Facebook photo album: Mo's Drawings (photos, art)

Mo's drawings

Few know my training is in visual arts. I love bold contour line and sculptural light. A car accident put me in front of a lot of flowers and since I couldn't do much else but sit around for about a year (and heal), I drew a lot of flowers. I used to think that cutting edge artists didn't draw flowers or landscapes, only Sunday painters, and here I was a SMTWThFS flower painter. The only edges I was cutting were my nails as everything hurt.

So I drew, and drew and drew until I got it. I also work in the schools teaching art to kids, so many of the drawings are quickies I've done in class. There are a few landscapes as well. I try to imbue them with energy because that's how I see landscape—alive, like a tawny beast.

But I prefer to work from real life as the human eye can see far more than the camera lens. The only exceptions are the Scottish landscapes. The fish and butterflies that have crept into this album are, for the most part, on the spot in-class 2-minute teaching drawings.




Shoes are amazingly complex to draw. There are so many details that it can be overwhelming. When I do this exercise with kids, they tend to scream because taking off shoes in school AND putting them on the table is way too crazy. The girls go squeamish and the boys go boisterous. Eventually they settle down and do some decent drawings. Sometimes I'll draw their shoes too. This is Freddie's shoe. I got the teaching idea from Greer Upton when we were in a group called Artists in the Schools of Sonoma County (ASC). (teaching drawing) 2005




.

Buddy's boot. One of my 2nd grade student's. 2005. (teaching drawing)



This little guy was so uncomfortable when I was drawing him, that he had constant fits of giggling so I had to draw fast. (teaching drawing) 2005



Little Jamie at the Clayton Montessori school had a deformed hand and she was like a small fragile bird but she was able to draw with that hand after I showed her some tricks of the trade. (teaching drawing) 2005



This old 1940s Argus camera was one of my first hand-me-down cameras, from my first boyfriend's father. I used it until it developed a light leak. Then it had another career as still life object. Countless kids drew it, took it apart. Note the film advance spool is really bent. Alas, my drawing notebooks were destroyed when my shed leaked. I managed to save only a handful of drawings from the 1980s.



Argyle Butte in Scotland (from a calendar photograph). 8x10" stabillo pencil. 2006?



Loch Tunnel, Scotland (from a calendar photograph). Marsha Connell, an artist I taught with in the schools of Sonoma County does amazing large watercolor landscapes and I can see a bit of her sensuous influence here. 8x11" stabillo pencil.©2006 Maureen Hurley



North side view of Mount Diablo from Clayton. I had a break between classes and since we were looking straight up the mountain, it was a pretty intense, if not unusual angle. 8x10 stabillo pencil. © 2005 Maureen Hurley



After a catering job there were hundreds of gardenias left over (it was a wedding) so I filled a trash bag with gardenias. Every large bowl I had was filled with them. There were so many I had to resort to filling the bathtub with flowers. Another lost drawing...luckily I have the xerox. Detail of a larger drawing, cheapie Bic mechanical pencil on xerox paper.



I only had three calla lillies, and I kept drawing them from every angle. I was too lazy to get another piece of paper. Then it reminded me of Diego Rivera's lilies. This version was scanned and colorized in Photoshop. 8x11, stabillo. 2000.



I absolutely love drawing star lilies, they're so huge. Unfortunately florists cut off the stamens and pistles which have amazing russet colors. I can't stand the heavy odor of lilies so they stay outside. 8x10" stabillo pencil.


Star lily and bud. 8x10" stabillo pencil.



Daffodils. Detail of one of my very first flower drawings (or rather a xerox of the original–which was destroyed when my shed roof leaked. I'm just grateful that I have the xerox. 2004, or earlier.

All works of art and photographs in these albums are © copyright by Maureen Hurley and may not be used in any endeavor or context. Got that, Facebook?   November 10, 2007








added 2/2017 These are salvaged from Facebook, so I'm saving them here all in one place for the prose as well. They're extremely small files. Loaded with artifacts. No use printing them.

