The Final Chapter

I would like to share below some heartfelt comments by readers of the new edition of Barbara’s biography. It is gratifying to think that such a unique and talented individual will not be totally forgotten.

My archival work on her behalf, however, has unfortunately come to a premature halt, as I have been arbitrarily denied access to her paintings – as well as, perhaps more tragically, decades of Barbara’s personal journals. Her facility with words rivaled her dexterity with a paintbrush and in later years she was immensely excited at the prospect of her life and work being documented. Sadly, that will not happen to the extent she envisioned.

A nurse assistant who described his first meeting with Barbara, a woman more than 40 years his elder, as “love at first sight,” is selling off her canvases to finance his education. I have repeatedly requested that I be allowed to photograph them before they disappear, to no avail. And precious growing pains, the daily sobs and delights articulated in her journal seem destined for the rubbish heap.

Be that as it may, on behalf of Barbara I would like to thank all who have so graciously patronized The Hawk’s Perch. Your presence, your comments, your kindness, your loyalty – each of you was so very much appreciated by Barbara, perhaps more than you know. Many times she told me how her mood soared after a purchase, or a favorable comment. “Too delish!” was a favorite expression of hers when describing a joyful moment.

Thank you,

John Hayes

oops.john@gmail.com

All three volumes of Barbara’s biography may be viewed & downloaded for free HERE.

******

Oh, John, this book is so beautiful.  I spent the first evening simply looking through it and showing Ronnie the ones I loved the most.  He really enjoyed it as well. I’ve shared some of Barbara’s story with Ron, and he loved hearing it because he admires people who go on ahead and take risks.

– M.G.

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Thank you for sharing it [Chronology] with me. I will pass it on to one of my daughters sometime in the future. There is much wisdom in her writing, and I am inspired by her courage and lightness. You must miss her very much as do others who knew and loved her.  This tribute to her will keep her memory alive . . . And today how exciting to receive the new book [Retrospective] you created for Barbara in the mail.  I am enjoying the animals and plants sections and will treasure reading your conversations with her. What a remarkable tribute you have made to her.

– L.P.

******

Thank you so much for doing this. I connected with Barbara after my daughter found her site online and contacted her about one of her first memories of being with her Father in Coney Island and running into his friend who was a Billboard painter painting the sign “JAZZ”. It turned out to be Barbara! It was a magical reconnection for so many. I have followed her ever since and am so thankful you have kept her site going for those who found her so interesting and special!

She is and will always be a part of my memory. Thank you for sending me the book. I’m sure I will enjoy it as I did the last one you sent me.

– M.M.

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An incredible story told extremely well by you. I am so impressed by your expressive way of telling her story.  I kinda sense that those few who were allowed to know her were constantly battling the feeling of “Barbara keep talking; tell me more.” and “Jesus, swallow some of that hard-headedness and pride and get your shit together.”

– JN

 

 

Barbara’s Biography

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!

Click to Access

Barbara Sparhawk: Expressionist Artist & Writer

 

 

Remembering the Joy of Being Alive

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.

 

The New Normal

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.

“O Death, where is thy sting?”

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

 

The Artist’s Mission

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.

‘Oh fuck, what’s the use’

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.

(IV) A Mother’s Loss: GRIEF

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.

CLICK TO READ

Part 4 of 4

[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]

The Jardine Ranch (III)

I DO indeed appreciate magnificent surroundings.  Although I wonder if I don’t just light up at anything shiny, and it all looks shiny to me. 

Al said once, following some lengthy poetic exuberance on my part over a glade or glen or blossom: “I suppose it’s a total waste to rent the place to anyone but someone like you.”

I think he liked hearing it, and felt, himself, the same way about Big Sur, and (how stunning!) not everyone did.

