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.
Read online, download pdf to your computer, share with friends – all for FREE!
Barbara Sparhawk: Expressionist Artist & Writer
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.
There will be newspaper stories about widows in farmhouses outside Paris and south of Duluth who discover a Sparhawk used three decades before to wrap the fish or carry the tulip bulbs through winter, and the auction of the original painting will allow her to buy her house, not face eviction, and put the 16 grandchildren through college.
******
Of all the things that might have caught my attention last September 15 that fateful night, the retained shock was coming home [from open heart surgery] two weeks later and looking around me and realizing that had I never returned (impossibly possible) my things would have been (as they are under such ordinary circumstances) thrown into dumpsters, snatched and concealed, ferried off or tossed. This would not only be the possessions I care about and personal treasures, but of course and most of all, my life’s work. All the drawings and writing and paintings unsold . . . it was an incredibly devastating shock to see that so emphatically, so cold and raw.
******
I had the feeling few hours ago that nothing I thought that mattered, matters.
******
It doesn’t always dawn on me that I’ve been hither and yon and done a thing or two, and should probably work on publicizing it. The editor of the NY Post, Jerry Nachman who was a good friend of mine, once said to me, incredulously, “Don’t you believe in self-promotion?”
Well, uh, I never thought about it. Is it too late?
******
I don’t know how to write out my whole life. I think the end results, these past two decades maybe started me turning my life around. Which really began with therapy in my early twenties.
It took me such a long time to turn from my very ruthless beginnings. From so many early years of being unfeeling, not quite human really. And KNOWING that, working to fully alter my character, terribly desperate to change.
Maybe it would be useful for people to know that it really is possible. There’s so much pain. I grew up in such terrifying horror. I don’t know how to go into that, approach that. I can tell you this: I NEVER expected my life to be as free or interesting or adventuresome as it has been. Though I’m in a constant battle of feeling such contempt for the me I once was, before I really understood my own acting out, and now-me who is trying to hold on to the heroic I’ve gone through to be born anew. I’m Heathcliff and Jekyll and Hyde and St Joan.
I have been dragons and I have slain them.
******
I would love to have books of my work with good prints, and I’d love seeing it too, my progress and change in style and evolution of moi. Or a slide show, or something. I regret having bad photographs of so many, or even worse, none at all. I never never never never never used to think of taking pictures of my work. Never. Now I’m thinking it’s something I can learn from, as well as the preservation aspects.
I remain certain that I am going to be universally considered an important American artist at some point, hopefully prior to dropping dead. And my work finally collected in museums. I know it’s good, and unique, and original.
Not everything’s worthy of documentation but a good 60-70 percent is. Not bad for a kid from Brooklyn.
******
The only impulse I’ve had is to try and organize and solidify my papers and work, to make it easier on historians to keep alive, and still have some control over what gets selected out. Whoosh. I want some legacy, I think about it.
******
Eventually (nice to think of being alive to see it) someone will be collecting the work I’ve done into professional shots from the actual painting, and setting up museum displays and wings, and making lots of books and making up lots of nonsense about what I must have eaten that day to paint like that and where I stood in what light and the turn of a wrist and grasp of a brush and brand of a pigment and my blue and green and water and sky periods and what I really meant not what’s just obvious. Secret mystical symbolism. Sigh!
******
I have begun to pose for your documentary. I sashayed through the garden drink in hand cigarette locked in toothy smile, decked out in a fabulous red silk multicolored embroidered robe. Feelin’ good!
Ah, Barbara! You had a sneaky premonition your reach might exceed your grasp.
I have a kind of vague hope to organize all my work and set things in order but I don’t know if I’ll make it, though I have felt more lively and that I just might live to 100. Most of my relatives made it into their nineties. I certainly ought to outlive the bastards.
I’m working on it, Barbara. The Hawks Perch is alive & well, garnering new viewers and keeping your memory alive. And the first book of your biographical trilogy is about 50% complete.
It is my mission to help you “outlive the bastards.”
[NOTE: Any pictures anyone might have of Barbara or her artworks and/or any memories of Barbara you would like to share for possible inclusion in the biographical material I am compiling would be most welcome.]
oops.john@gmail.com
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.
The Buckley portrait . . . you know I had never met or spoken to him but he was causing a great stir in NY at the time, National Review, then running for mayor. A reporter asked what he’d do first if he got elected. He said, “Demand a recount!”
And me being me, in my mid-twenties, I wrote him a letter. I had decided I wanted to paint portraits of interesting people I admired, he answered and we went from there. When I went to meet him the first time I was heavily pregnant. The first sitting included holding Trevor, who was in a bassinet behind me, to keep him from crying. To which Buckley said, ‘That’s got to be a first.’
Buckley himself was actually totally charming, sort of swooningly charming, a lovely man. The terror that was mine was more along the lines of Oh my God what have I gotten myself into here and can I possibly pull it off and not disappoint. It’s one thing to chat about working miracles when you’re still a novice, and another to do it.
