Amy for JKPP

Amy, for Julia Kay's Portrait Party

colored pencil on toned paper

This is my most recent portrait for the online group, Julia Kay's Portrait Party.  I find using colored pencil to be very engaging, and really soothing to do.  Lately, with the health problems I have been facing, working on a drawing like this takes time, and focuses my mind on something positive.  It's not obvious in this photo of the drawing, but the darkest areas are built up with browns, Tuscan red, indigo, and black colored pencil.  In the skin tones I also add a light warm brown, so there is some tonal variation and complexity.

I enjoyed working on this portrait because of her warm smile, and because there was a wide range of values, something I look for in a source photo.

Melinda for JKPP

Melinda, colored pencil on toned paper

I keep thinking about painting, and then going back to the trusty sketchbook and working with colored pencil.  This is Melinda, and I did the portrait for Julia Kay's Portrait Party.  I took way too long with this, going back and adding darker and darker values to make her face stand out.  I probably could have pushed the dark values more, but I wanted to be done with it.  I usually choose reference photos that have dramatic shadows, and that was true here.  But mostly I think I liked her direct gaze.

The Anti-Conjuror

 

Honest, I am not the most dedicated, organized, or consistent keeper of sketchbooks.  That said, I do keep one in my purse, and one by the little television in my studio.  One of my favorite things to do when I just want to more or less relax and watch something I've recorded on the DVR is to pause the program and quick draw something from the screen.

I have a an inexpensive little (3.5x5.5 inches) notebook I bought at the drugstore last spring, thinking I'd fill it up and use it in a future journaling/sketching workshop for homeless high school kids.  I wanted it simple - just black pen and maybe a colored marker.  The notebook is slowly filling up, with jottings from trips, ideas from art books, sketches of things in the house, quotes and so on.  Anyway, I did this sketch while watching a show called The Illusionists, who turned out to be magicians working in various styles.

Dan Sperry bills himself as  the "Anti-Conjuror" and has gothic makeup, lots of tattoos, and a really interesting act.  I ended up liking his sketch best, complete with a fairly wonky job on the hand on the left side of the drawing.  I like the way the drawing ignores the center fold of the notebook, like the simple use of color, and I like the use of a frame.  I've been looking at books concerned with cartooning, and they use a frame, which make the drawing more appealing on the page, I think.

This may affect the design of my future pages.

Capping Off Summer

 Dubuque Museum of Art - with huge statues to the left

Summer seems to be winding down here in southern Wisconsin.  The evenings are getting cooler, the nights filled with the sounds of crickets, the flowers looking tired and ragged.  My husband celebrated his birthday this week, and his desire was to take a multiple day bicycle ride home from the Mississippi River.  The weather forecast for the week looked good, so we drove west to Dubuque, and stayed over at the Hotel Julien Dubuque - very nice indeed.  Then he took his bicycle off the rack, hooked on the panniers, and left for a ride that included a side trip to the Quad Cities, a total of nearly 3oo miles by the time he returned home yesterday.

I had wanted to see the Dubuque Museum of Art, but it was closed on Monday when we arrived, so before I left Tuesday I waited around for it to open.  I wanted to see both their current exhibit of folk art, and their collection of Grant Wood art.  The museum opens at 10 o'clock, so I had time to sit in the park across the street and sketch the giant American Gothic figures that stand near the entrance.

My quick sketch of the statues - complete with a giant suitcase

The original Grant Wood painting, taken on a recent trip to the Chicago Art Institute

Before coming back home I drove north on the Iowa side of the Mississippi to McGregor, where I had made arrangements to be outfitted as a Victorian lady for a couple upcoming events with our historical society.  River Junction Trade Co. is a wonderful place, two stores, one for men and another for women.  It is filled with everything a historical society docent or re-enactor could need - hats, shoes, fans, dresses, undergarments, jewelry, anything.  I ended up with a walking skirt, mutton-sleeve shirtwaist, belt and cape.  I'm still considering what to do for a hat, but I had reached the full amount I had budgeted.

Mel helped me select clothing appropriate for a Victorian lady. My outfit is considerably less flashy than hers!

I had some time once I got home to read, water the garden, and take my annual trip to the Walworth County Fair.  It was hot, so I was not too surprised to find the midway uncrowded.  Or perhaps it was just because it was a weekday, and most adults were working.  Being retired, I not only got in for a reduced admission, but got to visit on a day the building were almost empty, and no lines at the stand with pork sandwiches, or cream puffs.  

It was crowded for the pig races, though.  These little porkers seem more than happy to scramble for the chance at an Oreo cookie.

I enjoy the fair, seeing the garden produce, the 4-H projects, the antiques.  I like wandering through the barns, seeing kids washing and brushing their cattle, feeding their chickens or rabbits, showing their goats or sheep.  But it always feels a little sad too, remembering how the fair was always a place to win ribbons, meet friends, ride the rides, mooch quarters off my dad or grandfather, who always seemed to be there too.  I did see one friend from school at the fair, but all in all, I felt a little like Rip Van Winkle, unrecognized in a familiar but changed place.

