————
This is part 2 of a long blog post. The first part is called “Wandering” and this part is “Wondering.” No real reason for those names, just playing with words. But mostly these posts are about images.
Kawaii. Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″. December, 2025
At one point, I had a nice square canvas, and a lot of fresh paint on my palette, so I decided to cover the blank canvas with lines. Initially the canvas was in a position where those lines were vertical. But then I rotated the canvas by ninety degrees so the lines were horizontal; and — aha! A sunset. I’d been wanting to paint an ocean sunset like I’d seen at Moss Landing, and here it was. But it didn’t have enough. It needed critters. I let the painting sit around the house for a couple of months until I could see…seals! I made mine simpler than life. Cute seals. For the title, I went for the Japanese word “kawaii,” which means something like cute, but in a special Japanese sense. I think it’s pronounced a little like “Hawaii.”
I was here just the other day. Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos. I’d just been up at a tree farm with Rudy’s family, and we stopped at Lexington to make sure Rudy’s tree wasn’t going to slide off. Sunsets…so obvious, so transcendent.
Rudy is interested in mushrooms, in a botanist kind of way, and here he’s using one as an umbrella. Up at the tree farm.
The tree meets its doom…or its elevation to iconic status!
This month we’re having a new retaining wall installed. Big, big job with many stages. Note the I-beams. I like this shot of the moon and, beneath it, the planet Venus.
Sawed-off tips of the “lags,” like railroad ties, which are to be stacked into the grooves on the sides of the I-beams.
With daughter Isabel on a hill above where we live.
Equipment for drilling the holes where the I-beams went. I love helix shapes.
Wedding With Cat. Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. November, 2025
One of my collectors, Julian Reschke, approached me with the proposal that I do a painting for his upcoming wedding to the woman he’d been living with for many years. We discussed possibilities, and he sent me some photos of him, his lady, and their one-eyed cat. I was eager to start work, but I didn’t have a blank 40″ x 30″ canvas. Rather than waiting for one to arrive by mail, I decided to paint over a recent work, Eye Candy, letting the green rivers become bodies. As I’m by no means a skilled portrait painter, I chose to model the faces on Picasso images. And I found a fun way to depict a one-eyed cat. I wasn’t sure if my friends would like the work, but they did.
Spring in November. Acrylic on canvas, 22″ x 28″. November, 2025
As I often do, I started my next work with abstract patterns drawn from the paints still on the palette from the previous work, that is, Wedding with Cat. . I had a lot of nice blues and greens, as if for a beautiful spring day with gentle skies and budding plants. And that was indeed the weather we were having just then, even though it was November. That’s California! I wanted something on top of that, so I drew dark lines in a kind of pictogram animal shape. I went over the lines three or four times until I got just the right colors and brightness. And then some flowers/eyes came it. I spent a last day refining the edges of the dark shape, making sure it didn’t run off the edges, or get too thick.
Isabel held an event at rudy Jr’s Monkeybrains headquarters in the Mission. Isabel and I were to be talking about the nature of time. And somehow Barb had a made a photo of a warped clock with a tossed potato in front of it…I think that’s Rudy’s hand. We have fun, our clan.
Rudy’s warehouse is another spot where I like to take photos. This is some electrical thingie that resembles a gnarly bug. I tweaked the perspective sliders to make sure the background lines are at right angles.
During the covid plague, Rudy bought an old school bus, which was retrofitted as a camper. He and his family, all five of them drove across the country and back, visiting friends and relatives, and sleeping in the bus. It’s still parked behind the Monkeybrains building, with a sky hole on the roof.
As I’ve mentioned, I did a Kickstarter for my novel Sqinks. Here I’m an uncut raw SF dealer heading for the post office. Took a couple of months for my back to recover.
Barb and Rudy at a cheap ocean-view motel in Santa Cruz.
Awesome car show in the Cruz Boardwalk parking lot. I love those ’30s hotrods.
Barg’s photo of an exceedingly long-lived orchid at my house.
Barb and Rudy dressed for Halloween. I’m an artist, right (these being my regular painting clothes), and Barb is a North African dancer.
One more photo of my Sqinks stash. They’re not selling particularly well, but at least I wrote the book, and got some money, and it’s out there published.
New Friends, Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. October, 2025
I was initially thinking of a big aquarium tank butted up against a zoo cage, and each group is seeing the others as entertainment. But then I was thinking more of a jungle scene, with two groups in the open air, encountering each other, and hoping to be friends. I used my trick of having the critters emerge like Rorschach test results from blobs I’d made. And I liked the idea of giving almost every one of them an eye. As for the sea anemone or campfire at the bottom, well, that’s an extra I wanted to see.
Barb and I went hiking at Abbotts Lagoon in Point Reyes National Seashore. A very long hike through sand and ponds, completely deserted most of the way, but then a huge group of people showed up, some kind of expedition. About half of them undressed and marched into the very cold Pacific together. Barb, who is more talkative than I am, approached a member of the troupe to find out what was up. They were members of an entrepreneur-ship workshop at Stanford!
This display of Tibetan artifacts at the Asian Art Museum…it blows my mind. That apron thingie is carved from some one person’s bones, and if you wear it, you can fly.
Another dawn shot of Tomales Bay. Love the touches of pink.