I was living on the second floor-through of a cold water flat on Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn; Black Panthers in the store front one floor below. There was no heat but hot water. The newly widowed landlady (youngish, Greek, head to toe black clothing) would come by for rents, never filled the boiler, I kept the stove going and literally ran the shower for steam heat. Hot water, on a separate system. Trevor was about six months old. I was waitressing. I had two dogs and maybe thirty cats. And a rooster, living in the one closet with a chicken wire door I’d made. Don’t ask.
There was a big kitchen with a room in the corner I’d built for the cats, and a smaller bedroom for more cats, and Trevor in a crib in the kitchen and my mattress on the floor and easel and paint set up in the front room which had the best light. Holy shit. I did the whole portrait there, then moved.
I wish I’d gotten more feedback at the delivery stage, the end, than I did. It apparently went to Buckley’s home in Connecticut but I have no idea if it’s still around or how he really felt about the outcome.
William F. Buckley, Jr 1925 – 2008
Oil on linen, Life-size
[B/W photo of original painting]
******
Artist’s Catalog Description
I painted a portrait of William F. Buckley, Jr. from sittings, many years ago. The man was a phenomenal wit and intellect, used the English language exquisitely, and was a thoroughly charming and towering human being.
I was in my twenties and had the cheek to write him and ask if I might paint his portrait. I said we were both questing for the truth.
His famous & phenomenal secretary, Frances Bronson, wrote back and said WFB asked three questions needing answers:
1. Might he read during sittings
2. May he bring his cocker spaniel
3. How much will it cost . . . IF he likes it
We worked out the particulars and he came to my studio in Greenwich Village, New York for sittings.
He was very famous, doing radio, tv and publishing his magazine The National Review. Buckley was a beacon of conservative thought causing trouble, uproar, and having an enormous amount of fun. The author of over fifty books. He ran for mayor of New York once, and (expecting the outcome in advance) when asked what he’d do first if elected, said, he’d “demand a recount!”
He debated everyone with equal intensity and mischief, and had a fabulous time with sailing around the world, writing essays and books filled with his astute observations of American politics. When he turned 50, he decided to learn the harpsichord and ended up giving public performances. At the same half century mark he started writing fiction novels – spy stories reflecting some early work of his own.
He was reviled and adored in equal measure, not a bad outcome for a life fully lived. Meeting him and painting his portrait has always been one of the highlights of my life. Totally gracious, charming, eloquent, brilliant man. I miss him already.
Regrettably, this is the only photo I have of the finished portrait, and it’s black & white.
Addendum: There are so many tributes now appearing about William F. Buckley’s life and wit, and this is typical, and so good, a comment made by Ronald Reagan in 1985: “Once when Bill was asked what job he wanted in the Administration of his friend the President, he replied in his typically retiring and deferential way: ‘Ventriloquist’.”
The couple are delightful. I swear, I was so happy painting yesterday I was laughing all day long with joy.
Santa Cruz is about forty minute’s drive north from here, right up along the coast on Highway One, through growing fields and harbors, fruit stands, rapidly changing weather from dense fog to sun mile to mile. Quite pretty all of it.
The house is spectacular, up on a very high hill alone, facing the ocean, nothing but treetops in view from the decks above, and the Pacific beyond that. The couple are delightful. I swear, I was so happy painting yesterday I was laughing all day long with joy. I go back for more on Monday, and right now in the studio I’m painting an old surfboard they plan to use for a headboard. Life is good.
I couldn’t help but think of a lifetime of varied wall painting experiences, including Coney Island and billboards, and man-oh-man this is some different kind of doing. No pain, freezing winds, dangerous turf, devoid of hardship. I have gone through much for the pleasure of having a loaded brush in my hand. It’s mostly been thrilling but rarely easy.
This is cake and eat it all the way.
******
I have thought very hard about this and do not think I was ever told to paint out my work before.
Not a great day in Santa Cruz. I should have known, remembered, that when people say they love my work, go ahead and do whatever you like! they don’t actually mean it. It’s not that they don’t mean it, they don’t KNOW they don’t mean it.
Today, I was instructed to paint out – remove – a great deal of what I’d painted. (“Too much; color too strong”) So I did. For three hours.
Notes were left in an empty house. I felt the umbrage rising and fought it. I got everything set to launch anew, saw the notes. I did a little painting, got angry, packed up, got as far as the front door and went back in.
I use potent exquisite oil paints. They do not fade or lose vibrancy. I’m painting on a kind of light yellow/ochre wall. They bought a quart of paint close to the finish used but no cigar, certainly no cover. So, in line with retouching an old painting that’s lost its way, I began eradicating the really divinely beautiful trail of whisping vine and flowers I had run around parts of the kitchen border, as originally devised in conference.
I will actually try to make a long story short. I took out more than half the work, marked for destruction with bits of paper.
The owner returned midway.
“We don’t seem to be communicating. I told you that I wanted….”
[Aside to John: You know, I’m not really used to being talked to that way.]
She continued, “I have to leave, I’m late for a meeting with a nun..”
I said, Have the meeting. I want you happy with this.
