Diary 10-18 to 10-29-15

Dear Diary – Got home from Bay Area just a while ago. Had a great time. Sushi Sam’s twice in San Mateo !! And several other excellent restaurants. Have gotten to see many friends, mostly artists, including excellent lunch with C at her house on the cliff at Half Moon Bay. Watched the Dem and Repub debates. Here’s 5 notes to you that I wrote while in Bay Area but couldn’t post:

10/28 Dear Diary – Pears in pastels at L’s studio, using the technique that I’m experimenting with in charcoal. I think I can get somewhere with it. Certainly having a good time.

10/24 Dear Diary – The weather has been excellent here, so I’ve gotten exercise every morning, walking L’s deux gros chiens, up and down mild hills, on streets lined with beautifully landscaped (drought-resistant but suffering) Eichlers.  We’ve also spent an afternoon in her studio, where I did pear still lifes in charcoal, and an afternoon at Portola (an art “colony” that is now a beautifully landscaped small park-like place with gallery, studio-shops, restaurant etc) where I did a charcoal landscape.  Plus, 2 3-hr sessions with nude models, in people’s large studios, again charcoal.

10/23 Dear Diary – Went into The City, to the John Pence Gallery, for the opening of a large show of still lifes in the neo-classical style. Very impressive work, even though not my Modernist thing. Five painters whom L has taken classes with, including Juliette Aristides who teaches at Gage, in Seattle, had work included, and four of them were at the opening (I’ve actually studied with one of them, Noah Buchanan, who is a born teacher and really knows his stuff).

10/20 Dear Diary  –  Yesterday eve, friend L and I saw “Bridge of Spies.”  Excellent film (Coen Brothers), well acted, good visuals.  It’s an historical and thematic film with very important messages:  the relationships between compassion and justice/law, and between personal integrity, citizen integrity, and national integrity, especially in the way our integrity depends on the integrity of our Constitution–which we must uphold.  For instance, We Do Not Torture.

10/18 Dear Diary – Here I am in San Mateo with no way of posting, but I’ll post this to you when I get home.  Yesterday we went to The City to the Geary Theatre, for an old folks Sunday matinee (plus some college students?), good production of O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness”.  It takes place on July 4, 1906, but was first performed in 1933, and it was fun to hear the references to socialism, Marx, and the first reformer-President Roosevelt.  O’N lightly showed his class- and immigrant-consciousness (accurately) in the servant girl and the prostitute Irish-American (as was O’N’s father, in his very successful stage presence).  Since I have grandkids aged 18 and 19, I much enjoyed the “rebel with a cause” (being rebellious), free-thinking, first-loving Richard, with his Rubayat and Swinburne and moonlit beach.  (The audience btw impressively responded to the fin-de-siecle poetry and the references to “Hedda Gabler”–a bunch of former English majors?)