WILBUR THE PIG

Wilbur was such a hoot. To me he was always cuddlesome. Well, almost. Pigs have a particular, er, way, about them. They’re actually insane. Although I say that with great affection. He tried to kill me more than once when, following joyful pasture picnics the very day before, he couldn’t remember who I was coming into his stall with breakfast, and was sure I was interloping enemy writ large. One is always smart to approach a piggy with food. It distracts. And of course they’re all nearly blind. Don’t ever get knocked over by a pig, they’ll stomp you to death given the chance.

All that aside, I saw Wilbur as an incredibly smart pig with a delightful sense of humor. He liked a good time. He would always do some surprising move, you can’t predict much about a pig, turn on a dime. And he was incredibly stubborn. If you said Go Left, just because you said it he’d either Go Right, or try to run you down out of spite. Pigs are fast but don’t leap well, there is that.

One day Wilbur just vanished. Gone. Spottings on Highway One near Fernwood. Was that Wilbur heading over the bridge to Clear Ridge? Wilbur was in my backyard an hour ago, I’m sure it was him. ETC ETC ETC. Well the bingo call was from a friend high up, two miles! up the next road, nobody knows how he got in the front gate unless he waited for a car to pass and open the security lock, and two miles up is Wilbur and it’s getting dark. The idiot Mrs Jardine actually instructed me, the swineherd, to walk up there (Wilbur newly spotted at three miles up and counting) and guide the impossible pig back home, with, errr, use a stick. He’ll walk in front of you. Really, he will.

Now it’s dark of night, except there’s a full moon. And the impossible sons are recruited to drive their pick-up truck and rescue Wilbur. Well it’s an even longer story, but they did, all of us did, pig in a blanket (too hysterical and also scary) screaming and hooting and attacking finally into the back of the truck and home. Getting him into the barn and paddock again was real tricky. Wilbur wasn’t talking to anybody politely for a good two weeks after that and refused to remember that I loved him so, once.

The best part of the whole story is that in the aftermath I am entirely convinced that Wilbur went up to the top of that mountain in order to see the full moon on Pfeiffer Beach below. It was a night brilliantly clear, filled with stars, a stunning night. Pigs are really poets at heart, with extraordinary sensitivities, wrapped in exteriors that border on the offensive. Too odd. What a planet.

LOOKING BACK

Jesus it was a perilous emotional delicacy that place. But honestly, I got so much out of being there. Apparently my 1-1/2 years was a local record. I absolutely loved the cabin, I had the gallery going within a year, 2010, I was in about the best place on the planet, in a garden paradise five minutes from one of the most beautiful beaches in existence, and taking care of four fantastic horses and cats and dogs, Dusty the parrot, and a pig named Wilbur, something I’d never done in my life. So I figured early on I’d make it work and get what I wanted for me out of it, and I did. 

One of the things that really made my heart sing was the complexity of managing all the land, 80 acres, and thinking about what was there and how to make it better and make sure nothing got neglected.  It was far and away not what I was there for paying a premium rent knocked down a bit to feed the horses and Wilbur, and when they were touring, the house animals.

Everything was actually under control only I hadn’t noticed.  There were tree surgeons who cut worrisome limbs, roofers being lined up, builders arranged for this and that, gardeners who were beyond superb, ferriers and vets and groomers, and eventually I got to see them all in play there.

But initially I sort of had a joy at feeling I was the glue that held an otherwise negligent rock and roll family together.  Imagine how my arrogance irked!  They’d been living fine without me before that, and none of them shared my perpetual sense of emergency.  Mostly because I didn’t know beans about any of it and had so much to learn about what does take care of itself without meddling and that everything had been pretty much planned for. I’m not a scold type and am generally so happy that we managed to get along mostly.

In my own defense, it was an easy mistake on my part.  The twin sons had gone off to Monterey to go to college before I got there, and I wasn’t there but a week before Al and Mary Ann headed out on tour for a month leaving me with phone numbers and lists of instructions.  Boy I was in high adrenalin for sure the whole time. 

