Tibetan Temple #3

I rediscovered polymer clay after a 20 year hiatus. Back in the early 90s, I made beads and pins and jewelry items.

This time around, I had in mind the tiny lumberyard and all my little itty bitty constructions. For the Zendo, I formed a little platter, a bowl and a vase. In the midst of the experiments, I fell in love again with this versatile medium. There are a bunch of useless polymer items around my studio right now,  a giant red flower, some art deco pillars, on the way to making tiny creations for the Tibetan Temple:

Here is the tiny tile floor, made from a large sheet of polymer clay, conditioned and rolled out to accommodate my 7x7 inch plan. After baking, I cut out the corner tiles to make room for the 1x1 inch pillars.

The wood base for the temple is three sheets of basswood glued together and framed in around the tiles.

I was attracted to Buddhist teachings because of the three essentials: (a) ethical conduct, (b) mental discipline and (c) wisdom. Along the way, I learned about making malas (another post) and painting as a meditation.

While studying Thangka painting, mental discipline was necessary, as was patience with myself and for the slow emergence of anything resembling a Buddha.

This little tile floor will be painted blue, the base stained with red.

The miter box lessons from my son, Michael, come in handy with my tiny tools. I am pretty happy with my corners.

Tulku Jamyang and his wife, Chigme, invited me often to share their Tibetan dinners. It was all very mysterious to me, big bowls of chopped meat, tureens of thick soup, flat breads and sweet pastes and sticky rices. We ate heartily with fat spoons as well as our fingers and drank copious amounts of rich dark tea with coconut butter (no yaks for miles and miles).

When I work out my Tibetan Temple, I remember Tuklu Jamyang's teachings, and translate the sacred geometry into my constructions.

I have become more patient over the years through meditations of all kinds, other art forms, knitting, of course, but the memory of Mondays with Tulku Jamyang, his quiet teachings, his generous spirit, hover around me like a sprite.

As I teach myself to sculpt with polymer clay, I'll make a teacher, a student and a Buddha.

Read More

Tiny Zendo

The finished Tiny Zen Shrine. I think it has everything but a hanging lantern. I love it.

Read More

Studio 12b - Horsie

My friend, Sampson, built this rocking horse on the left for Danielle when she was a baby. It had been repainted several times. It had some pretty straggley black yarn for a mane and Horsie had fierce un-horsie eyes.

Now grown up, with her own baby on the way, Danielle's family commissioned me to restore Horsie to its glory.

I gave Horsie new eyes, a mane of real horse hair, a lovely dappled paint job and tried to rename him Happy the Appy. I believe the family still calls him Horsie.

Renamed Happy the Appy

Read More

Studio #12 - The Cottage

 
In the 7990 Cottage, the Give Someone You Love the Boot series was born, short-lived because I needed David’s help pouring the three gallons of slip into the gigantic boot mold and pouring the excess out of the mold.

The mold came with its own simple design. During the greenware stage, I sanded off the original designs and built more satisfying creations. I boldly posted my designs on my website, not imagining an order of 25 to a country club in Hawaii for a western-themed event. The boots were the prizes awarded.

Read More

Studio #12 - The Laundry Room +

We moved into our love nest about three weeks before our first marriage ceremony, dubbed the IRS wedding, on December 31, 2003.  You’ll hear about Wedding Number 2, Valentine’s Day, 2004 elsewhere in the blog.



At 7990 I packed most of my studio paraphernalia into the dark and rather gloomy laundry room and shared my creative space with the washer, dryer, a cat box and the water heater.
In this space, and spilling into the kitchen and onto the decks by necessity, I painted one little Jack Russell terrier sculpture for the Carmel Art Festival and the next year four plaster-cast dogs for CAF and five resin cat sculptures for a spin-off fundraiser.

Although I enjoyed painting the little terrier, the clean lines of the elegant Egyptian style dogs in 2005 allowed for exquisite details - layers of paint, tiny lines, many dots, applications of beads and other adornments. The CATZ, sponsored by the Monterey Symphony, the Mozart Society, Chamber Music Monterey Bay and the Carmel Music Society,  were PizziCato, MagnifiCat, Meowzart and Kitty Bouquet.

