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.

Pizza

Being that I live in a dense suburban neighborhood, pizza chains abound—Pizza Hut, Domino's, Papa John's, you name it, we have dozens of outlets. But we also have a number of independently owned and operated pizzerias, from pizza-only to the full Italian menu.

A recent addition to this group is located about a mile and a half from my house, hidden in a strip mall across the street from the Balboa/Victory corner of the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area bike path. It's called Dough Girl, and it has an interesting history and purpose.

The business was launched five years ago by Mar Diego. Previous to her debut as an entrepreneur, she had a chequered past—she sold drugs and was incarcerated for five years, worked in the kitchen while in prison, and when she got out, she went to culinary school, then racked up some years gaining experience in various restaurants. She opened Dough Girl for the dual purpose of serving up some tasty pizza and helping homeless and drug-addicted local youth to shake their own pasts by giving them jobs, responsibility, and a future.

It's a tiny shop with mighty ideals, and seems to be working out. Some kids who she took in as teenagers are now in their early 20s and taking the lead in bringing in other disenfranchised youth. They start out cleaning the premises and putting together pizza boxes, graduate to salads and lemonade, and then learn to make pizzas with Mar.

It also has a pretty interesting menu, with categories of "earth," "land," "sea," "fire," and "alien." Some of the pizzas on offer include chicken and pesto,  the "hottie" (with five kinds of peppers), white pie alfredo, the "animal style" pizza inspired by In 'n' Out (featuring french fries and American cheese), lobster tail bisque, and lox pizza with dill cream sauce. They do both regular and vegan style pizzas, in two sizes ("selfie" and "big dough"). (You can also get "regular" flavors, like plain cheese, pepperoni, and veggie.)

The façade is pretty dull—a narrow store front amongst a dozen others—so I did a quick sketch of part of the indoor aspect, which is slick and classy in black and white and wood.

Uniball, watercolors, in Bee sketchbook.
#artinthetimeofselfquarantine
https://www.doughgirl.pizza/menu

Cars

I am up to things other than art today, so I decided to use an old drawing to fulfill the prompt for "hometown cars."

In my last year as a teen librarian, the summer reading club theme for teens was "Reading Takes You Everywhere," which I interpreted as a travel-oriented theme. While searching out road-trip books to feature on a book list, I found one that I thought had the perfect cover for the summer brochure (teens reading a map). But it was someone else's photo, and was also obscured by words and drawings. So I recreated the whole thing in an impromptu photo shoot, and then made a sketch to use as the cover.

These are Allison, George, and Katrina, three of my book club kids, posing behind the map and sitting in the open rear hatch of my new Jeep Renegade, which I had just bought that February after my beloved Kia Soul was totaled. These smallest of the Jeep line with their distinctive criss-cross tail lights are pretty popular now in Los Angeles (although at the time I bought it they were rarely seen), so I think I can legitimately use this for "hometown car."

The space at the bottom of the painting was left open for the title of the brochure. I thought I had a copy somewhere, but couldn't find it in my files.

I wished later that I had done this illustration on real watercolor paper instead of in my sketchbook, which will hold up pretty well to watercolor, but had a few issues after several layers!

Micron pen and watercolor, in Bee Sketchbook.

#artinthetimeofselfquarantine

My town

The prompt is "COMMUNICATE: post office, phone booth, radio/TV..."

While I was researching the Van Nuys Airport, I found out one interesting detail that led me to another. In June of 1945, a redhead named Norma Jean Dougherty was working on a drone assembly line at the airport’s military factory when she was photographed for a story about war workers in Yank magazine. As a result of the photo, Norma Jean secured a screen test, and was reinvented as blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe.

This factoid led to the discovery that the Van Nuys Civic Center Post Office Depot on Van Nuys Boulevard was re-christened the "Marilyn Monroe Post Office" in 2019, per a bill signed by the Resident.

I have come to the conclusion that, sadly, I have no sense of either scale or proportion. Something that looks like it's going downhill to me, when tested by laying a ruler on the photo or holding up an angle to the scene, is actually going uphill. I don't know what that's about, but it severely hinders my ability to render buildings correctly! This one is on a corner, with a doorway on an angle to both perpendicular streets, but you sure wouldn't know it from this drawing. Well, for better or worse...here is a quick sketch of the Art Deco façade of the MMPO.

The prompt is "medical"

...And, surprisingly in light of all of us sitting at home under quarantine, the medical prompt isn't resulting in a human interest story but one of a cat. My cat, sort of.

About 11 years ago, my neighbor who lived behind me came to me in a distraught state. He was a cat rescuer—he would go out and find ferals around dumpsters in parking lots, trap them and get them fixed, and release them; but if they showed any sign of being friendly and tameable, he would adopt them. At times he had as many as 20 cats living at his house.

