All three Volumes of Barbara’s biography are now available.
Included under one cover (318 p.) are over 150 color reproductions of major artworks, dozens of ‘fire-side’ chats, and a lengthy annotated timeline of her life.
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Barbara Sparhawk: Expressionist Artist & Writer
If I have been allowed to live these five months more to witness such remarkable beauty I better take note of it and act more responsibly toward the miracle.
[8 days after the previous post from March 2015, in which Barbara’s mood seemed to flirt with rock bottom, the irrepressible in her surfaces again.]
I am working hard (and you add so much to my life!) very hard on pulling myself from the yawning abyss, that lip of the crevasse atop the darkness. And may I report that finally I am making headway.
Yesterday before sundown I raced up steps, then over hills, drove up the roads for the best view of stunning skies, stunning. It has been raining two days, exciting and turbulent rain.
Clouds bigger than elephant herds storming across a black sky, raising up brilliant white thunderheads crafted by precision draftsmen, light rays of pure metallic light variously sifting down onto crests of rolling, lushly growing green, ochre and soft-sueded landscape.
Big Sur River Meets Pacific
And I thought (how could I not) that if I have been allowed to live these five months more (and etc?) to witness such remarkable beauty I better take note of it and act more responsibly toward the miracle.
I have not paid attention to what are reasonable repercussions to me after this major assault on body and face (open-heart surgery; no exercise or muscle building for five months; considerable eye surgeries including fragile adjacent tissue) and it has all horrified me to suddenly fall apart and feel aged by twenty years. The depth of horror that a narrow miss and near blindness produced is in a league by itself. I have had red to purple blotches all over my face for a month, horrifying me, not going away, no doctor knowing what or caring or thinking it’s their medication (emergency dermatologist appointment? Mid-April!).
And lo and behold, as I keep walking, even running a bit, doing Tai Chi, hoping, determined, refusing to dissolve to tears, dig a hole pull the sod o’er me and give up . . . something’s getting better. At long last I see myself getting reorganized, even restored. Thank you Jesus! Today, accurate or not, I feel beautiful again. Older yes, but I wasn’t ready for 90 and I’m back to the pace of the days of yore. All the severity of skin damage around my eyes is gone. (Why didn’t I know it was temporary, from the work on my cataracts, and my psychological fears?) The creases around my mouth and neck smoothed out.
I don’t know where I went but I left and now I’m back. I suspect I had been harboring panic. I don’t know that that’s gone but I’m learning to work within the changes and see that merely being alive each day is not a premonition of being dead. In tune with the magically constant, totally idiotic medical term of PRE-everything, what I currently have is pre-death.
I’m starting to actually enjoy the idea of work, not the breathless challenge it has become, the pain of thinking this is all I could do to keep alive and better keep at it and there is no time left to me at all.
Yesterday I actually sat at my drafting table. It is both covered and surrounded by wonderful supplies of every imaginable tool of the trade and I have ignored all since bringing my things to it from the gallery. It was quite thrilling to sit amongst things I love.
Tools of the Trade
I started to plan out some of my books last night and early this morning, half in a dream. What has heretofore been an hysterical list-making by some hand other than my own with which I could not possibly compete, became once more the steadier lifelong joy and prospect of making pleasure. Oh my God I have longed for this without the satisfaction of remembering the vocabulary to urge it forth from me. I am wise enough at this point to feel suspicion that it may also come and go and is not fully the resident, but was it? Was it ever a constant? The answer is ‘no’.
I am, I imagine, most of all, remembering the joy of being alive. And there are many doorsteps on which to lay that sweet bundle.
I have felt ever since being very young indeed that I was on the way to living multiple lives. And it’s been born out that I have by choice and decision and happy accident gone to many different directions and horizons and choppy seas, some of it conquered and some of it involved taking on a lot of bilge. Each incarnation so very different from the predecessor.