Tout Uncommon, Pied a Terrier, Haut Diggity Dog and Cinnabar represented four of the local retail shops. All dogs and cats were sold at auction to raise money for charities.

This event inspired me to organize twelve local artists to paint “Musical Chairs” for the Carmel Music Society 12th Night Auction/Dinner Dance. Once again, my studio spilled out of the laundry room, this time, onto the deck, where I spread a drop cloth and decorated two matching straight back chairs.

At 7990 my garden expanded from a few herbs in a pot to an acre of Sugar Pie pumpkins, artichokes, beans, tomatoes, and flowering herbs and this, too, became part of my outdoor studio, with a potting shed that held all the usual tools plus a mannequin names Kate Hepburn and a little corner with old wood, brushes and a few acrylic paints for sign making.

 When the tenant in the guest house moved on to greener pastures, I moved myself in lickety-split and spent the next few years amid myriad projects before the next folly took control of my desires.

Read More

Studio #11 - Above the Market

The studio above Carmel Valley Market: 800 square feet with two big rooms and the only unit in the building with its own bathroom.

Others more transient that I lived in a couple of the units: the red-headed, balloon-blowing clown and his wife lived behind their bike shop on the first floor facing the alley, a down-on-his-luck poet slept in sawdust in the woodworker’s back room. I was next door to an alcoholic hairdresser who sometimes slept in her chair at the salon and whose every utterance and popping cork and musical accompaniment was heard clearly through the paper thin walls. I was above the deli and and the pet groomer and down the hall from the chiropractor. The aromas were a mix of bleach, pastrami, flea soap and the herbal tea blend of the week. I added varnish, glue and ceramic glaze dust to the atmosphere.

This studio saw the biggest production of dinnerware, to use in service and sell at Ginna’s Cafe, just down the block. Under and over my designs, my friend and assistant Christine layered coats and coats of color and glazes to cups and plates and bowls, wrapped each piece in newsprint and delivered them to a local kiln for firing. Not too efficient, but our customers loved the colorful stuff painted with flowers and leaves and hearts.






Erin produced beautiful paper vessels and books.

After Ginna's Cafe closed, the studio above the market was my refuge, a place to rest while figuring out what to do next. The twenty years before had been one long catering job: for gurus real and fake, shamans and showmen, for business partners, leaders and would-be leaders, for parties and weddings and overnights in the mountains, always on the move, running my own business and/or managing a staff and driving my jeeps up and down the California coast.

It was time for me, my artist self and I. My writer, who had been not-so-patiently waiting, emerged.

It was in this studio where I accidentally whiffed Marine Varnish and half killed my thyroid and created a bunch of other chronic issues I won’t focus on (but will warn you about Marine Varnish accidentally up the nose).

It is where I settled down to create my cookbook series, Honey Baby Darlin’ -  where I realized I had something to write: 50 years of stories and recipes. The series started with my three year old alter ego, Little Glory, learning about the love of cooking at her mother’s knee on her grandfather’s farm in Ohio in 1951. I saw the project like a vision of a many-colored sunrise or a multi-layered cake with surprises inside.

I met David during this studio period and this became a familiar scene: Ginna at the big oak desk facing her iMac, tapping out ideas and words and scenes into the documents that would become her next books and David on the little sofa, singing ballads and love songs while playing his guitar.

Read More

Studio #10 - La Mesa

In San Diego, we found a house large enough to handle the entourage, including my son Michael (on the Chopra Center construction team), his five year old daughter, Taylor, two colleagues from Rainbow Ranch who came with me on this cooking adventure, their Dalmatian and two kittens.

My my, what a scene. How did I do it? At least our bedrooms were private and pretty quiet, and the recreation room became my studio, complete with a leather-padded bar, tiny sink and room enough for my workbench (that same piece of 4 x 8 plywood used as a bead table at Rainbow Ranch in the tipi).

I focused on ceramics here, bought time in a local ceramic studio kiln, and began producing dinner plates, chargers and service pieces for my kitchen and catering business. Thus began a long relationship with ceramics, as will become clear in the next blog posts.

