Penultimate Vacation Day

Vacation was niiiice. I like vacation. On the last day, we painted alebrijes. I bought them for Christmas, because one of the most relaxing days we had on our cruise in 2013 was a few hours painting alebrijes in Cozumel. Ahhh.

So that's what we did last Sunday.

We listed to the Red Album [aka Sons of Hawaii: Folk Music of Hawaii]. I bought it in mint condition many years ago, with autographs of all members, including Gabby Pahinui. We also listened to Buddy Fo Live at the Shell Bar.  

There was drama in real life, as the cheapo paint I bought for the project wasn't very thick. 

Mrguy pivoted after his purple was thin *and* wouldn't dry, and moved on to using black, which was thicker. He ended up making the most darling alebrije. 

My bottom layer of paint was thick and dried fast, but none of the other paints would cover it, so I needed to make the other paints mix with white (thick) for contrast. I often say that constraints are a good thing. I wound up really liking my result. After a while I used a tool that I bought in Bautzen many years ago that is used by Sorbian folks to decorate Easter eggs with colored wax. That really helped.

Our new friends have joined our original friends on the kitchen shelf.

And I started a little touchup on a pencil sharpener that an old boyfriend gave me years ago. I only use mechanical pencils, but I think this little friend is so sweet that I keep him around.

So ends holiday break 2025.

Adrian Lewis-Evans

Many years ago, my sister worked with an English lady, Christine Coles, at a bank in our home town. Christine was chic and funny. She was the first person I ever saw wear midnight blue eyeshadow, and sheer dark hose. She was married to another Brit, who had an Austin Powers haircut but a tweedy English country look. It was the 1970s. They moved back to England with their cat, Fred Fanackapan, and got a divorce.

When my mom and dad and I went to England, Ireland and Scotland in 1978 we visited Christine in her new digs. She'd bought a great house that had been standing for centuries, and she rehabbed it in a Medieval / 1970s aesthetic, exposing some beams and plastering other parts. In a room that wasn't finished she showed us how the walls were stuffed with what you had around you, which in this case was horse hair and lavender. It was dreamy.

She took us around to see a friend of hers who had a pottery studio nearby. His name was Adrian Lewis-Evans. He wasn't in, but she happened to have a key to the studio. I saw a mug that I liked, so we took it and tucked some money under a different mug. And we took a business card, which is how I managed to remember the guy's name for so many decades.

When I went off to college, this mug was my favorite. It was barrel shaped, a mottled green, ribbed. And vast. But one day it fell from a height of one foot onto the floor of my room, which was cement covered with thin carpet squares. It broke in two and I really felt the loss. I kept the business card, which is how I managed to keep the artist's name in my head. Until a few months ago.

Could I retrieve that guy's name? Could I find one of his mugs? Both things happened. I now have a mug in a different shape. The handle just *slightly* tilts toward your thumb, making it a comfortable grip for lifting to your lips. And if you're carrying the mug you can put your thumb *into* the mug for an extra secure grip.

It makes me happy.

New York -- Thanksgiving and After

Due to our early call on Thanksgiving, we chose a 3:15 dinner reservation. Our prix fixe dinner was inexpensive and totally rocked!

Pretty sure we slept 12 hours on Thursday.

We went to a great restaurant for breakfast and it was sunny and chill. We were the only people in there. Sorry for them, but it was completely delightful for us.

Then we headed uptown again to see the Nicholas Roerich museum. 

Here's the man himself:

For more on him, please see his wikipedia page. It's complicated. He was born rich in Russia, went to art school, fled, painted a bunch, was friends with Madame Blavatsky, a guy built him a skyscraper, then they fell out.

In 1935 Roerich got FDR to sign a treaty that would make us not blow up places of cultural or scientific importance in case of war. That was kinda cool.

His small drawings are nice. His big paintings are terrible. Once he discovered blue, it was all downhill.

Unfortunate floor detail:

Fascinating!

We went back to the hotel and to the airport. A relatively chill bit of travel ensued. I watched 4 episodes of the first season of Downton Abbey.