“I don’t know what to pay you. Do I pay you?”
“Forget about it now, have the meeting. This is your house! I want you happy with it!”
I behaved very professionally. The final result is nothing like the original, which had such beautiful flow and grace and color to it. I don’t know if I’ve ever painted such beautiful flowers. Now it’s inexplicable piecemeal. I suspect she wanted more control. Like my penchant for high grass, I don’t control well. I’ve spent a lifetime edging past it or bowling it over
I have thought very hard about this and do not think I was ever told to paint out my work before.
I don’t know the couple well and will try to cut some slack. They do intense work [at the local hospital] with life and death. I just don’t want to be part of fabricated emergencies.
I know the midnight fears. The daylight doubting.
We are all so often astray in this business of living a life. I aim for better, fuller function. For seeing and understanding what I have in me. It has become a compulsion to me to say out loud what I have learned, lay out the battlefield and battle.
I know the midnight fears. The daylight doubting. The spinning rooms of walls covered in my agonized torn flesh and soul’s blood. Can I help another mortal in describing what my passages have been and saying I came through alive and this is our commonality? I only know for sure how much the finely-honed creative work of others before me has helped me live. It’s proof.
I was late coming to it. My son’s death was life-altering. Most of all what has risen to the surface is not to leave words unsaid. I don’t know any more what forces silence, but it’s a fool’s game and detrimental to all life, especially our own.
It is anti-life. I vote against it.
I think my work lacks some commonplace universality
I know part of what I’ve been going through is feeling ‘oh fuck, what’s the use’. You know, John, it’s been a very long life of forging ahead with gusto, filled with hope of getting what said I’ve got to say and exhibit, then despair at the struggle. I’m not being a good trooper at the moment, but it is the core of the essential me and will return.
I have at least, thank God for it, seen that my work is meaningful to the world. I have managed to produce some life altering experience for my fellow man, to move people by what I do, to add to the experience of life on earth for more than me. I’ve witnessed that, and will keep at it. I expect the size of the audience I reach will expand when I’m dead, some misty time in the future. But I sure as bloody hell would like to see it, and profit from it, before I meet my hereafter.
There will always be an abundance of bad stuff being lauded by the roving eye within the bodies wherein critical critique and museum ownerships and benedictions are stored. It’s as much the way of the world as a lucky break or overnight success. I think my work lacks some commonplace universality. At least it has not been benighted by those whose approval makes it acceptable for an embrace by uncertain multitudes. All intelligent judgment has gone that’s based on personal certainty. People are afraid to like things that have not been pointed out to them first as something that’s okay to like.
So, knowing all of that too full well, I have, in my lifetime, plowed ahead determined not to notice or care. And buoyed, as we all are, by the stories of the unsung years of the now adored and famous, either present among us or in the mists of time passed.
I will see if I can start selling my work here, which I remain hopeful may happen, as it did in Big Sur. I don’t want to try and find a gallery there again, it’s a miserable place to run a business and that was a golden two years’ experience that gave me much. Whatever the new is, I’m in it now and need to push the parameters. I hope this makes some sense.
It’s very hard still to describe accurately what intense grief causes.
Now that we’re talking about it, I remember some visualizing I did about coming back to life and it was this…
I saw that I was kind of on plateaus I had climbed to, pulled myself up to from a very foggy bottom. There was almost always a rope bridge to cross, there was nothing about the trail leading to the new level place that did not involve fear and danger. But then I’d be there. And realize I had got there. And look back and see the place I had been, below, and that I was no longer in it.
It was an enormously pleasant, rewarding thing to see. Most of the time for especially the first two years I didn’t think I was leaving the insanity at all or getting better, yet was on some level very determined to be fully functional again. It’s very hard still to describe accurately what intense grief causes. It’s different than depression. It’s different than sadness. It’s different than a deep neurosis or psychosis. It’s grief and has it’s own defining and I still can’t describe it well. It’s very out of body, very like being on another planet, a loss of normal references, information, history.
I wasn’t sure I’d write Edith’s Story at all. But you know, John, it was a new place
for me that put me where other human beings have gone before or are going through now, and for that reason I thought well damn, record it.
When I decided to write that story it was in part to remember my child and in part to forgive myself for some of my very bad parenting.
Edith’s Story is published in The Gandy Dancer & Other Short Stories.
[NOTE: A Google search yields no mention of Trevor Paul Sparhawk, nor can I find any record of his traffic fatality in NYC archives – although I may need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone reading this knew or knows of or has any information about Trevor, his life and/or death, PLEASE email me at oops.john@gmail.com]
All of a sudden I start to paint a child, about 7 or 8 or 10. And of course my head’s already at war, pretending there’s no significance. Oh just a child. I think I’ll make it a little girl. Feeding one of the birds on the steps. But all that’s crap because it’s not just a child and not a little girl it’s my son, and there he is.
(1)
[From a letter addressed to South African painter, Jolande Hesse]
“I would like to suggest something, which has taken me a long time to discover about painting and I would like to pass on to you.