The process of painting ceramics: the coats and coats of glaze, drying each layer completely before adding the next, multiple firings for different results, this fit into my hobby motto, “No Hurry.” After-hours hobbies shouldn’t have tight deadlines.  

I covered the workbench with newsprint and set up my first production line of mugs, platters, bowls and plates. For the next twenty years, in every studio and even in the kitchen during times when I had no studio or kiln, I painted plates. If needed, I shlepped my carefully wrapped and protected un-fired dinnerware collection to available kilns and finally, almost too late (i.e., close to the time my interest in ceramics peaked) I purchased my own kilns.

I can set up each of my three granddaughters for life with plates and bowls just from my kitchen cupboards. I could open a store.

The La Mesa house rec room looked out over a canyon of Douglas fir and oak trees. I opened two sets of french doors for the soft San Diego breeze. I cleaned up all my ceramic mess one night, set the plywood workbench on milk cartons on the floor, piled up pillows around it and invited family, friends and staff over for a Moroccan feast. We draped gauzy curtains around and lanterns and candles glowed on the table. We passed around huge Ginna-made platters and bowls of spicy meat dishes, couscous and rice and sweets. We drank wine and copious cups of tea out of Ginna-made cups and told stories in the dark.

Read More

Studio #9 - The Tipi at Rainbow Ranch

Ah, the tipi: the most romantic of my living spaces, the  simplest of studios. A life-long attraction to Native American lore, life style and spirituality inspired my 400 “square foot” tipi at Rainbow Ranch in Calistoga. That and the 5 x 8 room (next to the kitchen and across from the pantry) they called the “Chef’s Quarters.” Nothing inspires creativity more than necessity.





Nomadic Tipi Makers of Bend, Oregon, those same folks who created the leather tipis for Dances with Wolves, made a canvas one to my specs and sent it by UPS in a cardboard box with instructions on how to raise a tipi. The 23-foot poles came by freight in another, longer truck.



I had a pad built on the slope of a gentle hill near the kitchen door and filled the pad with gravel from the nearby quarry, laying conduit and electrical wiring underneath, which, ultimately, came up beside my bed and by my “bead table.”




With a friend I constructed a giant, egg (tipi floor-space) shaped template out of newspapers and with a utility knife cut a piece of beige remnant carpet to exactly fit inside the tipi on top of a canvas pad on top of the even gravel. The lining attached to the poles was supposed to protect me from rain dripping in and the opening at the top rarely drizzled wetness or smoke into the space.



I faced the opening east to greet the morning sun. I placed my hundred and fifty year old wood stove in the center and learned how to vent the tipi by directing the smoke poles away from the direction of the wind.

True to my Native American period, I made mostly dangly things out of seed beads: earrings, medicine bags and loom-work bracelets and belt buckles. I sat on the floor on my zafu pillow and created beadwork on a table made from a 4 x 8 plywood plank perched on four milk crates.

As always during my cooking career, there was a
studio on the side for after hours, no matter when those hours were, or how few hours were available to me. At Rainbow, my day began at 5 with building a fire and setting bread dough to rise and ended about 8:30 pm with warm milk and cookies for the guests, so productivity was not the operative goal for this studio. Even so, just sitting down cross-legged in front of the tiny fire and doing a few weavings or sorting beads or graphing a project helped settle my mind and body for the night.



Several years later while living in San Diego and cheffing at the Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla, my Aunt Bonne came for a visit. I showed her photos of my tipi. She said, “Well, that makes sense.”

“Oh? Why?” I asked.

“Because of that Cherokee in your father’s lineage.”

“What? What Cherokee?” News to me.






The conversation went a long way to explain my interest, not to mention Dark Sage, the imaginary Indian Medicine Man friend of my childhood.

Read More

Studio #8 - Who has time for a studio?

The early 90s: fly fishing and camping in summers, skiing and snow play in winter. I stashed the studio in the garage, thinking I was taking some production time off. This only worked for about two weeks. Soon the guest room bed was covered with art materials and the drawing board squeezed into the tiny space by the window.

