Have some fun

The prompt is "have some fun," and enumerates movie theater, playhouse, arcade, music hall.
I chose to depict the last drive-in theater in the San Fernando Valley, the Van Nuys Drive-in. When it closed, it was the end of an era.

Kids today will never have the experience of piling into the back seat of the family car in their pajamas and driving with their parents to a big empty lot filled with painted parking spaces and short posts with detachable speaker boxes to see the latest movies on a giant screen lighting up the darkness. They will miss out on the swearing as their father tries to affix the speaker box to the rolled-down driver's window with a contrary clip that doesn't quite fit their car, and then complains about the staticky sound reception. They will never know the unbelievable thrill of being allowed to leave the car to journey halfway across the lot to the snack bar for popcorn and Coke. They won't remember falling asleep before the end of the movie and waking up as they are carried into the house to their beds. Of course, they also won't, as teenagers, have the experience of getting arrested for bringing in liquor, or make the mistake of begetting babies in that same back seat....

The Van Nuys Drive-in was a Pacific theater, opening on July 30, 1948 with the double bill of "Buffalo Bill" and "Wings of the Morning." The theater lot had a capacity of 891 cars, until it was subdivided into a tri-plex drive-in in June of 1983. Pacific Theatres closed the drive-in on September 2, 1996, leaving the message "closed for the season" on its marquee, but that season never arrived. The theater was demolished in the late 1990s.

This is one place I actually remember for myself; my then-husband Chuck and I moved to Van Nuys in our early 20s in 1981, and occasionally packed a root beer, a sandwich, and some peanut M&Ms and took in a double feature from the (front) seat of Chuck's old green station wagon. Although the sound was bad and the angle at which you had to hold your neck in order to get a proper view of the screen occasionally problematic depending on where you parked, there was nothing like watching a movie sitting on a comfortable upholstered bench seat but with all your windows rolled down to let in the warm summer evening. You could hear the distant murmur of other conversations and see the far-off group milling around the concession stand between movies, but you were alone in your own little world. The closest thing to this nowadays is the picnic-style movies they show starting at dusk at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, about which I have mixed feelings!

Pencil, micron pens, watercolor, in Bee sketchbook.

Buy some threads

I've been playing around with gouache and painting my reader girls and haven't been following through with the Home Town prompts for Art in the Time of Self Quarantine for a few days, but today I was inspired by the prompt "buy some threads," i.e., where do you shop for clothing in your home town?

This isn't exactly where I shop for my clothing (I do most of that online), although I have made a couple of trips to this iconic place in the past. But in Van Nuys, if it's cowboy gear that you need, the place to go is the Country General Store on Van Nuys Boulevard at the corner of Sylvan, just south of Victory Boulevard.

The store has been around since 1956, when the San Fernando Valley was closer to its original Wild West status. There were many ranchers and farmers living here who needed functional clothes for hard work—riding horses, hauling oranges, forking out the barn loft. After a while, though, as both the Valley and the store evolved, it became less a surplus store and more a purveyor of the best western wear, whether it was for weekend cowboys, actors, or the real thing.

Country General Store has supplied wardrobe for Dancing with the Stars, The Boys, No Country for Old Men, CSI, 24, Saving Grace, W, Knight Rider, The Hannah Montana Movie, Heroes, Land of the Lost, Leverage, and NCIS, among others.

There is a large Latinx population in Van Nuys, and it seems like whether or not those guys and gals have ever ridden the range, roped some dogies, or come near the rear end of a bucking bronco, a certain percentage of them still favor the cowboy hats, the fancy snap-front shirts and, above all, the beautiful cowboy boots that are found here. If you drive down Van Nuys Boulevard and look at the people walking along the sidewalk, you'll see what I mean.

Saunter in and salivate over their wide range of beautiful footwear, from Frye workboots and Minnetonka moccasins to Tony Lama and hand-tooled Lucchese. You can get you a Stetson custom fitted, try on a fancy Double-D shirt, and finish off your outfit with some basic Levis or Wranglers.

I haven't worn cowboy boots since I was a young rider—the combination of super wide feet with an unusually high instep make it impossible for me to cram them into boots unless there's a zipper involved (which is quite uncowboy-like). But if you have a hankering to deck yourself out in full western style, this is the store for you. Their motto is, "The twinkle in your eye starts with some sparkle on your feet."