It is possible, in creative work, to change and alter realities. It’s useful as a fundamental source of experimentation, but can go beyond that into the realm of self-fulfilling prophecy. Not too many years ago I was doing a great deal of traveling, living rough, and all my things were stored on the other coast. I was heartbroken over the separation. I started a painting of a wonderful big studio with me in it, in a fabulous bed, with everything I owned and missed around me, including the spirits of friends and animals. Studio and Spirit Dreams was the result. Afterward I ended up moving into several very similar places. The painting was cathartic.
Sixteen years ago when my son died I was swamped in grief. I have literally been unable to paint him at all. Only this past week I started a painting (without knowing where it was heading) of a wonderful garden island paradise, filled with birds and insects, flowers, sailing ships, a jeep, beautiful skies…then suddenly at the end of my brush my son appeared in it, and it was his. It is, in truth, the way for me to picture him still growing up with all the delightful things around him that I would have wanted him to have, to play and explore. It has certainly produced a great deal of emotion in me to paint it, which has turned from tears to delight in short order. And a sense of making something right over which, gone so wrong, I had no control. I’m suggesting this in part because . . . of your own story. You are new to painting, and wonderful at it. Instead of years usually wasted in developing technique that is ultimately discarded in favor of originality, you went right in with your heart in your hand, and it’s wonderful to see. I suggest you consider this skill as a playground for your imagination, to use in a way that will liberate you, and the subjects you paint, even more.
Artists have it in them to absorb and feel the depth of despair of life, and also to walk, with the viewer’s hand in ours, to imagined wonders that resonate with hope.”
(2)
The memories of my son always lurk, hover. Sometimes surface, sometimes a surprise arrival. wHOOOOOSH! I still cannot fully resolve the experience in me. I don’t know why. Maybe it never leaves anyone. But I want to somehow conquer the despair, to end the despair.
I get fairly trembling if I go into it all. And that scares me because it led me to a very bad place when he died, those first couple of years, not any place I want to go again.
So I’m back in the gallery painting on the landscape. I know it’s lacking. I’m adding some interesting things but there are still big open spaces I don’t know what to put in, make it more, make it better.
All of a sudden I start to paint a child, about 7 or 8 or 10. And of course my head’s already at war, pretending there’s no significance. Oh just a child. I think I’ll make it a little girl. Feeding one of the birds on the steps.
But all that’s crap because it’s not just a child and not a little girl it’s my son, and there he is.
So I’m getting very shaky and starting to cry, thinking what the hell am I doing to myself. And then I thought if I make it right maybe that’s precisely what I’ve needed to do. I haven’t been able to paint him at all. So I make myself keep at it until the form is right. I add a big Labrador. A jeep. Now he’s got a dog and toy. And the animals. And the garden, and off in a wild place with a wide open sky. And the bird, the hawk I started painting two days ago is really a sparrowhawk, wings spread, soaring, and Trevor’s on the steps under the sparrowhawk.
Trevor’s Treasure Island
(3)
I started thinking today that I’m not entirely pleased with the way I’m painting, almost as if everything I’ve done up until now is not right, or wrong, or off, or problematic. I end up with colors on the brush I don’t want, and then work and work on it and suddenly there’s a combination that’s so right it makes me cry.
I’m also doing essentially the first portrait of Trevor. He’s not the center of the painting but an important part. He’s a young boy on this strange bit of land, he is leaning forward feeding crows. I know much is coming from my subconscious. Without specifically planning it he appeared under a large protective sparrowhawk. It was going to be only a large sky and landscape, and there are massive flowers front and center, then I kind of started creating a treasure island, for Trevor, and oh God the things that have come into it, birds and emotions and sailboats and a jeep and more birds and dragonflies and crashing waves and trees and it’s getting very Hieronymus Bosch-y actually now I write this out.
I have likely studiously avoided delving very deep into anything, imagining I’d return to shaky ground. It’s so interesting to have you to write to, I swear. It helps me understand myself.
But the problem with not delving is a run of superficiality, which I don’t care much for either. I kept painting, saying, it’s not beautiful, it’s not beautiful….and then there’d be a start of something that worked, that was.
I think I may be having some rush of feeling to put everything in it that didn’t get done, know what I mean? It’s some kind of completing thing. I worked hours on
Trevor. I wanted the physical to be just right, he’s leaning forward, in curiosity not a boy’s mischief. I want it sweet. There’s not much detail on the face and may not be, it’s the posture that says it, the position of the hands and legs. It sure is a major challenge of portrait work, and I’m about to start yours. There is so much in an expression, so much subtlety to get right so that it is what I want to say, unmistakably. And I am finding much fault with myself. It’s not flowing.
Well, I’m obviously consumed with all this. I will eventually have a breakthrough, because that’s the way it happens. If I can let it all sort of play out by itself it will paint itself.
The central flowers were initially on stalks, a very crowded base of leaves and stalks, and late today I set them all free as if they’d taken off in the wind. Some metaphor.
I’m sorry to be so preoccupied. Bless your heart for listening. And how I love thinking of you with the straightforward, wholesome work with feral creatures and big open skies.
