The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Rothko

  • Penina and the Santa Ana Winds

    I was just a few months blogging when back in April 2008 I wrote a post titled “Where weather and writing merge,” about the Santa Ana winds, referencing Joan Didion’s “Los Angeles Notebook,” the first section of which was originally published in 1965 in The Saturday Evening Post under the title “The Santa Ana.” Didion claimed the winds influenced behaviors; she’s read up on it:

    “‘On nights like that,’ Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, ‘every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen.’ That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out the folk wisdom” (218).

    Didion references a physicist who studied the physical characteristics of winds and people’s reactions that suggest cause and effect reflex at play, and her anecdotal evidence, though bizarre and outlier, of the winds affecting one’s psyche is persuasive.

    “Whenever and wherever a foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about ‘nervousness,’ about ‘depression.’ In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable” (218).

    Didion also mentions the Los Angeles area fires that occurred in the 3rd quarter of the 20th Century, the scope of which at least in part she attributes to the Santa Ana winds.

    “The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn the way it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains” (219).

    We lived in Los Angeles in those years, in one of the beach towns, and I remember the long clouds of smoke that drifted out with the winds over the ocean. Evenings at the beach we took sunset-and-smoke Kodachrome slide photos (see examples at bottom). Now in Portland, which also sports a foehn wind, called the East Wind, which does most of its damage in the winter, falling trees, knocking out power lines, freezing pipes. Last January (2024), a severe East Wind that lasted several days and nights and brought down hundreds of trees and power lines, the temperature dropping to 12 degrees (F), incapacitated the city. A few days after the storm I went up into Mt Tabor Park and took some photos:

    Back in LA, in “Penina’s Letters” (2016 – now out of print), which takes place a couple of years after the time period Didion wrote “Los Angeles Notebook” (1965-1967), Penina picks up Salty at the airport and drives him out Imperial toward the beach. The Santa Ana winds are blowing for his homecoming:

    “At the end of Imperial, Penina turned the truck south onto Vista del Mar for the drive along the beach to Refugio. To the west, flattened by the winds, hunkered an ebbing Santa Monica Bay. Two red and black oil freighters were anchored off shore, one deep in the water, the other high, and three blue and white yachts appeared to be scurrying back to Marina del Rey. Above the horizon, the setting sun spread orange spears through the tar slick winds, and the smeared sky above with the windswept water below looked like an oil painting by Rothko. The Santa Ana winds had been blowing for a couple of days, and all the silt from the basin bowl had blown out over the water. It was Holy Saturday, and I thought I picked out the moon waning pale, high up, out over the water, but the Santa Ana winds were blowing, and I might have been seeing things. Close in, the beaches were buffed clean and empty, the waves flat, and no surfers were out in the water. The wind was now to port, blowing tumbleweeds across Vista del Mar, and Penina gripped the steering wheel with both hands” (21-22).


    ~ ~ ~

    I couldn’t find my old copy, and I wanted to read it again, so I recently got a new paperback edition (FSG Classics, 2008) of Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (originally published in 1968), which includes “Los Angeles Notebook” (pp. 217-224). Alibris has multiple copies of different editions, new and used.

    I published “Penina’s Letters” in 2016. It’s currently out of print.

  • Art from The Arc

    I paint for the same reasons I write: it’s a physical activity that is peaceful, happy, and all about light. Though for some time now I’ve not been painting much. When I do paint, the images come from some underground reservoir, the same place many poems come from, a vision from the inside, if I can say so without sounding too psycho, as opposed to en plein air, painting what one sees on the outside. I read recently that Monet painted dozens of scenes of the River Seine – the same scene over and over, but each scene in different light. I’ve never seen a Monet painting in person, only pics of them, often the light different in each photo, and I’ve often wondered what Monet would think of that, the light in his paintings changing with each reproduction. The light in a parlour or museum likewise might change the scene as it was seen and painted. That effect is not unlike sound effects, where the splendid, carefully practiced arpeggio heard on the radio is accompanied by static, a dog barking in some distant yard, or a trash truck picking up the street cans and noisily dumping them into the void.

    I did see some Rothko paintings in person, some time ago, at a show at the Portland Art Museum, and I was surprised by how thinly he applied the paint to the canvas. You could easily see the warp and weft of the canvas. Of course you’re supposed to view from a distance – the same distance for everyone? One’s eyesight too changes the light. Way back in my school days, I once tried to argue that Monet’s impressionist style was the result of cataracts, but I was struck down by an art student who argued that the work of the impressionists was the result of an art theory they had invented and implemented as a complicated statement on reality and vision. I still think it might have been cataracts.

    I started painting with my two granddaughters when they were little and liked to play with paints, unconcerned with talent or any kind of “I can’t draw” self-criticism. We all three painted for the same reasons mentioned above: peaceful, happy, and light. And fun! At first I bought new canvases from an art supply store, of modest size, 20″ by 20″ or so, but I then started to find large canvases at garage sales, priced cheaply enough, far less than I was paying for the new ones at the art store, and I bought them for us to paint over. The garage sale finds were not Monet’s or Rothko’s, so no harm was brought to the art world by our painting over them.

