Note

I’ve deleted 10 years of archives. I can’t relate to that person anymore. She said “wee” and “foist” and “thine” a lot.

I’ve also deleted my old tweets and deactivated LinkedIn. You’re next, Facebook.

I’ll keep recent blog years active and post art on Instagram. Just cleaning up some footprints and making myself put the feel-bad machine down.

39 - the birthday picture post

Another year. I swear we just had one of these.

This was the year I got reading glasses, lost 12 lbs, and sprained my hand drinking coffee. The year I painted my way through the family’s portraits, and got a bit weird about fire hydrants. Reconnected with the cheesecake-baking, motorcycle-riding Marine friends of my college days. Baked a German pancake, many loaves of Japanese milk bread, and some less-than-triumphant pies. Struggled a bit with marriage and sadness and almost-cancer; started walking every night while listening to Led Zeppelin and crime podcasts, watching the stars to remind myself that none of it matters at all and everything is ok. Flew over the California wildfires. Stood for a long time in front of paintings in galleries; Nucleus in Portland, the Honolulu Museum of Art, touristy art shops, the bank that has two big paintings by a local artist who's name none of the staff can remember. Fruitlessly continued hunting an old serial killer in the maritime. Taught my younger son to use oil paint, listened to audio books and watched Stranger Things with my teenager, ran around the park with my daughter; sat knitting and listening to the kids trash-talk over card games and role-playing board games, sprawled out all over the floor beside my chair.

It was a fast year, and a good one, if a bit lonely-in-the-crowd feeling.

GOALS. This year I'm going to enter paintings in local art shows until one doesn't reject me, finish getting through the family portraits (aunt, cousins), make prints to sell, take the kids to Lake George in the summer, and train up my son properly so I can take him along to a painting workshop next year. And the next time my doctor calls me in to check how things are progressing/regressing, I'll tell him to nuke it from orbit. Werf it with flammen, etc. I can do without a few organs, but there are things I need to do and people I want to see again some day.

Thanksgiving 2018

I scorched the pies and sprained my hand on a nutc
The cat took a startled leap off the couch like a bowling ball with legs and demolished my favorite coffee cup. In a cupboard full of dainty tea cups, the biggest mug I could find as a substitute was the Nutcracker head.

I should not have made fun of him, though, because he was so heavy and oddly shaped that something crucial in my hand gave out while trying to carry my coffee to the couch. I lost exactly the gripping function required for hoisting pies out of the oven, and the entire feast had to be prepared with a forearm and some swearing.

Everything tasted fine anyway. We added red-eye gravy to the eggs Benedict this year, which is a combination that is going down as a new family favorite.

"Wear something nice," I said, chasing the kids together for holiday pictures. So the teenager put on a Steve the Babysitter shirt.

Leif commandeered the camera and took a bunch of blurry pictures of me.

still counts

Thanksgiving at my mother's house was full of cheese, sausage stuffing snitching, and arguments with Alexa over what constitutes "classical Christmas music" (Bach v. bossa nova). Nobody spit food out onto the floor for the cats or caught the bird on fire this year, so we are kind of becoming experts at Holidaying.

one of several birds we did not catch on fire

Instead of going for classy decor, we used a 1970s bedspread as a table cloth, with plastic turkey place mats, circa 1984. The kids were SO IMPRESSED. Why do I bother collecting old silver-plate and pressed glass? I should be buying thrift store cornucopias and platters shaped like cartoon turkeys.

 intense turkey-carving faces 

I did recently buy a salmon-shaped aspic mold, so helloooo Christmas fish mousse.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks.

monday painting - fire hydrant

Did a first pass on this Portland fire hydrant.

Ignore the background. I get points for at least starting a background, and I can fix it up later. (I will not.) Only look at the color bits.

And now on my walks, I have fire-hydrant-vision. Just like I have drivers-weeping-at-stoplights-vision, and motorcyclists-without-proper-gear-vision.

Look at all these handsome boys.

Help.

Hedgehogs

These are not hedgehogs. They are mushrooms that look like you’ve flipped a hedgehog inside out like a sock. I love painting them, but the undersides are the worst things in nature since lotus pods.

Hey look, still no backgrounds. Backgrounds can go jump in a lake for a bit. I’m letting the lessons germinate in my brain, they’ll show up eventually.

Probably.

The wrap up

This morning I settled down on the couch with a nice big cup of coffee, picked up my sketchbook, and an enormous cockroach ran out of the cushions and across my neck, sending me leaping 3 feet straight up into the air. Things are back as they should be.

So, this trip was not my best idea.  I got out of my depth, surrounded by a city I wasn't prepared to navigate, attending a workshop that wasn't what I thought it would be.

