Art at the End of Schoolhouse Ridge (Draft 11/25/23)

We lived all the way at the end of Schoolhouse Ridge in a small wood framed house with a tin roof, tar paper siding on the outside, particleboard floors and lots of missing sheet rock on the inside.

The windows had no glass, just screens in the summer which we covered with double layers of plastic for the winter.

We heated with wood and cooked with propane.

We had a hand-built wood burning water heater and an outhouse with a screen door looking out into the woods.

We had a tiny black-and-white direct current TV, an RV size refrigerator and a shop light with one of those little yellow cages with a hook for hanging and a super long extension cord so you could move it around to where the light was needed… the dc trickle charge electricity was stored in a bank of old car batteries on the ground outside the kitchen window with a wire running to a fuse box in the pantry.

The Farm’s artesian well supplied the best running water of anywhere I think I’ve ever lived.

By Farm standards at the time, this was a pretty “middle class “ housing situation.

The winter my two youngest children were 5 and 9 was very cold. During one snow storm, the only place in the house to stay warm was about a 2 foot radius around our Norwegian Jotul wood stove. We all huddled there during the day and for several nights the kids slept, one on either side of the stove, wrapped in blankets on the wooden benches from our dining table.

This was the year I made a New Year’s Resolution of sorts to try to make one drawing a day for a year. The idea was inspired by a holiday phone conversation with my sister in Oregon, reminiscing about a family vacation to Oceanside, California, 20 years earlier when we were teenagers.

We had gone to visit my mother’s brother and his wife, Uncle Dean and Aunt Lonnie, who had recently moved there from Colorado. We had a great time. My first experience playing in a WARM ocean was fantastic!

One day Aunt Lonnie took us to a local art exhibit to meet a friend of hers who had a painting in the show. I’m sorry to say I don’t remember her name or even exactly what she looked like, but I remember how impressed I was by her life.

After viewing the exhibition, my aunt took us to her friend’s house where I saw a number of her works that I found really interesting and inspiring. She showed us her studio. I was mind blown. She had a studio! A studio at her house! She was an artist and she was a mother!! She made time for her art while raising a family and growing a garden and seemingly being a functioning adult! I had never met anyone like her.

The women artists I admired at the time - Georgia O’Keeffe, Emily Carr, Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt - none of them were mothers. But here was a woman who was able to have a successful career and raise a family at the same time. I was only 17 then and it’s not like it suddenly changed my view of the world or anything, but the glimpse into her life that I got that day was inspiring. Four years later when my first child was born during the summer break between my junior and senior years at the San Francisco Art Institute, I thought of her and I knew I didn’t have to stop painting.

The painting of hers I remember the best was of a little girl in a yellow dress surrounded by a huge bouquet of lilacs. She said the idea for the painting came to her when she was arranging flowers at the sink and her small daughter had come into the kitchen with a skinned knee. When she scooped the child up and set her on the edge of the sink to tend to the injury, she was struck by the beauty of the child’s dark auburn hair, the yellow dress and the purple flowers and simply had to paint it. “Inspiration can come anytime and anywhere,” she said. “Be ready for it.”

Sitting in the cold in the house at the end of Schoolhouse Ridge, the conversation with my sister brought the words of Aunt Lonnie’s friend back to me. I hadn’t thought about that trip in years. Her lifestyle and the one I was living on a 70s commune in rural Tennessee -- the Farm -- were light years apart.

She had a beautiful modern Southern California home and a separate studio with fantastic light in an upper middle class neighborhood.

I lived in a house with a tin roof and tar paper siding.

How I wound up in such a place is kind of a long story. I’ll try to keep it simple. I didn’t grow up on a commune like The Farm or in a house like the Hill House. My family lived in a comfortably modest three bedroom house in a small college town in Oregon. Most of the homes in our neighborhood were built during the housing boom after the end of WW2 and many of them were owned by young families who were part of the growing middle class of the 1950s. Like The Farm though, it was a great place to be a kid with all the freedom we had in those days before “STRANGER DANGER!” became a thing. There were vacant lots full of wild flowers to gather and a rock quarry we would ride to on our bikes and play fantasy games for hours on end. And there was a neighborhood full of kids our age to play with.

