What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Bruce and I took this past week off work.  Subscribers may recall that this blog began with a story about a week off, and you may be wondering why we chopped up our vacation.

We took this time off because it coincided with the dates for a week-long iPad art class at the Avenue Road Art School.

I saw the course advertised in a brochure I swiped from my boss' desk.  It looked like fun, didn't cost a lot of money and so I thought what the hell.

Art schools do a good business in the summer, so much so that the Avenue Road school did not have space on the premises to hold our class.  So the four women enrolled in the class sat at kid-sized tables in the fancifully decorated "Spirit Play" room at the Unitarian Church around the corner.

Over the five days of the class, the teacher - a fifty-something native of Yugoslavia named Sadko Hadzihasanovic -  took the class through a progression of copying from representations of iPad art by David Hockney and by Sadko himself, then copying from photographs and then, finally, on our last day, drawing from life.

These are my versions of Hockney:

 

I rendered these three pictures on the first day - in less than two hours.  We were all amazed at how intuitive and forgiving the iPad was as a medium.  "God bless the undo button," we said.











On the second day, I did one more Hockney:

And then, working from this picture of Bruce:

I made this picture of Bruce:

On the third day, the teacher, who had looked long and hard for just the right subject for an iPad painting, gave me one of his pieces to copy:

It took me the best part of day four to complete the picture of the urinal and to begin working from this picture I took at the Brickworks:

To arrive, about six hours later, at this:

On the last day, everyone had to leave early, so we had time only to do two pictures from life.  These are mine:

The Five People You'll Find In Art Class  

First, there was the woman with no prior experience in art at all, but a skilled whiz at information technology and a specialist in adult education.  She explained, on our last day together, that she was taking the twelve months after she turned fifty to do things she had often thought of doing but had never had the time.  This art class was one of those things. 

Next,  there was the woman who was highly skilled in rendering and painting.  Recently arrived from Brazil, she was self-conscious about her English, and quietly sat apart from the rest of us churning out amazing work at record-breaking speeds. 

Then there was the woman who was retired, living in the exurbs and busier than anyone else in the room.  She commented that, for her, the challenge of retirement was doing things she was not effortlessly good at, as she had been at her job.  

And of course, the teacher, Sadko.  Arrived from Yugoslavia in 1993.  Energetic.  Passionate.  Highly opinionated about what is and is not fine art.  And impatiently helpful.  A student would be painstakingly putting a line onto the screen and he would swoop in, thinking several steps ahead, and  start drawing stuff.  For the record, he helped me with Bruce's hand, some of the rendering on the Sunlight bottle and he told me to "STOP!!" when I thought I might have had a bit more to do on the background of the picture with the wine bottle.

When one of us finished a picture, Sadko would take it to the front of the room so everyone could see, hold it up, and hit the "replay" button, which showed all the strokes used to make the image.   He never got tired of that.

Finally, me.  I took the class because I thought it could help me find a way to be creative that did not involve paint, pencils, paper, brushes, mess, clutter, expense and waste.  It did do that.

As For What Bruce Was Up To

Bruce spent his summer vacation, as he has spent a lot of of his spare time over the past three years, composing a fridge poem dedicated to a friend of ours.  On Friday, August 24, at the small party we threw for his 55th birthday, Bruce recited all seven stanzas of the poem, for the first time, from memory, in their entirety.

Next time you see him, you should ask him to say it again.

And have a great week!

Karen

Lost and Found

A while ago now, the proprietors of the little yoga studio on Church Street I’d been patronizing for about four years decided to pack up and move their business to another part of town – a new location so distant I could not consider loyally following them.

For two months after they moved I was a yoga vagabond, trying out studios to see if any met the main criteria of a) being on my way home from work, b) having good teachers and c) good classes.  The best any other studio scored was two out of three.  The Yoga Sanctuary at the corner of Yonge and College was on my way home and had good teachers, but the classes… well, not so much.

But then I heard that someone was going to re-open the Church Street studio!  And then they did!  As of August 13, I have found a new yoga home.