You’re a fine example of continual re-inventing. We share a distaste for boredom and sameness, and a love of challenge and adventure. I love seeing your own taking on and surging ahead. And the street photographer, the most recent you, is a delight and I can see you loving all its parts.
I may just be good and depressed. Every day is painful in some new way, something hard to handle, some pain that frightens me. I feel ungrateful and uncharacteristically whiney and none of it makes sense. I hurt and I want the hurt stopping. I have things changing with my body I don’t understand or recognize and can’t fix.
[Barbara writes this a few days AFTER successful cataract surgery, 5 months AFTER open-heart surgery, and 3 years BEFORE being beset by a brain tumor and, eventually, a broken hip.]
I came home and was so hungry I stuffed myself and made myself sick from it, and since this morning have been trying to recover from what I did to me.
Maybe it just felt like too much, maybe I’m getting too much done at once. [Heart surgery, eye surgery, dental surgery] I’m overwhelmed, maybe that’s reasonable.
It’s funny, peculiar funny, odd. None of the usual remedies come through . . . a longer sleep, a happy day, a good painting session, a good story written . . . things that buoy my spirits. I still don’t feel as if I’m moving up and out and away from the great low hit in September [open-heart surgery], and so much curing is being done why don’t I feel it inside and outside me?
I may just be good and depressed. Every day is painful in some new way, something hard to handle, some pain that frightens me. And new doctors for consulting and visiting. See this one see that one. Now my skin’s broken out terribly in blotches, I’m guessing it’s nerves or the heart medicine, the doctor says no, then what is it and it’s horrifying me and why can’t I make it go away. And gaining weight, exercising more and gaining weight. Makes me feel so wretched.
I haven’t felt good for close to a year and I still don’t know what happened to me, how this happened, why. Or, most of all, how to fix it and finally feel better.
There are a lot of things, critical things that need fixing. Eyes, teeth, restoring muscle, I’m working on a long list. I’ve been accustomed to feeling strong and hardy and healthy and fit, and now I’m swept away from myself.
Yet here I am having survived by some miracle exactly what kills less fortunate 
multitudes. And on the heels of that my eyesight restored [successful cataract surgery], incredible. Think of it! I do think of it.
I was speaking with the recovery room nurse. Several years ago she got a sudden splitting headache pain in the lower back of her head at her neck. Her husband said something’s wrong, drove her at once to the hospital, she’d had a brain aneurism that burst! Flown up to Stanford, operated on, recovered in time, and back at work!
That seems even more incredible to me, and there we were talking, caring about minutes in a way neither of us had before, yes minutes. I asked if they’d stayed together through her recovery and return and yes, something which can drive people apart, she said sometimes he looks at her and tears will roll down his cheeks in gladness. He’s making dinner tonight, they share the dinner duties, she’s in her 60’s and lovely.
Not everything’s perfect she said. She has some residual paralysis in her face, her throat, scalp. She looks wonderful, her face was mobile as far as I could see, entirely. She said she can no longer whistle. She can’t gargle. She said it with feeling because these were things taken from her that she missed and I understood every ounce of that pain. The sense of it, too.
So the trouble I’m in is maybe this desperate lust for perfection, for not being called out for not being 100%, imperfect; vulnerable; some of that wretched history I still need to lose and have not.
I feel confused by the dramatic change I think, and eyesight returned is sure part of it, I mean, my God, the difference is beyond monumental, I may never get over what it is like to see again, and really that it’s been so long since I could. A very long slow process that may have been more than I could stand without knowing it.
Books. It’s an enormous pleasure to be able to read once more. Oh the printed word! Page after page of any book. Any time. Any light.
I don’t know John, I feel ungrateful and uncharacteristically whiney and none of it makes sense. I hurt and I want the hurt stopping. I have things changing with my body I don’t understand or recognize and can’t fix. I know what small things they are in truth. I can walk, I can take care of myself. I can still paint and read and write and sing.