Facebook photo album: Mo's Flower Pix (photos)

Facebook photo album: Mo's Landscape Pix (photos)

Facebook photo album: Mo's Flower Pix (photos)

Not a milk thistle, a cardoon, a member of the artichoke family. The color is outrageous.



A weed, but a morning glorious one

The light fairly pulsed through the heart of the morning glory, only it was late afternoon.



Morning Glory on the refuse heap.



Hollyhock...related to hibiscus...look at the stamen









I had never really taken photos of flowers before, and so I became fascinated with composition and light. Georgia O'Keefe certainly was an influence but I found myself unable to really focus in tight and crop off parts of flowers (or people's heads for that matter). It was hard to chop off the prettiness of the center of the dahlia in order to focus on the petal structure and raindrops.



One intense cosmos. I never realized how many blooms have blemishes and flaws until I started taking photos of them. The human eye is more forgiving than the camera lens, or should I say, the computer screen—because that's where the flaws show up. I came away from this exercise with a profound respect for still life master photographers and the F 16 school of Edward Weston. I wonder how he and Ansel Adams would've taken to the digital revolution? I was primarily a black and white photographer so color often distracted me. I sometimes turned the jpgs into B&W in order to see what I was doing.



Pansies with cat whisker stripes.



Gazania, African daisy



Foxglove. No foxes didn't wear them. They were called folk's gloves, fairy fingers or fairy hats. We used to put them on our fingers. Digitalis by any other name, used to regulate the heart arhythmia. Very poisonous.



One of the few times the old camera did a good job. Depth of field wasn't its forte. I figured that it was little better than a throw away camera with an ASA of 100.






Then the wind came up right before sunset and it lacerated the poppies.



I had to do a rose cliche, get it out of my system.






Two calla lilies (or Aram lilies) so like dancers. I love the forms. Very Martha Graham



Narcissus. An overcast or a rainy day was too much for the camera, I rarely got anything in focus. I miss my old SLR Pentax K-1000 and being able to focus my good lenses but I don't miss the darkroom chemicals. This was my training ground switching over to digital. I took a lot of photos before I figured out what would work. The digital SLRs were still in their infancy and were pretty lousy.




What's summer without basil? A member of the prolific mint family, some 2000 species and counting.



An urban succulent outside a Berkeley office. I loved the stark contrast of plant and door and wall. The people who worked there wanted to know why I would want to take a picture of a scrawny plant. They couldn't see it with fresh eyes. The pot was merely an outdoor ashtray to them.






Same leaf. The camera couldn't pick up the intense reds and greens next to the black edges of the leaf. I didn't know about photoshopping with layers or jpg deterioration and so the original pristine image is lost. I may try & salvage it at a later date. I was so desperate to capture is extraordinary color that I even scammed the leaf.




When I saw the rays of light streaming through the canna leaf up at the compost heap, I thought I was seeing things. I ran for my camera and was able to get a few shots before the sun moved and all was restored to ordinary light.

Most of these photos were taken in the fall of 2005 and 2006 with my first 3.1 megapixel digital camera that was so bad, it cost a whopping $29. The memory card cost more than the camera. But it had a great close up lens, better than my Nikon, but off color and pixellation was hard to work around. In this fall leaf resting on a black car hood, the graininess works. Very Seraut. See the shafts of sunlight streaming through the leaf as if it was a prism?

Someday I'll get a decent digital camera that can focus on what I actually see. it seems most of my best photos are taken with poor field of focus challenged cameras. The light fairly pulsed through the heart of the morning glory, only it was late afternoon. Unbelievable, the new 7.1 MP Nikon camera iisn't as good as the 5.1 MP Nikon I was using after I watered my cheap made in China camera. Ah well...training wheels.




added 2/2017 Google killed off Picasa, where I had the bulk of my photos stored, and left orphans all over the place. A nightmare for me, as I lost all my album prose, identifying people and places. To add insult to injury the photo albums also lost their creation dates, they were moved to the last edit date of the photo. These are salvaged from Facebook, so I'm saving them here for the prose as well. They're extremely small files. Loaded with artifacts. No use printing them.

