SUNRISE: BIG SUR

I could've gone to the writers' convention.
I kept thinking to myself, well maybe I should've.
I'm supposed to be a writer, and all that.
Besides, all my friends are there.
But then, this cliff, this shore
was my view yesterday, all day.
On set for Hand of God at an ungodly hour
we watched dawn's light crawl down Big Sur ridge
and the fogbank retreated to a safe distance.
A roadside chef cracked dozens of eggs
(we ate plein air omlettes right on Hwy 1,
a fencepost with a view for a table).
Such famous beauty before us,
replete with rubberneckers and cyclists,
cavorting whales and curious sea otters.
Between takes, surcease of the sea
breathing beside me. All day long.
I saw sleepy indigo wake to turquoise
and dream itself to pale robin's egg blue
to match the celestial eyes of the sky.

4/3/2016

Landscapes, sketches (art) 2013

I made these drawings in May and June of 2013, ideas for silk art and wet pastels. I like the drawings better than the finished product.

Scratchboard drawings, India ink, 1995-97
Landscapes, wet pastels (art) 2013
Three drawings, Scotland, ca 2006
Mt Diablo from Clayton, drawingBaja, Mulegé, Cabo San Lucas, watercolors
Shells, three drawings, stabillo pencil, 3/95
Shell, charcoal drawing

Landscapes, wet pastels (art) 2013

I'm posting all my 2013 wet pastel landscapes at the end of December, though they were done over the course of a year, most were done during the summer.

Wet chalk and wet construction paper pastels: these are 9x12". I can't go back and finish them when the paper's dry as they're generally far too fragile to re-wet and add details. I usually only have about 10-15 minutes to complete a pastel!

This idea evolved when my after-school art kids at Cleveland Elementary Schools (2007), asked if they could do chalk pastels. I wasn't wild about the idea as I like more painterly colors, etc. But I also love to draw. So we did some pastels and I was disappointed in our results. I noticed that one child developed a cough from inhaling the chalk dust. (It bothers me too). His mother insisted it was only a cold (I think she was afraid I wasn't going to let him participate as he totally loved art). But.... I wondered: how can I reduce the chalk dust? Water. When I worked at a horse training stables, we used to sprinkle the indoor arena sand to keep dust levels down.

I discovered a technique of wetting both paper and chalk and it's akin to painting with sticks of chalk. (I've used both oil sticks and Aquerelle watercolor crayon sticks so it was a natural progression. With the Aquarelles, I weted the stiff morilla board first, or sprayed it with water after the crayon was applied. But I didn't want to use white paper for chalk pastels—besides, morilla board is astronomically expensive to use in the classroom.

So I experimented with all kinds of paper and the ONLY paper that would work was my former school painting/drawing nemesis, construction paper. It has a tooth (texture the chalk needs to adhere to) and the glue that holds the woodpulp together softens and the chalk adheres directly to it. Riverside acid free construction paper works best. Most schools have the worst grade cheap construction paper, but it will work, though it's more fragile and will easily tear.

An added bonus of using chalk wet, the colors are more painterly and vibrant. Cheap kid chalk or hopscotch chalk generally won't work, it's often too hard and will tear the paper, but the heavy teacher white chalkboard chalk is a perfect blending tool with a buttery consistency when wet.

We add black details with the waterbase stabillo pencils at the end of the session. (I also remove black chalk from the pastel sets). Pieces are very fragile until the construction paper dries. I put them on paper towels and in a sunlit window to dry.

Adult pastel sets often have toxic chemicals in them—like vermillion, cadmium and cobalt. Don't use them with kids! make sure the chalks have non-toxic AP labels.

I was nosing around for a silk painting idea and did these instead.

Chalk pastel on construction paper, 6x9" or 9 x 12".

Landscapes, wet pastels (art) 2012
Landscapes, wet pastels (art) 2011
Landscapes, wet pastels (art) 2008
Landscapes, wet pastels (art) 2007
Still life (art) 2007

Henry Miller book review By Rosalind Sharpe, Carmel Pine Cone, 12/13/1946

While I was searching for obscure information on the Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery in Carmel, and Monterey, during the 1940s to 1960, I stumbled across a few of my friend’s mother’s art reviews and articles from the Carmel Pine Cone in the Internet Archives. Because it’s an OCR scanned newspaper archive, it was a mess: columns combined, chunks of text missing, orphaned text, and illegible clusters of consonants. But I cleaned it up and restored it to print, and am posting them here along with the Pat Wall stories, for context. there were several arts articles in this issue, probably the last issue of the year, published on Friday the 13th! I knew Roz for most of my younger life, and kept in touch with her when she lived in Marin and Sonoma Counties, so I was pretty excited to find something she had written during the Bohemian years. It is probably the first time that this article has seen the light since 1946 (other than the Internet Archives, where it is virtually unreadable). Read on.