And maybe all of it is the new normal.
And maybe fate provided that moment this morning when I got to hear something I needed to hear . . . a survivor of dramatic sudden near-death assault on her good health expressing to me the sadness in her when she said no, she could not whistle any more.
I’m accidentally on purpose in just the right place. Everything grows here.
In the garden all morning, I admit to realizing that I made this and it’s good!
Especially now that so much is taking shape and filling in blank places. There are new things popping up that haven’t seen the light of day in ages, ancient transplants, accidental seeded soil. A small-headed but tall daisy suddenly made itself known out of weedy looking foliage (which I have learned to leave be and observe because some surprise is always in it). The center of the bud was very dark, almost black, wispy little pointed projectiles out of it. It’s starting to bloom now, one main flower and several new buds, and it is deep purple with lighter near fuscia dots on the inside, I still don’t know what the petals will turn to but WOW.
Birth of the Garden
Oil on Canvas
The gardens, the old cabin of the Jardine Ranch was a miracle to live in. Probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived. The bed was set into a bay window, quite high up, Cecil Bruner pink roses lapping and climbing the cabin redwood, a pond only a dozen feet away with waving grasses and yellow iris and cattails, a river behind me, Pfeiffer Beach five minutes down the road. They had exquisite, roughhewn but spectacular landscaping. My God the color and variety! An orchard with pears and plums and cherries, and all of at the road bordered by the huge famous black green cypress trees. The horses, cats, dogs, pig named Wilbur. I miss so much of it. But the intrusion, the sense of excluding was pervasive. I thought of all that this morning, not a new thought, that I have more privacy here than anywhere in California so far. And I can do whatever I choose to the landscape, not so with the rock and roll legend [Al Jardine of the ‘Beach Boys’] and his family. I’m beginning to see as well that this is probably a very special climate and land for the kind of garden I want. Farther east to the mountains it is dry and hot. You struggle with gardens and the flowering varieties are limited. I love thinking of your video in that field of yellow flowers, way to go!
I’m accidentally on purpose in just the right place. Everything grows here. Wet enough from ocean fogs, the air heated by the big open meadow just beyond my garden and moisture in the air from the Carmel River at that border. Carmel-by-the-sea has exquisite, old established gardens. We’ve the same climate as the Riviera, as South Africa’s coast. Plants grow here that do not in other parts of America. I’d still like a house on the coast and maybe someday will again.
Carmel is a crappy snooty place to live in, but finds can be had. It’s dreadful that some of the most beautiful places are populated with idiots.
John, I started having the most phenomenal experience with painting yesterday. I got to the gallery in the afternoon, late-ish. And I have to watch that now because I’m entirely accustomed to strong natural light and when the sun goes, earlier every day! Damn! it goes and then I go.
But I’m working (along with your portrait) on a large floral. Big waving flowers that increased in sized and long stems in a nice floating in the air thing, and starting some light along the top then I realized, oh, they’re underwater. So I kept increasing the water level on the horizon from about an inch to three inches deep and yesterday suddenly began distorting the tips of the blossoms that are both under and out of water and oh my God it’s beautiful! I got so excited by what was happening, totally thrilling.
Sometimes I really feel I’m beginning to understand paint and pigment and brushes and me and what I want to do. I’ve begun to think this long dry spell of no customers is destiny, and a chance to change my work and delve into painting again. I’ve always felt so serious about it. I produced a lot of work that I’m proud of during the Big Sur gallery spell, but much of it was fast, too fast, and I guess it’s okay because it allowed me to sell cheap. But I do enjoy the times I can really stay with a painting and work it. Not every painting lends itself to that. Sometimes you get at a finishing point fast, and there’s just nowhere left to go. I love painting water and its effect on things, and this is getting really wonderful.
RAINSTORM ON POND
oil on canvas
20 X 30 inches
What IS the magic in rain hitting the surface of a lake, the ocean, a stream, a pond? A plane of glass gets wind-rippled then punctuated by drops, distorted and pushed and heaved right and left by torrents from the sky.
