Oil pastel on paper, 10.5″ x 7″
It’s a heart-thumping kind of game: I pulled off the tape that was holding this in place, put away the pastels and other materials, signed it, and propped it up, all while averting my eyes. Then I left the room and came back in, glancing over at it from the doorway, as if I had never seen it up close. I wanted to see if the magic had worked, and to a pleasing extent, it had. Scrawls, strokes and dabs of oily sticks on paper were transmuted into light on water.
Just as some ink paintings are called drawings, making this felt like painting even though it was done with a dry medium without brushes. I think I’ll paint the same scene tomorrow.
Just a listicle. I’m still kind of jetlagged.
Five Things That Are Great About Being Home
Luna
She seems very pleased also. Photo by Munchkin.
Being able to read all the books I’ve been ordering all summer. Most are for the grad school class that starts next month. I opened all the packages from Better World Books and started right in on Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I am loving.
The piano
I decided I’d go back to the very beginning of my binder, from when I started lessons about five years ago. Some of the early, exercise-y stuff is too boring to enjoy, but I quickly got to some nice pieces I had practically forgotten, but that are giving my rusty music-brain a way to loosen up and get back into the groove.
San Francisco
The first evening, even though we’d traveled for 22 hours and I had every intention of opening a can of Trader Joe’s corn for dinner, the child nudged me to go with her to our neighborhood grocery to pick up a few things. Carl* was rolling in, making the color of the sky different from anything we saw in Europe, and making the air blessedly cool. Walking up the hill was still a challenge despite all the walking I’ve done all summer (but maybe that had to do with the 22 hours). The store was familiar and friendly and had delicious mangoes. In general, the fruits and veggies were really good in Europe, but the mangoes, not so much.
Everything about our house
I just love our house. It is cozy and full of art we’ve made and/or love, overflowing with books I want to read, and imbued with thousands of memories.
Things I’ve Been Getting Done
Yesterday was a Getting Things Done kind of day. I already had car repair scheduled, because the tenants reported that it wouldn’t start even after a jump, so: maybe it just needed a new 12-volt battery? Or a new hybrid battery?–I hoped not, because they’re pricey, but the car has gone 225k miles on its original battery. And three of the books that arrived were actually intended to be sent directly to a 9-year-old for his birthday (pretty sure the mix-up was on me, not on Better World Books), so, mailing things from the post office being my kryptonite, I figured I’d better send them straightaway. The items that went on my Done List are:
made chai
watered outdoor plants
weeded for 10 minutes or so
played piano
got car jump-started twice (don’t ask)
mailed books
took car to mechanic
walked down scenic Van Ness Avenue (snort) to buy groceries
picked up car
went through mail and tossed obvious junk
read 50 pages of Big Magic
walked 8,000 steps
accomplished all of above despite one hell of a sciatica flare-up (driving is the worst if I don’t set the seat up properly)
re-learned that walking during a flare-up can make it a lot better, at least for a while.
And today: Went through all my mail, filed / took action as needed.
Two things that were on my list for yesterday were “make dinner” and “Zoom with my mom.” Instead I lay down for a nap at 4 and slept way past the time for both. It’s okay. Mom had been warned that that might happen, and the child made dinner for herself and even offered to make me something when I stumbled into the kitchen at some point, but I glurbled some kind of “no thanks” at her and just got myself peanut butter toast when I woke up later, at 1 a.m. That let me fall back asleep until something like a normal Pacific Time waking hour, which should help move the jetlag along.
The car only needed a new 12-volt, and they checked the hybrid battery for me and it’s going strong.
*Whoever announced and popularized the name spells it Karl, but when I first heard it, I assumed it was a clever play on the creator of the best-known piece of writing about fog, and he spelled it with a C. So in my mind the fog is Carl, because it’s funnier that way and funnier is better.
I recovered enough to make my way to the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, and I am making my way around it very slowly. Joy was right; I wouldn’t want to have missed this.
I like the strabismus-eyed angels:
And these 17th-century trompe-l’oeil diamond patterns. They look like they truly jut out from the wall:
But it is an illusion created by skillful painting:
There’s beautiful contemporary tile art here, also, such as this piece in the entry hall:
I really like the exhibit of combinations of two Portuguese art forms, azulejo and fado, made (with the collaboration of many people) by a French artist named Bastien Tomasini who goes by O Gringo. We just went to a fado performance over dinner last night, so I could hear the songs of longing in my head. This is also perfectly flat, although it looks like the hands have depth.
