Rest

Original Sold

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In November of 2010, I took a trip up to the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma to meet Icarus, Beverley Terry’s stately Russian wolfhound so I could paint him. Joe suggested that, while I was in the area, I go check out a Christmas tree farm we’d heard about. It was on Moon Mountain, which is a very special place to my family.

For many years dad belonged to a San Francisco-based Italian men’s cultural club, called Il Cenacolo. They held an annual opera picnic at one of the vineyards owned by the Martini family up at the top of the Moon Mountain. My dad is one of the few members who brought his whole family. Mom has pictures of all of us and the kids (our nieces and nephew) at all ages over the years. It was always a Sunday afternoon in late September, when everything is cast in a golden light. The property, called Monte Rosso, because of the red, red dirt, was enchanting: an old white wooden house, a huge two-story stone barn and an enormous arbor that covered enough picnic tables to seat a hundred or more people – all surrounded by acres of ancient grape vines. We loved to wander around, duck under the enormous old fig tree to smell that warm fig tree smell. The food, catered by the Orsi family was always the same, nearly-burned lasagna Bolognese, barbequed chicken with herbs and garlic, green salad, French bread, zabaglione and berries, and of course the Martini wines. It was like a trip to Italy. The opera outing doesn’t happen there anymore. And we so treasure the memories.

Back to that November 2010… I was driving back down the road and one of the properties along the way – just someone’s home, not a big vineyard – had some grapes near the fence. The sun was coming through them so that the colorful leaves were all lit up. It was one of these moments I write about all the time in these painting stories. Something I see is so astonishingly beautiful, I must stop and take a bunch of pictures.

It’s curious to me why sometimes it takes a few years before then I make paintings from these photos.  I think I had doubts about whether this was really to be part of my work. It’s quite different. For whatever reason, I started it right after this year’s (2014) Sausalito Art Festival, in the hopes that I’d be able to jam to get it finished in 2 ½ weeks, in time to show it at the Healdsburg show, like I did last year with Zinoasis. With about a week to go, I decided against pushing. The name of this painting had already occurred to me. I liked the double meaning of  “rest” – one being the remainder, the leftovers, the grapes passed by. And the other, the season the vines were heading into, when they aren’t working to push out new canes and leaves or ripen fruit – it’s when they go dormant – to sleep. This is something that I find myself craving more than ever, to have deep, restful sleep as well as some time to be not feeling like I need to be producing something – some rest! Given that I was considering giving this name to the painting, it followed that I’d not bust my butt to paint it! So I’ve taken another month to finish it, enjoying the idea of painting it in the spirit of its name.

I continued in my inclination of late to limit my palette. The rusty-maroons are a mixture of Pyrrol red and Cobalt blue. The greens are mixed with my new-favorite Cobalt teal. Beyond those three pigments are a few yellows and a couple of quinacridones (coral and rose). I really let myself be less precise in how I painted than ever and it was fun, and more rest-ful. I’m not sure that these hot and bright colors are exactly what many would associate with the word “rest,” but it’s very clear to me it is the name of this painting!

October 2014 – 29″x29″ – Watercolor on paper