Cradle of the Sun

This painting is a real treat.  I’ve kind of headed into it the way Trevor’s Treasure Island developed, more every day and in an odd direction.  With absolutely no foreground but rocks going into darkness I have all of a sudden added a chair and desk on the top of a peak, some kind of Greek ruins on a sandbar, a turquoise-lavender pool, stone gargoyles and seahorse, a writing desk, and steps…many steps.  I’ve decided to go with it, do not know what the hell I’m up to but up for the adventure.

It’s the sort of freedom I felt with your portrait which is a rare experience. Certainly possible with what you allowed, and unique in that only with historical portraits of my own devising have I ever moved into such a myriad of things.  Yours is the first portrait I let myself and you let myself do that with, and I am liberated from previous constraints as a result. 

It IS getting interesting.  I keep moving the waves and clouds around.  The very clouded sky reveals a reticent sun.  I’m calling it The Cradle of the Sun, or The Sun’s Cradle, which I find very exciting in and of itself and not sure what I’m up to.

The Cradle of the Sun

There’s a storm coming in from far away places ~~ sweeping up water, spray marking its path ~~ dark and fierce on a gentle cove.  Still visible inside fast-moving formations, the Sun is cradled by its cloudy banks. The golden strength hits boulders and quiet foreground pools which will be next to feel the crash of wind and sea. Large birds take frenzy flight. And a viewer’s ready chair says ”Come to me”… a kind of magic seating  … a match to the heady seascape beyond, and below, and around it.

VINCENT OF DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN

 

Sparhawk oil portrait of Van Gogh, c. 1999

 

“ONE THING I KNOW:  WITHIN A FEW YEARS I MUST BRING A CERTAIN WORK TO COMPLETION….I AM CONCERNED WITH THE WORLD ONLY INSOFAR AS I HAVE, AS IT WERE, A CERTAIN DEBT AND DUTY, BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN ROAMING ABOUT IN IT FOR THIRTY YEARS, AND ALSO BECAUSE I WANT, OUT OF GRATITUDE, TO LEAVE BEHIND A SORT OF REMEMBRANCE IN THE FORM OF DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS–NOT MADE IN ORDER TO PROMOTE THIS OR THAT TREND, BUT ON ACCOUNT OF THEM HAVING IN THEM SOMETHING THAT EXPRESSES A SINCERE HUMAN SENTIMENT. THAT IS THE GOAL OF MY WORK…”

Vincent Van Gogh’s letter to Theo Van Gogh, 1883, from the Hague, on his third year of having begun to be an artist.

I’ve been years writing my autobiography. In it Vincent Van Gogh comes to visit me this one anguished young painter’s night in Brooklyn. I ‘m in my early 20’s, in the clutch of death by brush, not knowing enough to translate my visions to canvas and I have conjured him up. He stays and advises and the most marvelous grand adventures happen in the following year. During which my own story unfolds. My book begins when I am packing up and leaving Yosemite, remembering back decades to that midnight I first saw him.

“Constant warfare my whole life.  Like an old soldier now done with war. What were the whirling years, to whom did they  belong.  Not a stranger, no not a stranger.     An earlier me.”

to be continued…………

 

 

YOU NEED ART! SPARHAWK ORIGINALS

T H E      H A W K S     P E R C H     G A L L E R Y

T h e      H a w k s     P e r c h      G a l l e r y

on Carmel Valley Road is filled with beautiful paintings.  Everybody needs a painting in their lives! And~~ I can’t help the feeling~~ the more the merrier.

OPEN NOON TO FOUR DAILY TIL LONGER HOURS IN SPRING EMAIL    sparhawk@barbarasparhawk.com  for appointments at any other time, glad to make it your day

There is no wall in anybody’s life that is too small or crowded that will not benefit from another painting.

   ALL MY PAINTINGS ARE MUSEUM QUALITY ~~ IN RICHLY PIGMENTED OILS ~ STUNNING COLOR ~ STRONG IMPASTO POTENT EXPRESSIONISM !!A good painting produces a powerful connect in us, straight to our interior ~ to explain the heart’s undescribed beatings ~ fix the eye on color that excites or reminisces ~ clear a path to untried places.  Here is the unmet friend. And you will also find beautiful PEN & INK drawings,

PORTRAITS (great commission prices)

Plaster Renaissance Sculptures, Handmade Redwood Frames, Turtle-shaped Drawer Pulls.

Hand-Painted SIGNS ON WOOD, Garden Light Garden Light Fixtures, Tibetan Necklaces       USED BOOKS – NOVELS and ART BOOKS,  beautiful GREETING CARDS, great chairs to sit and look, read….and Inspiration in every direction! The whole place is alive with beautiful things. Come add to that……………..