Across the Aegean

Yesterday I commented that back in 1998 I painted a still life that included two art books that my painting instructor owned, and I wrote about Venice Sketchbook.  The other title, which I eventually bought for myself, was Across the Aegean: Am Artist's Journey from Athens to Istanbul.  This latter title also is a series of travel sketches done in watercolor, with some personal reflections about the places the writer/artist visited.  While I had visited Athens in 2003, until this month I had never visited Turkey, so much of the book didn't mean a whole lot to me until now.  Marlene McLoughlin's sketches in pen and paint are smaller than Hank Scarrey's, more personal in their subject matter, and more pastel in their use of color. 

McLoughlin's sketches are often of her impressions of sunsets, hillsides, farm animals, and sun washed buildings and architectural details.  She doesn't include people very often.  But because I remembered her sketches I found myself looking at little things, food carts, pigeons, chairs, and olive leaves.  Here are a few of my photos that I think might have caught the eye of the author of this charming travel sketchbook.

This little potted orange tree sat near the entrance to a Greek winery on the  Peloponnese peninsula. I failed to get a good picture of the peacocks that wandered under the trees there.

These donkeys are for hire to carry tourists 800 feet up a twisting and steep path from the dock to the village of Thira, on Santorini.

The waters at the Strait of Bosphorus are filled with traffic.  Here you can see a tugboat and a water taxi.  In the background is the Bosphorus Bridge, over 4,000 feet long, linking Europe and Asia. At night it it lit with red and white lights, creating a dramatic zigzag in the dark.

The spires of Hagia Sophia make the skyline dramatic in Istanbul.  To the left in the trees is Topkapi palace, and to the right, cut out of the photo is the Blue Mosque.  There was a sort of haze over the city both days we were there, and I suspect it is smog from the heavy car and bus traffic.

These are windows from the harem at Topkapi palace.  The place was beautiful, ornately decorated with frescoes, tiles, calligraphy, and stained glass like you see here.

While we didn't get to see the ruins or sculptures at Athens because of dock and transportation workers strikes, we did see the wonderful ruins at Ephesus.  The library and terrace houses were particularly impressive to me.

I find myself very much attracted to cypress trees that are found all over the Mediterranean, in Italy, Greece, and here at Ephesus.

While McLaughlin includes watercolor sketches of dogs, of which we saw plenty, but she doesn't include any cats.  Because my husband and I have a spoiled pet cat, and missed her the two weeks we were gone, I found myself noticing the many cats that roam all over Greece and Turkey, almost of of whom were friendly, vocal, and very much at their ease. This one rested outside the museum of antiquities removed from the Ephesus site.

I still have not sat down to do any painting, and am finding it hard to leave my photos quite yet.  Soon, I hope, I can get back into a regular schedule here at home.

Considering Venice

I have been to Venice three times.  In 1972 I traveled by train with my high school girl friend Rosemary, and we visited Venice for four hours on a hot July afternoon.  I was not impressed.  The crowds were horrible, and the water filled with floating garbage.  I have no pictures.

Last year we visited by bus in chilly March with a group from UW Whitewater, and we found scant crowds, and it was cold.  But the beauty of the city disarmed me, the bridges, water, elegant facades, even the ladies dripping in furs who commanded the street in front of the Venice opera house, all took my breath away.  I still dream of a little restaurant in a back street where we paid inordinate sums of cash and were fed the best fresh seafood of my life. I took scads of photos and was beginning to fall in love.

Then we took a Mediterranean cruise this month, flying into Marco Polo airport and then boarding a huge Holland America ship.  It began and ended in Venice, and the city captured my heart forever.

Backing up a bit, specifically to 1998.  I had lost my best friend, a fine artist and teacher, to cancer, and had decided to start painting again.  It was clear to me that a long life was not a sure thing, and that there was no point in waiting until I retired to restart my art.  So I took a summer watercolor class with Amy Arntson, a fine painter, at Whitewater.  The big final class project was a still life, and I used one that included two art books in the painting, both of which belonged to the instructor.  One was Venice Sketchbook, by Huck Scarrey.  Two years ago I bought a copy of this slim volume of watercolor and pen and ink sketches for myself, and I revisited it before our trip to Venice this month.

Scarrey has clearly lived in Venice, seen its tourist attractions, but also its back streets and islands.  He has been there all times of year, all weather.  I love his sketches, the quick and the complete, and reading the book before we arrived helped me decide what to look for, and reading it afterward reminds me of what I've already seen myself, and makes me want to return to see more.

