Roasted peppers on an electric fire

Too many peppers took on a jaunty festive air on the windowsill. Spontaneous holiday mode. And then we ate them. Fogeddabout Peter Pepper’s pecker of pickled peepers. We roasted them and then tossed them in the soup, beautiful soup. Since I don’t have access to a gas stove, I roasted them on the burners of the electric stove (not an easy task). I flayed the peppers, and draped them right on top of the coils of the electric burner with a frying pan on top to weight them down until the skin burns, then I tossed them in a  covered bowl to sweat, and slipped off the burnt skin with water. A lot of messy work, but superior flavor. Once you’ve had them them there’s no going back. The flavor, my God, the flavor.

Fruit, iPad digital art

 

Fjaðrárgljúfur Gorge, SE Iceland, drawings from photos, 6x9” stabilo

 

Small pumpkins, drawing, 6x9” pencil, stabilo, colored pencil

San Geronimo Valley community center virtual art show

 I have two drawings in an online art exhibit, IN PLACE hosted by The San Geronimo Valley Community Center. 

An online group art show, In Place, presented on the SGVCC website through the Community Center’s Facebook page and Instagram on October 15 through November 15. The exhibit features work created during this time of isolation and stress. The art work in this exhibit is a follow-up of the Where Were Call Home exhibit but also expresses our inner geography, rather than our place on the planet. —Anne Faught

Desert landscape 2, pencil, 9 x 6”

 

Desert landscape 1, pencil, 9 x 6”

 

small bird sketches 6x9” pencil

Iceberg Alley sketch 6x9” pencil

Collage, Digging Deep, 9x12” with Blake More

Personification poems with Blake More Tomatoes, Carrots

Digging Deep: Revealing Nature Through Poetry & Art

Peru aquarelle drawing published in Spectrum 24

Spectrum 24 Peru aquarelle drawing published

Color original here.

Poppy, dry watercolor, 9x12” from a Michael's Zoom class

I've been taking Zoom classes in order to prepare for teaching in the fall. Michael's offers classes. I made a pre-drawing with stabilo pencils, thinking they would  send the model drawing later. So when the class began, there was no model drawing. I had to guess what the the left side looked like, as the camera didn't include the entire drawing. So I sucked. I redid the assignment later but I still had my original painting, I was going to destroy int, then I remembered the old outline trick. I think I like it better that the finished piece.

                       

Loma Alta, oil painting, 8 x 10"

 

Oil reworking of a failed acrylic piece. Still failed, it needs a glaze, but I like the green.

Loma Alta, oil pastel, 9 x 12"

An impasto reworking of an earlier failed oil pastel. Still failed but I like the shapes.

 

Grackle drawings 6x9” stabilo, colored pencil

Hawk drawing 6x9” stabilo

Duck sugar bowl, 9x12”

I really hated this Michael’s class, the guy didn’t even send a ref. photo, so I used a tiny image.

Woodpecker drawings 6x9” stabilo, colored pencils, from my photos

Aspens, after a Galen Rowell photo 6x9” stabilo, colored pencil

Four candles, oil pastel 9x12”

My first class with Michael’s and I didn’t have oils, so I improvised.

2 colored pencil landscapes 9x12”

Mt. St Helena, prismacolor wax pencils on white paper. 9 x 12”

Elephant Mountain, prismacolor wax pencils on white paper. 9 x 12”
After an old painting from 1950, by George Demont Otis.

contour drawing samples for poetry book

SGV Spring Arts Show vía Facebook

ARTIST STATEMENT

First electronic art show while under quarantine. 

I had been ogling a deluxe Stabilo pencil set for over a year, it arrived all the way from England in a beautiful cherrywood box, just when the coronavirus struck. Some Friday the 13th. My mind was alternately elastic, or a black hole—expanding and contracting—leaving me lost on alien shores of doubt and regret. I couldn’t make art. I couldn’t think. I had the attention span of a newt. The only thing that saved me was driving theback roads to my job. Car botanizing on the back-backroads of home. All this beauty and I couldn’t even leave my car. So beautiful, it almost hurts. I went the long way home whenever possible, sometimes taking hours to get home. This tree, and rock became my anchor. My salvation. I watched the greenery meld into a rainbow fest of flowers. First on the scene were the colors of the sun—buttercups and creamcups, meadowfoam and popcorn flowers, followed by the blazoning poppies, fiery dock, and the magenta flame of mallow, and owl’s clover, the sacred indigo breath of sky lupine, and the majestic finale of purple ookow, and Ithuriel’s spears—secret yarrow in the distance. Meanwhile, the mountain witnessed the passage of the season. In this way I began to find my out of the horror of what is, and what will be for a long time to come. This meadow, my salvation.Tomorrow, the hills will be a little less green, a fleeting moment in time. I am reminded of Robert Duncan’s poem:

“Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.”

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,

an eternal pasture folded in all thought

so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light

wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

When I was a young and uninformed poet, Robert Duncan always included me in readings, encouraged me to keep on writing. —Maureen Hurley

Photo for poster, “Old-fashioned, naughty, everything! A glimpse of Emily Dickinson,” a monologue by Chetana Karel-Michaan

My photo was used for a theatrical poster and chapbook on Emily Dickinson, From  a monologue  developed by Chetana Karel-Michaan, Jan. 11, 2020. Sadly I did not attend. I heard it was a smash success.

Tenth Senior Lunch Group Art Show, Maurice del Mue Gallery, San Geronimo Valley Community Center

Mt. Tamalpais from Corte Madera, from an old photo, acrylic 6x8”

Take two. Gallagher Ranch, Black Mountain, Point Reyes, acrylic painting, 8x10”

Gallagher Ranch, Black Mountain, Point Reyes, acrylic painting, 11 x 14”

Revised foreground, still needs more work.

Barboni Ranch, Tree and Rock, Hick’s Valley, acrylic painting 8x10”

Barboni Ranch, Tree and Rock, Hick’s Valley

Curious to see who had shared my post of this particular painting on Facebook, I followed a thread and found this unexpected compliment:

Marc - These are beautiful paintings. I actually have a Maurice Del Mue painting that has a very similar feeling. During recent fire evacuations it was the second thing I grabbed. Of course Henry was number one!    —Rick

Agreed Rick. The artist’s name is Mo Hurley. She is also a very interesting thinker and writer. I always enjoy her work, both literary and artistic.
—Marc Nassar

Marc Nassar is a Facebook friend I met long ago in Cazadero at a poetry reading fundraiser. We lost touch and it took a while for me to realize we knew each other. I had posted some old photos of poets from the late 1980s, which was his deck! It was this photo of Marc and Jim Dodge that led me back to Marc, who lives in Portugal. Facebook works in mysterious ways.

Of course, the art show was held at the Maurice del Mue Art Gallery, which hosts his WPA mural in the office hall of my grade school, now the San Geronimo Valley Community Center. Talk about circular file. So, who was Henry? Miller? Matisse?

Barboni Ranch, Hick’s Valley, pastel 9x12”

Spirit Rock, acrylic on canvasboard 8x10”, painting, art

I began a pastel which was an epic fail, so I touched it up with paint. So it’s really mixed media.

Where We Call Home, Maurice del Mue Gallery, San Geronimo Community Center 2019

Spirit Rock, 8x10” acrylic