Big Sur can be overwhelming enough just for its exquisite self, and that alone near blinded me. All the additional business of where I was and for whom, well I don’t know how I wasn’t prostrate in the high grass panting and delirious.  Come to think of it, some of the time I was.  It’s an unbelievably stimulating environment. 

When I told them I was moving on it was met with absolute shock. I don’t think anyone ever left them before.  By the time I’d left every family member had shouted at me at least once, Wilbur had charged me, each horse bitten me, the parrot had attacked, and the dogs snapped, the cats scratched. 

What a time I had!

The Jardine Ranch (II)

Rock and roll people are not necessarily easy to get along with (is that an understatement?) and more so the extended family. But we became friends, and talked a lot, and I like him. He’s a bright, thoughtful, articulate guy who gave up dentist school for the band. There’d be rushes of his being too important but it never lasted. He loves that ranch, the original Pfeiffer family homestead of 80 acres he was smart enough to get in the ’70’s when he was reeling it in. He’s got a converted barn for a top flight recording studio, the Red Hot Chili Peppers cut their last album there, the bizarre and famous were in and out but I’ll always love Wilbur most.

THE CABIN

It was the original Pfeiffer cabin, all redwood, absolutely covered with pink roses in the spring, the meadow all flower, the orchard; Al bought it in the ’70s, all 80 acres right at the beach. Smart. The big house on the hill is their place.

There was a kind of living room/bedroom with the woodstove. The big bed was set up inside a bay window, facing the front, about thirty feet or less from the pond. The river was behind the cabin.

There was a huge kitchen with massive glass windows on all sides, I loved it so. And a wonderfully big studio. Outside next to the cabin a few feet was a little sauna house. The sauna never worked but there was a great shower inside.

I miss it. Easily one of the best places I’ve ever lived in. Magical. Isn’t it pretty.

THE JARDINES

I gave Al and Mary Ann Jardine two paintings when I was there, one small oil of a dusky Pfeiffer Beach which he said had captured it exactly, and I said, Well then, here! And another for Christmas, Angels Dancing In The Treetops. I hope both have survived. They’re good paintings. I offered the Portrait of Xena to them at some point, or to Al and he wasn’t sure so I didn’t push it. He had a strong traditional sense of art but was also very fond of whimsy. Mary Ann liked primitive things with a touch of intellect.

It’s a funny thing about rock stars and celebrities, they are gifted so often and so remarkably it’s commonplace. They also have a lot of people wanting things from them. I tried to be aware of both when I lived there. There was a back and forth of distancing and close friendship, and I never knew which was the soup du jour until I was in it. Probably due to some generalized paranoia. There was rarely an equality, everyone outside the family was servant level unless they were also extremely wealthy or a celebrity. That was incredibly annoying. Though Al did think of me as a professional in my work and loved my writing, which I’d read chapters of to him and Mary Ann that first summer. We liked each other mostly. Although he could be very generous, Al never liked to pay for anything unless backed into a corner, not easy, because there was this sense of what all was due them.

THE POND

I always pictured myself ultimately with a lot of land and several buildings where friends could drop in and out, houses that needed work, gardens to build, inventing stuff, and horses and cows and goats and lots of cats and dogs, and I kind of despair of it for my own, though I was amazed that, holding that fantasy, I found it in Big Sur which had about all that and more. But it wasn’t mine. And taking care of someone else’s animals the decisions for whom are out of your hands, can be painful. They were a sometimes neglectful bunch, and everything had consequences. 

The pond that beautiful pond, for instance, had a huge lot of trout, and some catfish I think. Well big fish anyway. And frogs, which the herons adored. You’d hear these powerful throaty bull frogs, sometimes two, barking at the moon, oh heavenly! but only for a night or two then silence. Then in a bit a new one, then silence. I guess they migrated from the river and thought, wow, look at that pond! Lily pads and reeds and shade and sun and fishies, that’s for me! And I admit to being grateful for the draw because I swooned at the sight of king herons taking off and landing within twenty feet of me, or perched high, stark white and sharp edged against the green black cypress trees.