I have real difficulty in drawing and sketching en plein air, especially when time is short, and there are other people's schedules to consider.  But I take my camera with me everywhere, and I was interested to see that my photos conform to Scarrey's divisions in his book. Perhaps I can use my personal photos to create a sketchbook of my own, although created at home and after the fact.

Here are some of Scarrey's chapter headings, and my photos that fit each category.

CANALS: Canals are the streets for vehicles (boats) in Venice, and the Grand Canal is the main street.  The canals are busy with all manner of boats - water taxis, vaporettos, fishing boats, cruise ships, all use the canals.  But the areas where people walk are free of traditional vehicles, which contributes to a sort of quiet that I like very much.

BRIDGES: There are hundreds, including the famous Bridge of Sighs, which is still swaddled in plastic for renovation.  This photo is of the famous Rialto Bridge.

FACADES: The old buildings of Venice are build in the water, not just next to it, a fact that always amazes me. The warm Mediterranean colors, the Moorish windows, the extravagant chimney pots, all are worth considering.

SAINT MARK'S SQUARE:  This is what everyone comes to see, the Basilica di San Marco, with it's fantastic pillars and domes, tiles and mosaics.  It is the heart of Venice, and these days while there are still legions of pigeons, there are even more people.  Still, I catch my breath a little every time I see it and the famous bell tower across the plaza. I took this photo through the glass of the observation lounge of the Niew Amsterdam, our cruise ship.  It gave me a very different perspective than I had from standing at ground level.

MASKS:  When we visited in March last year it was just after carnival, and I found myself taking photo after photo of masks in shop windows.  This time I didn't as much, so the photograph is from last year's trip. I sometimes dream about having a gorgeous mask, and a heavy hooded cloak to wear to Halloween events in chilly Wisconsin. Not this year, though.

ISLANDS: As we flew into Marco Polo airport this year I could see that Venice has many many islands, many connected by canals.  But there are large islands that can only be reached by boat.  Last year we visited two of them, Murano, where famous glass factories still operate, and Burano, a fishing village that also is the home of world-famous lace makers. I love Burano best for the brightly colored houses, many with laundry hanging out the windows to dry.

Scarrey also has other chapters about the seasons in Venice, and of the many docks and boats of the area, though I don't have many pictures that correspond to those areas.  I know that nearly everyone who paints eventually paints scenes like these I've posted here, because they are beautiful.  I will paint them as well, though probably for my private sketchbooks, more as a way of reliving the experience than with any though of offering the results for anything public.

Hibernation Sketching

Dang, it has been cold here.  Car door frozen shut, crunchy underfoot, nose-hair freezing cold.  So yesterday I stayed in all day working on the Roy Chapman Andrews piece, reading and doing sketches of Jeff Bridges from a recent American Masters program on PBS that we videotaped. 

I have a new sketch book that I use for doodling, practicing zentangles, and messing around.  I liked the close-up shots of Bridges, directors and other actors, all dramatically lit.  This was the first in the series of quick-draws, and probably my least favorite.  Its a modified contour drawing, completed in the time that the pause button holds on the VCR (yes, old technology).  It forces me to work FAST.  I'm not sure how long the picture holds before the screen reverts to whatever is on the TV, but it can't be more than three or four minutes.  I added the textured background later. 

 

I realized as I watched the program that I have seen most of Jeff Bridges' movies, and many of them are favorites.  The top sketch here is from The Fisher King, not really a favorite, but I couldn't resist the expression.  I knew Bridges was a musician, but I didn't know he paints and does pottery.  In the bottom pose he was quickly drawing something with white paint (or maybe soap) on a clear screen.  He was clearly enjoying himself.

These two are from my husband's favorite, The Big Lebowski.  I remember being put off the first time I saw it, but a second viewing of the Dude had me gasping with laughter.  You have to admire that scene in the cosmic bowling alley, with Lebowski headed down the starry lane between the shapely legs of dancers, headed for the ultimate strike.

  

The Big Lebowki has its points, but I vote for Bridges as Rooster Cogburn in the recent Coen brothers version of True Grit.  In this scene the girl Mattie is assuring Cogburn that she is eager and ready to join him when he heads out into Indian Territory after the man who shot her father, and Bridges stares at her in drunken disbelief, legs akimbo, belly poking out of his undershirt.  I loved the movie, and maybe that shows in this quick sketch.

My last sketch from the television screen was of Bridges in his Oscar winning role of the washed up country singer in Crazy Heart.  I don't seem capable of economy of line, but I sort of like the combination of sketchy scribbly lines and the textured background that I added after the figure was done. 

I enjoyed the fast and furious sketching that working from a paused video recorder afforded, enjoyed watching the show again, and liked the spontaneous results  achieved from working this way.  It sure beat freezing out there in wonderful Wisconsin winter.

