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Well, I think I'd liked to just mention about the value of keeping a sketchbook
and this is my Pepperwood sketchbook.
And when I went to Pepperwood Preserve, I thought I was just going to go and start
making paintings
and I discovered that I really couldn't do that. I needed to draw first
and I needed to hike first. And so
I took a step back, I pulled out my sketchbook and I took walks
and I observed on all different levels what I saw. So I observed the close-up
of things like toyon berries...this is like very close
and then further away. The thing that struck me the most about Pepperwood when
I first came to Pepperwood
was how you didn't see Mt. St. Helena and then you went
over a ridge and there it was huge! And so many of my paintings have Mt. St. Helena in them.
And I became aware of thinking about the
history of mountains and artists who had painted mountains. Cézanne who painted
Mont Sainte-Victoire.
Here Hokusai,
who painted Mt. Fuji.
Georgia O'Keeffe who painted the Pedernal. And I started making notes
about that.
So, I'm just showing you through here...
I wrote at the same time. I use my sketchbook for reflections.
And just seeing this, it's like a movie of what my experience was.
And here's Mt. St. Helena
again with snow on it. And I have the dates...this is above Turtle Pond.
This is showing how things recede when
a storm was coming up. Sometimes it's just the feeling of the wind
blowing.
And then I have a series that shows...
let me see if I can get to it. Oh, this painting
which is a drawing which is almost like a painting.
I was sitting almost above this tree
on a hillside on a little deer trail. And this I worked on for a very long time
just building it like an etching, till I felt like I was really going
deep inside this oak tree.
And in the back right here is Mt. St. Helena.
And so it was with me all the time and I really begin to feel my history
of connecting to my family of
artists. And I had an instructor, Maya Schock,
who used to talk about, "my Grandfather
Cézanne, my Great-Grandfather Picasso,
my Great-Uncle Matisse," and she was Japanese.
But it was that we live in this family of
artists and that these are our teachers even though we've never met them.
And I was writing about it, always thinking about Mt. St. Helena.
Which leads me to think about Hokusai,
his 36 Views of Mt. Fuji, and
which leads me to Degas, who never went outside to paint landscapes
but nevertheless had a very Japanese series of
landscapes the that he made. Which leads me to Cézanne
and his Mont Sainte-Victoire. And then Georgia O'Keeffe's Pedernal.
She called it her mountain. And many years ago when I went to New Mexico,
I was sure with my friend Sally that we had found her house, but at the time they
wouldn't tell us.
But when we saw the Pedernal behind the certain house in the certain view
we said, "This is the place, becuase this is Georgia O'Keeffe's mountain."
And then there's the close-ups. I studied plants and I did close-ups of them.
I painted the negative spaces. I drew the negative spaces between
things. And one more thing that I'd like to say about my
art is that the shape of the space is really how I form
compositions. And this really shows it,
that the space is like the choreography
and the objects are like the dancers
or they are the punctuation in the space.
And...this is when I took a class
on identifying things and so these are my notes, my field notes.
And now I teach students in
the naturalist class how to draw
before they work with the scientists so that they can take
field notes that are drawings. And so that's another thing that I'm doing with
Pepperwood Preserve.
And I just want to show people that it's not such a miracle to be able to make a
drawing,
that if you just practice and you sit down and you observe and you let your pencil take
the journey
it appears on your page. So,
here's one last thing from it. This is a walk that I took
and a few notes going up a hill called Roller Coaster Hill.
And first there was light illuminating
the edges from the early morning sun.
Then climbing, light falls on a gentler
slope, dark woods beyond.
And these are my...just my writing in it.
Then, looking down into canyons,
up over treetops, beyond to suddenly near mountains,
and around the next bend, my eye will not hold still like a camera lens.
The first Zen view, the path flattens along the side
of the ridge and I'm just beginning to see over to where Mt. St. Helena
is going to be...I'm climbing to Mt. St. Helena.
A few more steps and she reveals herself
so grandly settled in her place like a great
earth goddess. Helena, robe spreading,
clothing the edges of eastern light.
And now, I got to the top, I looked at Mt. St. Helena.
And then I lay down on my stomach and this was my view.
Here's Mt. St. Helena, and here's shooting stars and buttercups,
seen from an artist lying on her stomach on the ground.
And they are now giant and the mountain is little in the
distance. And there you are.
It goes on.