(4)
I suddenly began to re-work a portrait of Trevor I started in 1996 and it was not good then. I have had the past two days of fluent emotional peaking and am finally getting into it in unexpected ways. It’s very different from the way I normally paint.
Trevor was born February 27th, 1972 and died January 27th, 1996.
I will say this for being a parent which I can only guess at with my own or other parents but I have the feeling it’s universal, which is that there is never a day that goes by that you don’t think about your child. This may be very good for me, the portrait is evolving into something remarkable. And I am trying not to burden it with, and in the process free myself from, all the weighty memories.
And two hours later, okay. I’m okay. I didn’t go nuts or die. I started something likely very important, or it drew me in.
(5)
The painting of Trevor is getting fascinating. A great challenge, and very good to see. The act of painting is taking over. I’m inventing a face I don’t think I ever saw, with a slight beard, JH inspired likely. Trevor and the royal Princes could all be kin, he looked like a skinnier version of Harry. I’m working on your portrait too and the one of me and the cats. Good painting going on.
(6)
I am having some fine metamorphosis with painting. I’ve tried a great many things in my life, and there is always a point where I understand and accomplish to a certain level and then it gets boring and I turn from it, on to the next. I note that painting is a singular experience. I am staying with it, a lifetime, and it continues to open new doors. Amazing to me. And my increased facility is actually making the experience more inviting, not less.
I spent several hours again on Trevor’s portrait today. Very pleased with the results. I still can’t stay beyond a certain point
I’m painting Trevor looking very alive and happy. It’s a good painting. Wait til you see.
Trevor Paul Sparhawk
I used to be scared of experimenting. I’d think, What if I throw some blue in there? I’d been meticulously building in one direction and was afraid I’d irreparably spoil what I’d been working on. Now I’m all gung-ho doing, and it’s incredible freedom. Turns out nothing is sacred in that insight and challenge are more important than the illusion of success by repetition.
Painting, any art, has always been like a laboratory to me when I’m doing it best. Which is why I never could bear commercial art for long, beyond earning a living and learning something new, briefly. It’s all style in preference to substance.
(7)
[Yours] . . . is such a solid, valid observation. I’m going through exactly this with Trevor’s portrait, asking him about the things I don’t know, that I want his time on earth to be incredibly full. He’s maybe older in my portrait of him than an age he ever
reached, maybe not. He had a beautiful little body as a child, and grown up. I’m working on his neck and collar bone, face, eyes, background. I was about five hours painting today, and it’s getting very good. I want no tension in his face, a laugh that’s pure joy in the presence of good company, abandoned to a near guffaw. It presents challenges to paint, several of which I have not dealt with before. And this memorializing, it extends a life I feel. That and all the lefts unsaid. A friend told me once of his best friend who’d committed suicide, Oh God! He would have loved it now! He would have loved this decade!! which seems so true of so many.
I think of that all the time.
(8)
Painted on Trevor’s portrait about four hours or so. I’m trying to get the expression just right, the mouth. I’ve gotten both eyes in very good shape, very pleased. More work on nose and beard. Teary of course, oh Lord. It’s impossible and wrong that he died, John. It’s so wrong.
(9)
I spent hours, all day, in the gallery working on Trevor’s portrait, and took some pictures, not sure if I got it right. Or if it’s actually finished. I’ve become involved 
in the side and backgrounds, lots of flowers and vines, I am always so desperately trying to give the child bouquets.
******
Well, it has not been an easy go but I’m at the finish, in the vicinity. I want him immortal, John. Then back fulsome to your portrait. I never fail to learn so much with any painting but more especially portraits, and I will be adding that to yours.
******
Well, despite poverty at every turn I am buoyed by the fine work on the painting of my only child and that I will make him immortal which he was destined for and this close of reaching on his own. My little boy.
******
I suppose by divine purpose the portrait of Trevor will be completed tomorrow, his birthday. I spent many hours today, and had gotten the left eye as good as the right, and the rest has fallen into place and there’s not much left to go.
It has been spurts of conversation and despair and hope.
[NOTE: A Google search yields no mention of Trevor Paul Sparhawk, nor can I find any record of his traffic fatality in NYC archives – although I may need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone reading this knew or knows of or has any information about Trevor, his life and/or death, PLEASE email me at oops.john@gmail.com]
I couldn’t stop watching him. I think Trevor does send these children and young men to me.
(1)
I saw a young boy about ten with his dad in Safeway checking out right behind me, and in a flash got all choked up. I smiled at the boy and said it was a pleasure to see him there, and I wish you well, and a very good, fulfilling life. And smiled at his dad and said, Which I know you will have.
John, he just beamed. A sprout of a kid, nice dad who was tall and you could see the boy beginning to catch up with him in that elongated stretch kids do in growth spurts where they thin out and loom upward and you can’t keep up with clothes and sneakers or enough food. They were wonderful together, easy, comfortable. I started to cry and turned away and stopped, and a minute or two later said something lighter about the food, his basket and mine, and said goodbye. I didn’t have to say what moved me, seeing a youngster okay, well, alive. His dad knew. The country knows.