A Study of Salome

study of a detail from Benozzo Gozzoli's 1461 painting, The Dance of Salome

Another online challenge site I recently discovered is one called Following the Masters.  Every month the blog's owner chooses a theme.  Last month it was the Ashcan School painters, and this month it is the Italian Renaissance.  She suggests books to help her people learn about the topic, and then followers can draw or paint something related to the topic.   Last month I read Robert Henri's wonderful collection of lectures, letters and essays about art called The Art Spirit.  This  month I re-read Irving Stone's fictional biographical novel about Michelangelo's life, The Agony and the Ecstasy.  I also decided this month to study another Renaissance painter, this time one I didn't know.  I chose Florentine painter Benozzo Gozzoli, whose figures attracted me.

Here is part of original painting:

I Salome's graceful figure and flowing dress, and the way he uses orange/reds, along with grayed greens and some blue in the shadows.  His painting is much more attractive than my study, but I feel I learned something in doing the work.

Two More Online Challenges

5x7 inches, for Illustration Friday: Expired, pen and ink, watercolor

I thought I'd post a couple of small illustrations I created in my watercolor notebook this week for online art challenges.  I've been interested in Illustration Friday for ages, since it is so well organized and so many people post their work on the site.  While some challenges are very specific (draw your shoes), the ideas at Illustration Friday are all open-ended.  They can be interpreted lots of ways, and they are!  This week the topic  is "Expired."  I thought about lots of things that expire: dairy products, coupons and sales, parking meters, people.  In the end a broken doll I had been saving for some sort of mixed media assemblage (yet to be created) called out to me.  I drew her amongst the twigs, dead leaves, and green shoots in my garden, a sort of plastic armless Venus.  Her life as a play toy has expired, but she lives on here.  The most challenging part of participating on this site for me was creating a 50x50 pixel thumbnail.  It took longer for me to figure that out than it did to draw all the teeny circles on the illustration.

5x7 inches, pen and ink, watercolor acrylic ink, created for Inspiration All Around Us

Another online challenge to try is a fairly new one entitled Inspiration All Around Us.  An Oregon artist named Dana Marie has begun posting reference photos every other Tuesday for people to interpret in any way they want.  In order to participate in this site you need to send her an email and ask to join the group, then you can post your drawing or paintings.  I did this little piece fairly quickly in my Moleskine watercolor notebook, first a pen and ink sketch, then watercolor for the waterlily blossom and leaves.  I did a dark blue background at first, but decided that I needed a darker value to set off the white blossom, so added a wash of black acrylic ink, letting some blue layer peek through.

I'm having a good time participating in these challenges, though I doubt I will participate in every one, every time.  For one thing, in order to get comments from other people, it's just courtesy to leave comments for other posters. That takes time.  But giving and receiving feedback is half the fun of joining these groups in the first place.  The other half is having a practically unlimited stock of ideas for creating art.

From the Art Institute of Chicago

On my birthday back in December Dick promised me a day trip to Chicago and the Art Institute.  I wanted to see the new modern wing, and to revisit some "old friends."   We drove to Harvard, Illinois, about a half hour from here, and took the Metra line to downtown Chicago.  The trip is a hundred miles, and takes a couple hours.  It was a nice day, clear, weather in the 40s, so we walked to Michigan Avenue, and got in for free, since the museum had a promotion of every day in February free admission.

It is OK to take photos in the museum as long as no flash is  used, so I took all sort of pictures of sculptures, and have only now gotten around to using them to add in my little watercolor sketchbook.  I want to do some more, but I'm not sure I'll have time before our trip to Italy, and after that I bet I'll want to work on other sketches.

Anyway, we explored all day, taking an hour off for lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant, and then returning to see how much more we could see.  I adore the Art Institute, but it is so huge that I feel bad about how little time I end up really looking at the paintings and sculpture.  By the time we walked back to the train station I was footsore and weary to the bone.  Good practice for Italy.

Recent Sketchbook Work

With all the snow on the ground, I find it easy to spend time up in my little studio.  I was combing through some workshop notes from a folder on the shelf, and I came across some notes from a class I took on nightscapes, with Catherine Wilson Smith.  I typed them up, and then decided to try out some of the combinations she often uses for mixed grays and earth tones.  Usually I would try these on scraps of old watercolor paper, but it occurred to me that the little papers generally end up in the trash, and they would be good to have to keep as reference.  So, into the Moleskine watercolor notebook, memorialized forever.  I like this plan, and I have used the page several times since I made it.  It only uses colors I have at home, nothing too complicated. The colors are real - not subject to the problems with three color reproduction in print.

I had a little stash of magazine clippings for that class, and one was of a man kneeling by a campfire in the snow.  I liked the image very much, and tried to reproduce the effect.  It isn't too bad, though it seems rather crude.  One thing that worked well in this little watercolor sketch in the Moleskine is the background snow, which I mostly did by lifting out the snow on the branches of the trees.