Now I am back in the museum café, having been delighted to discover that they serve small (20 cl) bottles of Schweppes ginger ale. There is so little ginger in ginger ale that I’m sure its effect as an anti-nausea remedy is 95% placebo, but placebos can be powerful, especially the ones that take you back to your childhood bedroom, sipping from a Dixie cup of ginger ale your mom has given you to soothe your stomach.
It’s our last day in Europe. I was waiting for a bus to take me to the National Tile Museum, when I began to feel increasingly sick to my stomach. I headed back to the apartment and got there just in time.
While my body was hunched miserably, my mind ran the inventory, as they do in this situation: what did I eat this morning? Nothing but oatmeal and mint tea! What could be wrong there? And it came to me: I made the oatmeal with the last of the almond milk. The almond milk that’s been in the half-fridge whose door doesn’t shut properly so that nothing gets very cold. The door that we discovered open a couple of inches when we got home last night, to an apartment that was in the mid 80s at least. Yeah.
I hope it was that, anyway, and not some bug that’s going to be with me for the next 36 hours, because I’m going to spend a lot of those in taxis and planes and I really, really do not want to be traveling while sick.
I’m recuperating and hoping I’ll be able to go to the museum a little later. In the meantime, I’ve sprinkled this post with some of the tiles from the buildings in the neighborhood.
Looking at art in museums, and also making a drawing of a building in SketchbookX, where I can’t make very precise marks, I noticed how little it takes to show light and shadow. So when we say by this patio at Palacio Viana, Córdoba, I tried to put in just enough to show the light.
I am now sitting in the park Miradoura de Sāo Pedro de Alcántara, in Lisbóa, looking out to the castle and hillsides of buildings. For music, there’s a breeze, the clink of coffee cups behind me, and a man with an acoustic guitar and a beautiful, unadorned voice playing bossa nova. I might get out my sketchbook and draw the light on the buildings, or I might just keep reading and making notes on How to Be an Artist, by Jerry Saltz, for my grad school course (The Arts as Leadership) that starts next month. It’s all good. More than good.
Edited to add this, the view from here, since I did do some drawing.
The bus yesterday showed us the temperature and time all the way from Sevilla, Spain, to Faro, Portugal. This ain’t Fahrenheit, folks.
The bus was air-conditioned, but shortly after the temperature hit 42°C (107.6°F), we made a pit stop and could experience it for ourselves. Whoof.
It was a 15 1/2 hour day of travel from Córdoba to Lisbon, even though it’s less than 5 1/2 hours to drive it. Minor mishaps dogged us. Faro rolls up the sidewalks on Sundays, so food options were few during the 3+ hours we were waiting there. We wouldn’t have been waiting there at all except that a travel site we like and trust unaccountably advised us that it was a haul between the Faro bus and train stations (it is not; it’s a five-minute walk), so we didn’t book the first available train, and we couldn’t exchange our tickets. The Faro train station has removed all its electrical outlets, and the ones in our carriage to Lisbon didn’t work, so I was out of juice: no books, audio course, blogging, or drawing from the photos I’d taken for the purpose. It was uncommonly difficult to get a taxi outside the Lisbon train station, so after walking to a hotel and waiting for the taxi they called, we rolled up to our apartment at 12:30 am Córdoba time, tired and without access to all the information the owner had sent me.
However, the day had many compensations. I knit a lot. I had made two false starts on the current knitting project, and probably only made this third one stick because I wasn’t distracted by my audio course. The sight of Portugal going past the train windows was made all the sweeter by the knowledge that it may be a long time until our next train ride (not counting BART). And even in the impatience to just get into the apartment and sleep, we could see that the neighborhood was beautiful. This morning, we walked one tile-lined block to a delicious, cozy breakfast cafe.
The day’s explorations confirm that Lisbon is beautiful. It’s still hot. But as Joy and I walked past the ornate government building that turned out to be the seat of Parliament, she nodded up at the building and said “You think we’re hot . . .” Two men in uniform, a la Beefeaters, though with slightly less punishing hats, were ceremonially guarding the door and marching with their rifles. I wonder what crime one commits to land that gig in August.
In related news, I have been drinking various interesting fruit drinks all summer, and have resolved to make virgin mojitos at home now and then.
Desde aquí, se puede ver el vuelo de las palomas desde arriba. Un perspectivo muy raro y bonito, lo cual desafortunadamente mis videos no expresraran.
Sin embargo, los mosaicos romanos son bellísimos.
Y los jardines son llenos de fuentes.
On the one hand, going to Córdoba in August wasn’t the most strategic choice, even before our visit coincided with a heat wave.
On the other hand, this light. This light.
Drawn yesterday during lunch at the Mercado Victoria.
Sermons in Stones 
Recent comments