9.17 japanese tea garden (field trip #44/50) if you have an art show in august in san francisco, chances are you’ll need to pick it up sometime in september, and if you do you’ll need a van big enough for several large canvases, so you’ll have to ask julie if she wants to go with you and tempt her with a day in the city, museums and gardens and lunch outside, and if she drives down the steep hills in her large van with no problem you’ll get to hug della at her gallery and she’ll help load the art and give you a poem diane di prima signed for you after she read in front of your paintings for her 80th birthday, then you’ll want to navigate your way through the sunny city to the park and go see the modernism show at the deyoung and the abstracts, and if you sit in front of a very large rothko you’ll probably tear up from the pure emotion of living, ecstasy and doom, and upstairs you’ll discover a new favorite artist painting in subtle shades of purple and green, and although it was just a field of color you’ll get so happy looking at it that you’ll smile all through lunch outside in the sculpture garden, and share three macaroons between you and spend your last dollars visiting the japanese tea gardens too because of a sweet memory from julie’s childhood, and then the purple princess flowers over by the hotdog carts, hydrangeas on the way back to the vanful of art and if you get out of the city just in time to beat most of the traffic you’ll get to hear julie’s great stories of how both her children came into the world, with a fabulous plot twist, and have even more love and respect for this woman’s work and life, and when you get home not terribly late you’ll unload the paintings and there will be art again in the kitchen for a few days, until it goes to the next place and because your day was so inspiring you’ll want to go back into the studio as soon as you can and paint on the biggest piece of canvas you can find, something subtle and new and full of feeling and then you’ll have big canvases filling up the hallways so that your family can’t walk through them so chances are you’ll have to take them to an art show in san francisco
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 15:35:20 +0000