To celebrate the renaming of Golden Gate Park’s Stow Lake to Blue Heron Lake I created an artist stamp for this month’s meeting of the San Francisco Correspondence Coop.
All summer long I keeping stopping by the Dahlia Dell. It is right next to the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. Each week the flowers are bigger and bigger and exploding with more and more colors. They have inspired my art before, and this year I wanted to use the palette for this latest piece in my ongoing Lines and Color Series.
In a world gone mad, one of the ways I cope is nice long walks to Golden Gate Park. This time of the year the dahlias are in bloom. Beautiful and inspirational. This weekend was spent carving rubber stamps for a series of dahlia-themed postcards.
Every time we meet, one of us does an artist stamp to be shared with co-op members. Many keep their stamps in special passports. For our 10th anniversary we did something different. 29 other co-op members sent me artwork that was then turned into a set of two commemorative sheets of artist stamps. Here is our very cooperative effort.
I always prefer weekday afternoons for my museum visits — it is the best time to avoid the crowds. Yesterday it was nice and mellow. Masked up and vaccinated, with our reservations on our phone, my friend and I got to get in some museum time. There is signage reminding us to social distance, passageway walls have had art removed to prevent visitors from lingering and some of the gallery benches have been removed. The museum felt a little bare, but it was still good just to be inside and wandering around.
The big change, after spending a year painting books, I am now really paying attention to paintings of books. I have always enjoyed the de Young’s gallery filled with trompe l’oeil, yesterday it was becoming a real favorite. John Frederick Peto’s books are so inspirational. Although, I will never have the patience to master that level or realism in my own work.
What San Francisco homes are not, in spite of the worst efforts of stagers and flippers, are the gutted Victorians that have been sterilized into white and gray modern lofts. Stainless steel and marble slabs with all the charm of a mortuary. We do not want to live in banal furniture catalogs.
The bookcases and things I paint for my Chaekgeori-inspired series are just a small glimpse into these wonderful San Francisco homes.
My friends have generously shared photos for me to work from. When I asked one friend to send some snapshots, I waited anxiously for their arrival in my inbox. He and his husband have a delightful Hayes Valley apartment that is like living in an actual cabinet of curiosities. It is one of my favorite San Francisco apartments.
The photos he sent, and what I have painted here, are of his office bookcase. Early on, I realized painting bookcases was, in many ways, painting a portrait as much as it is painting a still life. This made me think about a person’s bookcase in a professional office. Many of us wear different personalities to suit the occasion. A downtown office bookcase is going to be different from one at home. Maybe a little more restrained, a little more reserved. This is a professional bookcase.
A Handbag? Yes, a Handbag. Lots of handbags, purses and pocketbooks all in a museum exhibit at the V&A in London. These products might be worth a lot but are they worthy of a museum exhibit?
I won’t be traveling to London to see this one. But if I did, I would set up a pop-up exhibit out in front of the museum. I would place cardboard boxes on the street as display stands to show off the best knock-off handbags $10 can buy.
“No officer, these bags are not for sale. This is performance art!”
If the de Young is negotiating to host this show, I’ll be ready…
The space was filled with cardboard crates full of new merchandise shipped from overseas. In one corner was an office area. The temps (we started with three of us) had to work on the floor in the middle of everything. Our job was to take new, large craft paper boxes and cut and fit them, inside and out, with pretty handmade paper (they spent a fortune at Flax). The paper had to be spray glued into place. It was labor-intensive and each box took nearly an hour to finish. The plan was to use the pretty boxes to ship samples to journalists, fashionistas, etc. “P.R. Sweetie. P.R.!”
A handful of enthusiastic, young women worked in the corner office. All were very well dressed — especially to come to work in a urine-soaked alley. They were nice and pretty much left us to our task. Occasionally you would overhear snippets of conversation. Let’s just say, I never needed to watch Sex in the City. I lived it for about a week.
For a temp job, this was a better one. Still, one of my temp coworkers never returned from lunch. Another stopped showing up after a few days. I was delighted. More work for me. All by myself, I worked about 9 days at this company.
They were in such a hurry, they asked me to come in on a Saturday. There I was, all by myself, making overtime. And here was my chance. I could steal a few handbags. But then I asked myself, “What would I do with them? Who would I give them to?” I thought about it. My mom, my sister, all of my friends who carry a purse — not one of them would have any use for these delicate, useless little handbags. No shoulder straps, small and impractical. For the record, I did not steal a thing.
At that moment I began to realize the real purpose of carrying a designer handbag. It is not just about the label and the cost. A woman carrying a precious handbag communicates to the world that she only goes to places where she does not have to worry. Nothing bad happens in her world. She certainly does not take public transportation. Does she even walk down a street in a “bad” neighborhood? That handbag says she rides in a very expensive car. Like those impractical and tortuous high heels, the handbag is way to reinforce her class and her perceived status.