I wanted to see the turbulent top along with a dunk below. The motion most intense at sky level, then gradually shifting the stems and roots underneath. When I see plants in motion (which is most of the time) I get a fine internal boost, I’m that sure they’re happy. As a friend once said, “Of course the wind loves growing things. Otherwise there wouldn’t be poetry.”
These are dark Prussian blues, rich greens. Waterlilies on the surface go from pale pink to yellow-whites. Some russet in the stems and great twisting escapades.
You see what gardeners go through. It’s a whole fucking planet whirling through the solar system and I can only hope for daily gravity.
I have two of the most interesting trees here, they are evergreen, never shed, slim black trunks -so rare- growing like a kind of Aspen but in one tight group. They reach about twenty feet or more, one at the corner of the side wall by the rock wall, below the general walkway. The other by the same rock wall across the patio, about fifteen feet apart, sweet sentries. The second is also alongside the steps leading up, lightly touching the banister. The leaves are like a spearmint shape, pointed, but green inside, a kind of yellowed pale green, with a full white border on each leaf! They’re very unusual, I have no idea what they are and can’t find them referenced.
Well like most things here they’d grown down to the ground in a nightmare of dead branch and bramble inside. I’ve been working on clearing them out. They’ve been trimmed and pruned previously to a huge elongated barrel shape, which, with clearing the bottom, I am changing. In the process the beautiful stone wall is revealed and exposed to sun which makes for more plantings! So the tree shape is changing. Sort of round popsicle-y stemmed. They’re very round. I pruned to about three and a half or four feet up from the bottom, in a kind of swaying, gentle curve, but primarily flat across on the bottom. Then I thought I’d see how high the top went if left to its own devices, but wasn’t liking it much. The tops are visible from the walkway and parking lot. I’d say up to a good twenty feet so far and spurting higher.
Well I got back to the bungalow and Caesar was leaving with all his tools looking pleased with himself and we said hello and I went down the steps and I’m seeing all the green and white leaves and thinking what the hell!!! Like previous mentioned raccoons, or rutting deer at war in my garden! Leaves and branches everywhere! What the hell….and then I look at the tops and Caesar had cut them — flat off.
Now a gardener, I have discovered or anyone fitting the bill despite qualities, is no more someone to have truck with than a chef before dinner is served. You have no idea what you might be in for after starting a war. So I recovered from the invasion, which had me screaming YOU CAN’T DO THIS HOW DARE YOU to nobody at the top of my lungs, and which offended me greatly, swept up and took another look.
I’m very fond of Dr Zeus’s landscapes, they are in fact all over this area, trees pruned into balls and pyramids and inverted who knows, and all delightful. And I was looking at these trees over the past year, knowing I wanted some whimsy to them and had decided about a week ago I’d go for the African veldt silhouette, that kind of wide spread oval high up where growth stays beyond the reaching neck of the giraffe and its large teeth.
But I hesitated doing anything quite so dramatic at the walkway, because the tops of my trees kind of, well, belong to the property in general more than my own garden. (Let anybody try telling ME that). And then tonight Caesar did the work unannounced.
The funny thing is there’s already a history, a delicate first week boundary war. I saw what he did to everything in the place, square cut and Mohawks, and FORBADE his entering my garden. I knew it ruffled but I stood my ground and I am quite sure it ruffles every time he’s here when he looks down and instead of geometry sees rambling chaos he cannot understand or like. In trade I am solicitous, warmly greeting, and sing his praises to all who’ll listen including the landlord with whom he is very close.
So here as if by magic it was almost as if I’d asked him, or whispered the thought. He is now wearing a sense of triumph, and I will be quiet about mine, which arrived sans repercussion. And sweep up the rest of the mess in daylight. And not ask for my bicycle back. I might even try looking slightly wounded for effect.
