Day 20

I'm a seeker. While I'm not sure what I'm looking for, I often feel close to finding "it." When I was young, I liked those games in Highlights magazine. You had to find a dozen common items, like a squirrel, a spoon, a pickle, a whistle, well hidden in a line drawing. (That would have been a challenging art job before computers.)

Sometimes when I paint, an image forms that I did not intend. Its discovery informs me. The image was idling in my subconscious. Sometimes I'll play it up, sometimes obscure it. Ideally, it will be noticed for the first time, years later, by a patron, surprise gift. It's the realization that there's more to see than first meets the eye.

Making art in a new place, even a dream place, is a challenge. I purposely chose not to enter the Big Sur Artist residency with a set agenda for what I would create. I agonized for a month if this was a wise decision or not. While it would have been fruitful to use the time to continue painting a particular series, I was curious to see just what effect time and place would have on my art. I was essentially coming into the experience unprepared, but totally open. It was scary at first. The abundance of sensory stimula was stunning. I stood before my easel like a deer in headlights. It was the right thing to do. And then I started to move.

I was surprised by the physicality of my movements. My right arm swung a larger arc, though the support I was painting on, paper, was smaller than most of my recent canvases. Some would call it gestural painting; I feel it is unleashed energy. Several of these paintings suggest my immediate surroundings but they called out for something, an image that would convey this personal quest to find, to find......

Underlying question of the year: just what is "home?" It is a state of the heart, architecture and furniture to protect the soul. I know: one man's ceiling is another man's floor, but I don't see the point of having a house at all if it's not a home. (I'll be having this debate with Henry David Thoreau later, I KNOW IT. Henry's logical, economical, has a way with words. But he's not going to bear feng shui. He was content in a dugout, didn't have family and died young.)

It felt natural to float interior appointments in exterior landscape: consequently all day long I painted two white chairs (similar to the white chairs in my Beverly Glen house, the ones with the holes in the arm rests) suspended over forested canyon.

All day it has been frigidly cold and intermittently raining. I'm going on my eleventh hour in the studio (will walk in the dark again.) I keep thinking about a place I visited yesterday, the Spirit Garden in Loma Vista. (Loma Vista, Big Sur, is a bakery, a gallery or two, the Spirit Garden and a Shell station) The Spirit Garden sells succulents, windchimes and statuary, with intensely creative presentation. Colorful glazed ceramic heads hang like Christmas balls from a turquoise painted tree. There is a ladder made from cut branches that lead up to a giant man-made nest, hickory branches intertwine to create an elegant see-through cocoon, inside which are pillows to sit on. I want to live in a place that values this kind of artistic aesthetic and whimsy. (My next door neighbor in Los Angeles is the antithesis. Eschewing building codes and consideration of privacy, he stealthly tripled the size of his house. To add insult to injury, he landscaped with astroturf and planted it with Rubbermaid sheds and plastic Playskool houses.)

I'm on the twelfth hour in the studio and I'm hearing some creature make noises I've not heard in here before. A creature with wings. Hope you are all well and still with me..because
WE are putting on our caps and parkas and walking down the road now. Love, S.