So ends our journey to New York to wrangle a balloon in the Macy's Parade.

Another Painting

If this painting weren't 55" x 43" I would consider bidding on it.

I have been in that room and know the view. It's a small corner adjacent to the modest kitchen in the house where I used to pose for artists some mornings. It fascinates me that Charles would paint such a grand-sized and dreamy painting of such an austere space. I remember coming in for a gig one day, and in that kitchen he was serving a pork chop to another man, in his bathrobe. I remember the pork chop, a cast iron pan and a striped terry robe.

Houses of that era just post earthquake often had a steep wooden staircase to the downstairs, with a galvanized pipe serving as the handrail. I remember the sweet smell of raw wood rising from the painting studio as I went downstairs, and the striped curtain on a thin cotton rope offering a bit of modesty as I changed into my own robe in the closet. A bare bulb with a beaded nickel pull chain hung overhead in that tiny space.

Few people who had a relationship with the kitchen in the painting are still alive. It makes me feel as if it would be a sin if I didn't buy it, as if I owe Charles and the painting something for knowing it's out there and disconnected from its context.

Or it's ok. My thoughts are just facts, and what Charles meant by painting this setting may have been something else entirely.

Probably gonna let it go.

One Rabbit Hole out of Many

There isn't enough time or energy to staunch the flow of things I want to know about. When a prompt asks about what's a recent rabbit hole I've gone down, I don't even know where to start. There are so many.

Recently I've been thinking of a drawing group that I used to sit for as an art model. The homeowner was a classically trained painter. His figures all have a similarity. The one below recently came up for auction, and it resembles me at the time that I used to sit for him. What I like about the painting is that it isn't me. But it isn't *not* me, either, since we blend into that similarity. We are all Benny Bufano / Vigeland-esqe. 

The only truth in this painting is the light. The woman sits facing a large set of windows. The floor is not blue. The wall is not white. She is perched on a chair, on a fair-sized riser in the lower level of a Victorian home on a steep hill. Behind her is a famous and gigantic 19th century map of Paris made of four enormous sheets that are tacked to the wall.

The room smells of sweet raw wood and sour coffee, housed in an old fashioned urn that you'd find at a church function. The whitener offered is a can of Carnation Evaporated Milk. To this day that is what I drink in my coffee.

The model changes in a small raw wood closet behind a curtain. A fat black string is tied to the pull chain of the lightbulb above. It's clear when you're working for this group of artists that you are experiencing something of another era. 

Because of this, and because I no longer know these people, most of whom have died, I sometimes try to recreate the room in my mind. What you can't see in the model's face is that the she sits across from artists in chairs two deep, in four hour stretches on two successive Mondays. There's Joe, my sister's old boyfriend, who introduced me to the group, and Dale, who lives in the same co-op he lived in back in the day. The hummer, who may have been the only female artist in the group. Henri, a tiny and charming man from Martinique, who dated Julia Child's sister during the war. He's the one who taught me the story of how (supposedly) the French field easel was invented by a man who was imprisoned during the war. 

I stopped sitting for drawing groups decades ago -- the work's so strenuous that I would sometimes almost faint. But I miss the environment, and these people and artists in general, really.

That was today's rabbit hole. I had a sudden thought that if I Googled Dale's first name and the name of the co-op (a former mayonnaise factory), I could probably learn his last name and what had happened to him. It worked. Glad to know he's still doing art.

I really should have bought this painting.

Hawaii 2025, Day 7

On our last day we drove to Kailua and had lunch at a very random but sweet Viet Thai restaurant that may already not exist. The food was pretty good, and it was just nice to eat somewhere where only locals would eat. 

It had one good sign -- the requisite storage-in-plain-sight situation that endeared me to the donut place in December (didn't take a photo, but they had all of their striped donut boxes piled as high as the ceiling in one corner).

On the way back from Kailua we stopped to take pictures of a sculpture I'd wanted to see. It resembles the Automium, but it is a sugar molecule. It sits on land that had once been a sugar plantation in Aiea.