(2)
I was in Safeway this morning (jelly donut) and in line behind a young woman with her son, five. Named Malachi. Very shy. I was talking to him trying to encourage him to respond. Reminded me of Trevor so much, little shy blond child. His mother said they’d just gone through lessons about not talking to strangers, I said I was sorry he was growing up in a world like that, his mom said, It’s okay, you can talk to him, but to no avail.
I couldn’t stop watching him. I think Trevor does send these children and young men to me. Then I started to cry, tears just rolling down my face. I said to her quietly I’d lost my own child, I wanted to explain myself so she wouldn’t be alarmed but I hesitate because hearing it is alarming to any mother. The Safeway guy and bagger were so clearly moved after she’d gone, I mean I’m standing there with tears rolling down me and saying, I’m sorry, You never know when it’s going to hit, you think you’re okay then something happens and boom.
(3)
A couple of hours ago I went up to the gallery and passed a car next to Bob’s saddlery that wasn’t familiar. Young kid in the front seat passed out over the steering wheel. Frankly I thought he was dead. I shook his shoulder, he suddenly popped up, incoherent, I asked if he had overdosed on something, did he need an ambulance (I’m embarrassingly dumb), he didn’t know where he was or where he lived. He staggered out and peed over my garden then got back in his car and passed out again. Well everybody’s gone, so I drove down the block to the ranch guards, they knew him, he comes to visit his grandfather and robs him. I asked them to call the police. No sign of law after 15 minutes so I drove to the gas station and called from there, help was on the way. By the time I was back an ambulance (not needed) was pulling out and three sheriff’s cars and the kid up and doing perp walk back-cuffed and they know him real good. Out of jail two weeks. The sheriff said the whole family are into drugs and alcohol, the father’s a doctor, they live at Carmel Valley Ranch which is VERY pricey millionaire homes, the father keeps kicking him out, he gets arrested and bailed.
It was upsetting. I finally cried. I figured I should have taken the keys, it would have been a nightmare with him on the road, he was near comatose. Why didn’t I bring him home and feed him coffee and eggs and give him a place to sleep it off. All I could feel was angry he was being so stupid (and stupid a long time) and kept thinking of him driving away. I did not feel protective or caring or motherly at all. But he was just a kid. I’d have felt more for a stray or hungry or sick dog.
I don’t understand myself.
When Trevor died it was five in the morning and he’d been at a friend’s house partying and was driving the friend’s car and wanted to get back home to clean up for an interview later that morning for a THIRD job he wanted and fell asleep at the wheel. Maybe that’s the anger, or the immediate reaction Don’t Let Him Drive! and why didn’t Trevor’s friends do that. Or did they? Maybe he took the car without asking and everyone else was asleep. And I don’t know and never will.
Life is so damn interesting.
After getting myself traumatized with memories last night I find the morning has produced a sense of liberation after all. I initially just reacted as another person, a stranger to that boy drugged up in his car. Later I transposed my son which flooded me with…way too much of everything.
This morning I feel a kind of abandonment of these years of weighty responsibility for EVERYTHING that ever happened to Trevor. I think I first saw the boy as a separate human who was making his own life and mistakes.
I’ll tell you this, John. There is never a loss from engagement. It is always a benefit even if on unseen levels. Eventually comes the new dawn.
Thank you for being there to talk to. The extent of trust and friendship between us is just enormous, I hoped shared, and means so much to me.
(4)
Speaking of children, Trevor unexpectedly came to visit just after I’d woken up a few days ago. I probably had been dreaming of him. We planned a breakfast, first of pancakes and then crepes. He checked to see if we had all we needed and brought it out on the kitchen counter. He set the table. We were both so excited. He was about four. Then shortly after we planned a trip to Big Sur, the Andrew Molera park and walking along Big Sur River to the ocean. We had to pick out clothes and stuff to put in the car. He was about ten then. I said if we could find an empty parking lot or back road, he could practice driving again. He was very pleased. A few hours had passed and he was 13.
I’ve stopped thinking it insanity. If anything, it’s calming for me. I get to say and do much unsaid and undone. Or not done. The tragedy is that the undoing can’t happen. I barely remember ever cooking for us. So I’m changing that. I rather like it. I suspect it’s also part of the children’s books writing, talking to my child.
(5)
I go to Safeway for Thomas Jefferson’s cat food. I’m in line, long stupid line, and a woman comes up behind me and calls my name.
It’s a Cachagua friend I haven’t seen in three or four years. I’m very fond of her. She’s tiny, dark, Indonesian. Her husband’s a big Irish redhead. They built a spectacular winery out there, way out past Carmel Valley, gorgeous land, successful. Four years ago her son, 18, died in a car crash on Carmel Valley Road. He drove into a tree and died at once. She and I have helped each other when we talk. I like her so much, very solid, very bright.
As we’re moving through the slow line I’m telling her about the experience with the painting. With Trevor.
Maybe they’re up there, playing together. Your son and mine.
