CMAppleton

Insomnia

This is my newest painting and it is entered in a local show. The title "Insomnia" came to me while working on it, for the second or third time, at about 3AM. It's watercolor, gouache, collage, and ink drawing. For the collage I used photocopied pages of my journals and sketchbooks along with family photos, photos of my paintings, and found papers and objects. My poor photography has blurred a lot of the detail, especially the drawing and some of the words. I love working this way because it is a long process and the more I work on it the more it becomes 'me.' I just keep adding stuff; it becomes an autobiography, very personal. By the time this piece was finished I felt I had spilled my guts on to the paper, and then remembered with a pang that it was for sale at the show I had sent the entry form to the week before. I priced it before it was anywhere near finished and before I knew I would be so attached to it. I photographed it, framed it, and delivered it to the show. A few days later I opened the photo, and by then the attachment was worn off and I was fine with parting with it. I'm working on a new one now, larger, using the same media, titled 'Confessions.'

Drawing Chaos

I got up late this morning because I was up until 3AM working on a painting which I decided to title “Insomnia.”
After watching a Tivo'd "House Hunters" while eating a bowl of Grape Nuts I went downstairs to my studio/office/file room/ gym/storage room and just looking at it all exhausted me. It is such a disaster of STUFF. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to start organizing and cleaning, or just light a match. So I decided to draw it in all its complicated messy disturbing chaos. It took me a while because I was determined to capture not only the feeling of chaos, but to record every object as it sits, to do no cleaning in my drawing but to draw the tangle of wires, the piles of collage papers, the charcoal and pencil drawings and post-it notes tacked all over the walls, open tubes of dried up paint, dirty paint water, all of it. (A confession of sorts.) The designer in me forced some minor rearrangements for the benefit of composition. There are some errors, logic errors, things left out like drawing the edge of a table before realizing the lamp leg had to go in front of it. Sometimes I corrected, sometimes I just left things dangling in space or missing some of their parts.
I like drawing messes. Maybe I could ascribe some value to these drawings by saying they are a statement of some kind. My thoughtful comment on the waste of civilization, the superfluous baggage we need in order to exist. Our material nature creating waste. The reality is I just like to draw complicated things. I like my art to take a long time, I like to work on it and work on it and I hate to stop. (Probably because once I stop I am not sure when I will start again.) I remember in art school a teacher who was very dramatic and serious during our critiques. He liked to talk about pain and suffering and subjugation by authority figures and deprivation and repressed feelings – all this stuff as it related to the piece he was talking about at the time. (It was the early 70s.) I decided to draw a big ball of string in great detail, the layers overlapping endlessly; it was an etching and it took a long time. I was just messing with him, curious to see what he would say about what I drew simply as an academic exercise. During the critique when he got to my piece he used it as an analogy of the human psyche, it's complicated layers, the outside covering up the inside, etc. I was nodding my head while he was talking -- right on! Right ON! What a sellout I am.

ZOO Trip

The National Zoo is in the middle of the Washington, D.C., in Rock Creek Park, 2700 acres of wild, natural woods with mature pine, oak, maple, cherry, birch, ash, and tangled brush. The zoo has kept much of the woodsy aspect of the surrounding terrain, and is a perfect place to sit with a lemonade and people-watch to your heart's content.

But then there's the animals. I suppose it's better for animals to end up in the zoo than to be chased and murdered by poachers, but why can't we just leave them alone entirely?
This zoo does a ton of education and conservation work. One project is their effort to save the Asian Elephant by tracking herd movement by satellite for eventual relocation so they won't be killed by the Asian farmers they tangle with. They spend a fortune educating organizations, schools and visitors to keep us all informed and sensitive to the plight of animals. They have cleverly placed little bits of information all over the place. While in the ladies restroom I learned that the hippo, who fans his poo out to fertilize a wide area, is actually doing this because of a deal he made with the gods. His job is to mow the grass, but it's pretty hot along the Nile where he's from, so he asked the gods if he could mow by night and swim by day to stay cool. The gods' said yes on the condition that he wouldn't eat any of the fish. The hippo agreed to fan out his poo so the gods could see there were no bones and he wasn't eating any fish.
Elephants have been on the planet for at least 26 million years. Sometimes they cross waterways by walking on the bottom with their trunk above the water, like a snorkeler.
Rampant poaching has reduced the African Elephant population by over 50%, and that was just between 1979 and 1989. They eat 600 to 700 lbs of food daily and drink 30 gallons of water. The drawings here were done on paper made with elephant poo, sold in the zoo store. (Part of the proceeds go to elephant conservation.) They live about 70 years. We saw a friendly giraffe who seemed to enjoy watching the people who were watching him. He actually walked all the way around his living area to reposition his long neck so he could watch the visitors while he munched on his lunch. The drawings below were done of passersby. On the left a big burly man walking by, by himself, holding a tiny pink and yellow striped purse with a plastic heart on the side. On the right is an Indian woman in a gorgeous coral and yellow sari, with a 'Red Socks' baseball cap and Nike tennis shoes.

Tim Clark

He was an artist, a designer, a surfer, a collector of vintage cars, a father of two wonderful daughters, he was my cousin Tim. He died suddenly late last year and it is still impossible to believe he is gone. He was witty, smart, opinionated, political, hip. He was sixty when he died but seemed decades younger. At his memorial at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, he was honored with rooms full of his newest work, large wild colorful abstracts. The gallery's rooms were also packed with his family and artists and friends, so many who loved him. Many spoke in front of the group, all with warm recollections of experiences that made the rest of us chuckle and smile because we knew him too. One comment that brought a lot of giggles was "He could always find the cloud in a silver lining." That was so true, and always with humor. Tim had a way with words and you could get him started by mentioning the proliferation of Starbucks, money, traffic, the phone company, the national debt, trying to survive as an artist, phone solicitors, TV, ocean pollution, agents, etc. Once I got him started just by saying I liked the movie Chicago. I am grateful that the last time I saw him I thought to thank him for spending time with my sister in the final months of her illness.

The photographs below, beginning with the top and moving down:

1. This is a watercolor of his, 22" x 30." It's interesting and whimsical, like Tim.
2. Recent photo of Tim.
3. Tim with his mother, my aunt Sue, also an artist, a fashion illustrator. (When the newspapers were full of those wonderful fashion drawings). When I was a kid I used to look through the paper daily for her drawings and often found them, wish I'd saved just one. When she retired she painted, mostly watercolors.
4. Tim with one of his paintings behind him.
5. Tim with my aunt Sue sitting on the steps of their house on Bluff Place in San Pedro.
6. Sue with Tim.
7. "Monette's Milk" the family business.
8. Memorial announcement.

Artist Friends

This watercolor is by Gretchen Hughes and is called "Cliff Dwellers." It won first place in the California Gold Coast Watercolor Society show.

Bill Hughes did this watercolor which was accepted to the California Gold Coast Watercolor Society show where he was also invited to do a demo.