Since my brain was thinking about grays, I noticed an article I clipped ages ago in an art magazine about painting reflections in metals like silver and copper.  This was a demonstration from the magazine that I tried in my sketchbook.  I wouldn't call the result a rousing success, but it was interesting, and the colors were not ones I might have chosen on my own.

Here's another try, using different colors.  One thing I decided to try after reading this article was Winsor Newton's Neutral Tint.  The color is a transparent, mild gray that mixes beautifully with other colors, and may be useful for night scenes and things like roads and sidewalks.  

Stormy Day

watercolor from reference photo, Moleskine watercolor sketchbook

My fortune cookie from the takeout place said I'd find something I had lost, and that something turned out to be notes from my Catherine Wilson Smith workshop on nightscapes in 2004.  I spent time yesterday typing up the notes, playing with her color combinations for grays and earth colors, and doing this small watercolor.  I like the drama of lots of dark, and I may go back to those notes and try more.  I have difficulty keeping the light passages, as in the field of the painting.  The sky isn't really dark enough either, especially on the far left.  But the scene is appealing to me, and I may try it with other color choices later.  Storms are always exciting; we have a snow storm brewing right now.

I'm nearly finished with the Robert Henri book, The Art Spirit.  Here are a few more notes I copied into my journal.

I can think of no greater happiness than to be clear sighted and know the miracle when it happens.  I can think of no more real life than the adventurous one of living and liking and exclaiming the things of one's own time.


More and more things are produced without a will in the creation, and are consumed or "used" without will in consumption or the using.  These things are dead.  They pass, masquerading as important while they are before us, but they pass utterly.  There is nothing so important as art in the world, nothing so constructive, so life sustaining.  ...Go to your work with a consciousness that it is more important than any other thing you might do.  It may have no great commercial value, but it has an inestimable and lasting life value.  (Steinbeck says something similar in East of Eden)


Men either get to know what they want and go after it, or some other persons tell them what they want and drive them after it.

Wild Things

pen and ink, marker, in my sketch book

Last week on my birthday we went to Madison to see the amazing film version of Maurice Sendak's 1963 Caldecott winning children's book Where the Wild Things Are. I was mesmerized by the visuals, and charmed by the child who portrayed Max. Unlike Ralphie in A Christmas Story, who is forced by his mother to wear a pink bunny suit, and is the image of misery, Max wears his wolf suit proudly. He is a wolf, a wild child, king of the wild things. I was intrigued by the way Dave Eggers and the other writers built on the basic story, giving it an even more universal appeal. Who hasn't been angry at the slights and limitations of his or her life? Who hasn't wanted to clobber her tormentors? Who hasn't wanted to start a rumpus?

All this led me to remembering my youngest sister, Mary. She was a sweet child, though she and my youngest brother, who was only a little over a year younger, got into plenty of trouble. "Let the wild rumpus start!" could have been their motto for several years. At any rate, in 1960 Santa brought her a flannel tiger suit. Perhaps Mother had been reading Winnie the Pooh, or maybe it had something to do with Kellogg's Tony the Tiger, or even the Esso gasoline ads that promised to "put a tiger in your tank." Mary loved her tiger suit, which at first was too large, so that the feet flopped. She wore it to sleep in. She wore it to play in. She wore it every day, everywhere, until finally she either outgrew it or it fell to rags. Mary earned her nickname, Tiger, a name she answered to her entire life.

I wonder if Sendak had a child in an animal suit?

Sledding Santa

I decided not to put up a full-sized Christmas tree this year, but I did dig out some favorite ornaments and decorations. I bought a little wooden Santa Claus ages ago, and he has become a favorite. The old guy still has some child alive in his heart, apparently. Just so I could look at him more carefully, I decided to paint him in my sketchbook. Who knows, maybe he'll end up on a card some time.

I had a good surprise yesterday when the English pen pal I started writing to in 1961 and hadn't heard much from for several years wrote me an email. When I was about ten I sent fifty cents in to some magazine and got back an address for a pen pal. This boy and I wrote a couple times, but didn't have too much in common. However, his mother started writing to me, and to my mother. I met the family in 1972 for the first time in London. Then over the years we met several more times. Through weddings, divorces, deaths and births we kept writing, though not so often in the 1990s. Then five years ago both my mom and the woman who had written so faithfully died in the same week. I didn't hear from the son and his family except for a Christmas card with signatures until yesterday. Now the boy I wrote to so long ago is a grandfather, and he promises to catch me up on their family via email.

It's a wonderful world, eh?

Hungry? Got Cupcakes!