Turns out ponds are high maintenance at best and moderate maintenance at least, and can become the kind of thing that just paralyzes the soul and in and of itself is the culmination of every mental disorder personified.  Such was the pond to Al, who is a perfectionist of the first order.

Although all the water in the world was available through good wells, Al’s panic (one of a handful) was using it. It couldn’t have been easier to fill the pond, a slim hydrant, pipes and controls at its edge.

Like the bull frogs my first connect was oh my God! A pond! What a pond! I can’t believe I finally live next to a pond! (one of my long-time fantasies) and I went on about my business, sure that ponds knew how to take care of themselves or some other human there did.

Well one day in my first couple of days I actually notice the thing called water level and it’s dangerously low.  That is, the big fish are all trying to crowd in what’s left of the deep end and some of them are belly up in the shallows panting! I’m still basically from Brooklyn and never rescued anything more than an overturned goldfish bowl in my life but I figure something has to be done and have not a clue.

So I call Al, which he really hated for anything. I’d gone wading in and picking up the flopping fish in a bucket filled with water and they’re coming back to life but I don’t know what to do! Then Al meets me at the pond and he paces the pond and is looking and shaking his head and doesn’t want to do anything. Well, it’ll be okay, and he leaves, to think about music.

Then Mary Ann storms down the hill and turns on the water and shows me how then storms back home with hell about to be paid. You just never knew when you were about to introduce yourself into some raw ancient horrendous thing that upset the balance of nature like that.

The thing was, the PROBLEM was that the pond really needs cleaning out every five years or so and it was way overdue, which on another happier day weeks later, Al enlightened me about. 

You catch all the fish, maybe there’s a neighbor who takes them in their pond. Then you take out all the plants, like Mary Ann’s gorgeous reeds and eight foot high yellow iris, and water lilies, and drain the pond. Then you pull out the lining and call the guy with the back hoe and scoop out and cart away stinky black sludge in trucks which in the process covers everything for twenty feet around it including the banks filled with indescribably beautiful flowers, and start from scratch.  So it’s no small job and a costly messy deal.  That was the other part, the consumption of time and money, employees to deal with, huge uproar in the home’s heart, I mean yes, I could feel sympathy about that, but there it was.

So I think every now and then if the stupid pond just dried up, according to his thoughts on the subject, he’d get at stage two accidentally and it would force him to further action. But, if every time he just filled the mess again he’d be reminded how far he was from the solution.  I think he’d done this twice in thirty years, maybe once, and it made him very unhappy. And it made him very unhappy that interloping me had gone and poked him with it.

So I had to take it upon myself and when they were away, if it hadn’t rained hard, I’d turn on the hydrant and fill the damn thing so the fish could breathe. It was never easy.  It was about a six hour run to get the level back up.  You could hear it in progress. If they arrived home I’d have to sneak to the shutoff hoping not to get caught at saving the fish. And more than once I forgot about it and it got WAY high before I shut it down and just prayed they’d go on tour and nobody would notice.

Part 2 of 3 to be posted consecutively.

The Jardine Ranch (I)

‘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.

Part 1 of 3 to be posted consecutively.

What a Task!

“I had so much me churning in me”

Working for other people 9-5 never ever helped me. Though so many I knew were satisfied with the putting in of a day then leaving it behind for the life.

My intensity never changed at five. I don’t understand time off work and never have. I liked learning things I didn’t know but it always migrated into being a support system for someone else’s life, and nothing ever depressed me more because I had so much me churning in me.

Now here I am with all that expression possible at last, almost, and wonder if I’ve gotten it right.

And what is that anyway?

Being happy, pleased with a day. Setting our own standards for achievement. Learning ourselves.

What a task!

Cats & Dogs

“In the next life I will be a cat.”

I wondered about how much cats sleep and asked Tommy in his sleepy reverie full of purring what he was up to with more naps than awakes. 