Uniball pen, watercolor, in Bee sketchbook.

4-9-2020

Readers

One of the projects I have wanted to take on for some time is to paint people reading. I buy the "Women Read" calendar almost every single year, and am always poring over the infinite variety of poses and costumes in which people read books. I want the art to use with my Book Adept blog, and possibly to sell prints to other people who like pictures of people reading (or make my own calendar!). I have done a few, but haven't made any progress in a long time, so today I decided to tackle one.

I was all set to try painting it in gouache, but it's been a while since I did a painting I really liked, and using the new medium was, I thought, setting myself up for disappointment. So I painted this one in watercolor.

I found a picture of a young woman reading in a wing chair and thought it would work great. It didn't have much of a background, but I was planning to put one in. I was going to put either a wooden bureau or a bookcase in the background on one side of her, but I got so involved in the drawing of the girl and chair that when it came time, I completely forgot that plan and started painting, so then it was too late. It feels a little weird to me, with her in the chair in the middle of such a large space—she should have at least had a side table for a cup of tea—but so be it.

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do in the background otherwise—I had an elaborate aspiration to add Victorian wallpaper—so I decided to be smart and paint the background one solid color, scan the picture, and then do the wallpaper so if I messed it up, or didn't end up liking it, I would still have the original. Now, however, I can't decide which one I like better. I do like the wallpaper, but the plain background probably showcases the reader better. I guess, since I have scans of both, that I don't have to choose!

I painted this from an old classic Hollywood glamour photo in black and white, so it was a little hard here and there to get the colors right for the various shadows. But over all, I'm satisfied.

A new medium

For a while now, I have wanted to try out painting with gouache. I started painting 20-some years ago in acrylic and stuck to it for a while, but I didn't like the shiny, plastic quality it had when it dried. Then I switched over to watercolor, and loved the transparency, the layering, the nuance, the bloom, so much that I never used anything else from then on. But I belong to an urban sketching group on Facebook called "Weekend Warriors," and they all paint almost exclusively with gouache.

It's a flat medium, primarily used by illustrators but increasingly also by landscape painters. It has the advantage of being a water medium, like watercolor, so you can at least partially reactivate it, unlike acrylic or oils. You can limitedly paint over the top of it, but it becomes mud if you try too much of that. It is in some ways a much more primitive medium than any I have worked with, calling for blocks of color, unsubtle shapes, and a fair amount of planning ahead—not many happy accidents, unlike with watercolor.

My plan was just to buy some and try it out on landscapes and urban scenes, but a class was offered yesterday by Sketchbook Skool on how to paint portraits in gouache, so I decided to take it. By portraits, it didn't mean great big formal things, it was more a case of finding a black-and-white photo of some people in your family (or stranger photos you pick up at garage sales) and making little scenes, using your imagination to color their clothing and fill in their backgrounds as you please. The teacher was Jennifer Orkin Lewis, aka August Wren (website here), and we followed along as she painted, among other subjects, Danny's grandparents. Here is my effort. I was fairly pleased with the figures and completely unimpressed with the generic background I constructed. Some of my classmates' backgrounds were so imaginative!

Today, after breakfast, a social media session, and a dish-doing interval, I decided to try another one. I think I'm probably trying too hard to capture a likeness as I would with watercolor, and not hard enough to use my imagination to make things better. Also, gouache does NOT rework like watercolor does, nor is it forgiving of blending. Anyway, here is one from a photo I had of my mom, back when she was about 40 and was super into her beehive hairdo, holding our family cat, Peep. I used that raspberry color for the background because that was one of her favorites—I vividly recall one outfit, a raspberry suit with a pale pink blouse, pink heels, and a big raspberry straw hat with a dip in the front that held a pale pink rose. Mom was always stylish. I still have the hat.

I'm going to keep exploring this, even though it's a struggle, and try out urban landscapes to see if I do better at those. It kind of seems a shame to work as hard as I have to learn to capture a likeness in watercolor, only to give it up by using a less adaptable medium. I'm so nervous in this new arena that I don't stop and consider things like proportion—I looked back at this a few hours later and realized that her head is about double the size it should be for her body!

I was also inspired (and this is why I may continue with the figures, despite the likeness issue) by the gouache paintings of people and books by Jenny Kroik, a young and gifted artist whose illustrations have graced the cover of The New Yorker magazine multiple times.