Hippie Days Are Here Again

On Saturday I drove up into the mountains to a hot springs resort where, for an affordable fee, you can spend all day soaking in hot and cold artesian spring-fed pools, and hike 1600 acres of undeveloped woodland so that you feel, when you get back home, that you've been on an adventure to some far-away, exotic land.

Besides hiking and soaking, I spents lots of time lying out on the decks catch up on my reading, did yoga under the trees, ate delicious home-grown food, sat catatonically in the sauna, and saw quail, wild turkey and deer. A man played a cello by the stream beneath a flowering pink magnolia tree; the sounds of weekend Kirtan ( Hindu devotional chanting) rose up from the garden; a delicious breeze kept the day from getting too warm (yeah I know - life's rough in California).

It's kind of a hippie Club Med, and sometimes I go there to revisit the spirit of my (somewhat mispent) free-spirited youth. Times have changed, though; I had to laugh at how many half-naked, dreadlocked, pierced, granola-eating, patchouli-wearing hipsters were stretched out by the pools reading their Kindles in the sun. Me, I was kicking it old-school by carrying around an actual book. Hey, what can I say...still a rebel.

And I guess I'm not completely domesticated yet, because I left my shoes up there and didn't even notice until the next day when I was about to head out to a painting workshop. So apparently, you can take the girl out of the commune, but you can't always take the commune out of the girl.

Published in Life Images Magazine

It was exciting to get an email from Life Images saying that they had accepted the two images I'd submitted for publication. They did a great job of replicating them. It's strange to walk through a bookstore and pass a magazine that has my work in it. I always wondered how that would feel and now I know. It's a little on the surreal side, actually, like it's still "other people" who are featured in magazines, not me.

The image entitled "The Swimmer" is digitally enhanced to bring out the weird alien nature of my niece in her goggles, cap and swimsuit. As a teenager, she occasionally seems a like an alien creature anyway, so I wanted to document the look for all time.

I also used her face for "Childhood's Edge." It was digitally manipulated and combined with one of my paintings as well as a photo of a concrete wall I took years ago. I then printed a mirror image of one half of her face, affixed them both to two 8x10 wooden panels, and coated them in encaustic medium. It's always hard to tell in photographs, but the encaustic texture lends so much depth, mystery and tactile interest to whatever it encases.

Just as I was writing this the Alien Queen (my niece) herself called. She lives in Connecticut but is here in California for Spring Break. They have 10 inches of snow on the ground out there, and here we're in the middle of beautiful full-blown spring. She and some friends are down in Santa Cruz, surfing. The girl lives to surf. She used to spend every summer with me as a child and the second time she took surfing lessons, she was up on the board and riding the wave into shore and she hasn't looked back since. I envy her that skill. I do more of what you might call "snurfing": kind of surfing while half-kneeling on the board, trying to get up into a standing position before I'm flung wave-ward and have to paddle back out again. Even if I spend about 30 seconds on top of the water and the next minute and a half trying to avoid drowning and being knocked out by my own board, I have to admit it's a great time.

I just realized that surfing, like being published in a national magazine, is another one of those things I thought only other people were able to do.

I wonder what else I don't think I can do that I'll be trying in the future...?