 

Carmel Pine Cone 1946-12-13 

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1946
Henry Miller book review
By Rosalind Sharpe

By no means the best or the most recent of Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart, a collection of essays ranging in subject from sex and French prostitutes to D. H. Lawrence, Gutkind and the Collective Whole, gives one unfamiliar with his work a good bird's eye view of the range, style, and, in some instances, the very essence of Millerism. Heterogeneous in sequence, it is in short a kind of teaser, a, capsulized version of Miller, which nevertheless seems as organically whole as anything else he has written, in that everything he writes of proceeds from himself, his own personality, his own reactions, impressions, searching, awareness. "Writing,” as he said in Reflections on Writing, "like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.” The essays are a good spring-board from which to proceed to Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Colossus of tyaroussi, or the Tropic of Cancer (if you can get it), which are arranged in a more definite sequence, centered on the topics of America, Greece and French prostitutes respectively.

Some of the essays in Wisdom of the Heart, particularly Creative Death, Uterine Hunger and Reflections on Writing, make one aware of the brilliance, clarity, ceaseless fertility, richness and creative variation of his reaction to reality; his paradox and never-ending exploration of values and meanings and symbols and sensations—the sort of thing that has made Henry Miller a cult among his admirers.

He has expressed his basic attitude towards writing, life and reality very lucidly in the essay Reflections on Writing where he says, "I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life.... It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that... one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling it in dry-lipped whispers, ...characters and come forth with such books as the Wisdom of the Heart (a collection of essays), The Colossus of Maroussi (about Greece), and Air-Conditioned Nightmare (his impressions of America), all conspicuously devoid of four letter words.

Down the coast, he is writing a sequel to the latter volume, entitled Air-Conditioned Nightmare II.

He goes on to say, ”1 talk now about Reality, but I know there is no getting at it, leastwise by writing. I learn less and realize more. I learn in some different, subterranean way. I acquire more and more the gift of immediacy. ... I haven’t the slightest idea what my future books will be like, even the one immediately to follow. My charts and plans are the slenderest sort of guides; 1 scrap them at will. I invent, distort, deform, lie, inflate, exaggerate, confound and confuse as the mood seizes me. I obey only my own instincts and intuitions. I know nothing in advance.”

It is altogether obvious that comment on Henry Miller and about Henry Miller by other writers is a foolish and superfluous business. Henry Miller has said it all. He is honest and searching. He discovers everything in himself and exposes it to view. His search through reality and sensation is continually given body in his writing, and if one wants to know Miller, all one has to do is to read him. He withholds very little. If he changes, then so be it, life changes, reality changes, the "voyage of discovery” goes on.

Pat Wall, modern art dealer: Dali, Miller, & Varda 3.5, envoy; folklore & fragments from The Pat Wall Gallery

(Much of this page was gleaned from orphan newspaper clippings—both fragments and articles often without dates or provenance—this is a pastiche of reportage and paraphrase, my own journal fragments—as well as some of my memories of Pat telling the stories of the artist colony that made Big Sur famous. Journal entry notes were collected from various sources, Pat Wall, his daughter Micaela, and other friends of Pat’s over the years.)

In the late 1970s, early 1980s, I also edited several of Rosalind Sharpe Wall’s manuscripts, one eventually became a book. When the Coast was Wild and Lonely: Early Settlers of the Sur  1987. The manuscript was a right mess as I recall, so her son, Chris, must’ve worked on it too, as it was reprinted. As we went over the manuscript, Rosalind would fly off into tangents on Egyptian scarabs, living Mexico, Henry Miller, the Tarot and John Cooke—scraps of stories with lots of middles, with no beginning, and no ending in sight. Only later, long after Roz died, was I able to make any sense of her stories.

 

Many of these orphan fragments came from old newspaper articles. I grew fatigued, and abandoned the project, as I had never properly recorded, or lost the sources. Someday I’ll get back to it. Micaela and I were hellbent on recording Pat’s oral history before it was too late. Then it was too late. So these are mostly from Micaela’s scrapbook collection. I was going to shape these notes into a fourth piece on Pat, but too much time had passed, so I can’t reconstruct it from these rough fragments—that strangely create their own story. So it’s a pastiche, a collage of sorts.