He said: 

When cats sleep, they hold up the universe.  They travel vastly among the stars making sure the planets are in alignment and stars keep twinkling to please humans and inspire all life, and making sure that the moon and sun are tending to business. 

So now I know.  It’s a fine mission.  In the next life I will be a cat. 

I’m sure Tzuri does some of the same, though I suspect the canine mission has much more to do with organizing life on earth, all in the present, requiring enormous energy.  Dogs always look so concerned for their humans lest they go astray.  I am convinced their sleep is respite from duty, and their playfulness a respite from the enormous tasks at hand, so much teaching to do. 

So there you are, two professors, united.

 

The Mystery of Plants

“Now I am becoming a gardener and every day is a revelation.”

 I had another splendid garden day. I’m in a place that has risen and fallen via occupant, and they have been legion. What’s stayed are some brilliantly designed for the place fifty years ago, very old established plants. The huge Pride of Madeira, the very old gnarled lavender which were trimmed into trees, huge patches of tall reedy African Lilies, dozens of plants I’ve never seen. And every couple of days, something brand new rises out of the ground, stirred to life, introduced long ago by some former planter and which lay dormant. Now here is me, clearing out the underbrush, ridding old bushes of dead branches, exposing the soil to light and air and water that was held captive, and everything in sight starting to cry in a unisonous voice of exuberant joy.

The Mexican Aztec destroyer gardeners have done a nasty job of such severe pruning it’s heartbreaking. I mean, you see the base of things like a jade plant that is so huge it has to be maybe fifty years old and only allowed to grow three feet high! The cherry tree with a ten inch plus trunk was maybe seven feet when I got here. I’ve forbidden the gardeners to come back down here (very sweetly, “Oh, I’ll Do That!”) and the cherry tree, like the others, is now reaching for the sky, some shoots up to eighteen feet, waving deliriously in the sun and wind.

The hedges which are all flowering were reduced to short boxes. And now it’s all hoopla and blooms. The gardeners must be very annoyed when they look down here.

And John, I look around me now and it’s only been a few months, less than a season, and I say aha, that’s me. There I am, in greens and reds and yellows and blues. Time to start painting it.

I’ve landed somewhere I didn’t intentionally head for. It’s taken me more than a decade to begin to unravel the mysteries of plants. I had one garden experience as an eleven- or twelve-year-old somewhere. My mother introduced me to flower seed packets and I dug up a patch of land and grew fabulous zinnias and somethings. But never picked up on it in Brooklyn, except for house bound geraniums I loved, some spider plants and ferns, and nasturtiums I had growing year-round in my studio window, street-level, that used to stop passersby in their tracks routinely.

Now I am becoming a gardener and every day is a revelation. So there’s something more than I knew in being led here, to this place, where gallery is important, house too miniscule to consider much, and garden is critical to life. I never know where the hell I’m going or why but learning to trust myself that there’s an attached purpose in it.

 

The Pig Who Loved Plums

“It was so tragically romantic . . . wild pig all poet. I was training myself to think, ‘Bad wild animal, dangerous wild animal!’ so I wouldn’t care . . . and it turned out he was in love with the plums.”

There are coyote packs out here who howl to each other at late night, moon nights. It’s not scary. There can’t be much other than the occasional mountain lion in the way of predators here – [The Holman Ranch] – 400 acres of a lot of wild land, canyons and hills, beyond the modest cultivated places and few houses and stables and the horse pastures.

Before I had the studio/apartment in the barn on the hill I lived in the peasant housing, the Bunkhouses, a row of about eight on the last stretch of road before the big house. Lousy housing, about 12X12 feet, everything leaked, the walls, half underground in front, seeped, a long communal porch facing west and hills, but oh my God the property was free range and spectacular. The big house had a pool nobody used but me, set off in a mountainside, blue/green tile, condor and hawks overhead, sun-heated.

