While You're Staying Home

One positive thing about this quarantine (aside from it flattening the curve and saving lives!) is that it has encouraged an appreciation for nature, creativity and connection for many. Here you will find some great resources for fun, educational and mostly free links. Scroll to the bottom if you are only interested in finding organizations to help with COVID-19 relief.

For some comic relief, check out this funny song This Ain’t No Living by Tim Heidecker (and filmed by his daughter) about having to stay home. And here’s a great segment about a formerly incarcerated artist, Mr. Wash, and his advice on how to handle being confined at this time.

Are you feeling anxious? I found this Vox read How to Manage Anxiety During a Pandemic to be helpful.

If you have any other resources you’d like to share, you can leave the info in a comment below :)

ART & ILLUSTRATION (see below for museums)

Carson Ellis, an illustrator is giving daily prompts for drawing with her #quarantineartclub

Danielle Krysa, The Jealous Curator, is doing the #30dayartquarantine

Mo Willems, children’s book illustrator is doing Lunch Doodles on YouTube

Oliver Jeffers, children’s book author and illustrator, is reading his books live on Instagram.

Wendy MacNaughton, illustrator extraordinaire is teaching kids art classes live at 10am. She did this for one week and has decided to for the rest of the school year. Find the art under #drawtogether

You can find more free drawing classes with illustrators here

For a variety of online classes, try

• The Arsenal, a classes and art supply store in San Jose, is offering online figure drawing for $15 a session without instruction. They have other classes as well.

• Creativebug - they have a free trial

• Skillshare, an online learning community focusing on creative classes

• YouTube - free, just search any media and/or subject and you will find instruction videos

EDUCATION

Cal Academy of Sciences - animal webcams, STEM and more

Instructables - free tutorials on a variety of subjects

Monterey Bay Aquarium - you can enjoy a virtual visit

NASA - Space Center Houston app

The San Diego Zoo - live cams

Scholastic - learn at home for students

Here’s a robust list of educational resources.

EXERCISE

Fitness Blender has great free workouts

Grokker is free during the outbreak

Westca is showing free workouts on Instagram

Yoga with Adrienne free yoga that’s good for beginners and beyond

LANGUAGES

Duolingo

Open Culture

MUSEUMS

Louvre Museum

The Met

Musee d’Orsay

The National Museum of Anthropology - Mexico City

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

The Natural History Museum

The Smithsonian

And find a longer list here.

This list of home tours (including Frida Kahlo’s!) will keep you busy for awhile.

MUSIC

A list of All Musicians Streaming Live Concerts (although I’m sure there’s more than this!)

POSITIVITY

Good News Movement is what you think it is: positive news stories including ones related to the pandemic. If you aren’t on Instagram, you can find them on Facebook too.

RELIEF

While some are lucky to work from home (and still have jobs), medical and emergency workers, delivery drivers, grocery store workers, janitors, recently unemployed, restaurant workers, postal workers, the homeless, trash collectors, those in underserved communities and more do not have the same privilege of being safe at home.

ACLU

American Red Cross - donate blood

Best Friends - no-kill animal rescue and advocacy

Boys and Girls Club of America

CERF+ for visual artists

COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund - help at-risk countries track the spread of the virus, testing, vaccine development and protective equipment for medical workers

Direct Relief - delivering protective gear for medical workers

Feeding America

Meals on Wheels

No Kid Hungry

Restaurant Workers Community Foundation or see A List of Relief Funds for Restaurants, Bars, and Food Service Workers

You can also support the businesses you love by:

• Purchase online or gift cards from retail, galleries or restaurants.

• Order books online from your favorite bookstores (rather than Amazon). I love Powell’s in Portland.

• Sharing how others can support them on social media

Take care, stay healthy and wash your hands!

2019!

“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

I love thinking back on the previous year and writing a list of what I want to do for the new year. There’s something about doing it that blows my mind. I will go back through the list from the year before and find that I actually checked some of them off. Ok, so I know this is kind of a maximal list, but it’s just how I am. Always dreaming big. Thank you for indulging me with this post! I hope it encourages you to make a list too. I swear they work :)

2018 Review

• Backpacked the Trinity Alps

• Camped

• Really learned to handle my stress better

• Ran a watercolor workshop at an Obi Kaufmann book signing event

• Painted things that initiated commissions (wildflowers, etc.). It’s a nice domino effect, to share some art and have people want me to make more.

• Painted my first large-scale mural for the Pow! Wow! San Jose Festival

• Painted commissions for the holidays with ZERO advertising! Not once did I have to announce or market portraits. You people came to me. I kind of despise marketing so I got lucky this year.

• Received portrait orders in late 2018 that I will be starting in 2019. Already busy! That feels good

2019

Non-art

• Read everyday. Read more. Read first thing in the morning. Less TV/screens.

