The Top Ten Reasons Why...

Regular readers of my blog will already know that The Man and I are looking forward to retiring within the next few years. He's had more than enough time working for the steel industry, and a job that gets him up at 4:00 in the morning and not home until 5:30 pm on a good day. But beyond the need to stop slaving for big industry is the soul's cry (his and mine) for something more fulfilling: we crave a new adventure. We are long past due for a big change. Change can be scary, change can intimidate. But it also beckons with the promise of new riches, new inspiration. Places to go, people to meet, ideas to hear, new colors and textures to life. Who is satisfied with waiting for change to come and get you? That sort usually involves something unpleasant, something out of control, maybe something on the road to breakdown. 

We want to choose our highway, and so we are planning. We are seeking this big move in both attitude, and in longitude and latitude. We have explored our options and have settled on the Rose City, Portland, Oregon. What could possibly be bad about a place that celebrates the fabled flower of romance? So why else Portland? (It rains a lot, you know? Yes, we've heard. But in reality no more than it rains where we live now. Have you ever lived with the extravagant weather of the South Shore of Lake Michigan? Wind, rain, ice, snow, humidity, tornadoes, oh, and of course, sunshine, which Portland has, too.)

But why this spot in the Pacific Northwest above anywhere else in this broad and varied county? I could go on for days about the positive experiences we've had on our three trips to the frontier, but let's just say: when you know, you know. There is a personality to a place. It either embraces you or it doesn't. And this one welcomes us more broadly every time we return.

So in no particular order of rank, how about my top ten list of why I'm sooo ready to move to Portland:

1. Size Matters. I have always wanted to live in a downtown neighborhood of a chosen city, be surrounded by the the culture, just walk out my door and fall into life, yet not get lost in the noise, the dark of the high rise canyons, the overwhelming energy of the larger metropolis, like our current closest, Chicago. Portland is sized to human scale. (And we love how close the airport is.)

Sampling fresh baked croissants and more. Hairnets required.

Portland Walking Tours: Epicurean Excursion

We attended cooking school for local farmers market cuisine.

A favorite deli from past trips has a new outpost.

Silk, a Vietnamese restaurant in the Pearl District.

2. Feed Me. Now that I'm here, I need places to eat. Interesting and varied cuisines abound, farmer's markets pretty much every day of the week, cooking classes, micro breweries, wineries, chocolatiers. Artisan is a word with integrity here.

Drinking "Fresh Laundry" at McCormick and Schmick's

A Latin beat, and couples are up dancing.

3. Party Hearty. We appreciate that that when people have places to gather and a town with civic pride, all sorts of gatherings for the purpose of a good time will arise. And this is not only for the young. Families and singles, young and older, locals and tourists, all find planned and spontaneous entertainment around every corner.

4. Hitchin' a Ride (on public transit).I have lived in and visited cities all my life, and used subways, trains and buses from Toronto to Philly to DC. Where I live now, they pretty much don't understand the concept; Portland, outstanding transit system.

Outside the Portland Art Museum 

The Oregon Symphony prepares to play a free concert in the river front park.

Just fun!

Saturday Market

5. Cultcha'. All sorts, from free symphony that we happened on in the Tom McCall waterfront park, to Latin quartet on a public plaza in the middle of town, to fantasy auto shows at the art museum, quilts at the Japanese gardens, Saturday market crafters, Voodoo Donuts (a touristy but wonderfully fun institution of sugary badness.)

Cycles...

to kayaks...

to Segways!

6. River and Bridges. The romance of water and a way to cross over. In Chicago it's a lake that looks like the ocean. Here a river called the Willamette fits the scale of the city. I grew up in Philly and the gritty industrial areas and rail yards are a part of what defines city for me. But here they decided to move the road and make that waterfront accessible for recreation. A big loop of exercise and possibilities.

View of downtown from the East bank.

View of downtown from the West Hills.

7. Hills and Views. It's a little like San Fran, built on hills. Mt. Hood watches over, and if you are located on higher ground, you can see all the way past Mt. St. Helen's to Mt. Rainer. Now that's a view you can boast about! So many wonderful attractions on the West Hills--zoo, rose gardens, forested parks.

8. Fit, Active and Attractive. The population that is. Almost seem like another species when compared to home. Oh, and way more laid back. The airport experience alone tells the tale before you even set foot out the door. And when you do, the air will be sweeter and feel cleaner. No lie.

Portlandia

9. Ideas into Action. Fitness here is more than a personal philosophy. It also pertains to making society a better place. Civic involvement in creating a positive future is on display around every corner. It's like a workshop for the rest of the country to get a taste of the possibilities. Watch us, we're willing to try the grand experiments. The excitement is palpable.