A less significant studio, but the one Sampson’s 9 year old daughter, Danielle, after a week of playing with beads and fimo dough, dubbed forevermore Camp Ginna.









Faces painted and birthday cakes made for my brother, Jess and niece, Kelly: A German Chocolate cake for him, a Faerie Land cake for he.

Tea and scones with Sampson in Glastonbury. I can see thoughts of flour, sugar and butter in those eyes, can't you? These scones may have been the beginning of a journey into the world of baking, where art studios blurred with kitchens and food became the primary artistic expression.

Read More

Studio #6 - Spring Mountain

“Where will you go?” My friend Sampson asked during the phone call when I told him my restless self would be on the move again.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have my little bed-sit in LA.”

“You hate LA,” he said.

“I know, I know.”

“Come see my Paradise on the mountain,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. He didn’t see me roll my eyes, of course, but he knew.

“Stop rolling your eyes,” he said, “and come check it out. I have room.”

So I hopped a plane, which he met in San Francisco with flowers from his garden and a bottle of wine from his favorite vineyard, Folie a Deux. I wondered if he was trying to tell me something. It was too late, if he was. He was 80, I was approaching 50, we’d been the best of friends for years. Sampson invariably introduced me as his “little sister.”

Late afternoon sun glittered over the dormant Napa Valley grape vines, turning the bushy little plants of tiny mustard flowers into shmears of buttery yellow. We drove up, up the hill to the property, seven hundred acres of grapes and seven different kinds of trees. The owner, a cheese and washing machine heir, gave Sam carte blanche to design and build him a house on his little man-made lake tucked away in the forest of oaks, pine, madrone, manzanita, fur, cedar and maple.

Sam lived in a three bedroom/two bath caretaker’s cottage. After three days of friendship, conversation, good food and rest, he said, in distillation, “You need healing. Do it here.”

And so I did.

There’s not much to say about the tiny bedroom/studio on Spring Mountain: a drawing board and a folding table. One of Sam’s architect friends taught me how to make miniature houses to scale.

I made a tea house. I made earrings out of old book papers and created a bunch of largely unsell-able stuff for a couple of local gift shows.

I did heal on that mountain. How can you not? Quality air, with only the sounds of the hoot owls and coyotes at night. No more honk, honk, beep beep, hurry hurry. Just me, my own bed, my yoga mat, music, some good food, someone to talk to and a little room for my ebbing and flowing stash of art paraphernalia. It was good.

Read More

Studio on the Move

About the time I stepped into the Orchard studio in Ojai, my attentions got diverted to LA, where I signed up for the UCLA Design Program. Classes in the arts of Trompe l’oeil, Shiburi dying and surface design (and a little dip back into commercial acting) took me all over downtown LA to various teacher’s studios (and several theaters).

I divided my time between Ojai and LA for the next three years, transformed the kitchens of my two borrowed apartments into temporary art spaces (one in Santa Monica and one in the fancy shmancy apartments in Marina Del Rey) until I rented a friend’s guesthouse in Culver City, where I could prepare my artsy homework and rehearse for acting classes unseen and unheard.

Three years! What was I thinking? Compared to my life now (where I walk to the grocery store and post office and take the car out twice a week), I was in Hell - on and off the freeway all day, stuck in traffic on Highway 10 at 11pm, looking for places to park ad nauseum. Schlepping art materials and paraphernalia up stairs and into elevators and down escalators. Driving back and forth to Ojai for long weekends, busy busy, and then back to LA for three days of classes.

On those long weekends, I reveled in my Orchard, sucked in the rarified orangey air. I drew ideas in the dirt with a stick. John Denver crooned in my ear, reminding me… just reminding me.

On an eleven day “Burro Trip” in the high Sierra with the Headmaster of Thacher School and 10 other intrepid hikers, I took my drawing pad, a few pencils and a journal and kept a few notes.


I made a Bisquick Apple Cake, buried in two pie tins in the coals of a hot fire, drank out of a tin mug, led burros, hiked trails, ate Toblarone Bars that taste like Heaven on top of a mountain after an all day hike.

Better, to be out on the trail than stuck in LA traffic. GB

Read More