Paper, Brush, log

Beauty of a day today; sun’s out and it’s heating up. My Mt Baldy Touchstone painting has been accepted in the organization’s own little exhibition that shows three times a year at City Hall! So today I must get it in for hanging.

I have been painting with watercolors off and on for a while now. Actually long ago I drifted into using a bit of color through the use of Japanese pigments on my rice paper paintings of bamboo and moons. And although I’ve been using more regularly a real watercolor paper, I still prefer the Japanese paints! But the subject of this painting is a scene out my Mt Baldy front door, a scene - like others I’ve painted - that is burned in my brain so to speak.

My son asked me one year what I wanted for my birthday, and I said I wanted this particular log I see in the Mt Baldy stream - where Ame liked to romp on a hot day a few switch backs down from my cabin - to be brought up and placed by my favorite tree outside my door. It was not a mindless ask, I had been working by that tree cleaning up the area around it and, on a recent play date Ame had with her friend Bodi, I spotted what I thought was an amazing log. It was a very happy birthday indeed thanks to my son and grandson and their good sense of humor as well as adventure.

Many years earlier, I caused a great and wizened log from deep in the rocky flood plane of Mt Baldy near where I founded Yama Biko Dojo to be brought to Musubi dojo in Claremont as a link to this mountain dojo where we held Summer camps. The National Forest Service gave me a permit which I found delightful and quite surprising. Our Musubi Dojo group had visited Mt Baldy nearly once a month through a program I called Sandokai (MountainWayGroup) which was a program that led interested parties, their kids and dogs up to a mountain path to walk for a few hours on a Sunday. One development of that monthly practice was to assemble a group of students, prior to our Summer camp and practice at Yama Biko, to clean up the area from the garbage that visitors to the mountain saw fit to leave behind. Sarah, the National Forest ranger would happily supply us with large garbage bags which she would pick up at the end of our “cleaning.” One year we left 15 full bags. She said, “I wish there was something I could do to reward you for this tremendous effort!” to which I replied, “Well, there was a log over there I’d like to have in my dojo to link students to this place.” She just stood there and smiled. But a few weeks later I received in the mail a permit to take the log!!! It took 6 students - 3 on either side of the log - with 6 obi belts to walk the log to my Trooper. Somewhere in my photo archives I took a photo of them walking the log across very uneven ground. And somewhere I have a photo of that log in the dojo in front of the gardens outside the bay door. It was a wonderful log: it revealed its life in the elements: rain, snow, wind, fire as well as its difficult passage down the mountain to the point where we found it. It even had a sign of the aggression of humankind in a hachet mark left on it. It was a log that had seen a lot, like older humans show on their faces. l have always found this record of bumps and bruises of a lifetime captivating; when I was a young artist and doing a bit of sculpture it was of the old faces of seamen and such. I couldn’t wait to see how my face recorded my life; I hoped it would be a pleasant record.

My watercolor got a start because once I began using color in my rice paper paintings it was but a small step to using the heavier water color paper. I had quite a lot on hand. My old bestie Mary loved to go to Estate sales and one day my cell phone rang as I was out in the village and it was Mary calling to say I must come over to this sale that she was calling from: it was a block away from my house and it was an estate sale from a house of an art teacher that had passed away. As Mary rarely called like this, I immediately made my way there.

She was standing by a kiln, reserving it for me as she knew my interests in ceramics would lead to firing this old kiln up and boy was she right! Once I purchased the kiln we took a walk around and I ended up with quite a few other things, most notably a very large portfolio case which now hangs in my closet filled with premier water color paper which is the very stuff I use in most of my watercolors now. I had been taking a clay class at the gallery around 2017-8 when she saw the writing on the wall. Then constantly tapping me on the shoulder was the memory of all that watercolor paper hanging in the closet and I am not one to accumulate useless stuff, so voila I began using the paper. Funny how that happens.

Water color is fluid like sumi ink that I use for my rice paper work. It makes it easy for me to use as my brushes work well in a fluid medium like that. One reason I’m nokw having so much trouble with the glazes on ceramics: the glazes don’t brush on so easily. But I’m learning about tints now so I may find a way.