Opposite the bunkhouses was a little house with the washers and dryers. A fence below that and a big sloping lot of land into a canyon. And Patty and Chris who lived in the one full house next to the laundry. They had a fantastic garden filled with extraordinary plants, flowering vines, fruit trees in flower, a pond, chickens and roosters, cats and a really old cocker spaniel, and they did underwater landscaping for ponds, including for Monterey Aquarium, and pretty much took care of the ranch.

Slow to start, but with increased passion each night one summer, one of the pigs in a wild pack began trying to break through that back fence. Chris, a well-armed Texan, would charge out at 1 or 2 am and fire in the direction of the pig and scare it off.  But the insistent pig returned, every night, making more need-to-repair holes in the wood fence, not getting through but upsetting the Holman Ranch balance of nature, our natures anyway.

These things run about 3-400 lbs, and are all muscle, near blind, and aggravate easy. They charge at whatever appears to be a target.  And they are dangerous. So there was general worry and specific annoyance and between the crashing wood and Chris firing nobody was sleeping any more.

Except me now up on the hill in the barn. The ruckus woke me around 2 am one morning, a lot more shots fired than usual, and voices shouting and screaming and I threw on clothes and ran down the hill.

Chris (and of course it’s the dead dark of night except for some badly placed electric lights) had heard the wild pig break through the fence and he’d gone out with a rifle and shotgun and handgun. Seven or eight or ten shots fired. As the pig charged him! The flashlights from all the woken tenants honed in on the dead pig’s body, still heaving its end of life, Chris panting not more than five feet away, it had come right at him. It was pretty sad along with a relief that the enemy was stilled, Chris unscathed.

But the story, the real story, lay in the aftermath. Here was this grizzled huge thing, they are enormous, and they do attack, bad eyesight and generally peeved at the world, and it lay dead now on the path, and of course I’m in the wild west and everyone here grew up with doing this so they cooked it later that day.

So all this is going on and I’m trying to adjust to the thinking. I’m in a different country, five years out of Brooklyn, one year out of Virginia (where they cooked and ate everything with great fanfare on complex homemade equipment, and often) and I’m talking to the Texan and his wife about the rampaging wild pig and it turns out that the pig kept breaking into the back yard in order to get at the very full post-blossom fruit-filled plum trees that bordered Chris and Patty’s yard. 

My God. The succulent plums. Here was wild pig all poet. He had risked his life for the sweet plums just out of reach and I could not get over it.  No other pig before or after him had thought the plum something he would not live without. No other. It was so tragically romantic, too much to stand. It had never occurred to me. I was training myself to think, ‘Bad wild animal, dangerous wild animal!’ so I wouldn’t care about the rest that followed and it turned out he was in love with the plums.

This was some special creature whose heart must have been filled with exceptional poetry and the stuff dreams are made of.  All the pig wanted was something beautiful and wonderful with that alluring perfume to it. I tell you, it so affected and crushed me, I cried and cried, and for months, and still.  And no I couldn’t bring myself to be part of the feast that followed. And it gave me a new respect for the souls of what is called wild.

Which of course you’ve seen, you’ve known, from among others, your wolves.

 

What did I want?

“As far as I could see a checkered career was about the best thing on earth. I could live my life as I saw fit to live it and the more checkers the better!”

Many years ago I presented myself with choices about conducting my life. I was in NY and witness to, friend of, working with a lot of driven, influential people. I could see caution at certain turns with them, thinking of the big picture, the future stardom, the decision not to be careless about . . . something. I could watch it take place; fascinated me. It played out in ways like, I’ll get you a cab vs come upstairs. Or carefully, pointedly, leaving a room when discussions were headed a particular way. That’s most especially political. Sometimes a candidate has to be directed. Sometimes they get it on their own but there are conversations inappropriate to hear because of what might come up later if events go south.

Well, as I’ve said I grew up in an emotional desert, and when I started finally allowing emotional content to my life I couldn’t bear the thought of not letting it all hang out.

So that decision, choosing how to conduct my life . . . it was very simple and very fast.