She’s a Buddhist. Amazing woman.
[NOTE: A Google search yields no mention of Trevor Paul Sparhawk, nor can I find any record of his traffic fatality in NYC archives – although I may need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone reading this knew or knows of or has any information about Trevor, his life and/or death, PLEASE email me at oops.john@gmail.com]
I’m working on the painting of the Magnolias in the Blue Bucket and this morning added a cat napping alongside. It’s an interesting challenge, calculating the light reflected and filtered, the shadows and angles. It’s a very pretty painting, a kind of wonderful painting, and different from paintings I normally do I think.
Well, who knows; I’m no longer sure. I still have so much to learn and want to get close as I may perfecting, well no mastering, knowing my trade.
Magnolias in Blue Bucket & Cat, End of Day
Lovely Magnolias blossoms and their leaves crowding into a sweet old tin bucket in a big open room. The sleepy eye of a wily cat watching your every move as you enter the room.
‘Al’ is Al Jardine, the shorter blond of The Beach Boys who looks a bit like Richard Widmark. I lived on their family ranch on Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur, took care of their animals including Wilbur the pig, the horses, cats, dogs, parrots; was the family chef, too.
THE BACKSTORY
My getting to Big Sur is a lesson in making dreams come true. When I was 14, new in California on a drive with my mother and brother up to SF from south, Rancho Santa Fe, we stopped and I stood on a cliff there somewhere drinking it in, stunned, and never forgot it. I left the coast at 17. I came back at 51. I ended up in my car with my animals in Big Sur forests for 2 years, lost in every way.
Meanwhile looking for any job, going to construction sites and asking for house painting work. Got hired, a good one on a house in Carmel, three weeks and good pay. A carpenter fell in love with me and took me to see Pfeiffer Beach for the first time to show me the purple sand.
I’m going to live here some day, I said,
Impossible. Nothing for rent, only for millionaires.
YES, I will.
THE INTERVIEW
Ten years went by, and during that time, Holman Ranch, Yosemite, Grass Valley, Pebble Beach, Cachagua, constantly asking everyone about Big Sur, visiting, walking, smelling the place, getting the IMPOSSIBLE response. Very unhappy at Carmel Valley ‘Lower Circle’ down by the river. If I’d known that’s what it was called I wouldn’t have moved in. But I had my first gardening experience there and last suburbia, and kept asking about Big Sur.
I was at a vineyard Christmas in Carmel Valley talking to a woman. She lived in Big Sur. She said she knew a place maybe coming up but couldn’t say who it belonged to because they were famous. I can do famous, I said, I almost am myself. And I knew it was the Jardines, everybody knew where they lived. She said call her in a week. She never returned my calls. I looked constantly on Craig’s list.
I was producing a radio show making $650 a week. Big Sur rentals started at $2500. I emailed a realtor. I wrote, I’ve seen your ads for six months now and these beautiful places stay empty. If anyone needs a responsible, fully employed tenant let me know. I can manage $1500. He wrote back, sorry, never less than $2000. Sigh.
Then the next day, he wrote again, There is a place, a small cabin on Pfeiffer Beach, $1850. I talked to Al, he’s expecting your call.
I nearly passed out. I looked up Jardine on the internet, there are photos on a website because of the recording studio, called Red Barn. I decided I couldn’t miss the opportunity no how even if it was a high-priced shed, and called. He was annoyed and coolish and I ignored it and we made an appointment for early Sunday afternoon next. I went bearing gifts, brought a copy of The Gandy Dancer and a bouquet of purple Iris for Al and colorful Ranunculus for Mary Ann and drove there trembling, so excited, willing to take on anything, sure it wouldn’t work. But the sun was shining, it was December and 80 degrees.
Al was on the roof of one of the little buildings when I got there, and met his wife Mary Ann, who shouted up, Al…get off the roof! It’s okay, come down and meet Barbara. I gave the Ranunculus to Mary Ann. Her favorite flower. I gave Al the Iris. His favorite flower. He loved the book, no slothful Sparhawk. She’d shown me the place. I looked at all the little buildings and sheds we approached and thought, well no, that’s their house, it must be the goat shack over there . . . then it WAS that cabin.
This? This is the house for rent? Yes. (Oh my God, every square inch was charm. When I got home I had no idea of what it really looked like and couldn’t remember the size or layout of anything except I was in love with it.)
Al and I got on very well. The first thing I said to him, shook his hand, I want you to know that your fabulous music has been an important part of my life since I was in my teens. Thank you for all you’ve done. We all hugged when I left.
I knew some people he knew, I sang a song about something, I talked about myself, I loved all the animals who came over, I was in some kind of cloud of transport to another life.
And every sentence I anticipated a reply of, Oh well, then you won’t do at all.
It never happened.
I said, Look, Al. I smoke. He turned away and held his head and thought a minute and turned back and said, I hate smoking. I take it you love tobacco. Yes. Okay, you can smoke inside the house. (unheard of).
And Al, I said next, it’s worth every cent but for me the rent’s too high.