Facebook photo album: Mo's Landscape Pix (photos)...

Facebook photo album: Mo's Landscape Pix (photos)

 Mo's Landscape Pix 

Some landscapes and odd things that caught my eye. I'm fairly new to the realm of digital photography. I don't yet have a good SLR digital camera as the quality is still so poor. They're a bit better now, but not as good as my trusty old Pentax K-1000. But they're still way too expensive for what they are.

So I'm using two entry level Nikons that are not really all that good. My old 1980s Nikon auto focus sport camera has a better lens than these digital cameras. Auto-focus leaves a lot to be desired and I miss being able to manually focus and choose my F-stops. 

I used to take photos for alternative newspapers in Sonoma County, CA. My realm was grainy black and white Tri-X film. I loved chiaroscuro light and Dorthea Lang was my inspiration. A car accident in 1996 put an end to my camera packing days. I'm only now coming back to my love of taking photographic images.

All works of art and photographs in these albums is © copyright by Maureen Hurley and may not be used in any endeavor or context.

This Facebook photo album was created November 10, 2007 so I'll use it as a temporary post date, until I figure out what to do with them all.  Most of the photos are from 2005-2006.

LOL. I posted the date as 20007, and Blogger didn't find that date at all strange.... So, I can backpost to 1970, and apparently forward post to the year 20,007. Will we even make it that long as a species, I wonder? 

The pergola at the headwaters of Lake Merritt, Oakland. After we lit our vigil candles, during a MoveOn rally on the first anniversary of the war, a huge stormfront moved in. Lightning struck the lake, thunder bellowed. It was if the sky was speaking. 

During the final dog days of summer, a fleet of antique chairs suddenly appeared, disappeared and then reappeared again—up and down our street like homeless cats, as people claimed them, then changed their minds and put them back out on the street. I think this one eventually made it into our neighbor's home. There was a real pith helmet sitting on the chair too. By the time I got to a camera and back to the chair, the helmet was gone. 2007

This old leather chair was less lucky, it never found a new home but there was something so surreal about it patiently facing a busy street.

Grotto, Andreas Canyon, Palm Springs desert. Mid-July, the temperature was pushing 120 degrees so we wallowed in an upper pool sheltered by house sized boulders on Andreas Creek, on the south-eastern slopes of Mt San Jacinto. Note that the boulders don't actually touch each other. the gap between them created a visual tension that made for bathing at their feet a little worrysome but they never shifted.

Eons of relentless water from snowmelt on Mt San Jacinto carved this deep gorge in Andreas Canyon. I think it's a type of schist or shale as it's layered. I love how the canyon wall looks like the trunk of the native California Washingtonia fan palm (right). I felt like a child caught between giant elephant's legs.

Rare native California Washingtonia fan palms in Andreas Creek gorge, Palm Springs desert. Native California palms are like redwoods, they need to keep their feet cool and damp year round. I think of them as southern California's equivalent to our northern California redwoods. Both have an extraordinarily small range and very specific micro climate needs. Redwoods are strictly coastal and extend from Big Sur to the Oregon border. Washingonia fan palm once extended as far north as San Francisco (one of the few palms that doesn't mind the cold). They need year round water and favor the fussures caused by the San Andreas fault because of the presence of the dense ultrabasic rock: serpentine, blueschist and clay that help hold onto year round. water If you use Google earth to look at the desert landscape, the palms are bright green strands on an otherwise arid and colorless landscape.  July 2007?

Mt. Diablo, from Ygnacio, Ca. Outside the NICU trauma center at John Muir Hospital, I was waiting for my cousin to come out of a coma, after a brutal hit and run car accident, and suddenly the clouds parted, I knew she'd recover. May 2004

Most of these photos were taken in the fall of 2005 and 2006 with my first 3.1 megapixel digital camera that was so bad, it cost a whopping $29. The memory card cost more than the camera. But it had a great close up lens, better than my Nikon, but off color and pixellation was hard to work around.