I asked myself if I ever wanted to run for political office. No, I did not. I had no interest in power, or governing, or sticking to one job more than two years tops.

What did I want?

Writing. Painting and Art. Endless Experience. As far as I could see a checkered career was about the best thing on earth. I could live my life as I saw fit to live it and the more checkers the better! Launching into any creative field provides enormous license to behave well or badly, then write a novel or screenplay about the process! I didn’t want so much to behave badly as to not prevent myself from heading around just about any corner that looked good. How I looked in the doing did not matter a whit.

 

When Will My Time Come?

“I had a rare and precious independence in all this isolating exclusion from convention. That I knew”.

Many years ago when I was in my twenties, a time long in the rear view mirror when I think of all the life since, I interrupted a walk with my dog Princey to sit down on old border barricades of an empty lot in Brooklyn. It was past midnight. Intensely quiet. A moonless early spring night of impossibly bright stars and a night I have never forgot.

Princey was a collie shepherd mix. I found him months before, racing on the city streets from some cruelty with a bum’s old rope for a leash around his neck, scared and cowed and desperate and starving, and took him in.

Somewhere in the dark behind me by many blocks was my apartment on Atlantic Avenue. I lived on the second floor of a 3 story walk up, small building. There was no heat, the newly widowed Greek landlady drove in from Jersey to collect the rents but never filled the boiler. I used to run the hot water in the shower to make steam, somehow there was endless hot water. Turn on the oven and open the door. It was bone cold that place.

A Puerto Rican family lived above with two beautiful daughters. The father worked in the Ex-Lax factory half a mile away. The Black Panthers rented the store front on the ground floor below, filled with black uniforms, army boots, guns, bullet filled bandoliers, pot and incense in the air, secretive 24 hour conspiring, meetings, music, muscle and talk of revolutions.

The apartment was a good size, most were in those days. Lots of light from Atlantic Avenue through big windows. In the back the kitchen window could be opened onto the bit of roof of the room on the ground floor that extended into the crusty back yard. My apartment was filled with rescued cats, sequestered in what would have been one bedroom and a new room of chicken wire I constructed in the kitchen corner, and three dogs. And my child, less than six months old, my Trevor, left sleeping in his crib this night, so many nights, while I finished the endless day.

Mornings came early and nights ended late. I waitressed, tended bar, went to Coney Island on weekends to earn sign painting money. I’d wake my little boy from sleep before dawn to dress and bring him sometimes unfed to the babysitter and picked him up, hot against me from sleep in a strange crib by ten or eleven at night to bring him home. And lucky to have that in an age unknown to day care. There were clothes to hand wash in the sink, his and mine. Animals to feed, the dogs to walk. I’d even found a rooster on the sidewalk, a refugee from cock fighting and was trying to keep him alive in a closet fronted by a door I’d made of chicken wire. And it was during these months in that place that I started and finished a commission of a life size portrait of William F Buckley, Jr. in the front room that doubled as my bedroom and my studio and my everything else. Because of the animals, to not be found out, have them seized and killed, and us evicted, I kept the whole place clean and odorless as possible. That was its own career I’ll tell you that.

And through much of those early years like that I never understood my child’s crying because I did not allow crying for myself. The life I was in I had somehow made and was I in it. And the child with me, in it.  And I didn’t know why I hurt when I hurt, or was angry or confused, or happy when any of those things hit. I’m not sure I questioned it. I had no idea how to care for either of us. I only knew I wanted to learn it for myself and being taken care of or married was not what I could stand, not deep in me, not that sacrifice. But I had put myself in therapy to reach it all, a slow grueling and liberating process. I had a rare and precious independence in all this isolating exclusion from convention. That I knew.

And in that night out under the benediction of starlight on that empty Brooklyn square feet of dust and quiet with Princey sitting beside me and welcoming my hugs and thoughtful of my agony I cried out to the universe

When will my time come.