The Columbia River Gorge at Crown Point

Multnomah Falls

Mount Hood

Wine Country in the Willamette Valley

The Oregon Coast near Yachats

10. It's in Oregon! One of the most beautiful states in the nation, with  an embarrassment of riches, it boggles the mind--mountains, rivers, oceans, fertile valleys, wildlife. A retirement playground with abundant variety.

I'm going to need a little extra income to support that city lifestyle. Do you think the tourism board needs any help?

Practice Makes Perfect

There is so much to tell about my recent travels out West, but first I must catch you up on my summer of art.

I have been doing some sort of visual creative expression all my life. If you have read my blog in the past, you know something of my history of the pursuit of art vs craft. Every day there is a project (or three, or ten) that I wake up to and look forward to working on. And just as surely as I continue to "work" every day, I constantly hear from whose who do not, how talented I am, and how easy it is for me to achieve success. I use to just thank them for the complement and move on, but lately I feel the need to clarify the reality. No, it's not all innate talent, it's about passion to try and try again. And it is also about work and practice. Something over fifty years of daily practice surely will improve and refine many skills, and passion for the process as well as the results will show in the final product.

I have been a quilter for twenty years and with every quilted project I did, I included new techniques and skills. In quilting as in every other visual art, I make the project my own. This means that every time I start something, I must use my own ingenuity to figure out technical aspects, and how to best alter them to fit the needs of my vision. Above all, I strive to improve my own artistry and express something important to myself.

This first image is from a photo of my husband that appeared in one of my first blog entries last year. I am learning to interpret a photo in fabric without being entirely literal about color and detail. I show here phase one, where the basic color values in the self-imposed rule of only four gradations is maintained. Should I decide to add more details, they will be added in free-motion machine stitching. Right now I am contemplating the needs.

I am in a collaboration with the "subject" who would like to see this made into a panel of three different colorways, each building in intensity, and finished without a binding, but with something "more modern". My husband is an engineer, not an artist in practice, but he is every bit as creative, because he sees, and feels passionately about his vision.

This next photo shows how I was kidnapped by a yarn shop in Ashland, OR, a couple weeks ago. I had vowed that I wasn't going to knit this fall, but after being dragged in the door kicking and screaming and made to sit on the floor sorting out the endless choices of color in this Koigu yarn, I had to buy the pattern too, and of course, a new size needle missing from my vast collection. Even though I have been knitting since childhood, I have never done the Linen Stitch. I think the approximately 28,000 stitches in the completed scarf will give me enough practice to master it.

Here is the completed, but yet to be mounted, bordered and framed first piece from my Sumptuous Surface Embroidery class last month. I was sad not to have the time to participate as fully during the class as I would have liked, but learned so many new stitches and have acquired so many new resources to go forward, that I am glad I signed up when I did. The best part of the class was getting to design the piece from the ground up, and use a visual journal as a design tool for the first time. It now makes sense to me how to use one.

When I last left you at "Art Camp," with Carla Sonheim, I had completed week one of "Imaginary Creatures." Week two was even more exciting as we had a super intense practice at drawing faces. "Faces 101, " was literally drawing at least 101 faces in five days. Practice Makes Perfect! (Or at least it begins to free you and take away the fear of what you can't do.) I loved drawing faces so much I can't wait to get back to it. Each day we would warm up with expressive lines and then move on to two complete and different techniques and mediums.

One liners are "ten second" sketches you do by not lifting your pen from the page. They capture the essence of your subject.

Cheater blinds are blind contour drawings done with just a little bit of looking. We used two sizes of felt tipped pens, and no erasing. These are from pictures of high school teachers in my yearbook.

These "eraser faces" are drawn with the finger and a kneaded eraser using pastel powder: lay down the colors with your fingertip, then erase in the highlighted potions of the face. Repeat as necessary. Just a couple minutes for each.

Ink drawing done with the dropper from the bottle, and blotted with toilet paper. Wonderfully fun.

Extra Credit: Tea box drawing. We used gessoed tea box or other packaging as a base, and drew in markers. My first experience with Copic markers (the grey shades). I'm collecting them now.

The final week of art camp with Carla was the "Junk Mail Artist Book". This was an opportunity to create the paper media for a storybook from gessoed and watercolor painted junk mail, and then draw a storybook of about five two-page spreads with a front and back cover. All in one five day period!!

While creating the physical book we practiced the technique of creating interactive drawings: drawings that connect from one page to another.

My tied together book with offset pages  waiting for the story.

A look at all the page spreads before they had the story added. Some of the papers were bubble wrap liners of envelopes. Some had plastic windows. Some printed ads. All sorts of colors and textures showing through the layers of water colored gesso.

The completed front cover.

The completed back cover. I hope you will take a look at the rest of the book and the rest of the faces by checking out my photostream on flikr.