Oh, well.

Not having a companion along to take pictures of me posing in front of weed dispensaries and embracing pig statues, here is the total photographic evidence that I actually went on this endeavor in person: two outfit poses in the hotel mirrors for Sarah; locked out of the studio; and an accidental selfie. There you have it, posterity.

Refusing to leave the city without starting a decent painting to remember it by, I took a few reference pictures of interesting objects and lintels on my walk to the train station and sat drawing in the airport food court, trying stupidly to calm my nervous hands with more poisoned coffee.

I'll straighten it out with paint

"Good job," the man said when I showed him my sketches. "You flew all the way to Portland to draw a fire hydrant."

YES I DID, OKAY.

Also some mushrooms.

The kids were most excited by the loot I dumped out on the coffee table - particularly the .99 Trader Joe's chocolate advent calendars I got for each of them. Gavin awarded me parenting points for figuring out what he meant when he asked me to get him "smoosh penguins with goo bellies" (these turned out to be gummy snacks with liquid centers that are shaped like penguins). I also bought a couple of letterpress prints, and they all agreed that the naked-butt goat picture by Phoebe Wahl was the best. Should have given that bat some rosy buns, Erica, the critics have spoken.

I'm going to re-do the city painting in my own time and method, applying what I learned in a manner that works for me. Will not be defeated by 2-point perspective and wobbly power lines.*

* Oh yes, I was. Go to hell, city street painting.

Homeward

Stay in your lane, Braffet. Go back to the countryside, go back to small-scale paintings with limited backgrounds that you enjoy doing, go back to manageable life expectations.

I checked out of the hotel and walked down to the rail station, feeling kind of  deflated. I guess I thought that “city street painting” meant painting on a city street, not painting a street scene from a picture. It was useful to have a live instructor taking my brush and showing me how to make adjustments, but I felt let down anyway. I passed a couple of buildings that would have made better paintings and cussed at them. Some homeless guys took this as a good sign that I might be someone to bum cigarettes from, and I had to disappoint them. Sorry boys, I am just your average small-town librarian yelling “motherfucker” at decorative cornices. Sat waiting for the train, watching pigeons circle the street and donkey engines* chomp up rocks nearby. A smelly guy made loud kissy noises at me all the way to the airport, but I didn’t notice until he disembarked because I mistook the sounds for train noises. Being clueless is kind of like being cool.

Waited in the airport for 4 hours, drawing mushrooms for my forest-foraging friend who took me to Lardo the night before. Flew into the California fires. It’s hard to breathe in the SFO airport. I want to be home. That’s a good thing to feel, right? Returning to a place you’ve left is not the same as never having gone, and knowing what you don’t want is important. Knowing what other people don’t want is useful, too. Knowing not to schedule 30 kids for a class visit the morning after an exhausting trip would be invaluable. But there we are.

*I know excavators are not donkey engines, but these things remind me of the 1986 movie "The Quest" with the lake monster called Donkagen.

Last day

Tomorrow morning it is back on the hobo train to the airport. Figuring I should pack in all the Portland I could into my last day, I walked up to one of the famous donut shops and bought a gourmet blueberry bourbon donut and a cup of locally made coffee. It tasted like a cold donut and a cup of thermos coffee. I have not been doing phenomenally on my phenomenal meals endeavor.

Meh 

Picked up a loaf of apple monkey bread at Trader Joe’s to share with the other painters. They are happy to see snacks, but they do that weird polite thing where nobody eats the last tiny sliver of whatever it is. We don’t have that rule in Hawaii; polite people hork everything down to show how good it is. I did them all a favor and ate the last bites of everything. Painted industriously, fixing some of the problem areas on my piece; making other areas worse. Took notes as Jen came and commandeered my brush for corrections.

Buildings get more muted as they go down, because of dirt.

Work on the part of your painting you are trying to avoid FIRST. Take your medicine, the rest will be more enjoyable.

Warmer lights, even if they don’t look that warm in life. 

Cars are just two boxes stacked on top of each other. Get them done and move on.

Vanishing point is at head level of the people in the scene.

Oversimplify shadows and leave the complexity to the light.

Neutralize colors as they recede.

Use more paint on your palette. MORE PAINT. (I have a hard time with this one, because that shit is expensive and you have to scrape it off when you don’t use it.


By the end of the day, I wanted to frisbee the painting out the window, but I carefully packed it up, instead. It’s the most important of the pile of shitty paintings you have to paint through to get to the good ones; it is the very first. I will be braver in my use of backgrounds now, with a bit of pushing on.