For dinner we met with Miss T, whose parents lost their house in the Lahaina fires. As wildfires were happening back home at the time, and our insurer dropped us last year, we had much to learn from her experiences. Dinner was great, conversation was great. 

Ahhh.

Hawaii 2025, Day 5

The wind calmed down and we were able to truly swim at Sea Bear Beach. I walked out of the water so deeply relaxed.

We ate lunch at the museum. The Satoru Abe exhibition was completely satisfying.

And I got to visit my favorite Lee Bontecou, which was not being exhibited last time:

After happy hour at the hotel restaurant, we ate the rest of yesterday's burrito and watched Storage Wars. Funny.

Victor Vasarely and Gordon Onslow Ford

I was going to say that they made too much art, but they both lived to be 90, bless them.

Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer

Readers of mrsguy are aware of how much I like an auction. Shopping makes me happy, and by reviewing material at auction you learn about so much weird historical stuff that you wouldn't know about otherwise.

If you're me.

Today I got an email from Dorotheum. It's an auction house in Vienna. We stayed a few blocks from it in 2014, and were able to visit on a day when they had all of the items in an amazing auction of household items (furniture, lighting, hat stands, you name it) all laid out like dozens of rooms in a museum exhibition. And now I'm on their mailing list. I especially enjoy looking at their Old Masters auctions.

Today there was a good and small auction. One painting in particular was super compelling. I love paintings that also contain writing. Anyhoo, here you go:

Witness Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer. She was a wood merchant in the Netherlands who became a folk hero for helping defend the city of Haarlem against the Spanish. Hard to tell but the guy represented on the left (wearing a Spanish helmet) may have left his body elsewhere. Like it might just be a head. 

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. If someone hadn't already bid 5000 USD I might have been tempted. For more reading on Kenau, here is the Wikipedia article.

Genealogy Updates

After several months of waiting, the German genealogist got back to me. I am trying to determine the parents of my 5th great grandmother, who has an uncommon last name. I would really like to be able to tie her to Ferdinand Christian Touchy, but despite my research on him and his known descendants I can find no connection.

In the meantime, we have had no hospitalizations this past week, and mrguy is feeling much better and I've had time for a little genealogy and other puttering myself. I bought an Ikea shelving unit for the laundry room as a place to store extra cat food, cat litter, Ensure, and canned goods. It feels fantastic to get all of that stuff out of bins on the floor.

Another denizen of the laundry room is Ernst Gottlob's pastel portrait from 1775. I stashed it there until I had time to put it on the wall. I will say that this piece of art found a perfect home here with us. It's kinda ugly. It came up for auction in 2020 and nobody bought it. The fact that an unattractive pastel on vellum survived this long is kinda shocking. And somehow it made it 5,643 miles to our house in the US where an actual descendent of the artist could own and appreciate it. For a song. Did I mention that, inclusive of shipping, this thing cost me about $250? 

The other day after my Taskrabbit, Sarkis, left and I had put away many things in the new shelving unit in the laundry room mrguy pointed to the place on the wall in the kitchen den where I'd said I wanted to put it. He guided me in the pastel's placement, and I was way too lazy to get the real ladder from downstairs, so I got it as high as it could go. The goal was to get it high enough so that boy kitten couldn't reach. He immediately wanted to check it out. Hopefully he will not bring it crashing down.

And there it hangs, my mystery man gazing down on me, next to an Okiee Hashimoto print and a Katherine Sherwood.

Next, I have my eye on a portrait of Johnny Mathis.

Ernst Gottlob Arrived

It seems like ages ago that I bought the pastel. It arrived yesterday, in several separately wrapped pieces. It feels weird to acquire something so celebratory in the midst of life that feels dire. Is it ok to be happy? It felt calming to work on putting this artwork back together while listening to one of my many hours of the Barbra Streisand audiobook.

It is either a pastel or an aquatint. I don't know how to tell the difference. It was described as being on vellum.