• Meditate everyday

• Jiu jitsu training/competition

• Work on my rusty Spanish (and maybe even French)
• Restring my guitar (with the strings I bought 6 months ago!) and start playing again

• See Zion and Bryce National Parks (we just got a National Parks Pass)

• Plan a trip abroad

• Continue with eating non-processed foods and no refined sugar

Art

• For my birthday in February, I am going to do my own kind of art residency. We are renting a cabin for a week and I’ll be making everyday I’m there.

• Spend more time with art friends with art outings

• Original art for art show later in the year

• Make bigger, better art

• Redesign website (AGAIN?!)

• I’ll try to post more art on social media. I have a love/hate relationship with it, so I kind of avoid it much of the time.

• Start my 2020 calendar in January! Duh, I realized that I should do one or two images a month and have it done early, since this last two years I have not been able to make one. 

• End my holiday portrait orders earlier. I kid you not, I end up delivering my last portraits on the 23rd or 24th and it’s just too stressful.

• Design a book cover

• Take a few art classes

• Paint another mural

• Paint more from life

• Paint more from imagination

• Go with the flow! I really don’t want to plan out too much of this life.

Pow! Wow! San Jose Mural

I was honored to be a part of the Pow! Wow! San Jose Festival. Painting a mural had been on my list of things I wanted to do and I have been needing a new and exciting project in my life. At first, I felt totally ready for it, knowing it was a big undertaking, but feeling like I would have no problem carrying it out. But after a couple of days of laying in background color, I started to see what I was really in for.

Don’t these art studios look like they could use some paint? The Alameda Artworks had recently painted the doors and added the black awnings. It worked out perfectly to paint a day and night scene with the yellow and purple door colors. They are just close enough to the color scheme, but don’t totally blend in where you don’t notice them.

I must say I love being on a lift. There’s something about driving around and working on a giant painting that is so satisfying.

I sketched the mural idea out multiple times and with different colors and imagery, so going in I didn’t project my sketch on the wall. I decided to start with painting the sky and drawing the circle and figured I could freehand the rest.

A little about the idea behind the mural. When I was offered two walls, I thought of dualities, specifically between male and female. I always loved painting diptychs (and triptychs and even up to 8 panels). I have been thinking about how we need more feminine energy in the world right now. How we need more balance and less chaos within ourselves. All of the plants within the circles are healing plants: saw palmetto, juniper, aloe, red clover, agave, burdock root, witch hazel, kava, cordycep and reishi mushrooms, lemongrass and more. It felt good to channel difficult feelings I have politically, environmentally and personally into this. The overall feeling people voiced is that the painting made them calm or relaxed. I think that was the point.

Photo by Lanny Nguyen

Photo by Lanny Nguyen

I was pretty excited at this point, starting to see it come to life. I was offered the two big walls, but asked if I could also paint the center and top. At a certain point, I started to feel like I wasn’t going to get to the top, but a couple days before I finished I knew I had to make it happen.

That damn textured wall.

Friends came by and brought me mint from their garden. Another friend brought green tea multiple days. I will treasure all the friends and family who came by to talk, bring me treats or help.

Here you can easily see how textured the wall was. The white primer is showing through and when I painted leaf shapes it’s not solid, not covering the surface. I kept telling people that a lot of walls that murals are painted on are more like the ocean, with waves in them, but this wall was like the earth with caves and crevasses. I had to push paint into the wall’s surface for it to go on smoothly. I soon discovered that foam brushes are the best thing for detail on a wall this size. I keep joking about how I can’t wait to do another mural, but I want to touch the wall before saying yes!

Photo by Lanny Nguyen

As I developed the mural, I paid very careful attention to each color that was used. Here you can see the lower part of the circle on the left had a green background and the lower part of the circle on the right had an orange background. The ground on the right was also a pale pink. I was trying to really push my color choices with this mural. That green was too predictable for a landscape. You can see below the lower half of the circle on the left became a deep red orange. It was so exciting to mix this color and just try it and then cover the whole area.

I had lots of visitors including a friend’s kid and her friend who helped me paint part of it. I would love to do a community mural at some point, where people can help me with the early stages. Roan and Sean of The Arsenal did this for their Pow! Wow! mural and it turned out great.

A few things made my wall take an extra week from the allotted week: the textured wall made it super hard to paint details, I was going with an intuitive approach where I painted freehand on the wall rather than project or draw beforehand (except for the circles) and I changed colors on large areas a few times. Another reason is adding the upper level to the mural. If you know my work from some years back, I always loved painting A-frame homes so that peak needed paint.

Another challenge is that the mural attracted a ton of visitors. I had forgotten about this aspect of public art. When I painted an electrical box years ago, people from the neighborhood stopped to talk to me. And when I sketch in public, people stop to talk to me. It actually takes quite a bit of time to talk, but I am grateful for all the visitors I had. I am used to working alone in my studio so it takes some getting used to.