    Recently, over at The Arc, a non-profit thrift store not far from us, out on the sidewalk, against the wall, behind some smaller items, I spied a large canvas, 26″ x 60″ x 1 & 1/2″. They wanted $10 for it. A great find. The visions of what I might paint over it started drifting in like a slow moving moon, the light in a park changing by the minute. But when I got the painting home, a canvas print of some sort, the kind used to decorate hotel rooms or small business lobbies, I began to have second thoughts about painting over it. Something about it said no, put me up as is.

    So I did, and here it is, for your critical review. Please leave a comment! Is it art? Is it good? Why, why not? …B, care to comment? Ashen? Dan? Bill? Barbara? Lisa? Susan? All you artists and art aficionados out there?

    The pic in the bottom right corner shows one of my basement paintings, sitting on the piano, which I took down to hang the Arc find.

  • Sunset photo, Kodachrome slide, around 1970

    From an old role of surfing slides, taken around 1970 – looks like a late Rothko.

  • Rothko at the Portland Art Museum

    The Rothko installation yesterday at the Portland Art Museum felt claustrophobic. The fabric covered faux walls created a maze of high vertical columns separated by narrow horizontal spaces, forcing the large Rothko paintings, which I’d been curious to see close up and in person, too close to one another, like pictures taped to the wall in a grade school classroom art show, parents and friends crowding in to see.

    These large Rothko pieces, the ones he painted toward the end, are best viewed from a distance in proportion to the size of the piece, but everyone wanted to see them both up close and far away, myself included. I was surprised to find the paint so thinly applied on most of the large pieces. In some, I could see the weft of the canvas. Of course, I was standing too close, bringing both my amateur eye and my reading classes to the subject. One result of everyone wanting to be at once near and far, combined with the cloistered installation, was that viewers kept crisscrossing in one another’s view. But the crowded effect also created the feel of being part of an audience, which I appreciated.

    Why does the museum have the feel of a church, viewers whispering as if performing the Stations of the Cross, usher-guards at every corner like nuns ready to pinch the ear of the tinkerer? Of course, my sensing a reverent whisper could have been the result of my asymmetrical hearing condition, which creates a peculiar point of view not shared by the whole audience. This distorted point of view is important, though, for doesn’t everyone suffer some asymmetrical perspective, the result of imperfect tuning, a slant eye, a limp? The Portland Art Museum has a generous age 55 senior ticket limit, and I had snuck in at the senior rate in spite of my youthful looks, the ticket-seller discretely not asking to see my ID. Once in the show though, my senior frailties began to make up for the reduced ticket price.

    From a distance, immediately my favorite Rothko was a green over blue rectangle about 10 feet high and 14 feet wide (the museum info-cards inexplicitly did not show dimensions, just date and title – though most of the later Rothko pieces are simply numbered or “untitled”).  From a distance, this blue-green was filled with luminous, almost phosphorescent, watery colors like we find in Monet’s water lilies, yet when viewed close up, I saw brown splotches in the green, dull beige drops on the blue, the color of ordinary dirt. I was also surprised at the way the rectangular boxes of color swirled and clouded at the edges, like a broken ocean wave, like surf. But as I browsed around, I soon realized that every combination of colors was represented, reds and blues, oranges and yellows, purples and greens, and I liked them all, and did not need a favorite.

    The Rothko exhibit is chronologically arranged, and I had entered from the end. Still, the sense of development, of an expressive evolution, from recognizable shapes to abstract color fields over the course of the artist’s life was easily realized and a pleasure to see. I particularly enjoyed the early pieces, unknown to me, women on a beach, people in a subway, one small piece of several large women, the circle of women reminding me of Matisse, the female form beautiful in a near-realistic rendition of shapely fat. I looked in these early Rothko pieces for some sign of things to come. A middle piece contained just vestiges of shapes. I dared to guess at the shapes, but I’m not sure this is allowed. Rothko’s end period is laced with shadow, grays and blacks, purple stripped of its nobility. I thought of Beckett and his late characters, seniors all and barely still citizens of some bizarre place, blind and hobbling, but still trying to express what they see or feel, nothing, and what nothing looks and feels like, and what nothing tastes like, and smells like, and sounds like.

    Practically ruining the entire installation, and inviting dilettante comment, into which I happily step, the museum posted a quote above the entry pavilion, something to the effect of the subject of modern painting being the painting itself. This is the reductio ad absurdum of modernist criticism, and is often applied to poetry, music, whatever. If nothing else, the Rothko paintings are about money, which suggests some attempt to persuade someone of something. This is one peculiar experience of the museum, where art gets institutionalized, its importance inflated to the size of zeppelins floating aimlessly above the heads of the crowd.