"Cat Dream"

I know it's in her nature and she can't help it, but I'm mad at my cat for going after the little creatures around here. We plan on building a courtyard that will become her outdoor experience, but until then I cannot make her be a house cat...I was very happy the other day to see a beautiful skink, the kind with the bright blue tail. We see several a year, really not many. The next day I found it dead, obviously the work of Reikia. She goes after lizards, too, but she just gets their tail. Maybe skink tails don't come off.

Watercolour/Gouache/Ink 10"x14" $145.SOLD

Three "Vintage" Oil Paintings

"Betsy's 21st Birthday" 1980. Oil on canvas 38"x48" NFS
These next 3 paintings I did after graduating from CCAC. The paintings I did while in school I did not like, and I did not save any. They were more abstract, more sophistocated, more what I felt people wanted to see in the class critiques, and didn't really feel personal to me. I appreciate a wide range of styles, but what I want to do myself is more funky, primitive, and very personal... what really turns me on is a folk art quality. This remains true for me still.
This one I did from a photo I took of my sister on her 21st birthday. In the photo, the woman on the left was our mother, but the proportions were not right, so I changed her to me, taller, which balanced the composition better. I added in my sister's dog, and my cats. In the right background is a variation of one of Rob's paintings. The banner in the upper left is one I made for our wedding. I use those banners a lot in my paintings still. We really did make that amazing cake, with little flags and umbrellas sticking out all over it!

"The Divorce" 1978. Oil on canvas, 38"x48" NFS
I had started this painting a year or more before my divorce from Rob, and was having a heck of a time. I just couldn't figure it out. I painted most of it over several times. The day Rob drove away for the last time, I felt devastated. Even though I was the one who wanted the divorce, he was my best friend, and I felt like I would cry forever. He moved to New Mexico. I started working on this painting again, and it just all came pouring out, and I finished it in about a week. It did not start out having anything to do with Rob, or our marriage, let alone a divorce. But as I painted on it after he left, it became my "liberation", expressing my freedom and my starting over. In it also appeared my little girl again, the child I didn't have yet, a blonde, blue-eyed minx...little did I know it would take me another 16 years, but she would finally come to me! (We were divorced in 1978)

"The Wedding" 1974. Oil on canvas, 38"x48" NFS
Actually, I should call this "The First wedding"...I married my first husband in 1973, painted this in 1974. And since I forgot- again- that this is a BLOG, and the next painting I put in will come BEFORE this one, as you read this you will already have seen "The Divorce". Oh well... In this painting, you see myself and Rob in the wedding clothes I made us, with our alter-egos- I was "The Cat Woman", he "Prince Gang","the bird man". The little kid-faerie people represented our kid-selves, and our unborn children. One of the reasons I wanted a divorce was because I REALLY, REALLY wanted children, and he did not. Want any. At all. On the right side of the table there is a little glass box. This was a wedding present, as were the two "pickle" goblets. The cats are Equadablick and Olive. I had gotten "Quadie" when I was 19, because I knew that I really wanted a baby, but I also knew that would be totally ridiculous. He definitely became my baby, and I was devastated when he died, at only 7 years old. I vowed not to become so attached to a cat again, then got Moon, and was devastated when he died, too young also.
(We did not have a cake anything like in the painting, nor did we get married in a Rousseau painting, but we did get married in a redwood grove.)

Dunvegan on Forestis Haefen

Here is the view of our house from the back. It looks huge in the photo, but in real life it doesn't. And inside it seems just right, neither too big nor too small. When I designed it, I used my experience of our old house to help me- "The dining room would be just right if only it were another 2 feet wide." "I'd like the kitchen, which is a perfect size, to be open to the family room so that I can visit with everyone as I wash dishes." etc. The house is burmed in, so what looks like the bottom floor in this photo, is actually the basement. The front and left side are completely subterrainian, the right side and back have windows to let light in. The slope of the land was absolutely perfect for a walk-in basement, no need to mess with the slope at all. The basement is all storage now, and our temporary kitchen. Eventually the carpentry shop will be in it.

Here is the front room, used as our bedroom, office and meditation room these past two and a half years. One day our "real" bedroom, upstairs, will be done- but for now the upstairs room is Bill's workshop- where he mills the wood for our furniture and frames, and puts the pieces together. Downstairs, I cut out little pieces to paint or stain, and glue them onto the doors, then paint or stain the big pieces as well.