And Al said, Hmm. Well, how much can you pay?
So we negotiated. It went from $1850 to $1550 and I’d do the feeding of the animals twice a day.
Then I said, That’s fantastic. Thank you! But I need a month. The place where I am expects 30 day’s notice and they’ve been good to me.
Okay.
And Mary Ann said That’s good, we’re still painting the bedroom, what color would you like?
I met the housepainters inside, they were the Dali Lama’s documentary film crew. True. Really.
I wrote a check for the first month. More unbelievable: Nah, we don’t need a deposit, forget it.
I’m not sure how I was still breathing after all that or able to drive but I did and got home and started packing and called the people where I lived and gave notice.
I’d gotten a call from Al at midnight a week later. He was nervous about smoking. Did I smoke in bed? Not since the ’60’s I said. Okay. I liked how peculiar they were.
CHEF BARBARA
The day of the move was enormous tribulation, sorting, endless boxes and too small moving van, Jeep falling apart, borrowing money for every part of it, and engineered during the worst first storm of the season in gale force winds, torrential rain and floods. Sycamore Canyon Road is the old, one lane, curving road to the beach, and unpaved and rutted. The Jardine Ranch is the last house before the beach. The woodstove had four inches of water in it.
Al and Mary Ann left on tour almost immediately, and there I was alone on 80 wild 
acres with one storm coming in after the other (and you really feel it there), with a dozen animals to care for, this completely incompetent Brooklynite on the horse/pig front. It was fantastic.
About a month went by. I’d gotten up to Whole Foods in Monterey and stocked the pantry. They drove in that night around midnight. Al called. I said everybody was fine, welcome home. He sounded exhausted. He said it was a great tour but he was knocked out. Mary Ann had a broken arm that wasn’t healing right. I asked if they had any food in the house.
Not really.
Then I said I had Chateaubriand in fried onion and Portobello mushrooms, fresh asparagus, mashed potatoes, Cheshire cheese, lemon meringue pie, ginger chocolate, a nice bottle of old Port, and after every thing he gasped and sighed, and I said give me fifteen minutes I’m bringing you dinner. I put dinner for two in a white wicker basket swaddled in red and white checked cloth and trotted it up to the Big House. After which I became their chef, they both said they never tasted anything so delish. In less than a year I quit the radio job and opened my gallery.
I happily consider myself an opportunist, or at least someone not adverse to turning down chance when it appears unexpectedly and wanting to have a life of joy. There were, as you note, a lot of maneuverings around very strong personalities required, and this breathless sense of not wanting to do wrong on my part. But there was so much for me to gain, and grow I did. Life altering, every bit of it.
And stimulating beyond belief, I never painted so much or so fast or so well in my life.
“My work is focused on inspiring individualism, personal responsibility, and an independent spirit.”
Expressionist artist and published author Barbara Sparhawk passed away unexpectedly on September 4, 2018.
The public is invited to a Memorial Art Show being held in her honor at The Wild Goose Bakery & Cafe, 18 E. Carmel Valley Rd., Carmel Valley, CA.
The exhibit will be open throughout the month of August, 2019. Cafe hours are 6:30 am to 6:30 pm, although they sometimes close early on slow days.
Ph: 831.659.5052.
We would like to invite you to submit pictures as well as video of your visit to oops.john@gmail.com, who will attempt to edit them into a short documentary that can be viewed here on The Hawks Perch.
My name is John Hayes, and I recently received the following sad news which I would like to post for those who have noticed Barbara’s absence from these pages:
“Alas, your fears are justified. Barbara died in early September (2018) from complications of surgery. . . She had survived radiation for tumors behind her eyes, and her sight had improved. She was in the middle of chemotherapy. Evidently, however, her cognition and balance led to a fall and immediate hip surgery for the break. She aspirated during surgery.”
I “met” Barbara online in 2012 while reading her book, The Gandy Dancer & Other Short Stories. We shared a love of art and writing, and over the next half-dozen years our email correspondence would grow to ¾’s of a million words.
From the beginning it was obvious that Barbara was special. Her observations and insights, her paintings and drawings, her bohemian life as an artist – in so many ways Barbara defied the norm and approached greatness.
In 2013 I described Barbara’s life in a blog as:
“If ever there were a biography as yet unwritten I would love to read,” I noted in that same blog, “it would be Barbara’s.” And toward that end I urged her many times to sketch her life in words, as well as to let me photograph and document her canvases. An artist of her caliber should not be forgotten.
“The only impulse I’ve had is to try and organize and solidify my papers and work, to make it easier on historians to keep alive, and still have some control over what gets selected out. Whoosh. I want some legacy, I think about it.”
– Barbara Sparhawk
And yet, two months after Barbara died her body still lay unclaimed in a morgue in Carmel, California. I do not know if the situation has since been resolved.
If anyone has more information or thoughts they would like to share, please do.
“So we shall have at it and write for the sake of, and see where it leadeth and be happy and full in our souls from the splendours of the language, shall we not.”
– Barbara Sparhawk
The Hawks Perch 