the dunes disappeared. Rolling through the Sunset on the trolley, I saw few streets lined with trees. Without trees, the streets seemed bleak and uninviting in the looming fog. At the end of the Sunset, the N Judah descends into a tunnel. As we moved towards the opening, I felt as if I were on an amusement ride going into another world. When we came out, we were in the Noe Valley/DuBose Triangle area, a section of town filled with tall trees, hills, and well-maintained Victorian homes. At the edge of that area, the N Judah descended again into another tunnel that follows the path of the BART subway line across the downtown section of San Francisco to emerge again into the open at the Embarcadero and the Ferry Building with views of the Bay, container ships, and sailboats. The N Judah continues to the CalTrains Depot, but I got off at the Brannan stop, a short distance from our new home.

Today, as we had a picnic lunch near South Park, I watched a yellow and black Swallowtail flit from one tree to another across the street. The butterfly reminded me of a poem I wrote after seeing another Swallowtail cross a busy street:

A swallowtail

At a crosswalk

On a six-lane street

Fluttered across with the light.

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On Mother's Day, to honor my mother, long gone now, I am including two of her art pieces:  a flower drawing in pencil and an oil painting in the Impressionist style, of a girl fixing her hair. I was the model for this painting. It took long hours of my sitting still, holding my hair above my face, but gave the two of us time to be together.

by Esther B. Heimdahl

Flowers by Esther B. Heimdahl

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 "I am thinking of artists such as Frida Khalo, Corita Kent or Louise Bourgeois, and many others. I hope with all my heart that contemporary art can open our eyes, helping us to value adequately the contribution of women, as co-protagonists of the human adventure."  Pope Francis  

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APRIL 2025 New Window View

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."