When will my time for painting endlessly with all the supplies I need in a wonderful studio and house all safe and warm, a busy kitchen filled with food and color and life, a wonderful man who loves me and will raise my child with me, when will MY time come to paint and draw and write my books. How do I make that happen. I don’t know how to make that happen.

And weep I did.

 

Choices

“Isn’t being alive wonderful?”

Yes, we all take our own pathways, some very purposeful, and the more surprising and alarming: oh what the hell why not. But you know John, something both of us have worth keeping in mind are the frightened and incapacitated who have not moved from spot one to spot two in a lifetime. And blahs or hallelujahs, neither of us has been much thwarted by fear or conventional thinking. Worth celebrating. Yes. Really it is.

I suppose I am some evangelic about really living. I witness too many people stretching endless days into complacencies that kill them. You can’t always turn that around. And it breaks my heart. And keeps me at the trying

Oh John. Isn’t being alive wonderful. What on earth went wrong with those who are not and could have been. Well, we know that too. You have to make your happiness. I bet more than one of your students, including the one you nudged into Art History, are looking at your life and getting smarter with their own because of it. Many of them must have loved you.

I wish I had realized decades ago how much choosing was my own province.

Living Wild

“Wild, unruly, and mystical is good.”

It’s a steady job rejecting the conventional illusions, planted so young in us and reinforced continually. But only if paid attention to and not ignored, which is all the standards deserve. The friends I’ve lost to early deaths who clung to doing what was expected of them, horrific.

Don Quixote had it right, dear adventuring heart, but forced to cloak himself with insanity to be an explorer, a free spirit, instead of a dangerous challenge to the conventions of his times.

Observe the limits of those you meet or knew who ground to a halt in fear. Wild, unruly, and mystical is good. I do the best I can in it, glad to be here. Sometimes even proud.

I’m not sorry for the years I spent in cities but I stayed too long.

There is nothing to match living wild.

 

A Barbara Sparhawk Tribute

[Thanks to Nola Barnick for providing cell phone video.]

Make an Offering

“Make an offering of ourselves, like you said, to the life force.”

This business you mention of artists giving, it’s true, that impulse. Somewhere in my very youth when I was starting to know I was heading into a life of doing artwork and was standing in a museum, I recognized in myself the heart throbbing connection to beautiful paintings, the artists who meant so much to me. It didn’t cow me that I could never equal what the great ones painted, I don’t think I spent much time on that. What I decided very clearly was that I could do that for others like me. Make paintings and drawings that would do as much for strangers as these fine strangers did for me, and by doing so, reciprocate some part of what I was taking in because of them. I thought, look at what I’m being given.

I think I kind of forgot about it for years.

I was still very young, early 20’s and had started a portrait business. Some gallery owner I can barely remember had a couple of my paintings and actually sold them. And came one day with a photograph of a young man, a policeman, who’d died in the line of duty. His wife, from Germany, was heading back home and had stopped in and asked for her husband’s portrait to be painted. Well, so I did, and delivered, and went home with whatever was earned. He called a few days later and said the wife had picked it up. She had, he said, cried when she saw it.

That was pretty much life altering for me. I even asked him why she’d cried. I had no idea I could do work that would move other people and elicit that reaction, tears! And I hadn’t consciously been heading for it, I hadn’t planned it, I hadn’t remembered as a chosen path the insight in the museum long before that, but here I was on it, and it’s been important to me ever since.

I will get to a point with painting about anything when my eyes start to water. It’s not quite crying but it is I suppose, is.  And it’s become a kind of signal to me that I’m reaching something crucial in myself, and that it will transmit to strangers.

The Barbara Sparhawk Memorial Art Show

“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.

 

 

Let Us Not Forget

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:

• A life lived on the edge where the risks are greater but the rewards are priceless
• A life spent saying ‘no’ to compromise and ‘yes’ to distant horizons
• A life bristling with the ‘courage to be’ and practiced in the art of joyful engagement

“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