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A very, very long time ago, my father brought home to my mother a pair of diamond earrings from his travels to Brazil. 

Mom wore the earrings constantly.   “When you have diamonds, “ she used to say, “Why wear anything else?”

But then one day she lost one of the earrings while she was doing laundry in the basement of our old house in Trenton.  We all looked and looked for that earring, but we never found it.  I imagined that it had fallen into the floor drain and been washed into the sewer.  It finally settled in the silt somewhere at the bottom of Lake Ontario.

Mom put the other diamond earring away in her jewel box, which is where we found it after she died.  She had promised the earrings to me, so I took the remaining earring as a keepsake.

I never wore the earring, but, when Bruce and I decided after thirty years of shacking up to finally tie the knot, four years after mom died, I had the diamond put in a white gold ring.  Bruce had a similar ring made with the stone from his grandmother’s engagement ring.

With our wedding, I transitioned abruptly from a person who never wore rings to a person with a ring on each hand (we had two wedding rings, and three wedding ceremonies…. It’s a long story).

And what, the increasingly impatient reader is asking, does the yoga studio story have to do with my rings. 

This:

There’s a pose in practically every yoga class where you have to stand on your hands, and it hurts if you’re wearing rings. So, before every class, I take off my rings and place them deep in one of the side pockets of my handbag.

I did this just before taking my very first class at the new/old studio.  And I absent-mindedly brought the handbag and my yoga mat and a yoga strap with me when I used the washroom just before class.  As I gathered all the stuff I’d brought with me and prepared to step out of the washroom, I heard a “ping” that I assumed was the metal buckle on the strap hitting the door on my way out.

Most nights after yoga, I have exactly enough energy left to make my way home, have dinner and conversation with Bruce, watch Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert on the Internet and go to bed.   It’s the next morning before I sort through the contents of my handbag and get my jewelry back on.

The morning of August 14, I pulled my wristwatch, my silver rice bead chain with the little Ganesh pendant, and my gold wedding band out of my bag.  But the diamond ring wasn’t there. 

I thought about that “ping” I heard.

That afternoon, I spent ten minutes on my hands and knees in the yoga studio washroom, using my blackberry as a flashlight, trying to find the ring.  It wasn’t there.

Recalling that I heard a single “ping”, but not the sound of a round object rolling, I have to believe that the ring fell out of my bag… and into the toilet.

Now both of the diamonds my father gave my mother are settled in the silt somewhere at the bottom of Lake Ontario.

As do most people who marry after thirty years together, Bruce and I had a bounce castle at our wedding.  You can just barely see on my raised right hand the glint of the lost ring.

Have a great week!

Karen

Publish or Perish

There will be times - and this is one of those - when I will not be able to perform my duties as a once-every-Sunday blogger.

In these cases, I will resort - as I am now - to providing "first-runner-up" posts, or, in a term more familiar to the tv-watching public, reruns.

The story and picture that follow were originally mailed to subscribers on February 23, 2012.

Enjoy the trip down memory lane, and have a great week!

Karen

Your Tax Dollars At Work

The little black cat with the green eyes who lives at 249 Sherbourne Street has had a bit of a bad week.

On Thursday the 16th, he got chased up the big black willow tree in front of his building by a neighbourhood dog.  When his folks tried to coax him down, he was too scared to move.  He spent Thursday night in the tree.

On Friday, a guy in an Ontario Hydro cherry picker offered to help, but all that accomplished was to frighten the little black cat with the green eyes even further up the tree.  He spent Friday night in the tree, during a snow storm that changed to rain and soaked him to the skin.  Poor little cat. 

On Saturday morning around 10:00, Bruce and I were getting the place ready for company and we heard the unmistakeable commotion that comes with large emergency vehicles clustered along the curb.  Bruce looked out, counted the constables and shrugged his shoulders.  Another day in the 'hood.  

"I didn't hear sirens," I said, and that usually means that something very, very bad is going down.

