How it all began.

In the winter of 2002 I began a new project. It was purely a business venture making scale model mock-ups of rooms to create sample wall murals. While I was working an impulse came from the unconscious that was purely playful. Just for fun, I followed it.

		This was the beginning. As I started the assembly of the scale model room. 11" x 17" on a 1" scale with scale model red oak flooring. I thought it might have the look of a loft. My plan was (and still is!) to paint wall murals. Madeline said that she has been decorating lofts and wants some mural models that she can sell to clients. It's a straightforward project. I thought, perhaps I could photograph the process and put it up on the internet in case other people wanted to learn how to build a model of a room, or, a doll house. I have a hand paper recycling site up and this would be one for making miniature models. But, something happened to my straightforward, down to business outlook.
		I pulled out a couple of characters and thought it would be fun to photograph them as if they were building the room. My father, bless his dear soul, carved the Santa Claus figure and I had picked up the 1" scale model doll at a miniature show I had attended with my friend Dorothea (rest her soul in heaven now, too). The photo is of the two dolls standing on my work table in my studio.
		I had a very difficult time deciding where to place the openings for the windows and finally asked Halina, a friend from the offices what she would do. Halina has the best suggestions and ideas and she recommended to put both windows on one wall. I also wasn't sure if I should attach the floor to the walls or leave it unattached and took a picture of my two "construction engineers" debating that very idea with a drawing board.

When I was a child growing up in the Midwest of the United States I used to spend hours in the park with my friends. We built elaborate fairy homes out of twigs and moss in the bowls of trees. We didn't know if they would be used but we hoped they would and we really wished to see a fairy. "You know," they told me at the end of one of our building sessions, "fairies only lived in Europe, not in America. When pioneers first came, there weren't any fairies over here." We were walking past the football field on the way home, "Really?" "Yes," one of them said, "but I heard that they were digging a tunnel from Europe to America and were going to get over here that way. They couldn't get on to the boats when people were coming over here but they were curious about the place and so they built this really long tunnel under the ocean to get here." That seemed like an awful lot of work for them to do and I wondered if it was necessary. "Maybe they could have just hidden in the boats and to get here that way," I offered. "No, someone would have seen them. They built the tunnel though and they might have gotten here by now. It's been a long time since the pioneers first came." I wondered how long it would take the fairies to dig a tunnel underneath the Atlantic Ocean. It was pretty big. Would 500 years be enough? My friends thought so, "500 years is a long time. They must be done by now." I wondered why they only lived in Europe first and not in America. But they didn't know that, just that they were only in Europe first. We spent the whole summer building the little houses while imagining the little people who might use the cottages. They weren't palaces. They were rustic, woodsy affairs. "Don't you think it would be fun for a group of fairies to be walking through the park and maybe they're tired and don't know where to sleep and, gosh, just look, they would come upon these great houses and have a place to stay!" We put in separate rooms so they could have a living room and a bedroom and we put in windows and stairways up onto roof decks with a balustrade. We gathered small pebbles and made paths leading up to the front door and covered the front yards with moss so it would be like grass for them. But we couldn't put in a good kitchen. There wasn't any way to make a stove or fire place because since the structure was made from leaves, twigs and moss, the whole place would burn down if you started a fire in it. "Well, maybe they're camping out and can have cold food." We created kitchen counters and even made a table and chairs out of bark before we made the front wall of the cottage closing it all in. LuAnn remembers building them and she has this to say: "We used to build them all the time around the roots of the big trees with Cathy, Shirley, and Judy. We would pretend real fairies lived there. We would leave food and water. Sometimes we would leave little trinkets. Those trees are still there and the roots are still perfect. I should really take my little Granddaughter, Alexie there and build some with her. She loves all the magic in the old Disney movies. She loves to pretend." [Thanks LuAnn!] There's a great movie for your granddaughter to watch called "A Fairy Tale - A True Story" with Peter O'Toole and Harvey Keitel. It's about two little girls at the turn of the century who were playing with a box camera and photographed fairies. It caused quite a stir in England when the pictures were published. I think there was a remake on television not too long ago. It's quite interesting. Makes you believe in fairies again! When I was a teenager I took a stroll through the park and looked at the old trees to see if anything remained of the fairy houses. There were actually a couple of places where I could see remnants of the old structures. They looked like little architectural ruins and I smiled to remember building them and how I had wondered if the houses would ever be used. When I got into my twenties, I happened to go through that area of the park and checked again but found that all evidence of the fairy homes was gone; blown away perhaps by too many years of wind, snow and rain. I chuckled thinking about whether or not fairies had walked underground all the way from Europe and if they ever got here or if the tunnel ever was completed. My friends had said that since they loved trees, the tunnel would have come up underneath a bunch of tree roots. I'm living in San Francisco now and when I go over into Marin County to hike up on Mt. Tamalpais, the view over the bay when the fog comes in looks exactly like descriptions I've read of the entrance to Avalon, the legendary Land of Fairie. But the entrance to Avalon is supposed to be in Glastonbury over in England. Holding on to the air of mystery and enchantment that a child's eyes can see is as difficult for an artist as anyone else. I have my work. The technical process of rendering what I see. Getting the color just right. Getting the texture smooth or fuzzy enough to trick the eye into thinking it's seeing clouds in the sky instead of paint on a canvas. And people are always talking about what is important in a piece of art work and should it be socially significant and make a commentary and be a communication or how decorative is it and will it sell to the corporate market or will the private collectors get interested or museums? Time goes on. I've been painting for many years. There's the whole problem of marketing and making a living and selling. The market place is quite different from the studio. Some artists are blessed with equal talents for creative inspiration and the charisma of salesmanship. Salvador Dali and Picasso both had those gifts in equal proportion. Andy Warhol connected with a great marketer by the name of Leo Castelli and Leo made Andy's name a household word. I've been working to develop my marketing skills, but it's been as difficult a task for me to accomplish as painting would be for an accountant or mathematician who love only numbers and logical sequences of facts. Sending out marketing packets and making resumes and flyers and searching for addresses of decorators, designers and galleries to send to. Talking to people and, oh, yes, working a regular part time job to pay the rent and keep the wolf away for years and years and years. Hmmmm.