Caesar and crew are ruthless in gardens. They just trimmed back a daisy hedge near Saddlemaker Bob’s, the size of three buffalo and filled with yellow daisies to the limit. It’s now a smaller green ball. THE FLOWERS ARE GONE. So I don’t even know how they think except as a tenant here said, These are more Aztec invaders than Mexican gardeners.
If he TOUCHES my cherry tree, which he had sawed down to a five foot collection of six and four and eight inch stubs and which, left alone at last, has, since last summer, sent out twelve foot shoots. If Caesar touches that he will pay dearly, et tu Brute all over again.
I may be up to asking Moses to describe to Caesar in their native tongue that I am doing drawings and paintings of the garden, my garden, AS IT IS!!!!! and it greatly disturbs my artistic nature and temperament when things are altered or moved about. But I’m not convinced Moses could pull it off, he has a limited artistic eye, and then they’d be talking the mother lingo which I could not amend or adjust to my specifications, and it might start a war after all.
You see what gardeners go through. It’s a whole fucking planet whirling through the solar system and I can only hope for daily gravity.
Oh America. I’ve never in my life hated the mix of people here.
Here’s an odd and funny 9-11-2013 experience I had. . .
I think I mentioned that the Miata’s front bumper had popped loose and was kind of dangling, and I went into the shop down the block and asked them to look and the mechanic, one of two brothers who run the place, fixed it with a twistie baggie tie. It’s held good as new for months! I was delighted, they wouldn’t take a cent. I have to get the Miata smogged this month and was thinking well I’ll go back in there for it and give them some proper business.
Barbara’s Miata
[after being vandalized w/ a rock]
Over the past couple of days they’ve had a cyclone fence with signs erected around their gas station. They only do mechanic work and they never sold gas. However, the gas tanks are being dug out of the ground. I suspect there’s some idiot California law that you can’t have an empty tank or hazard hysteria something.
Well I saw them out this morning when I drove by, putting up tiny signs every couple of feet that declared, OPEN!! and you could hardly read them. I drove in and said, Hey…you need a sign! Give me a couple of hours. So I went to the gallery and made them one, painted a big piece of wood I had white, and blue letters, OPEN FOR BUSINESS, then AUTO. REPAIR. SMOG. and painted a nice picture of a pick-up truck on the bottom. I’d been working all morning on the blog and swept up in 9-11 reports and feelings. I brought the sign over to them. They loved it, they were so pleased and excited, I found the brother who fixed my bumper and put out my hand and shook his and said, Now we’re even. It was lovely. Happy moment.
Here’s the interesting thing, they’re a family of Sikhs. Turbans, beards and all. But flying a good-sized American flag on the wall outside their bays. Sweet guys.
Oh America. I’ve never in my life hated the mix of people here, it was always what totally thrilled me about New York. I’ve loved that exposure to a zillion cultures, food and smells and styles so different from my own experience. I figure if you’ve lived any length of life or been anywhere or seen anything else you get an idea of how precious if imperfect this country is. People hating America bothers me. I find it beyond understanding.
I’m really glad I told you about the experience I had with the Sikh garage mechanics, because Chapter Two unfolded today.
From the easel in the back of my gallery I saw one of the Sikhs walk by and halooed. I went out, he had come to see Moses next door, who’s his friend; Moses was closed today.
He said it’s slow, he’s been walking around the neighborhood visiting his neighbors. The Pizza guy, the restaurant guy.
I invited him in to see my work. He thanked me again for the sign and said it was unusual for people to do things like that for each other. And that it had helped to bring him business. And could he have cards from me because people ask about the sign and really like the truck I painted on it.
I said, Well you fixed my bumper! and it was a great opportunity that I could repay you with the sign.
In fact another (professional) local sign maker did a big Open For Business sign for them too! What a neighborhood. They’re having the old gas tanks removed from the ground, major dig, because California charges them $7,000 a year just to have them unused in the ground!!