The room cleaner has gotten used to my minor clutter and didn’t bother replacing all the coffee pods, knowing how many I drink. She emptied the trash, folded the bath mat, and moved on. I ditched my gear back in the room and set out to meet one of my online mom-friends. She took me to Lardo, where we ate the best damn meal of this entire trip, and I bought a shirt with a pig on it.

We walked up and down Hawthorn and visited Powell’s, picked out this year’s commemorative Christmas ornament to mark the trip, and she hugged me goodbye back at my hotel room.

Packed my suitcase, taped up my painting for transport, and that is that.

Hearing  the call of that lonesome train.

Portland: day 2

Today it was down to work. Carried my gear to the OSA studio and spent the day listening to Jennifer Diehl talk about painting theory* while executing a demo.

After the demo ended, everyone scattered instead of wanting to go out and eat. The city is fun, but perhaps in the way a survival video game is fun. On 23rd Ave I went walking along under the seasonal lights, looking for a good place to eat, and ended up getting chased by a homeless guy screaming "YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE MADE THAT COMMERCIAL, JESUS IS GOING TO PUT YOU IN JAIL". So I jog-strode with all the don’t fuck with me I’m a tough city person indifference I could muster back the way I had come and ended up at the Elephants Delicatessen, which was packed and noisy with laughing people at long gleaming deli cases full of cakes and soups and breads. Ate a fish taco, video-game-maneuvered my way back to my room around a guy with his legs wrapped in dirty towels and a skateboarding youth in a full fuzzy blue shark onesie, locked and barricaded the door, and now  I’m working on my value studies for class tomorrow. Well. I’m not, because I’m typing on my phone in my pajamas and contemplating video-game-murdering the screaming college kids in the adjoining room and collecting all their coins for my bag of holding, but that is the plan. 

Making the value studies is the plan, not the murder. To be clear. 

* I was going to post here at the bottom all the things I learned, but they’re written on my notes in the studio and I can’t remember them because I guess I haven’t actually learned anything yet. Tommorrow I will apply the things, and in experiencing the things, the things will become learned.

Portland: day 1

Hey my hotel room has a view of a distant mountain AND the back of an enormous Volvo sign. SO FANCY.

Here is what happened today:

Got off plane at 4-fucking-AM in San Francisco and realized that 55 degrees in my head is not NEARLY as cold as 55 degrees on my physical person. I was not cold when I was packing, why should I be cold ever? Solid reasoning.

Bought airport coffee. Discovered that in San Francisco, airport coffee is made of poison. This is no good. Began chattering like a purse dog on the flight to Portland. From the sky, the city looked like a cloud bank with spires. It was kind of magical, until the pilot announced that the temperature was 38 degrees. THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES. I threw my knitting in my bag. Would not be able to knit a full snow suit in 20 minutes.

Retrieved bag. Dragged it through baggage claim to find a non-poisoned coffee stand.

Drank coffee while poking at the TriMet ticket vending machine until it spat out a day pass. Like a good little citizen, I sat on the train and clutched my ticket, waiting for a red-cheeked porter to come by and check it. Instead, a couple of drunks fell in and then staggered out a few stops later. Nobody ever emerged from the engine room to check our tickets. Mysterious. The rail wailed and screamed through tent cities and yards of shipping containers. I was almost sure I was going to get mugged for my suitcase by the time the rail stopped at Providence Park, but the neighborhood took a sudden nice turn and I realized I only had a couple blocks to walk to my hotel. Except nobody told me that the streets around here go straight up. I dragged my case all the way up an 80 degree incline, stopping to eyeball some of those green scooters that people have been menacing the city with. I could put my suitcase on a couple of them, and then jog along beside them all the way up the goddamn hill! And then lose control and roll all the way down. I kept walking.

Checked my luggage at the desk, and then went out into the streets to kill time until a room was ready, with eyes like two holes burned in a blanket. It was 10am. WHYYY was it only 10am? HOW? Found a cheese croissant for lunch, then walked back down to the bus stop and waited with a guy who was laughing at something I couldn’t see. Drove back over the bridge (bridges? There are about 20 bridges in this city?) and I spent SO MUCH MONEY at Nucleus gallery. Got to see Nicolas Uribe’s paintings in real life, and he had a painting of his own feet up there on the wall, so it was pretty wonderful.

Then I rode back, bought the entire contents of Trader Joe’s, got my room at the hotel, and passed out on the bed for a 30 min nap like a person hit in the head with a cast-iron pan. I didn’t even get the blanket over me.

And now I am at the Kells Brewery, drinking my way through... well, two drinks. But they are REALLY good, and I am REALLY tired. They’re playing all my music. This is ok.