San Francisco 10/14 - II

Some more photos from our trip up to San Francisco at the end of October.....

I love these smooth, rolling, golden hills in California... So soothing and sensual... Every time I'm a passenger in a vehicle and going between LA and SF, I can't help myself, and shoot a ridiculous number of these photos, looking for all the variations in spaces, shapes, shadows, lines, textures. Love, love, love and obviously very inspired by them.

found exactly as photographed.....

 

....as I look at this set of photos, I realize how much Alcatraz was this insane overload of photographic bliss for me, all the textures, light, lines, man vs. nature.....I still haven't even posted some of my favorites yet! If there was a way for me to make a living off of shooting these types of places, I would be one of the happiest people ever.

green brain swirl

Earlier this year I discovered one of my coworkers in my department is into painting and drawing as well. This has been both awesome and horrible. Awesome because I have someone to talk with things about and show things and bounce ideas off of. Awesome because he's always up for going out art supply shopping (one of the few things I actually enjoy shopping for) and we both always have our eyes open for sales... this is especially nice since we no longer work a semi-reasonable-walking-during-lunch distance to Dick Blick. Horrible because, well... I have a built in enabler and someone else reviewing art supplies and giving me suggestions. I really don't need any more encouragement to buy art supplies, pretty much ever. But that is ok - obviously in my very comprehensive list, the good outweigh the bad.

Anyway, this week we were talking about cleaning up and how that can be motivating to work on things since you come across supplies or inspiration and many things are more interesting to do than cleaning, so that's kinda what I did yesterday. And eventually I was staring at my copics thinking about how pretty the colors were and how I wanted to draw with them. I've been in this point of paralysis with drawing for a while because I just couldn't figure out what to draw. I was putting too much pressure on myself to know beforehand and so instead I just started drawing last night, put on some of my new (old, used) GusGus albums and ended up with this.....

 

 

My brain likes to go towards the organic, flowing, smooth shapes, green..... always the same, but different each time....I think I used about 20 different colors for this, all copics on marker paper.

San Francisco 10/14... OK

This past weekend we drove up to San Francisco for a long weekend. My sister was visiting and so we decided to meet up with her for a couple days and crash her vacation. We also stayed with a long time friend, which was good since I don't get to see him much anymore. Yay!  We ended up going to Alcatraz one day, which was awesome (pretty much no one I talked to had been before!) and included art from Ai Weiwei scattered throughout the buildings. Although visiting a jail is kinda weird on some level, the views, the experience, the decay of the buildings and the resulting textures and colors and the nature all really add to the experience. Buy tickets in advance and go! Then the next day we drove up to Muir Woods to see the giant Redwoods. Yay for trees and more nature and green and nice smells and old living things! Then we came home and now I am back at work. I think this started out as a quick post & a couple photos and grew to 11, although I will hopefully post more later.

I took I think 6 cameras along, which included 2 medium formats - my yashica mat and diana, so I still have film to develop. Random people around me were super fascinated by the yashica mat and I heard comments from people from time to time. Film is so novel to people now.....

 This was part of the Ai Weiwei exhibit in a bathtub of the hospital in the jail. These kinds of textures and colors make my mind go crazy, I love them so much. If I was visiting alone, I would have been so lost in all the peeling lead paint flakes, rusting, decaying, breaking, textures and colors all over for hours...

I found it interested that the windows that weren't barred still projected the same sort of shadows as the jail bars...

 Nothing like the tallest living things in the world to make you feel tiny and insignificant

Stopped in Sausalito before heading back over the Golden Gate bridge...

sighted

copics on 11" x 14" mixed media paper




...and unrelated, but kinda, I really visually enjoy this video from GusGus "Crossfade". The framing and composition and surreal, yet unaltered nature of many of the shots are pretty awesome.

no such thing

copics and sakura pens on 11x14 mixed media paper.

A long a slow and tedious process working from the foreground background w/o sketching, abstract nature, done (maybe not), happy, bird reference guide, John Audubon excellent hunter. I don't know, make it up yourself. thanks for visiting this place (which place?)

Here, There, Everywhere

Flying someplace, likely over Texas or New Mexico, December 2013