Next two days

Continuing with the documentation of Van Nuys...

Yesterday's prompt was "It's the home of..." i.e., what is it known for? Well...in certain parts, gangs...hmmm. I did a little more historical research, and came up with this composite painting:

Before the San Fernando Valley was the home of endless suburbs, it was an important source of produce, and two of its most frequently grown crops were walnuts and oranges. If you own one of those suburban houses that was built before a certain year, like I do (mine was built in 1949), you probably have an ancient leftover orange tree in your back yard from those endless groves. Mine is barely hanging on at this point—after all, it's more than 70 years old!—but despite the fact that it's about a third the size it used to be, it still bears about a dozen perfectly delicious juicy oranges every January.

Besides the suburbs, represented here by a partial view of my own bungalow, Van Nuys citizens used to most of them work at the General Motors plant, but that closed down in 1992, changing the economy of the region significantly.

Van Nuys is the home of one of the busiest general aviation airports in the world, with more than 230,000 takeoffs and landings every year. The movie Casablanca was filmed there, and it's also where Norma Jean Dougherty, a worker on the drone assembly line, was discovered and morphed into Marilyn Monroe. It was built in 1928, and is still going strong today.

And of course we must mention the climate, which is predominantly sunny, and graced by the stately yet ridiculous silhouettes of palm trees along many of its boulevards.

Today's prompt was "Main Street, high street, downtown, crossroads." With Van Nuys being the seat of government for the region, and all of that being located on Van Nuys Blvd., that street would seem to qualify today, although the first street actually designed and built for the city was Sherman Way! I drew a bit of the government section of the street (badly), and up front I featured a longstanding tradition of Van Nuys Boulevard: Cruising, as memorialized by the movie American Graffiti. Show off your cherry car, pick up a date, hang out with your buddies on a warm summer night...as you can see from the posted sign, the local constabulary doesn't view that activity so benignly.

Art in the time of self-quarantine!

I somehow haven't managed to make much art lately, although I have been thinking a lot about a couple of projects, and have made some preliminary sketches for one in particular. But a Facebook friend decided to start a new page called Art in the Time of Self Quarantine, and then posted a "prompts" list that is all about where we are—home town, where it is, who lives there, what you can find there, etc. And despite the fact that I, unlike the author of the page, don't live somewhere quaint and eminently paintable (she lives on Whidbey Island in Washington), I decided to participate.

My first painting reflects the split personality of the town where I live. My house is part of the area known as Van Nuys, but a few years back a small section of Van Nuys petitioned to set itself off as a separate entity called Lake Balboa. We are the far west chunk of Van Nuys, right on the borders of Reseda and Encino, and we boast part of the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area as our own (though it mostly lives in Encino), including the artificial Lake Balboa that offers bike and walking paths, picnic areas, boating (swan peddle boats), and (in the spring) beautiful cherry trees, along with lots of wildlife (mostly birds). Thus the name.

So, rather than paint a picture of the "Welcome to Van Nuys" sign, which is on Van Nuys Blvd. in a commercial district, I chose instead to paint the Welcome to Lake Balboa sign at the entrance to the park and actual lake.

Although I don't really have anything else going on right now while in quarantine, for some reason I was feeling impatient and not particularly inspired, so I rushed this and as a result did a bad job on the sign lettering (which was the whole point of the picture!). But I'm letting it stand because I don't want to do it over! I did like the people and the dog.

Today, I was feeling much more inspired, and I wanted to do something more than just a map of Van Nuys, so I looked it up on Google and found a Wikipedia article all about the man for whom the town is named, Isaac Newton Van Nuys. He was quite the busy guy during his lifetime—I have included just some of his history by incorporating it into my artwork. This was fun, as I got to combine drafting, portraiture, and ornamentation.

There are also prompts available from the Urban Sketching groups; when I get completely bored of my surroundings, I'm going to go out and fulfill some of them from the isolation of my car!

These are both in my Bee Sketchbook (9x12), incorporating Uniball pens, pencil, and watercolor. #artinthetimeofselfquarantine #melliott #vannuys