Sometimes other people's ideas just call out to me. This little watercolor in a notebook is a study for a larger painting I'm planning. The source photo comes from a blog called Different Strokes From Different Folks, so there will be lots of cupcake paintings around online. I suppose I could change this, make the paper liners different colors, add a patterned cloth, but I like the simplicity of this image. I also am grooving on the swirly frosting and the colored sprinkles.

http://differentstrokesfromdifferentfolks.blogspot.com/

Sounds From the Past, part 2

Anna Bernice Adams, later Bernice Ann Smith

I've been continuing the slow process of transcribing the tape my mother helped my 92-year-old grandmother make back in December 1994. My husband says it's strange hearing their voices coming from the studio where I work; I guess it is. Like ghosts, almost. At the beginning she is still talking about living on the "Big B" ranch, which was in the southeastern part of Washington, not far from the Columbia River, and the Tri-Cities area today.

Bernice Tess interview pt 2

We had more horses than cows, because cows were purely for our own use. The horses were for sale and for breeding purposes. We had a lot of horses, and a lot of hired men and a great big lot of land. Four square quarters of wheat. I used to ride on my special mare all around the acres. It seemed like we’d go forever and still be on “our land” I called it, because to me it was our land. It eventually did become our land because my mother ended up marrying the manager of some of the land, the son of the man who owned it, and that was a turning point in my life.

It was my eleventh year. Everything seems to have happened in my eleventh year. My real father was shot and murdered when I was eleven years old, and six months after that my mother told me she was marrying again. The only son that was managing the ranch. Which was not particularly good news to my ears because I didn’t think he liked me, and I knew I was very much afraid of him, because I had been taught to be afraid of him. Because he didn’t like children. Well of course I would grow up. 

So, then I was sent away to school. To a Catholic school, and I was the only Protestant in the whole school. In the questions that my granddaughter Sherry asked, she wanted to know some of the people who had had a big influence on my life, and that I admired. And even though the girls were so hostile to me, there was one of the sisters. Because it was a Catholic school with sisters and priests, they went out of their way to be very very nice to me, and they really made up for it. – the coolness of the Catholic children. And this one sister, I think her name was sister Teresa, she encouraged me very much in my English and my composition. And I remember her telling me one time that she hoped some day to read an article or a novel or a piece of fiction, that I had written with my name on it because she was sure I would become a great author. Of course I would have disappointed her, because I never went on to college, and I never wrote anything that outstanding. I loved to read, but it was other people’s writings I enjoyed, not my own. That lasted, I was in the academy one full year, practically.

At the end of it they came and took me to Hillyard, no I think we went to Spokane first. I know that we lived very near the Jesu Church, and they told me there that next to that church was were there was a little house , not very big, and they said that was where - what was that singer? Bing Crosby was born, just a block from where we lived. And I always thought that was very exciting. Our house there was very small, not pretentious at all. But it was wonderful to me because I’d never had an inside toilet before, electric lights before. It was the first time in my life I’d ever had electricity or any of the nice things about living.

Carol: How old were you then, Mother?

Oh, I was eleven years old yet; that was my eleventh year. That’s my daughter, I’m glad they’re asking me questions, because that’s what I want .

My best friend died while I was still eleven. She was – I considered her my best friend. She lived next door, and she as a lovely sweet Catholic girl. But she didn’t hold my being a Protestant against me. She was, we were, very very close friends. And she played tennis with her brothers one morning and fell against the wire that was put up between the two poles. And I never understood how, but somehow she hit her head on the wire and died instantly. And that was a terrible shock to me. So I had lost two dear people that year, that I loved. 

Then I had the news given to me that I was to have a new baby brother or sister. Well, I was pleased about that, I guess. In the beginning it was such a shock to me I couldn’t hardly comprehend what was happening. But I was, later, it made me very happy, and I always enjoyed having a brother. It was wonderful, because I’d never had a sister or a brother. And I, I thought as much of him as I possibly could, of a real, full brother. And he never wanted me to call him a half brother. He was really angry with me if I said that he was my half brother. He always said, “There are no halves in our family, just wholes.” And that’s the way it was, all through our lives. 

I’m sorry for the interruption, one of my daughters just told me that I hadn’t told my brother’s name. His name was DuRell. And that was a family name from Dr. Smith’s side. His mother was a Durrell. She was French, French Dutch, or Dutch French; I don’t know which it would be. I always considered her more Dutch than French.

Carol: Is that the diamond that Sherry has?

Pardon me, Carol’s asking something.

Ellen: Is that her diamond that Sherry has?

Yes, Sherry has her diamond. And it was mine for a while, and before it was mine, I guess it was Dr. Smith’s mother’s. Yes. 

Carol: You never said who your stepfather was either.

Carol said I never said who my stepfather was. 

Carol: He wasn’t a doctor then.

He was not a doctor at that time. But that’s when we came back to Milwaukee he decided to become a doctor. And we had eleven long years ahead of us. And they were not easy years. We had DuRell to raise, and we had ourselves to take care of. Because his folks did not approve of him coming out there.

I wasn’t happy about leaving Hillyard, It seemed as though my life was just a series stops and starts m strange people, and losing friends, making friends and losing them. So I was very unhappy about the trip way “back East”, as we called it, although really it was only half way. But, we boarded the train. I couldn’t take any of my toys.

