Budding Impressionist

by Lisa 

  

This is a painting by my student Susie who is a landscape designer. She is naturally interested in landscape painting and I decided to park her outside the Art Institute for the past two classes so she could try her hand at it. I first had her paint colored blocks outside using Lois Griffel’s method of impressionistic painting. This week she moved on to painting a landscape of the nearby water tower that is in clear view of the Institute using the same technique. There is not a whole lot of scenery near us, but I happen to like the classical cylindrical form of the tower with the free form trees around it. My other students were not interested in standing outside in 100 degree temperatures and chose to stay inside in the comfort of the studio. Susie was most determined, and I thought she did a beautiful job, and managed to capture the effect of the bright sunlight. This technique utilizes the palette knife, and it’s not easy. We all loved her piece when she was done, and next week everyone has decided to paint outside!!!

I Can Fix That Car Myself

by WR Jones

  Lisa’s story and near tragedy brought back memories of my own car repair experiences.   Not as dramatic to be sure, but illuminating a much higher level of  incompetence. 

    As a teenager, all my friends worked on cars.  They worked on the engines and the bodies.  I never had any interest in autos other than to get me from place to place out of the rain.  This is perhaps a little strange as I ended up spending my adult life as an engineer. 

    When I reached young adulthood, just out of the university, I bought a Datsun 510.   One day it started running rough so I wheeled into the nearest filling station.  In those days just about every gas station would do at least minor tune ups.  I picked the car up the next day and found it ran even rougher.  The car seemed fairly simple to work on so I went to a book store for a book on car repair.  When I finished with my first attempt at a tune up the car no longer ran rough; it didn’t run at all.  I had to push it to the dealer just down the block.  I paid a second time to have the car fixed and as I was about to drive out of the dealer’s lot one of the mechanics said to me, “Look here young man,  I understand if you don’t want to bring the car back to us as we are expensive, but for God’s sake, don’t ever let the person who worked on it last touch it again.”

   I heeded that advice for several years, then forgot it.  I was living in Ventura when the same car started running rough again.  Feeling the passing years might have given me new mechanical abilities I tried to tune it again.  After replacing the points and plugs and adjusting the timing, it still ran bad. 

    I had a teenage neighbor who suggested I rebuild the carburetor; that was what it needed he said.   When I told him I didn’t think I had the necessary skills, he said it was a piece of cake you just needed to buy a carburetor kit and follow the instructions.  

    With grave misgivings I bought the kit and then spent hour after hour on the kitchen floor taking that carburetor apart and putting it back together, sort of.  After I felt enough time had passed to complete the job, I had two leftover parts, a spring and someother little dodad.  Interestingly enough, the car now ran very smooth, purred like a kitten.  I took it for a test drive from Ventura to Camarillo, a distance of about 10 miles each way.  As I was pulling into the driveway after the drive, I looked at the gas tank.  In a drive of 20 miles I had gone through an entire tank of gas.  I had to buy more gas just to drive to the dealer to get my car fixed again.  Words really can’t do justice to the feeling a man (ok so I knit a little) has when he has to go to a real mechanic with left over parts in his hand and ask, “Uh, er, do you know where these things go?”

    They didn’t even try to put back my two little left overs; just made me buy a new carburetor.

When Life Happens

by Lisa 

I have a story to tell today that has nothing to do with painting, but it’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.

I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday morning in the Valley–a good half hour freeway ride away. As I was walking out the door, my 17 year old son, who had just awakened, walked into the room and when I told him I was leaving, he whined that he wanted to borrow my car for the day. This meant switching cars with him. he has a souped up 5 speed Mitsubishi Eclipse. He rebuilt the engine himself, and last week replaced the brakes painting them bright red because I guess that’s cool. His car is not comfortable to drive with three passengers all the way to the beach in Malibu, plus, he has carpal tunnel in both his hands (surgery is scheduled for tomorrow), and his car aggravates his hands–it being a souped up five speed and all.

I groaned audibly and told him no.  Any other day, but I had to drive to the Valley, and they would have to make do. He gave me a puppydog look. I groaned again and thought about it.  It was their last day before school started. ”Do you have gas?”, I asked him. Sheepishly–”Maybe a quarter of a tank”. NO. No way. I did not have time to stop for gas. NO. Another puppydog look. I told him I would go look at the gas gauge and evaluate whether or not I could make it.  NOT. No way. He argued that the car was on a slant in the driveway, and it made the gauge inaccurate. NO, I told him and started heading toward my car. I looked back, and it did me in AGAIN. OH GIVE ME THE DAMN KEYS, I told him. I got in his car, and off I went, loudly, in a souped up kind of way.

I made it to the doctor’s appointment, and was barreling down the freeway on the way back when suddenly it sounded like a rock hit the bottom of the car. Then another bigger rock. Loud noises. Next I heard what sounded like the noise you hear when you are coming up an off ramp to a stop sign, and the road has a set of textures on it to warn you to slow down. A great rubbing sound. The rubbing soon turned to grinding, and I began realizing something was terribly wrong. I began moving to the right through the lanes of traffic. The sound got worse and worse, and luckily I was close to an off ramp and was able to exit. Before I knew it, the tires seized up, and I had no control over the brakes, but the car was coming to a grinding halt all by itself.  The sound was now constant and deafening. I was yelling OH MY GOD, but I couldn’t even hear myself yelling. I could not, for the life of me, imagine what could make such a tremendous noise. I imagined the brand new engine dragging the ground underneath the car.

I was shaking like a leaf when I called my husband. From my description, he knew right away that it had to be the new brakes Dylan had installed. Sure enough, the front right brake had mangled the hub cap and was broken probably as a result of the bolts not being properly tightened. We called Dylan and told him about it. He felt terrible. My husband felt terrible. They had worked on the brakes together, and are very competent mechanically, but something went terribly wrong and could have caused a dire situation. We called a towing service.

As I was standing there watching the car get towed, thinking about what a rotten day it was shaping up to be, and feeling rather sorry for myself for experiencing such a trauma, another thought dawned on  me that turned my mood on a dime. I realized how close I had come to making Dylan drive his own car with his three friends that day through the winding mountain pass on their way to the beach. And the waterworks did flow. I am not a religious person, but I was sure counting by blessings after that.

Maybe there’s a painting to come from this story. Okay that was a lame attempt to make this post about painting in someway.