Inner child? Story telling? Thinking of magical realms and making up tales? About ten years ago I tried making T-shirts. "You should make cards and T-shirts," my friends said to me. "Those really sell. You could make money that way." I'm always game to try things so I did a run of angel shirts. I sold quite a few too, but not enough to make a living from. I might as well take up plumbing, I thought, it pays better. Even though the image was my art work, I was still not making my deep inner vision, which is what my painting is all about and, I was spending all my time trying to market, not painting, and still working the part-time job to pay the rent and keep the wolf away. T-shirts didn't work. Cards would be more lucrative because the amount of money invested in inventory was less and the return on investment in terms of retail sales price was higher.

The T-shirts were hand screened by a master printer from Japan. He told me that there was a Japanese firm who wanted a wall mural painted on the outside of their store in Japan, 300 feet long. I was very excited. I had been painting in the Rhododendron Dell in Golden Gate Park and thought how beautiful it would be to do a 300 foot wall mural of rhododendrons. I asked my handsome and debonair friend Gary if I might put up a model wall mural in the atrium of his house as a sample of my work for the Japanese firm to see. Negotiations continued with the firm and I painted the mural out at Gary's. Hiroyuki got back to me with a final offer from Japan as to price and I was aghast. Per sq. foot they were offering only as much as someone here in the U.S. would give to a college student to paint the outside of their house during summer vacation. To render a mural the size they were requesting would require a team of workers to prep the walls. The walls had to be scored and underglazed. The entire surface primed and then the mural drawn and painted. It was impossible. They didn't have enough money to cover the cost, let alone have me fly over to Japan and live for a couple of months while the work progressed. I was disappointed and told Hiroyuki how much it would really cost. When he told the Japanese firm of my figures, they refused to pay and the deal was off. I let the project go, walked away from the mural without a second glance and got back to work.

Last year I signed up for Open Studios and decided to feature the mural. I registered Gary's address and sat inside the atrium for two days while various passersby on the Open Studios tours came and talked about art and looked at the mural. When I signed up for the tour I felt that I should make a scale model and do some more murals in miniature as samples of what could be done. But I didn't manage to find the time to do that before the tour in October. Sitting in the atrium felt like sitting inside of a painting. I had painted all of the walls as well as the ceiling. I was surrounded by color and was glad that I had not made any models because it wasn't until I had experienced the mural in a deep way that I realized what it was that I had created.

After the studio tour I began working on the box. But a shift took place in my processing. An impulse toward play began to surface.     I must be a bit of a surrealist because I rather delight in strange juxtapositions. The idea of Tarzan climbing through an open window standing on a floor with a photo of a tree behind him intrigued me.

Someone suggested to me that I could start making up stories with these scenes. At first I couldn't really see it. I felt rather blank. "Oh, sure, yeah, stories," I said. I wasn't' sure where all this was leading. I was supposed to be working on a wall mural mock-up so Madeline could show it to prospective clients. But this other "thing" seemed to be happening and I wanted to follow it. It felt like an impulse from the deep unconscious. I had no idea where it was going to lead but felt that I should give it full freedom to be expressed, what ever it turned out to be The second building project turned into a complete story and now, working on getting this up onto the net, more stories are coming out. Ah, well, you know, it's a start, as with the following:

Tarzan dropped by and I snapped a photo of him through the window before he stepped in. He doesn't like to use sidewalks and doors. He prefers climbing up to the second story of any house he is visiting and then crawls through the window. He says it keeps him in shape. He doesn't want to get flabby while visiting civilization. I thought he was a bit of an exhibitionist but he said, "No." The reason he goes around with so few clothes on is that air on the skin keeps you from getting allergies and that if people went around in breech cloths like they used to no one would have allergies anymore. "It's true, you know," he said, "the more skin exposed to air, the healthier the whole body is." I was a big fan of Tarzan movies when I was nine. The story continues in Winter 2002, cont.