In many ways our family was pretty typical. Mother, father, three kids and a cat. My father taught at the university, my mother was a stay at home mom.

There were a couple of things that set us apart, however. We weren’t Christians and my father was a socialist, an egalitarian and the first feminist I knew.

My father taught me and my brother and sister the radical, revolutionary belief that women are people too. He talked to us, starting before we were even old enough to go to school, about racism and colonialism, economic inequality and ethnic and religious oppression. He taught us to treat others with kindness and respect, not out of fear of punishment from a jealous vengeful sky god, but because it was just the right thing to do. He taught us to think for ourselves, to question authority, to stand up and speak out against oppression and injustice, to try to make the world a better place. He instilled in us a love of reading and learning and respect for science and the scientific method. He gave us a book called The World’s Great Religions and then talked to us about the part some of these organized belief systems had played in the mistreatment of indigenous peoples and other minorities throughout the world. Politics, news and world events were routinely discussed around the dinner table. When I expressed a desire to study art, he told me about Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralists and talked to me about art as a way of advocating for social change. He gave me a book of prints by Kathe Kollwitz for my birthday.

I got married on Bastille Day, 1967, in my parents’ backyard. I wore flowers in my hair and a dress made by my grandmother and a string of hippie beads around my neck as the Beatles “All You Need Is Love” filled the summer evening air. I was 19 years old. My husband was 20.

We honeymooned along the Oregon coast and at a cabin on the Umpqua River where I had an amazing psychedelic experience communing with tree spirits and becoming one with the river’s song. But that’s a story for another time…

We were both in college then. He was a creative writing and theater major and the drummer in a rock band. I was studying painting and drawing and learning how to keep houseplants alive. We had a yellow dog named Hamlet, a black ‘59 Ford station wagon and a wonderful group of friends who were both encouraging and challenging creatively, intellectually and philosophically.

But we were young and restless. We wanted to see more of the world. My husband and I shared a love of San Francisco and frequently talked about maybe moving there some day. When one of my sister’s friends was accepted at the San Francisco Art Institute, she encouraged me to apply, too. “We can live together. It’ll be great!” she said. “I’ve already found a place that would be big enough for all of us.”

We were ready for an adventure and so when I got my acceptance letter from the Art Institute (Oh my goddess, there’s a Diego Rivera mural there!!!) we packed pretty much everything we owned into the black station wagon and headed south through the redwoods and across the Golden Gate Bridge into the City. It was September 1968.

Our third floor flat on Mason Streets was just a block west of the cable car stop on Powell. From there Hamlet and I could ride all the way to Chestnut and walk the few blocks up the hill to the Art Institute for my classes.

How we got from San Francisco to The Farm in Tennessee is another long story, but was not an uncommon one at the time and all of a sudden it was ten years later and we’re huddled around a wood stove in a tar paper house on a cold winter night and I decided to make a New Year’s Resolution, of sorts, inspired by the telephone conversation with my sister.

After the phone call with my sister I decided to focus more on trying to find one inspiring thing each day that I could put down on paper. Inspiration can come anytime, anywhere, Aunt Lonnie’s friend had said. It doesn’t require a fancy house or a lot of money. You just have to be ready to recognize it.

I wasn’t entirely successful. There were many days when no drawings were made. But also days when numerous images emerged. It was a way of encouraging myself to keep my eye searching and my hand moving.

At the end of that year I had a drawing book full of sketches of children, plants, animals, still life arrangements, dancers and fantasy images. Some stayed just as sketches, undeveloped ideas, but others evolved. Some of them became greeting cards, gifts for friends and relatives and illustrations for a story I still haven’t finished (!) Several individual coloring pages I made for my daughter were eventually combined into the coloring book “Sweet Dreams.”