In the early 1970s, I also revisited many of the places Pat and Rosalind mentioned, including Doc Rickett’s lab on Cannery Row, when you could still go inside and see the empty aquariums, and the ranch that Henry Miller was living on. These were stories we grew up on. We used to stay at Deetjin’s cabins in Castro Canyon when we were flush, but more often than not, we slept in pullouts along Highway One. We met up with a bunch of hippies, who saw that we were reading Tropic. A party ensued. My boyfriend Bob Hamilton and I wound up sleeping in the VW van on a hill so steep, it was a miracle the van didn’t roll down the mountain into the sea. Oh, but the morning was stellar as we were above the fog line, afloat in our own cloud kingdom. Magic was afoot on the Big Sur coast. 

Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 3 Henry Miller and the Avant Guardians (journal)

Amazing to spend the morning reading about the Pat Wall Art Gallery and its wild guests, then to look around Micaela's room and see the very art mentioned in the reviews. The Avant Guardians are watching over me as I sleep.

I'm looking at Henry Miller's self-portrait with its red and green five sided frame, the brushstrokes are deft. Henry, supposedly in his 50s, stared back at me across the years, a young man with sallow skin and Prussian blue ears and nose. 

You painted what you liked, Henry. I hope you died happy. Henry looks a bit like Oleg Atbashian, which puts me off a bit. Self-absorbed men. Was it the talent that made them so self-absorbed, or was it the rank self-absorbtion that allowed them to become so talented?

I recognize so many of the paintings: McClatchy's Door. Several Graham paintings: Lament, and The Beginning of War. Other unnamed pieces. When Graham and Miller became rather famous, things changed. 

In the early 1970s, I remember traveling to someone's house under the Bixby Bridge to see Henry Miller's watercolors. I was not duly impressed. But I dutifully read everything that Miller ever wrote, so I felt compelled to witness the paintings too. I think I was reading Nexus at the time.

I think the owner was rather hoping that we'd buy a painting, but we were as penniless as Miller was when he moved to Big Sur. Micaela has more articles on Henry Miller's watercolors. Wish I had time to read them all.

Henry moved to Big Sur in 1943 and lived in a tent alongside the highway, he was already living the life of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, it was a cult of sex and anarchy on the coast. He said, "I'm not perverse, but the idea of looking through a keyhole fascinates me."

A keyhole in a tent? I asked myself. And thought of camera obscurae.

April 14, 1947: Henry Miller talked about how his paintings morphed from landscape into fish. I wonder if that's a reference to his Red Fish? 

Said Miller, "When I paint I have a lot of fun but I feel I'm on a tight rope. I'm jittery sometimes when I start out to do a landscape I end up with a fish I worried about this until the other painter said they do the same thing."

I had to laugh, Mike Goldberg's painting, Sardines, came to mind. See, Frank O'Hara's poem Why I Am Not a Painter sums it up nicely.

....I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

Pat Wall's art gallery became the focal point in a Harpers article on the new west coast cult of "sex and anarchy." A Times reporter descended, to buy a Miller painting, then left for the East Coast, calling it Paris of the West. Miller was a Paris expat, so he had several threads going. The race was on.

About the same time, the restless New Mexico contingencies (Wilfred Lang and Co.), were experiencing hot flashes, the Age of Light was born. (My grandmother's niece was working on the Manhattan project).

And somehow the role of art went from the cultured confines of the City of Light to the Age of Light. Miller detonated a moral code in Big Sur. The world fell apart, the center did not hold.

Henry must've loved exhibiting his thermonuclear watercolors next to the surrealist nudes of Dutch oil painter, Cock van Gent (a she!), and Edward Weston's extreme close-up photos of bell pepper buttocks.

The Grahams, Toni & Ed Ricketts, James Broughton, Virginia Varda, Dr. Rodin, Henry Miller's physician, and someone named Brewsie were among those attending. Everyone signed the register as Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so, as if that slender slice of decorum could contain the avant guardians.

Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: Ellwood Graham (journal)

Patrick Wall, founder of The Pat Wall Gallery, Carmel/Monterey, ca. 1973

When I was a child, my eyes feasted on the paintings collected by my best friend's father, Patrick Wall, when he was an art dealer in Monterey during the 1940s. Pat's gallery was on Olivier Street, we never did collect his oral history, so this is a placeholder for what we collectively remember. We also didn't realize that Pat singlehandedly changed the face of West Coast art with his controversial unorthodox exhibits. 

Pat, who was from Jersey, the Channel Islands, UK, came to California ca. 1940, with his inheritance and a dream of art. He took a chance on the local "moderns" and created The Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery, and through this connection is how I got to know the work of Ellwood Graham who "painted out loud" with lots of hot colors. His abstract portrait of John Steinbeck was controversial at the time—circa the 1940s.