The noise of giant idling vehicles continued longer than seemed right.   Consumed by curiosity I looked out the front door.

There was a ladder truck backed up as close as it could get to 249 Sherbourne and, on the ladder was a fireman, trying to get as close as he could to what I could see even from that distance was a cat.

I grabbed my camera, got my boots on, and headed out to record history.

The police were there to direct traffic around the ladder truck and to yell at middle aged women with digital cameras to get the hell of the street and the hell away from the "fall zone" of the ladder.  

I finally found a spot where I could watch - but not take good pictures; the numerous branches of the tree confounded the auto focus feature - without getting yelled at.  

The lady constable who had yelled at me to get away from the ladder stood near me.

I asked her who called in the cat rescue.  She gave me the details, recounted above, of how the little black cat with green eyes had spent his last 48 hours.  "I called it in," she said, "If it were my cat, I'd want someone to do this."

Shortly after this exchange, the infinitely kind and patient fireman on the ladder finally, after more than an hour of trying, got hold of the cat.  We all (there was quite a crowd gathered) clapped and cheered.  The local 24 hour news station guy took his camera off its tripod, hoisted it on his shoulder, and moved in for a close up.

As they painstakingly lowered the ladder so as to not take down half the tree and to avoid hydro lines, I crossed to the west side of Sherbourne to be in a better spot to get a photo.

While I waited, two passersby stopped and asked me what was going on.  I related the details shared by the lady constable and one said:

"Now that's a story you'd like to read in the newspaper."

And the other said:

"All that, for a cat?"

I couldn't really decide whose side I was on.  I'll grant you, it is ridiculous to send in so much public infrastructure for a silly little cat, no matter how green its eyes, or how awful the weather the poor thing had suffered through.  But the young fireman (the one looking up in the photo below) who rescued the cat, the lady constable who called in the rescue and the TV guy who got it all on film, and who all went into the building to return the cat to its owner probably didn't think it was so ridiculous.

See photo.

Spoiler Alert

I'm still not watching the Olympics, but, really, who needs to? There is SO MUCH coverage, I feel I've watched it all, even the sports I don't understand, like artistic gymnastics and dressage.

I know about the badminton players who were suspended from the games because they were trying to win a medal.  I know about how the US women's gymnastics team performed so well they made all the other teams cry.  And I know about the Chinese swimmer who also performed well, but this time the crybaby was a US swim coach who immediately jumped to the conclusion that her performance was due to drugs as opposed to the fact that she has been in training since she was four months old.

And in other sports news, if anyone outside of Toronto has been wondering what ever happened to all those blue seats in Maple Leaf Gardens, take a look at the shot on the right.

William Ledingham Clark, 1928-1985

August 2nd, 2012 marked the 27th year since my father Bill Clark died.  One of my cousins found some old Kodachrome slides with these shots of Bill and sent them to me.

The one on the right's from the early sixties.  We're visiting my grandmother for Christmas.  Dad's wearing his Christmas cracker paper hat and getting set for a postprandial libation.  I think that's my grandmother's coat he's wearing, but I don't know why.

The shot below is from the early 1970s.  Dad's standing in the front yard of our house in Edmonton and he's holding our standard bred male dachshund who bit me more times than any other dog in the world.
























The shot on the lower right is of Bill in dress uniform (he served in the Canadian Armed Forces, Air Force) with my grandmother in front of her house in Burnaby, B.C., circa 1980.

Allan Gardens Update

For a month or so, the plaza in front of the Allan Gardens greenhouse was home to an upright piano, plunked there by Play Me I'm Yours.  I got one shot of two (see if you can find the second one) kids playing with the "Caymans" piano.

Check out the whole concept here: http://streetpianos.com/toronto2012/

The Allan Gardens aboriginal artwork extravaganza is getting pretty close to completion.  All the works are great, but I give extra points to the artists who have embraced the whole graffiti thing.  It seems so appropriate.  

All you Canadians enjoy your long weekend!  And have a great week!

Karen