The coolest thing is the hanger, forged out of iron. It makes it seem as if this was once hung in an important place. The subject was unidentified, but may have been a government official of some sort.

The paper covering the back of the work must have been pretty cool. There are still remnants of it on the framing.

Here is the pastel itself, unframed. It's pretty beat up, but cool. 

When I held it up to the light it looked super freaky. You can tell more about how it was drawn by seeing it this way.

I am guessing that this is his handwriting, which is crazy. 

I realized that the original spacer that belongs between the glazing and the pastel was in usable condition, so I just went for it and repackaged the piece.

I washed the glass. It has a big wave in one area, which is super cool, and also includes little tiny elongated bubbles. It seems like it would be original to the piece.

And here he is put together again, sitting in our non-fancy kitchen. I'm not quite sure where to hang him. I'd wanted to put him in the bathroom with the reproduction of the painting from art.com, but I really want to see him. Not sure. For now he lives in the laundry room.

Things I Bought: Ernst Gottlob

The other week I was looking at Liveauctioneers, as I often do. I decided to look for items from Leipzig. This is where my people lived for a few generations, and it's a town that mrguy and I have visited and like. So I ran a search and found a rather unattractive pastel portrait by my 5th great grandfather, Ernst Gottlob. His name was misspelled "Ernest", and that's why my saved search for his name in Liveauctioneers did not notify me. I bid on it and won. It was dead cheap. I'm sure it will be much more expensive with the auction house fee, tax, shipping from Berlin and custom packaging, but the base price is $216.

Sweet!

It will go in the lady bathroom, next to the copy on canvas of a portrait by him. My sister the painter was right, when she predicted that some day I would probably own a work by him. I'm psyched. I will be able to own something that he actually created one year before my 4th great grandmother was born. Super cool.

A Sweet Goodbye and a Cool Beginning

My friend and Pilates instructor, Miss T, is a powerful woman. We've been working out together since January of 2015 and that means that we have seen a lot of each others' major life transitions. When we met my mom was still living at home and T's son was in middle school. Mom has progressed into memory care, and T's son has graduated from architecture school, has his first professional gig as a junior architect, and is living in his first apartment.

She's flying off into a new future as well. Over the past 8 years she has set and met all of her goals -- without a partner, I might add. When we first got together she was a corporate trainer for the forklift company. And we started working together in the gym. Then she decided to get certified in Pilates. I hated Pilates but was devoted to her. She's sooo observant and smart and this is exactly what she should be doing. She made me like Pilates again.

Three years or so she decided to branch off and start her own business. She has developed and nurtured a whole group of people, the Strong Squad, who are devoted to her practice. I stayed a private client, so I'd say I'm Strong Squad adjacent. As Covid approached, she was the first person I knew to really take it seriously. She brought her clients onto Zoom without a hitch. She took masking and all protocols seriously, too, which is important to me even if we were not going to be seeing each other. I love her.

Her next goal was to buy a house. Home ownership was not possible here, and she worked with some real estate agents who probably didn't take her seriously, given her price point. She was briefly boo-ed up with someone in the Las Vegas area, and that expanded her view of what was possible. Her new agent there was not successful, so she moved on from him. One week after engaging her new agent she was in escrow in Henderson, NV. A perfect little flip with an out building where she can teach her clients. Room for her flock of tiny dogs and baby grand piano. She is moving pronto.

By way of goodbye she invited her people to ride the merry-go-round where a friend of hers works, but it rained. I would have missed out, being a cruise ship captive that week. But I had offered to help her pack, and she decided that I should help her pack her art. We were able to use most of the packing materials from a shipment that came to the archives before we left for the cruise, which was great reuse of materials that would have been otherwise discarded. And I suggested that she get some bedsheets (which were super helpful for some of her more substantial pieces). Those came from Buy Nothing. I bought us some of that stretchy cling wrap that movers use (which I felt bad about but was essential), and we were in business.