This is the living room, in the back of the house. This is one corner of a large room in which I do my work on the furniture, as well as much of my painting, especially when the weather is cold. In warmer weather, I have a studio upstairs in the front I paint in. It is also my sewing studio- a weird combination, I know, but it is working pretty well for me.
You can see the thickness of the straw bale walls around the doors and windows. I added a lot of clay to the bales to get that lovely undulation in the surrounds. They are like big sculptures, and I never tire of looking at them. I love all the imperfections, the curves and bends, the bumps and texture of the walls. I purposely did not put a really smooth and refined finish plaster over the clay base plaster. I smoothed them up cursorily with several coats of lime wash worked into the surface of the clay with a stiff paint brush, then painted on lime wash with colour pigment added, natural yellow ochre and sienna Italian clay, mixing the ingredients untill I got the shades I wanted. The dividing walls are regular dry wall, on typical 2x4 framing. Bill did most all the framing on the inside walls, and he did all the dry wall. He did most of the drywall taping and mudding. We both did texturing on those walls- I wanted them to look like clay walls- we would have made them of clay, but by the time we started on them we were pretty much doing it all ourselves, and time was becoming an issue.The perimeter walls were done with lots and lots of help. Daryl Berlin of Emerald Earth, here in Anderson Valley, was instrumental in our building process, and he brought groups of people that he had helped train in natural building skills, for us to hire. It was a lot of fun to have all these interesting people around working with us, and made it go very fast. The outside got its final coat of lime plaster from a team of Daryl's people after just a few months over a year from starting- it would have been less than a year, but the first time they came to work, we had an unusually wet spring, and it rained and blew so hard they could hardly work, got one wall done, and had to arrange to come back a few months later. Most of the inside Bill and I have been doing, though Juan did work with Bill on some of the inside framing. Our neighbor Steve, also a carpenter, and excellent cabinet maker, did the stairs, and also hung the exterior doors. We also had help with the basement from various people- more about that another time...

Our house, "Dunvegan", April 2008

This is the right side. You can see that I've started staining the light grey lime plaster the beautiful, mottled rust colour, by applying ferrous sulfate (Iron) mixed with water.

Here is the front of the house.
I forgot that this blog site posts new things on *top*, rather than under what's already been done...so you will have already seen the other parts of the house before you see this picture of the front...!
I designed the house in March, 2003, as I lay in bed sick, at our home in Oakland. I was furious that I was sick, because there was so much I needed to do to get the house ready before we could sell it. But I quickly realized that it was a perfect time to design the house, and that it would not get done if I wasn't forced to by being ill. A year later, we were living in 2 trailers on the property we had bought, and it was time to draw the plans. I'd never drawn "real" plans before- done plenty of sketches of gardens and a few rooms- but I'd seen both my mom and dad do it many times, and I had with me the plans my dad drew for the second storey we built onto the Hudson St. house in Oakland. I happened to have in the trailer with us a roll of tracing paper from some other project, a clear 1/8th inch marked ruler, and pencil stubs of Olivia's. I knew pretty much how a post and beam house was built, but even though I'd been reading a lot about them, I knew I'd need a lot of help with how to build a straw bale house. A guy Bill had worked with in Oakland told him, "You're going to build straw bale? You need to talk to Catfish Jack at emerald earth!" We had no idea what an "emerald earth" was, or how to get in touch with this Catfish. We had our trailer on the property of an old friend's place in Mendocino for a few months while our land was in escrow, and one day she showed me a newsletter she had from a place called Emerald earth. this must be it! It had a very fine article in it about peace and ending war and such- certainly something close to OUR hearts! And it was written by a guy from Emerald earth called Jim Stoops. I had known a Jim Stoops many years before, in Oakland, and he had moved north. His was an unuaual name- maybe this was him. We called the number and found that Catfish Jack no longer lived there, and that, yes, they did deal with straw bale houses, but they were all booked up for the year, and yes, JimStoops did live there, but he was away now, call back in a month.
I called back several times, the Jim Stoops person was elusive, and I still did not know if he was the guy I had known. But I prevailed, and finally he had come back, and he was indeed my old friend. We arranged to go to Emerald earth and see Jim. There a few minutes, told Jim what we were doing, a guy walks by and Jim says, "This is the guy you need to talk to!" It was Daryl, and he had just had something fall through, and he was available to help us with our project! So, with Daryl's technical knowledge of straw bale building, I was able to draw up the plans, working at night by lantern light on the table that made up the trunk of our car and the 3 pieces of "equipment" mentioned above! Somehow I managed to draw up plans that passed the building dept, including a full basement. (Charlie Hochberg gave me a drawing of the basement foundation cross section from his house, and I borrowed the basement plans from another neighbor, Kevin, and I was able to extrapolate them into our needs...)
We hope you will come up and see what we have done!