Unfortunately, both he and his wife lost their jobs in the course of six months, and were being forced to sell their house before it went into foreclosure. He had found homes for all but six of the cats, but the new apartment into which he was moving would only allow him to bring three, and he wanted me to keep the other three.

Since all of them were familiar to me, having migrated over to my yard to get an extra meal now and then, I agreed to take care of them. That's how I got Orwen, Griselda, and Elphaba. Those were the names I gave them to start, but the names proved either badly chosen or ill-fated. I lost Orwen a year ago to a septic infection in her leg. Griselda is still around and going strong, only she didn't turn out to have the personality for either that full name or a nickname of Zelda, so I rechristened her Gidget, which suits her personality much better. Her nickname is "Patsy," because she likes to be held and patted rhythmically. As for Elphaba, I initially thought she was a girl, but she turned out to have a different orientation, so I shortened HIS name to Elf, after briefly considering and rejecting Fabio.

Elf is an odd cat. He doesn't come up to you begging for attention, but if you approach him, he stands his ground and waits for you to pet him or pick him up or whatever. He's not exactly affectionate, but he does enjoy company. And he has a steady stare that some find quite disconcerting. He turns out to be a bit fae, so Elf is probably a good name.

Unlike Gidget, who hangs full-time in my back yard, Elf is a wanderer, and befriended my next-door neighbors. They didn't know he belonged to me, and started feeding him, and gave him the name "Q" (not, as I initially thought, after the enigmatic Star Trek character, which would have been appropriate, but because his favorite sleeping place was their barbeCUE.) At some point we all figured out he was splitting his time between us, and so we both became casual about whether he showed up for a meal or not, assuming he was getting one at the other's house.

This habit became perilous for Elf this week, because he became ill and neither of us noticed it for too long. I took him to the vet on Sunday after spending Saturday trying to get him to eat and drink, and the vet's diagnosis was dire: He has feline AIDS, is quite dehydrated, his breathing is labored, and he has a UTI. The vet told me 24 hours later that he had not improved at all from being hydrated, fed, and given a fast-acting antibiotic shot, and basically said I would be doing a mercy to let him go. Then, just as I was resigned to this course, the vet called back and said Um, let's wait and see, I'm not so sure. So now we are waiting.

This is a quick and dirty sketch of the vet's office (with several perspective mistakes) that I did while waiting for his call this morning. It hasn't come yet...

Adler Veterinary Group has been an institution in Van Nuys since 1981. It started as a partnership between the two Adler brothers, Ted and Craig, but after Ted retired, the partners sold out to the VCA veterinary chain and became part of their network. I've been going there on and off since 1982.

(Parenthetical question: Why are cartoon characters inevitably drawn without PANTS?!)

The prompt is "worship"

The prompt is "WORSHIP: church, synagogue, cathedral, wayside chapel, mosque."

I pretty much left all that behind me at about age 20 after a childhood of repressive Christian fundamentalism, and I definitely don't "worship," but when I do feel moved to gather with like-minded people, I pick a specific date to visit the Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society, affectionately known among Valleyites as "The Onion." It's not technically in Van Nuys (it's in nearby North Hills), but it is my location of choice for anything remotely approaching ritual or spiritual practice.

The organization recognizes that its members are theologically, philosophically, and spiritually diverse, and offers a variety of Sunday services to accommodate. On the first and third Sundays, it's the "traditional" Unitarian Universalist service. But on the second Sunday, they offer a "contemplative" experience of reflection and introspection that may include meditation, music, yoga, or drumming, and on the fourth Sunday the space is dedicated to the Humanist Forum, focused on living with more wisdom, connection, and compassion, and turned outward towards action. And throughout the year on their high holidays, the space is shared with the "Craft of the Wise," for pagan/earth-centered rituals (and potlucks).

I don't attend frequently, but the experience of music or drumming under that high, domed roof is not to be missed.

The building was commissioned by the Society in 1960 and designed by Frank Ehrenthal, himself a Universalist and also a student of Richard Neutra, a prominent Southern California architect and associate of Frank Lloyd Wright and Rudolf Schindler. The building was completed in 1964, and is constructed from glued, laminated timber that curves from the foundation to a small flat point at the top of the roof. The outdoor façade was originally covered with wood shingles, but now is sheathed in composition between its thin, green metal ribs.

I didn't do a great job of drawing the ceiling, but you can get the idea of just how amazing it is to lie on a yoga mat and look up at it while experiencing those acoustics.

Uniball pen and watercolor. Information from the church website and from Wikipedia.