Our day was fantastic. I made her a plate of deviled eggs. And we picked 70's Soul music as our soundtrack, which is a place of overlap for us (I'm her mom's age). Then she turned me on to the only podcast she listens to, which is about music. We learned that "Got To Get You Into My Life" is a song about drugs. But more importantly, we howled with laughter and outrage that a) she had never realized that The Beatles wrote and performed it first and b) I had never realized that Earth Wind & Fire also made it a huge hit. Each of us had never heard the other. Then anyone coming through the door of her studio was quizzed about whether they knew that the song was by The Beatles. And we *both* wanted to tell people immediately -- just not the same people.

One of the folks who came by brought us masking tape for taping the glass on her artwork so it doesn't shatter in transit. And she brought the best garden burger I have had in a very long time.

Oh my gosh. We had a great afternoon. I got Private Playtime with T (and her flock) for most of the day. And then I went home and got into bed, cause that was a lot of work. Can't wait for her to get settled and put that art up on the walls of her new home. In just a few weeks we'll be doing the Pilates in a new setting, in the home that she owns and can do anything she wants in. 

Hoo-ray.

2023 Cruise -- Day 3

For a good time, go on a cocoa and alebrije painting excursion with Carlos. It was completely delightful and relaxing.

We met Carlos and he took us to a van, which ushered us to a location that teaches about the origins and development of cocoa. We also got to learn about the Aztec numbering system. Did I mention that our tour was small (6 of us) and all adults? They'd left their kids with their parents. Oh good.

I like to learn about plants, and there was some plant and bee knowledge laid on us. We got to eat some fresh-ground cocoa, which I'd never had. And then we went to a place called Barriocito, which was a cluster of cement buildings converted into and some purpose-built for outdoor tequila tasting and alebrije painting opportunities for tourists. 

Mrguy and I picked out some figures to paint that we thought were cats but turned out to be dogs. Photos of both together later, but here's mine in progress:

I don't know what it was, but painting little figurines for an hour and a half in a cement box in Mexico was the best relaxation I've had in many many months. And mrguy's alebrije is completely darling. He really snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat on this one, because he started painting the eye holes and ear interiors using a paintbrush whose hairs were clearly having a disagreement. It got all brushy and wild, and then he started to work with it further, and I found it so adorable that I just wanted to cry. It has personality for days. Mine is a little more uptight, as one could imagine.

I came back with cocoa bars, and our little figures, and some lotion made from cacao and a pink nativity scene and some tamarind liqueur which was delicious.

I could do that every day.

Hawaii 2022 Day 5

When nerds go on vacation they swim, eat, go to the library and look at newspapers on microfilm for 6 hours. If you're us, anyway.

During the beginning of the pandemic, a friend who grew up in Hawaii told me that his grandmother had written a column for a newspaper called the Pali Press. He didn't have copies of her work. I was dying to help. I looked up Pali Press on Worldcat and it turns out that the only library with holdings is the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Two of my favorite things are Hawaii and research, and we didn't go to Hawaii for almost three years. It was so frustrating! So when people asked what I was looking forward to doing in Hawaii they laughed when I said that my very specific plan was to go to the UH Manoa library.

The campus has some really cool sculptures and 60's and 70's architecture. And on a Sunday, the week before Thanksgiving, I would definitely go there *just* to hang out.

The library staff were suuuper helpful, and mrguy's has a keenly honed sense of where to find things that are eluding us in a library setting helped us home in on the right microfilm. Recall that although I went to library school, he's the only one of us that has actually *worked* in a library.

For the first few hours we were having a good time looking at vintage newspapers but not finding grandma's column. And we were going to starve, so we went to find some lunch. We had some yummy Mexican food at an outdoor spot near campus, where we were treated to some bawdy gossip by nearby elderly white ladies -- "You put it down and it goes 'wah, wah, wah'...You couldn't insert it if you tried, or at least I can't!" 

Oh. Vibrator talk! 