I said, I have to get the car smogged later this month and I’ll come to your place and give you some real business.
Oh, I’ll do that now. No charge.
Well, I looked at him: No you can’t do that.
Yes, I can.
No, it’s too much.
No, it’s not. You brought us business.
I was almost in tears by now because this and the coming registration due in a week were weighing heavily on me. I mean it has been slow. But I got him the paperwork and handed him the key and thanked him profusely and off he drove.
My God. Imagine.
He drove back a bit later and said the car passed smog but it was close because it was a little smoky but it’s okay, and handed me the paperwork marked N/C.
Then he said, And by the way your rear brakes are shot but I didn’t know if you needed the car right away, if you have time I’ll do the brakes.
You can’t do that!
Yes, I can. No trouble no charge, don’t worry. I want to do it.
That’s too much.
No no you brought us business.
But then tell me how much it costs so I can at least repay you at the end of the month.
Well it’s about 89 dollars for parts, but don’t worry, it’s not a problem.
(He was very firm and serious about this, that it really was okay by him.)
Would you like a painting? Is there a painting here you’d like?
I’m really floored by what’s been said, had no idea the brakes weren’t good but suspected so, and just so touched by all this and he’d admired my art work.
I’ll bring my wife back, she will pick a painting.
I don’t know if there’s enough gas in the car to even get you back! (I’m driving on fumes and a prayer.)
It’s okay, he said. I put gas in the tank. (Me–near a faint!).
All of this was pretty transporting and I’m not sure what happened next but I guess I gave him the key back again and off he went. He returned at ten after 5 with everything fixed.
Promised to come back with his wife for a painting.
Oh John. Such goodness in people. All started with a baggie tie on my bumper, no charge. A sign to help their business, no charge. The rest is history.
What a day.
This painting is a real treat. I’ve kind of headed into it the way Trevor’s Treasure Island developed, more every day and in an odd direction. With absolutely no foreground but rocks going into darkness I have all of a sudden added a chair and desk on the top of a peak, some kind of Greek ruins on a sandbar, a turquoise-lavender pool, stone gargoyles and seahorse, a writing desk, and steps…many steps. I’ve decided to go with it, do not know what the hell I’m up to but up for the adventure.
It’s the sort of freedom I felt with your portrait which is a rare experience. Certainly possible with what you allowed, and unique in that only with historical portraits of my own devising have I ever moved into such a myriad of things. Yours is the first portrait I let myself and you let myself do that with, and I am liberated from previous constraints as a result.
It IS getting interesting. I keep moving the waves and clouds around. The very clouded sky reveals a reticent sun. I’m calling it The Cradle of the Sun, or The Sun’s Cradle, which I find very exciting in and of itself and not sure what I’m up to.
The Cradle of the Sun
There’s a storm coming in from far away places ~~ sweeping up water, spray marking its path ~~ dark and fierce on a gentle cove. Still visible inside fast-moving formations, the Sun is cradled by its cloudy banks. The golden strength hits boulders and quiet foreground pools which will be next to feel the crash of wind and sea. Large birds take frenzy flight. And a viewer’s ready chair says ”Come to me”… a kind of magic seating … a match to the heady seascape beyond, and below, and around it.
I only made ten bucks all weekend.
Now I have to tell you, this has been a day of miracles. Absolute miracles.
I woke in great distress about a handful of troubles. Washed the Miata, which meant facing the bumper but the car needed a wash, and even used Bob’s vacuum cleaner. So worried about what might fall off though.
Then I bit the bullet and wrote the landlord about being late. I only made ten bucks all weekend. I worry a lot about the landlord’s feelings toward my tenancy. He had been stunningly thoughtful, the gallery rent has stayed HALF since I’ve been here and I will never find any place to live so sweet and cheap as this, plus my garden. Or as benevolent an owner.