November moonrise over Nicasio Resevoir, I took this shot with my cheap camera while I was driving down the highway. I pulled over and tool lots more photos but this is the one that came out.... 2004?

Goat Rock, Sonoma County. This was taken with my cheap $29.95 Chinese camera. Looking south from Goat Rock. Note the solid carpet of dwarfed flowers. The dwarfed California poppies are less than 6 inches tall, I had to lay down to get to their level. Note the solid carpet of dwarfed flowers. I've never seen a spring like that one.

Goat Rock, Sonoma County. My old stomping grounds, and one of my favorite places on earth. The mouth of the Russian River is just north of Goat Rock, Sweet Colt's Foot blooming in the foreground is taller than I am.

Teaching Conceptual Optics in the Classroom

Back in the 1990s, I saw several classes listed for kids at the Lawrence Hall of Science, and a school wanted a science unit for GATE (in Alexander Valley), so I created an arts based optics class combining several class write ups from the LHS...which was wildly popular... I taught it for years evey spring.

I never quite teach it the same way twice, I guess I'm teaching conceptual optics with a K as in Newton's Opticks. I have a certain, if vague fondness for Max Planck, Heisinger, and we can't forget Schrodinger's cat! I once held a letter Einstein wrote, after the Bonb, and I had a a 2nd cousin who worked on the Manhatttan Project—the math gene skipped me. And my grasp of physics is challenged but I can show how scientific questioning and hypotheses are related to artisitc inquiry.

It all started one day when I was throwing light around the room with prisms, and as we looked at the rainbows on the ceiling. a kindergartener asked me quite seriously, "Are you a magician?"

I often start with the EM scale and show kids where visual light lives on it. Such a narrow band. Then we explore and create a variety of optical illusions. Benhan rings, eye fatigue; we view an upside down world with magnifying glasses, we look at the retina as mirror (and that pesky flaw in the mirror, the optic nerve that forces the brain to create illusions like hotdog fingers), concave and convex (camera) lenses, we use fishing line sculpture for fiber optics, etc.

We make Dame Edna glasses, with one red and one green celluloid lens, color in geometric shapes, make contrasting color collages and look at them vibrate. Very 1960s acid trip kind of thing...the kids are all wandering around looking at the world with rose and green colored lenses, exclaiming, "Oh WOW!" it's a real scream. Sadly, I can no longer get celluloid, I'm eeking out my last few scraps (from Australia). Plasticwrap doesn't work. Can't see thru it.

We also do some really basic examination of eye structure, with partners, mirrors and flashlights...talk abiut how humans and other creatures see, and what colors we see vs. spiders & dogs. I show them how cyan, magenta and yellow dye can make every color. The main thing is that kids have fun while exploring a tiny portion of the optic realm.

We chase rainbows with prisms, CDs, crystals, Calistoga water bottles (the indentations throw rainbows) and bubbles. I've found that feather and snakeskin both have prismatic qualities. One final project is to throw sunlight at a right angle and create rainbows on a shadowed wall.

I think what got me interested in this originally was that when Newton's Opticks was published, it spawned a revolution in art and poetry...people had a new relationship to color and light. And I'm an artist and poet... I've a KQED SPARK grant at Cleveland ES during the day (painting on silk—see it's not paint, as in pigment but dye which stains the fiber—back to physics again). This is just extra. I'm still learning as I go.

A BROKEN HALLELUJAH FOR SEAN RITTER

A BROKEN HALLELUJAH FOR SEAN RITTER

Someone once said in order to tell the poetic truth
sometimes you had to stretch it a little to get to the deeper truth.
My beautiful and tragically flawed mother was a poetic soul
and when her sister Toddy couldn't have children
she got right down to the heart of things.
She was a woman way ahead of her time.
She created a small bundle of poetic truth and gave it to her sister.