Speaking of favorite toys, Sherry once asked me which one was my favorite. And I did have a favorite doll? I had very few toys as a small child, because we moved so much and I never had a place to keep them. So, this doll was very special. The last time I ever saw my father, he brought the doll to me. Mother and I went to Seattle, no, we went to San Francisco, right after the fire, and the earthquake. And we went to a big hotel, ‘course most of the hotels were burned out then, and we could still see the black skeletons of them, and the ruins of bricks that were left, and the burned out houses. I can remember asking my mother what happened, and she said that they’d had a terrible fire after an earthquake. Anyways, afterwards we met my father at this hotel, and he had a big present for me. And it was a doll, a walking doll, and big, came up to my knees you know. And I treasured that doll more than anything I ever had, but I had to leave it behind with all the rest of my things when we started out for our new life in Milwaukee. 

Being on the train was an experience. We had a baby, of course, DuRell was very small, ten months old when we left. And we had to get our own meals. We had just what we could buy at stops. The train would stop and we could get off and buy things to cook on the stove, which was an old coal stove. The conductor put coal in, and some people heated up soup. And we heated up DuRell’s milk on it. And, the smell, of the coal smoke was not nice. We could, everything in the car smelled of oranges and coal smoke. Because so many of the people ate oranges to get the taste of coal out of their throats. And I always well remember that smell - coal smoke and oranges, mixed. To me, that’s train smell. And the conductors were very friendly, They’d come around very often, and set and talk, and play with the baby. But it was a very hard trip with a small child. And we had lost so much that we left behind that I was very sad.

I wasn’t happy about going to this new city. When we finally got there it was a long trip,, we slept in relays. We had just the chairs that we made into a bed at night, with a curtain that came round them. And we’d sleep for a little while, and then somebody else would get up and they would sleep, because we only had the two seats. Double seats. For the three of us. No, four of us, with the baby. So it was very cramped, very uncomfortable, And we were glad when we crossed the big muddy river, and finally landed in Milwaukee. The muddy river was the Mississippi. And I remember they got me up out of sleeping to go and look at it, and I was so anxious to see the Mississippi, all the things I heard about the mighty mighty Mississippi, and how beautiful it was. And I looked at it and was so disappointed. All it was, it looked like mud, like a river of mud. A big wide river of mud. And of course further on it looked much better, but that was near the big cities and it was very polluted. So I was disappointed in that.

Sounds From the Past

modified contour drawing of my great grandparents when first married

In 1994 when my mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I asked for a taped interview with my grandmother. I got the tape that year, listened to most of it, and put it in my tape caddy. Last week I got it out and listened for nearly an hour. There behind the hissing of the old cassette tape, were the voices of my mother, aunt, and grandmother. Grandma and Mom are gone now, and it makes me a little crazy that I cannot ask for more details on some of the stories. Now, after having put together memories with old photos, and having visited the places she lived as a young girl, I know what I would ask Grandma. In 1994 I didn't know, and was probably too busy with teaching to probe for more.

So, little by little I'm transcribing her taped answers to my questions, and when I finish I hope to have it transferred to a CD, and share it with my family. This is the first installment.

Transcript of Interview With Bernice Tess

December, 1994

This is Bernice Tess. We are gathered here with Ellen and Carol, my daughters, to celebrate Carol’s birthday, and while we are all here together we thought it would be a good time to answer some of my granddaughter Sherry’s questions. She has written down quite a few questions on paper that she would like to know about my past. And I think we should start more or less at the beginning, which is a long time ago, because I am ninety-two years old.

And I was born in the Cascade Mountains in the state of Washington, the very very deepest part of the mountains in Leavenworth, Washington, where they cut the big pass for the railroad over the mountain. They had to put two engines on there because it was too steep for one engine. And my father, being an engineer, wanted to live there. So my first memories were of a little cottage, up on a hill, very high up, And all I could see when I was a toddler around the house was snow because the windows were all covered with snow, and we had to have lamps, oil lamps, to see by, even in the daytime. And gradually in the spring, we would see the snow go down, and we would watch it on the windows, because every day it’d be an inch or so when the sun melted, and it was very thrilling to watch the snow go down, inch by inch, until we finally could look out our windows. They were pretty dirty by then, but that didn’t bother me any at the time.

We lived there until I was about three years old and then there was trouble in the household. And my mother and father disagreed, or, agreed to disagree, I guess. Anyways, Mother got me up in the middle of the night one night and said we were going on a train journey. Which was very surprising to me because my father was still sleeping in bed. But we went to the neighbors and the neighbors took us down to a train, and we went to Hillyard, which was quite a few miles and on flatter land. It was a suburb of Spokane. And we went to a friend of Mother’s and stayed with her for a while. Eventually we bought a house there, or my father did; he came back to live with us for a while. But that didn’t last too long either. And this time when we left, we left for good. 

