I loved the class and the drawing. For anyone in the Bay Area wanting an excellent visual art teacher, I strongly recommend Pam Lanza at UC Extension. We worked almost entirely in charcoal and on increasingly complex exercises that demanded we practice range of value, postitive/negative space, volume, perspective, composition. Here are three of my beginning beginner attempts!

Sunflowers

Exercise in unusual perspective

Portrait of William Trevor

Janie and I talked and talked when she visited last January. We're both hungry for time and space to surround us in memory and image. She suggested I read the new Lydia Davis translation of Proust's Swann's Way and I did. This collage is from that reading. Some of the other passages in the book I used on other pages:

"... Winter bedrooms in which, as soon as you are in bed, you bury your head in a nest braided of the most disparate things, a corner of the pillow, the top of the covers, a bit of shawl, the side of the bed and an issue of the Debats roses."

“So it was that, for a long time, when awakened at night, I remembered Combray again, I saw nothing of it but this sort of luminous panel, cut out among indistinct shadows, like those panels which the glow of a Bengal light or some electric projection will cut out and illuminate in a building whose other parts remain plunged in darkness.”

Most years, Sara and I see the two shows Alonzo King's Lines Ballet offers in San Francisco. We love some more than others, but love them all and are both so grateful for this choreographer's and these dancers' invitation to be present, attentive, to notice. I'm also grateful for all the images that arrive from Lines in the mail (not the troupe at the bottom, but the dancer in the wild red skirt) and that fill my collage book.

Gregory Boyle, Father Greg, quotes this line of Jack Gilbert's in Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. He also quotes Mark Torres: "We see in the homies what they don't see in themselves, until they do." One of the best descriptions of what I notice myself lately calling "the work." So grateful for Father Greg and for this book.

Loved, loved, loved the Cartier-Bresson exhibit at SF MOMA last fall and early winter. So many years of loving Cartier-Bresson photographs -- in the books that Ronnie brought to our marriage and Sara looked at when ill and lying in the alcove of our little house in Anchor Bay, in museums in many cities, later in exhibits when Sara was an au pair in Paris after high school and I visited her there.

The South African artist William Kentridge spoke at UC Berkeley in March 2009 during the time of his Five Themes exhibition at SF MOMA. I loved the show and the talk. I made a few collage using Kentridge's words and this is one.

Other quotes:

"I think what's productive about that dissonance is that it's accurate."
"...take fragments and make sense."
in History of the Main Complaint: "Whose lap am I lying in?"
"The nostalgia in the work is connected with moments of childhood that one tries to reclaim as a touchstone for authentic experience."
"...recognizing something when it appears."
"Understand the world as process rather than fact."
"There's  a knowledge of the glass through which you perceive the world, even if it's the projection screen. But it doesn't negate what is represented, nor that representation is possible."