When I was young, my mother often dragged me into churches,
not on Sunday, but in the middle of the week to pray to St. Jude.
Her only wrongdoing was sharing the genetic coil
that unwrapped in Sean the addiction and the burden of California's third strike
that led to this premature shedding of his own mortal coil.
Sean's middle name was Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

Sure Sean was a teenage terror, and a troubled young man.
His actions put strain on the family and occasionally the law.
But my mother loved Sean with a fierce mother love
that transcended and forgave his flaws.
For Sean also inherited her talents and good qualities.

Sean was a carpenter. After the Loma Prieta earthquake
he restored fallen landmark buildings of Santa Cruz,
and he built showcase homes for myriad families
though he could never build a home within his own soul.
When my mother died, Sean stepped up to the plate to share the burden.
He was there to sing praises to the crazy hallelujah that was his mother.

But from that tragically flawed miracle called Sean Jude Ritter
other miraculous lives were formed.
I give my mother thanks to Sean
for his brothers, Barney, Myles and for Katie.
And from that miracle, I give thanks for
my nieces Tiffany, and little Emma Rose,
for Brittany, brand new Sean Logan, and of course, for Taryn.

Before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Irish poet Seamus Heaney
once said to me that as a tribe, we are a genius of poets.
Genius runs in the family but the flip side of the coin,
is that the piper has been well paid for his time.

When my mother died, she had a tape of Leonard Cohen's songs,
it was set to the song Broken Hallelujah—which became the Shrek theme.
I kept on playing that song all through the night
and when I got the news of Sean, that song played through my head
wouldn't let me sleep, so I downloaded three versions of it
and when I peeled away the onionskin layers of language
I realized the music was telling me that Sean was a broken hallelujah
and that I should praise him.

We are all connected by the deeper truth of family
bonds that cannot be broken by death alone.
Sean was a broken hallelujah. I will remember his strengths.
I hope that he will find a great scaffolding project in the mansions of God
within the folds of giving up of the individual self to the greater self
and to that vast ocean of love.

10/27/07

Sean Jude Ritter was my half-brother, but, because my aunt thought that she couldn't have kids, my mother, who was in no condition to raise a child, gave him to her to raise, and so he was raised as a cousin.

Being his half-sister, I wrote this piece, expecting to read it at his memorial, but my cousins and nieces completely ignored me, and didn't even acknowledge that Sean was my half-brother. I was polite, as I realized it wasn't about me, but, their grief. No need to feel snubbed—we were all grieving. So, I let it be. I lost this writing and, while cleaning out old files, I only now found it Jan 2/2014. It's lain fallow long enough. Time to let it go.  

A POEM FOR MT. ST. HELENS 1980

 A POEM FOR MT. ST. HELENS 1980

Here, the dawn breaks 

like a dancer veiled in vermillion.

Here, it arrives in crimson clouds 

arranged against cerulean skies.
It swirls and leaps in fleeting colors 

until we are dizzied about

and all out of breath.

10/5/2007? no date

don't know if it was for Helens or Helena, but 1980 suggests Helens,

Interruption, freewrite

Interruption: not to interrupt as in bury but to erupt like a volcano. Pyroclastic chaos. The sunrises and sunsets these days are lurid fan dancers of flaming color. The volcanoes on the other side of the world, on the other side of the hemisphere, are belching forth and the sky is a flamethrower of passion. No tender pink peach and mango hues, but raging carmines and crimsons like women in sequined red dresses. All eyes are on the night sky. No rosy-fingered dawn but entranced firewalkers on the hot coals of morning. We hardly know how to keep contain all this beauty and so we haul out our cameras to capture fleeting glance at this immorality of color and  maybe even an immortal lady in the red. You interrupt my sleep and  haunt me with your vermilion veil stretched across an indigo night. I am at odds with all this color and I cannot just sit and watch. I want to paint the sky and auroras of color—whether Australialis or Borealis, I'm not choosy. 

10/5/2007?