I wasn’t ready for school yet, so I must have been around four when we left the final time. And all I remember from those days were different people’s homes and faces where I stayed while Mother worked. She was a midwife, and she went to various homes and helped with babies being born, she told me. So I, being a very shy little girl, I wasn’t used to staying with all those people; I was very uncomfortable. Especially when I could hear them talking, whispering about my mother behind my back. I didn’t like it very well. So we were not too happy. Mother read ads in the paper, and finally decided the best place for us would be out on a ranch. There would be no people around to be talking about us, and we could live our own lives. So she answered an ad, for a man that wanted a housekeeper, out on a big ranch, in the east, northeastern part of Washington, right near the Columbia River. So she answered the ad, and he was not too happy. He didn’t know that she had a little girl, but he finally accepted me because there were very few people that wanted to go work on a ranch that was fifteen miles from the nearest town. Well, fifteen miles on land. If you crossed the Columbia River you could go to Hanford, and that was only six miles away, but it was hard to get across the big wide Columbia River. 

Eventually I had to cross the river to go to first grade, And then I was boarded out again. But, that year passed, and I was back to the ranch. Then we looked for a school teacher. We had a hard time getting one because nobody wanted to teach out there. It was very wild and woolly.

We had four big sections of land, and it was sand dunes and sage brush, and they grew dry wheat. It was an experimental thing with growing wheat, because it was bare, almost desert like country. Hardly ever rained. If it did rain we all ran out and tipped our heads and opened our mouths and let the rain run in. It was fun. We loved getting wet. We loved the rain.

But, school was not much of a success. We started out in a little one-room shack that had belonged to a homesteader that went broke, as they all did, most of them at least. And they had a woman teacher, but she didn’t stay with us long. When the left they got a man teacher and eventually built a one room school house, that was really a school house. We had an outdoor toilet, that had to do for both boys and girls, and we had a lean-to that did for the horses, because a lot of us rode horses to school. There were no cars of course, and no roads, really, just sand,. We went where there was room to go, there wasn’t a real road. And we thought we were very well off with the new school, though the teacher was rather - different. He taught us all that we didn’t really need to study, because the world was coming to an end, in just probably six months. So, we needn’t worry too much about our grades. He just taught religion to us. He said that was much more important than lessons. And of course we didn’t sleep very well at night, I had nightmares, Finally Mother asked me what was troubling me, and I told her. I said, “We are all going to die,”

“Oh no, “she said, “we’re not going to die.”

I said, “Yes we are, and it’s going to be real quick.”

And so, that was the end of the teacher. He left and we didn’t have any school that year at all, we just sort of took it easy and went without school. It pleased most people, but I was very hungry for companionship and the only companionship I had was at school. So I was pretty lonely. 

Then we got a hired man that was very very nice to me, so that helped a lot. He taught me how to dance, out in one of the hay lofts. It had a hard floor. It was over our jackass. And when we danced too hard he would bray, and make a terrible noise. You could hear him for miles away. But we laughed. That was just part of the fun. But I was never allowed to go near him. He was very vicious, wild. The farmers brought their mares there, but that was all. He had a very special yard of his own that was fenced in with high fences. That was just part of farm life. 

And we also had the only windmill in the country, and the only place that had a well big enough that they could dig down deep enough in the sand to get water. So all the farmers and the homesteaders would come to us for water. And they had water wagons in those days, made out of wood, and the slats twisted and turned like a barrel. Some of them leaked. Most of them leaked, and you could tell their trail, coming and going, by the water leaking out of the slats. But that’s all they had, apparently there was no way to seal the seams because they all leaked. But we never charged them for water. They got it for free. They just had to carry it. 

And we also had a huge big water tank, and that’s where I learned to swim, in the water tank. And then I also learned to swim in the Columbia River. But the current was so swift there that I had to have a big rope tied on me. Because the current would have carried me downstream, and that really wasn’t a very good place to learn to swim. So I really relied more on the water tank for the cattle and the horses.

Recent Illustrated Journal Entries

This blog celebrated its second birthday April 17th. Happy belated birthday to the Late B(l)oomer!

It occurred to me that if I wanted to get better at doing travel journals, I'd better do some practicing. So, these are two pages from a recent trip to Madison's Olbrich gardens. I worked from snapshots, and tried my best to keep them simple. I wanted a combination of sketches, in this case of the garden's beautiful Thai pavilion, and information. I only used a Pitt artist pen and a grey brush marker. My next real chance to do travel journaling will be May 9th, when I travel on Amtrak to Washington state.

On a sadder note, my cousin called me from South Carolina to say that my uncle, my dad's only sibling, passed away this morning. Although he had an accent from decades of living in the South, he looked a lot like my Dad, who died in 1983. I counted on Uncle Gene for that resemblance, and for the family stories he knew and was happy to share. I'll miss him.