What I loved were how Graham's personal hieroglyphics, or pictogram paintings which were almost quilt-like in nature, I loved the way the heavy dark colors were a combination of thick impasto, a drawing, and transparent glaze. A doodle, a half a whale (the tail end) captivated my attention. He compared his work to a composer working on a "musical canvas." Graham painted an egg tempera mural in the Ventura Post Office. Is it still there?

So much history attached to those old paintings of Pat's. There was John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, known as Doc Ricketts— they too were juxtaposed in Graham's work. It was John Steinbeck who told the artist to paint out loud imagine that—paint out loud. Graham moved to Monterey because of John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck also created in Graham's [Monterey] studio. He wrote Sea of Cortez while Graham rendered his portrait. Of course he sold the painting to Steinbeck, but "I kept some studies and sketches." 'Where is that portrait now? "People have been calling me for years... I don't know." he says, "I haven't seen it in over 50 years."

Then he adds, "That portrait was very good... I hear it was bought by Burgess Meredith but I also heard it belonged to John Huston. —from Alta Vista Magazine, 1992 "Ellwood Graham: Never Say Die," —Susan Lea Hubbard (see bottom of this post for more stories).

Letter from Rosalind Sharpe Wall

Dear Maureen:                      October 24, 1986 (I can’t read much of it)

I was much moved by your poems and their quality – also seeing your picture with that nice young man. I am glad you are seeing something of Micaela. 

My only suggestion in regards to a poetry reading or whatever, is the Carl Cherry Foundation. My friend Jane Wilgevess is no longer the curator, but if you just write the foundation and mention my name to them. I am still Rosalind Sharpe Wall, an accompanying booklet I wrote for them. you will get some sort of answer and I believe their policies have changed somewhat since Jane is no longer heading it, but I am sure they will give you some preference on my account, if none other. 

The address is Cherry Foundation, PO Box 863, Carmel, CA 93921 phone 408-624-749. 

The artistic center is at the Sunset cultural center but I don’t know how to contact them. I will try to find out and write you again.

I am home which is to say, in my home technically, but I don’t get around and don’t generally mind …. Much on account of my physical condition. In addition to advanced emphysema, I am on oxygen, I am crippled and can walk almost not at all. 

But I am busy writing, Maureen, my book on the Big Sur coast. I am rewriting it. When the Coast was Wild and Lonely will be out in January by …  I hope my publisher will be sending you an invitation to the  autograph party at the Thunderbird bookshop. I hope you can come. I … and hope it is a meal of food to … and I hope that my professors at SSU might be able to come. Helen Dunn, Marty Blaze, Gerry Haslam and Jerry Rosen.

I am much interested from… that’s my book was excepted by a house a creative project in lieu of a journal MA thesis in 1984.

In the past two months I have been working on a new version of the New Tarot for the Aquarian Age, but Alice Kent and I do not see eye to eye on it, and although she says she is giving it back over to me, she is retaining control. And I have four other books to write I am a little miffed?…. and I made working in it? a priority. Not … I shall plow on, but I realize it will all come together in the end. … It has been restrictive and depressing to me. But I realize it will all come out alright in the end.

Tell Micaela to show you my story about Bixby creek where I grew up in the Herald which was published September 21. It’s a freelance piece for the Monterey Herald weekend magazine.

I intend to type all after some publ. I will call in the next day or two the Sunset Cultural Center about its programming. Meanwhile go ahead and write to the cherry foundation. As a writer, I have dropped the Wall, after all, I am an ex Mrs. having been divorced for over 30 years so I have reverted back to my maiden name, Rosalind Sharpe. 

Love to you Maureen, 

signed, Rosalind

October 25, 1986 dear Maureen

Have some more info for you. Cherry Hall seats 50 and the charge is $10 per hour but they are open to  negotiation. Phone or write Linda Coppens c/o the Cherry Foundation, same address phone number, call Tuesday through Friday between 9:30 and 4:30 ask for Linda Copppens. 

carpenter carpenter Hall at the Sunset center seats 150. Some thing a address is PO Box 5066, Carmel, CA 93921 phone 408-624-3996 I don’t know what the charges for advanced publicity releases that could be arranged there The Monterey Peninsula herald in the Carmel pinecone PO Box G Carmel but eyes support the cherry foundation and or the carpenter whole arrange the advance publicity releases cherry foundation runs a something enormously schedule cultural events in the Carmel pinecone I don’t know who is crutch in the who is to contact at the Herald but I will find out once you have the cherry foundation and or Carpenter hall or sunset Creek love Rossiland Then she writes on the back of the envelope this is PS I miss addressed a letter to you yesterday but this one contains the info you needed hi