Iconic landmark

The next prompt is "ICONIC LANDMARK: geographical, historical, social, cultural, novelty." I did a search for "Van Nuys landmarks" and came up with a bunch of stuff "near" Van Nuys—in Mission Hills, the Hollywood Hills, and Studio City, plus the rather hideous Federal Building, which I didn't at all wish to draw! But then I hit the jackpot—the Japanese Garden, built next to the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant on Woodley Avenue, to demonstrate "a positive use of reclaimed water in a delicate environment."

The truth is, I didn't think of it right off the bat because despite having lived within three miles of it for almost 30 years, I have never been there! It's true that the hours are odd (Monday-Thursday from 11-4) and until a year ago I mostly worked full-time, but the gardens are also open from 10-4 on Sundays. I have driven by the entryway countless times, on my way to the parking lot for the wildlife refuge that butts up against the Sepulveda Dam back behind the garden, but even though it's supposedly open on Sundays, it's been closed many times—for filming, for construction, for a multitude of reasons. But the website has great photos, so I chose one and made a painting of what looks like a true iconic landmark!

The garden is 6.5 acres, and includes a dry Zen meditation garden, a Chisen "wet promenade" garden with lakes, waterfalls, and streams, and stone lanterns, and an authentic tea house and tea garden. The combinations of flowers such as azaleas, cherry trees, magnolias, wisteria, raphiolepis indica, iris and lotus, along with the other garden features, provides beauty throughout the year.

The garden was designed by Dr. Koichi Kawana, who was responsible for the designs of more than a dozen major Japanese gardens in the United States, including botanical gardens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Diego’s Balboa Park, and gardens in Denver, Chicago, Memphis, Minneapolis, and the largest Japanese garden in the United States—the 14-acre garden in St. Louis. He pioneered the design of traditional Japanese gardens that utilized plants native to the area of the garden, and won many prestigious awards for his designs. He taught Japanese architecture and landscape design at UCLA. He passed away at the age of 60 in 1990.

The adjacent water reclamation plant services 750,000 to 800,000 residents to the west, north and northeast of it. Approximately 60% of the wastewater is from residents and 40% from industrial and commercial sources. After a process of many steps and much filtration, reclaimed water can be made available for reuse, with any excess being discharged into the Los Angeles River.

And thus ends today's Van Nuys history lesson! I'll do some plein air paintings of this place for sure, once it reopens post-virus...whenever that is.

Baking in the time of lack

An artist's exercise in futility (I know it sounds like it's about baking, but just wait):

This morning when I got up, I decided, since I'm out of breakfast foods (cereal, yogurt, eggs, bread, bagels) and not going to the market until tomorrow, to make cornbread, which could also be eaten later with my pot of beans. So I looked up my recipe in Laurel's Bread Book, and started assembling the ingredients into two bowls (wet and dry).

I couldn't find the baking powder, so I looked it up online and discovered I could substitute baking soda plus vinegar or lemon juice. So I put more baking soda in the dry ingredients bowl, put lemon juice in the wet ingredients bowl, and then...I couldn't find the cornmeal. I knew I had bought a brand-new one a few weeks ago, but it was nowhere. So, since I had already measured out baking soda and salt and lemon juice, I decided to make muffins.

I thumbed through the muffin section in the cookbook. I wanted to make cheese muffins, but they call for rolled oats and I didn't have any, so I opted for some basic wheat muffins. They are supposed to be made with pastry flour, but I only had whole wheat, so I used that. I had a choice of either honey or "light" molasses, but I only had regular molasses, so I used that. I was supposed to have powdered milk, but I didn't; but one variation substituted orange juice, so I used that. Worried that without the baking powder and the heavier ingredients the muffins wouldn't rise, I added some buttermilk, even though the recipe didn't call for it. And, I used the last egg in the house. And walnuts. The batter was thicker than it should be, but I filled the muffin tins and put them in the oven.

While the muffins were baking, I went into my studio and there sat the baking powder and the cornmeal, because they were among the subjects of a painting I made a few weeks back, so of course they stayed where they were, unnoticed until 20 minutes after I needed them.

Notice the cornmeal and baking powder, to the right.

The worst part of it is, I USED MY LAST EGG, so even though I found them, I STILL can't make cornbread. Unless I could substitute something...