And so it was an intense and productive month. Practice may not make perfect, but it will lead to self-discovery and wonder.
The things we can do when we just: Do It!

Art Camp or Bust

When I was a kid, summer was all about the out-of-doors: enjoying the weather (never too hot for a kid), the friends in the neighborhood (real face-to-face friends), playing in water to keep cool, using your imagination and savoring the sweetness of something inherently fleeting. Times were simpler and we were of average means. Water might mean the huge community pool with mobs bobbing, then sunning on towels on the hard concrete, the foot deep baby pool in the backyard, or most especially, running through the lawn sprinkler. We built forts under trees, caught fireflies in jars, drank pitchers of Kool Aid and waited every day for the pied piper music of the ice cream truck. Life, in short, was great.

Our favorite past time, beside art, is observing nature and the garden.

Chillin' after a wild storm played havoc with our nature.

Sunset on the front porch is one of the best times of our camp day. Work done, satisfaction registered.

But for some we knew, there was a different sort of summer routine. People with more money then we went away to "camp" where they took lessons in the arts, rode horses and played team sports, put on plays, sang around the campfire, and engaged in myriad mysteries we just knew belonged only to that special society. We were given a taste of camp several times in our youth, but that meant a two week session at a nearby day program, or the endless overnight misery of Girl Scout  camp, with latrines  we not only used but had to clean, sleeping bags in wet fields, tents with huge spiders on the ceiling, and more chores than fun.

Chores still need tending.

July 1 ? 

I thought I had found my final chance at real camp the summer after my freshman year at Penn State (sweet 1970). I was recruited with a lot of other foolish dreamers in need of a few bucks and a place to continue escaping home, to be a counselor in the Catskills of New York, in a little town called Bethel. If you're old enough, you might recall that's where the original Woodstock music festival had taken place just the previous summer.  I went with high hopes that quickly turned to homesickness and desperation after realizing I was neither cut out for camp life, nor was I the camper. I was a designated slave for ten weeks at slave wages and almost no free time, and nursemaid to five year olds who wet their beds and didn't like sports in the sun any better than I did. I broke out after two and a half weeks (along with about a third of the staff who felt the same way), returned home to work in a factory assembling riot control guns in a time when I was likely to be marching and in need of "control". But those were days when you did what was necessary to be independent of your parents, and I was trying the best I knew how.

In "Shoot Your Art" with Steve Sonheim, I learned about the magic of a couple of shop lights and a level. This quilt, called "Dancing Solo" was made specially for illustrating the design technique, blind painting, for the book "Design Explorations for the Creative Quilter" by Katie Pasquini Masopust.

Getting psyched for summer camp with Carla, we drew on our imaginations and sidewalk cracks.

Fast forward to my current life in "almost" retirement. In a sense, every summer day is camp. Sure I have many household responsibilities to fit in to the mix, but I can craft a day to take advantage of sun and summer opportunities. This year I have been doing what I would have if I could have as a kid: attending art camp.  Of course, it hasn't been the sleepover variety, but that would've involved a lot of travel if it did. You see, my teachers and fellow campers are kind of spread out around the world. So we meet each morning at the computer to get our schedule, go off to a day of creative sessions (with some responsibilities squeezed in) and return at dusk to share around the campfire, although our fire is the flame of "flikr" or Yahoo groups or our counselors' blogs. Works great except for having to make your own s'mores. But I don't have to take swimming lessons (not a water baby), I get to sleep in a private air conditioned room, eat when and what I want. For exercise, I choose to walk every day for 4-7 miles  instead of having to sit on the sideline of a hated team sport, have iced coffee breaks on the porch and a grownup beverage, if I desire, at day's end. I don't have to drink bug juice in a saggy wet suit or be bullied by mean girls. I do miss the story time around the fire, but some days the stories on campmates blogs are far more captivating, and I get to choose which ones to read.

Learning to loosen up and be expressive, these one-liners were so much fun.

As was scribbling.

Coffee  breaks are important in a hectic camp schedule.

Just a little shout-out to my great counselors: thanks, Steve and Carla Sonheim (calling in from Seattle, USA) for photography and drawing lessons, and happy attitudes. Thanks to Sharon Boggon, stitcher extraordinaire (all the way from winter in Canberra, AU) for her excellent lessons in creative embroidery design, the art of discipline with freedom. You can check them out for your next summer camp. But why wait, when summer is a state of mind, and it will soon be summer again in other parts of the camping planet.

At the end of week one, four paintings entirely from imagination, with the help of Carla's techniques for discovery.

Never a plan, just working from the "gut" and having fun.

When you finally like them, they are done, and not a minute before!

Oh, and as counselor Carla says is the first order of business: "spring out of bed enthusiastically!" You know that I always do!

My "blob" creatures are full of joy!