I went to the gallery to paint. I thought, I will WILL WILL sell paintings. Went back to the bungalow at noon and landlord had not responded to my email. Increasing gloom and despair. I went back to the gallery and thought, okay, this is foolish, I just have to give the gallery up. I’ll figure out something somehow, but it’s depressing and extravagant and I just simply do not have a business anymore. Well that was pretty emotionally tearing me up. I went outside to the mailbox for some air. At that very second a couple drove up who have been keenly interested in Trevor’s Treasure Island but had decided against it about a month ago. And there they were!
And they bought it!!!
I had lowered the price a couple of hundred bucks in emails back and forth the past two weeks but they hadn’t responded. And here they were! They’re Chinese Americans I think. They’ve bought a lot of paintings from me, I even did a blog on them called The Returning Customers. Mostly Calla Lilies. And C____, the wife, really loves my work. (M____ is more circumspect and less effusive.) C____ is reserved but speaks about her feelings. And she was so moved, even the first time, at Trevor’s Treasure Island.
She said, There’s a child’s playground, immersed in nature and no computers or distractions. Something for her grandchildren to inherit, to see now, to learn from.
Oh John. Well I was awash in tears. It’s not only going to someone who loves it and understands it. It’s almost as if it waited for them. And I’ll know where it is. It really is a beautiful painting. I was pretty sure it needed to leave me though I’ve been concerned about where it would go.
And C____ also bought the new one, the orange/yellow tulips in the blue vase with the blue background. Incredible.
Tulips in Blue Glass w/ Fruit
I think I was in shock most of the day. I emailed the landlord, saying he should ignore the pathos of the previous email because the ship came in. I stopped in at the local gas station run by two Sikhs who are very Americanized and like Brooklynites and one of them fixed the bumper in a second with a baggie tie! Tight as new! For Free!! What a time I was having. I ran to the bank in Carmel. The post office with the rent checks. Then groceries at Safeway, and man I was out of EVERYTHING.
I should have more faith. And just so you know, your faith in me has been justified. Everything changed in a matter of minutes. And the landlord wrote back, thanking me for keeping him up to date on what’s happening, wishing me well, and hoping the rest of the year is just as good.
It’s the only thing that really has ever been missing from here, actually having a going business to support me. It really doesn’t require keeping up with anything like the overhead in Big Sur, and who knows, maybe I can actually do this now.
Maybe I can.
I write about few of my gallery customers, though the experience warrants pages of description as the transferring of my art work from my hand to the far-off stranger is always full of meaning. The buyer’s privacy must be considered, too. But this is a noteworthy exception; the fine patrons of art who entered my gallery deserve celebration by all artists. This is hope personified.
On the first of July this summer, a wonderful couple from the Bay area (San Francisco environs) bought a large painting I’d done called Wild Blue Iris by Riverbank. I wrote about it then on this blog. Their reaction to my work was memorable and divine to hear.
Wild Blue Iris by Riverbank
Well, they came back on the 26th of August, and bought 4 more paintings!
Stunning! Collectors of Sparhawks!
The first canvas in July, Wild Blue Iris, was destined (immediate decision) to go over their piano. What a stunning thrill for this painter to see this couple return for more of my work! After the second visit, their house must be filling up with Sparhawk oil paintings. Their enthusiasm sure stayed with me; boy oh boy, it cancels out every despair.
That was quite a day. The sale itself is part of it, but even better is a confirmation that I’m on the right track, I’m painting in a way that moves people!
Wahoo! THAT’S success.
These are the new paintings they took back north with them:
Calla Lilies Against Blue Wall
Calla Lilies & Leaf Interior
Calla Lilies Against Red Wall
Flowers Against a Frozen Windowpane
To you lovely people: I hope these 4 new pictures make a splendid addition to the first one! and to your lives, and that I’ve given you interesting work to look at for decades.
Thank you, once more, for doing so very much for my heart.
The Hawks Perch 