Edible flowers

I went to the nursery about two weeks before virus time, looking for herbs and vegetables to plant in my back yard. It was a beautiful sunny day with a few high clouds when I got there; I pushed a cart around, picking up a plant here and a plant there for about an hour while seeing what they had in stock, and then went inside the garden shed where they keep the seed packets. I collected half a dozen of those, and made my way over to the checkout stand. While I was standing there chatting with the nursery guy, all of a sudden we heard a loud rat-tat-tatting sound on the (tin) roof. We looked out into the nursery and saw that it was hailing giant clots of ice! The temperature had dropped by 12 degrees from the time I arrived until the hail started. After paying, I waited under cover for about 10 minutes to see if the hail would stop, and finally made a run to my car, getting cold and soaked in the process.

Since then, it has rained on and off almost every day for a couple of weeks, plus there's this little thing called Covid 19 that has preoccupied me to the extent that I haven't thought about too many other things. But those plants were sitting around waiting for their permanent home, and I finally got outside this past weekend and got them into the ground—a couple varieties of lavender, some rosemary, sage, oregano, lemon verbena, two kinds of basil, a couple of tomatoes...and then it started raining again.

I also have a bunch of seeds that need to go in the ground but haven't made it yet. One of the seed packets I bought was for borage. I used to have a bunch of it in my yard, but it died out and I never replaced it. I never have eaten the leaves (they say you can sauté them and eat them like any other greens, but I am wary of the prickly little hairs that sting when you pick them), but I love using the flowers as garnish in a salad, frozen in ice cubes for drinks, or sugar-candied on top of desserts. They taste kind of like celery, or maybe cucumber, and their bright blue-lavender flowers really fancy things up. They are also fun to float in things like homemade herb vinegars.

Just about the time I was thinking about all of this, I got an email from theydrawandcook.com that their guest artist for this month was running a challenge on "Edible flowers." I immediately thought of the borage, and started making mental thumbnail sketches. I followed that up by making four or five actual thumbnails, but procrastinated until yesterday before finally deciding that I needed to follow through. The finished work was due tonight at 9 p.m. PST (midnight in NYC where they are based), so I had no time to lose. Yesterday I did the pencil drawing at the correct size, and today I got out my good watercolor paper, inked the design onto it, and then watercolored the whole. It took me three hours yesterday for the pencil sketch, and then another six hours today, from 1 to 7 p.m., to finish it; and then I had to scan it (in three sections, my flatbed is not very big), put together the three pieces in Photoshop, erase the joins and tweak everything so it looked like one seamless piece of artwork again, and upload the resulting .jpg to theydrawandcook.com. I made it with 27 minutes to spare!

Here is my piece, entitled "I, Borage..." With Pliny the Elder to endorse it, you can be sure that borage is a valuable addition to your garden, remedies, and diet!

The finished product is about 22 inches wide by about 8.75 inches high, on Canson watercolor paper. The inking was done with a Uniball fine pen (waterproof), and the rest is watercolor. I was particularly happy with my lettering efforts for this: I got out my old Formatt pressed letters catalog and found some typefaces that I liked and mimicked, for the main title, the bouncy captions, and the cursive.

Before I did the scans and submitted it, I sent it to my final critic, Kirsten, for approval. Her comment was, "I like the inclusion of Pliny the Elder. You don't get enough Pliny nowadays." Remarks like this one are why I keep her around.  :-)

Old drawings to fit the themes

I got busy working on a big project (revealed in the next post) for a couple of days, but since I had some sketches that fit the themes for the "Hometown" prompts, I posted them on Facebook, even though they weren't new product. Day six was "a place to buy fresh food," so I posted these two of my local farmers' market, which happens Sundays at the O.N.E. parking lot at Louise and Victory Boulevards:

Day seven's prompt was "PARK: city part, town square, pocket park, play park. I had a couple I had drawn at Lake Balboa, this one last fall:

And this one during the summer, I think, back when it was still okay to crowd into a swan paddle boat with a bunch of other people:

Now that I'm done with my special project, I will get back to the prompts list. Tomorrow is NEIGHBORS: local faces, storekeepers, friends. Hmmm, whom shall I draw?

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

Another aspect

I tried another one of "Tildy," from another photo representing a completely different mood. No smiles this time, but instead a rather quizzical, almost anxious look. And again, I feel like I didn't quite catch it. I got the love in the eyes, but not the curious cocked-head, eyebrows-up expression of the photo. And without that, I'm not sure the portrait is a good one.

There is always an indefinable something you have to capture to make the portrait individual to that person or animal, and I'm beginning to grasp how to get that with people, but not quite yet with the animals. Also, these smooth-haired, mostly white dogs are hard to paint! Gimme a hairy mop of a dog and I can work it over with a pen and some expressive line and get the gist, but this gal was a much bigger challenge.

This is Mathilda #2
Pencil and watercolor on Fluid 140-lb. watercolor paper


An addendum to this post: Susan liked and is taking both of them.