A POEM FOR MT. ST. HELENS 1980

Here the dawn breaks 

like a dancer veiled in vermillion.

Here it arrives in crimson clouds 

arranged against cerulean skies.
It swirls and leaps in fleeting colors 

until we are dizzied and all out of breath.

10/5/2007?

Buena Vista Social Club on AmieStreet Music

“Talk about finding solid gold on Amie Street Music! The Cuban All Star Band aka the Buena Vista Social Club, has gotta be the motherlode of Cuban music. The all stars of Cuban BC Big Band (Before Castro) era had a huge American following in Hot & Hip Havana from the Prohobition to the 1950s.

have a listen here

On the track, "Chan Chan," the late, great godfather of the son-bolero style, Compay Segundo, performs his own world famous composition with lead singer, Eliades Ochoa. That unmistakable four-chord opening "son" is Buena Vista Social Club's calling card!

Some of you might recall Wim Wenders' amazing 1997 award-winning documentary entitled "The Buena Vista Social Club," that showcased Old Havana's golden age of big band music during the 1940s.

In those days there were fraternal social clubs for all kinds of interests: cigar clubs, literary clubs, music clubs. Think mens' clubs, like the Bohemian Club. There was one Afro-Cuban music club, the Buena Vista Social Club which was abolished, the music nearly lost forever when socialism "abolished" racism. But hey, it gave us a communist-sanctioned version of mambo called salsa.

These world-class Cuban musicians who invented the mambo, lost their livelihood under the throes of communism, the king of mambo Perez Prado fled to Mexico and Ibriham Ferrer, the veritable honey-voiced Nat King Cole of Cuba, was reduced to shining shoes on the streets of Havana for pocket money.

Kudus to Ry Cooder who was instrumental in resurrecting these neglected stars of the golden Cuban musical tradition that languished some 40 years. Cooder's three resulting CDs, by "Los Super abuelos" (super grandaddies) of Cuban music, The (Afro) & the Cuban Allstars, and The Buena Vista Social Club, took off like wildfire—almost entirely by word of mouth.

The most famous CD, the Grammy award-winning album, the Buena Vista Social Club (1997), recorded in six days in Havana's vintage RCA-EGREM studio, went on to sell over 6 million copies, worldwide. Not bad for word of mouth.

Cooder was later prosecuted and fined for breaking the US trade embargo Trading with the Enemy Act.

These old Havana musicians really are super abuelos. Imagine this: Compay Segundo (1907-2003), who invented a seven-stringed musical instrument similar to an Andean charango, called the armónico, came to world fame at the age of 93 and in 2003, he recorded his final album, "Las Flores de la Vida" at the tender age of 96.

Ry Cooder said of his passing:
"The last of the best,
the oracle,
the source,
the one who represents where it all flows from"
is gone from us.

Horsemen, pass by.

Arby's Dancing Chimps Ad is Offensive & Racist

When I saw the Arby's dancing chimp ad, at first it made me laugh. I thought, Oh, Riverdance, oh how funny. Michael Flatley and all that. But it also made me uncomfortable. So I began to explore the basis for my gut reaction: The pseudo-scientific theories of race eugenics and social Darwinism raised its ugly Medusine head.

A sampling of social Darwinism in action— a la Dr. Beddoe's "index of nigrescence"—reads like a string of redneck blason populaire jokes: ...The Irish are an inferior race, genetically prone to violence, incapable of higher mental feats associated with human intelligence. Teaching algebra to an Irishman is like teaching a cat to churn butter. Study of Irish DNA proves they are closer to a weasel or an ape than an Englishman...

However, in my objection to the Arby's jigging apes ad, I find I am in a very small company. Everyone seems to love the Arby's ad— they find it funny. Intellectually I understand that they see the ad as a current pop cultural icon (I should be flattered. Have we arrived yet?) What disturbs me is that people don't get that it is a reference back to a deeper cultural icon based on centuries of racism.

The missing stereotype that begs to be added to the Arby's ad is a minstrel chorus of whiteface jigging chimps.