We went back to the library. I was looking at newspaper issues from the 1970s, and mrguy was in the 1960s. Just as we were ready to throw in the towel, he found grandma's first column! Now that we knew the years in which she wrote, we went to work and found a ton of them for our friend. Microfilm readers are so much fancier now, btw! You can email images to yourself. We were very happy to provide our friend with 40+ articles. That was so much fun.

In the meantime, things were blowing up at the forklift factory. The top guy toppled, and I got a text from a friend telling me the news. I texted her back: "Current view" (microfilm reader).

What a day! We scratched that itch, and went home. On the way out, the lights were on in Keller Hall, illuminating the stained glass from within. Love that font, too.

Hawaii 2022 Day 3

The previous post was a combo of day 1 and 2. 

On Day 3 we went swimming in the morning. Then we headed out to do some sculpture hunting. One of my ideas for this trip was to go in search of some of the sculpture listed in a book called Sculpture in the Sun: Hawaii's Art in Public Places. This book, which I'd bought about ten years ago, documents some of Hawaii's artists and artwork funded by the state's public art program. And my thought for the trip was that we could go find some of the art in person, which would lead us to go places we hadn't been before.

So we headed up to Leeward Community College, in Kaneohe. But before we could get to the freeway our path took us past Haili's Hawaiian Food, which is a favorite spot to pick up poi and other taste treats. We stopped and had a sit. They chopped up some dried aku for us, and packed up poi and served us chilled water while we chatted about how they'd fared during the hardest parts of the pandemic. They were a little surprised that out of towners made plans to visit them, but we're kinda used to surprising people.

On the way to Kaneohe we got the idea that all is no well when it comes to man and automobile:

Shiro's Saimin Haven

It doesn't take long to get to Kaneohe from town, and we were hungry so we stopped at a very old strip mall that we'd passed many times before. 

Our bellies full, we went across the freeway to Goodwill. I was still recovering from Covid and seemed to have an allergic reaction to something in the store that drove me out into the parking lot with a need for 800 kleenex and some cough drops. I recovered pretty quickly but WOW that was intense.

And then on to Leeward CC! Not sure why, but the campus was empty. The day was gorgeous. 

The brutalist design of the buildings was so lovely. We wandered around in search of architecture but there was none to be found. But when you turned around you realized that you were right there on the water with big big ships in the harbor.

Still on the hunt for sculpture we went back to the art department. Front doors weren't open, but I walked  around the back of the building and found some people sculpting outdoors. "Excuse me -- I'm looking for some public sculpture..." One person spoke up "I think it's outside the library. And inside the library."

Sure enough, the Satoru Abe sculpture we were looking for was outside the library. Thanks, sculptors! It was kinda awkwardly placed, and oddly monumental but tiny. But you could see how it was very cool at one time. None of my photos did it any justice. And I now see that we missed an exhibition by Tadashi Sato that was on at the time. Argh.

Outside the library was a lovely oculus, lined with mosaic, showing off the brilliant sky and a lone cloud:

Inside the library was some cool artwork by Kahi Ching.

A nice sunset awaited at the hotel.

We wrapped up our day at Stand Up Honolulu, a fairly new club on Cooke St. We met up with our old forklift friend, Ms T. One of the fun things about coming to Honolulu is that Ms T. lives here but she and we have none of the same points of reference. So we can take her to places she's never been. And she's up for everything and it's always a blast. So she met us at the club. She texted that she was scared to get out of her car, which was adorable. Anyhoo, we met in the parking lot and went up to the club. 

I like their bathroom keys!

We saw Andy Bumatai, who was fabulous. And it was a local crowd, but he didn't single us out like he did when we saw him back home. There was, however, a bit of a thing with a wiry guy in fatigues who came in late. He seemed to be altered, wiggly, and Andy couldn't resist dragging him into the act a bit since everyone had seen this guy enter the small club in the middle of his set. He was definitely walking the knife's edge a bit with this guy, and at more than one point I thought "This guy probably has a gun and we're going to die." But that didn't happen and we all had a good time. Except maybe for that one guy. 

I hope he's ok.