The final mural on each side. Working on this mural was really transformative for me. I have been wanting to paint bigger and this was as big as it gets. It made me realize how important color is to me. I guess that’s something I realize over and over again. And I see how long it has taken me to get here. This mural was really meaningful for me on a personal level. The themes explored here will definitely be explored in future work. I might even make a couple of large paintings similar to this day and night theme. I worked so hard on this. I worked 10-14 hours a day the first week, waking up early and heading out in the cold to get started. I stayed late with spotlights, hungry, tired and my legs aching. I took good care of myself. Everyday, I made a mushroom mate tea elixir, filled a few bottles of water and packed a nut and fruit mix. I made my lunch many of the days. It feels so good for me to eat healthy. The second week I stuck to an 8 hour workday until the last day when I was at the wall about 14 hours. I asked for help and had the best assistance from my husband, my friend Bella, my friend Laura and my friend Amy. I pushed myself harder than I had in a long time artistically. I totally needed this.

Here’s the beautiful Pow! Wow! San Jose crew at a blessing ceremony with Calpulli Tonalehqueh. The folks behind the festival did an amazing job of bringing artists together with field trips, events and dinners. Truly an awesome experience.

Weird Transition

This has been a strange year. It hasn’t gone as I’ve expected. Last spring my computer failed and they couldn’t save the data. I could send it off for a ton of money for them to try and retrieve it, but there’s no guarantee. Then, when I checked the backup drive, it had failed too. Same story. I can send it out for a ton of money, but it’s a gamble on whether they can get the data. It’s so strange to have a chunk of your work history disappear. Now I don’t want to be too dramatic, since I have a lot of images on my website, Instagram, on Google Drive and in random emails, but still, I know quite a few images, especially older ones are missing. Plus, the missing files were edited so even if I gathered images they would have to be cleaned up in Photoshop all over again. This also means files for prints. Prints have been an awesome source of side income for me, but I never planned on selling prints initially. I am all about original art.

Yet in a big way, it’s a good excuse for a fresh start. I feel like I have been in the same place for awhile. I feel like I haven’t grown the way I’d like to. I want to work in a variety of mediums, work bigger and get out of my comfort zone. I want to make art that really excites me.

I recently had friends over for an art night and it was awesome. I have been occasionally having friends in my studio to work and I want to make this a more regular thing. When I used to run Sofa Sketch, a monthly art meet up, we had a great time. But working in my studio is the best. We aren’t working in a public place, there’s a variety of supplies to grab and use. I love it. Oh, and I provide great snacks. There’s nothing like having friends to experiment with and talk to about art and other things.

This is a recent succulent painting I made for a client for a housewarming gift. With all the commissions lately, I have been thinking more about my personal work and I have so many ideas right now. From subject/theme to medium, there are a lot of ideas I want to explore.

I haven’t had much of a plan, which I normally do. It feels good to go with the flow lately. All I want to do is get deeper into my work and take it somewhere exciting. So, art night with friends, more experimenting, going to shows and evolving my work. I am going to roll with this freer approach and it seems to be a good track since the work isn’t slowing down.

What’s I’m thinking about lately…

• Painting a mural - which I will be doing for Pow! Wow! San Jose in October!

• Taking a break from commissions after October or after the new year

• Hosting more art nights and more art field trips

• Going to art shows

• Finishing my proposal for a book

• Making a new zine

• Returning to different mediums - Sumi ink, acrylic ink, ceramics, textiles and trying oils again since I learned how you can reduce the toxicity of them

• Thinking over whether to do limited prints of only most asked for images

• Making a BIG painting - been hard to get to since I’ve had so many commissions!

• Caring about the work and not the money, which has made me make more of it lately

The Last Couple of Weeks

Client Work

I have been super busy with client work between a wedding invitation and paintings of various subjects. I can't wait to share them when I'm done! I also hope to get some free art time this summer to work on personal work. I have lots of ideas I want to get to.

 

The Dancing Cat Workshop

Last weekend I taught a watercolor workshop at The Dancing Cat. I love their space! It's always amazing to see what they come up with, but I found this group to really impress me with their compositions, colors and style. We had a blast talking and painting with each other. I love my neighborhood and how we have lots of great things going on like this.

 

Figure Drawing

I have been getting back into figure drawing these last couple of weeks. The poses were from one minute to twenty-five minutes. As usual, I find drawing women easier, but after working on the short poses, I got into working on drawing the male model. I am finding this to be really good for me. Even though I don't always paint the human figure in my regular work, it teaches you so much about form, light, composition and your style. I hope I can continue to make time in my schedule for this! 

Next Weekend!

I already had tickets for this Obi Kaufmann talk and book signing at Forager in San Jose, CA. I even spread the word to friends and got them to sign up for it. So it was super exciting to be invited to do a watercolor table for attendees of the event. Guests will be able to make a small watercolor painting with me. Obi Kaufmann is a rad backpacker and illustrator. He primarily works in watercolor and recently wrote The California Field Atlas. This event is in collaboration with the Peninsula Open Space Trust, an amazing organization that preserves natural space in the area. They will be working to fight against Measure B and preserve this special open space in San Jose, North Coyote Valley. Bring your love of nature and signup here!