The Hawks Perch 

6 miles in from the Ocean

9700 Robinson Canyon Road

COME FOR A VISIT

OPEN NOON TO FOUR DAILY TIL LONGER HOURS IN SPRING

EMAIL sparhawk@barbarasparhawk.com for appointments at any other time, glad to make it your day

One more, Flowers and Moth Caught by the Wind

 

FLOWERS and MOTH CAUGHT by the WIND

I did this awhile back, and it’s been one of my favorites. It’s got a nice weight of paint on it and the colors are good, and there’s a fine activity to it. If I do say so myself.

The moth is in the lower right hand corner, not too visible and definitely not in distress.  This sold, last week in the gallery.

I overheard two musicians talking about the effect of wild climate on the landscape. Of course plants love the wind, said one. Otherwise there wouldn’t be poetry.

Studio Chair

The Studio Chair

Oil on Canvas.

This big old fine thing sat in the corner of my studio in Big Sur in the Sycamore Canyon cottage. The seat was a good three feet almost square, fine curling up with a book chair, or collapse in me chair or just to look at for it’s generous proportions.

The bathroom is through that door around the corner, deep claw foot tub and circular shower curtain that always made me feel like Paris redux.

Late Summer Arrives

We’ve had a cool summer on the central coast, only now beginning to break its grip, finally heating up. Big Sur south coast (Big Sur Kate) announced 84 degrees before dawn, and I envy that cozy kind of hot air. Carmel Valley isn’t matching it.

Carmel-by-the-Sea was jammed yesterday. Fog lifted, word is out. The ocean was going from turquoise to a deep ultramarine blue, brilliant white foam on the cresting waves that hit those cratered copper colored boulders along that stunning coastline. Down by Carmel River a long slim span of kelp just under the surface put a mystic shine on the blue. When you get closer you see the orange and brown sea creature dancing.

In that little sheltered, sand dune protected bay just a few feet from the ocean, a man in a big straw hat was practicing kayaking. Doing all the maneuvering, memorizing technique. His young daughter was inner tubed, laughing, weaving in dad’s wake.

Always curious to see tourists, which I once was. I wish it were not the case but Carmel fosters a kind of uneasy pretension, all that beauty and so few sure of themselves in it. Until you hit the beach and get carried by it. Thank God for nature and it’s power to connect with what’s real and discard what ain’t.

A friend in Yellowstone overheard a visitor who said, I’m comfortable in my own skin here. The friend’s been there for weeks now, photographing grizzly bears and wolf packs vying for fallen bison, and has amazing photographs (Oops John) of the incredible wild things that live out their dangerous lives within those acres and acres of flowered pastures and purple mountain majesties.

Enough time in wilderness we forget how we look, what needs fixing, the fugit of tempis, and all the stuff that doesn’t matter once our hearts and brains are on fire with the call of the wild. All that registers is, Oh my God, look where I am! The stuff dreams are made of.

Gardens have been delighted with the cooler weather, very good year for plants and flowers, no heat drooping anybody. I feel so bad for the drought-stricken mid west.

I heard a radio report on the weather in Fresno, I think they’re looking at 113 degrees today. But if you live in Fresno you expect it.

When I lived in Coarsegold and up above Bass Lake (5100 feet) we’d get some of those hot mountain top days making for spectacular sunsets.

Those hills around Yosemite are famous for flying saucers and UFO’s. You learn to take your new neighborhoods in stride. It’s always something.

South Coast The Wild Coast Is Lonely

The south coast of California is empty/full, a hurricane on its calmest day. Once seen it is become mine. This one construction of flesh and bone and H2O particulate facing the massive power (of the very same flesh and bone and H2O) knows…it is who I am.

Bed In Summer

Bed In Summer  by Robert Louis Stevenson

In winter I get up at night

And dress by yellow candle-light.

In summer, quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see

The birds still hopping on the tree,

Or hear the grown-up people’s feet

Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,

When all the sky is clear and blue,

And I should like so much to play,

To have to go to bed by day?

 

Heron-Otter on Wind, Night Sky Pfeiffer Beach

Oil on Canvas.
Bear with me here.
It was 2 years after I moved to Big Sur and was living there that I had one of those fabulous spiritual recollections of the first impact of that, my first night sky on Pfieffer Beach, the presence literally and imaginatively of everything in and out of sight, the overwhelming sense of plenty. No, of TOO MUCH and thanks to that revival, two years later when I could actually assimilate all that it meant to me, I painted this.
As near as I can tell, the flying oblong thing is part sea otter and part King Heron. The flying poppies are, sort of, self-explanatory, and if not, well you wouldn’t like this.
Starry starry sea otter flying bird flower garden in the sky kind of night.
It’s out there.
Some lovely fellow bought this just before Christmas.
Mwah, world.

Expressionist Painter’s Christmas

Christmas is Coming!

I’ve got 2 websites with my TOTALLY UNIQUE  Expressionist Paintings and Drawings on Clothing, Posters, Ipod cases, & Greeting Cards. MERMAIDS! BILLBOARD PAINTINGS! FLORALS! SEASCAPES! RedBubble is a fabulous Australian site, they do beautiful work. Zazzle is USA. Both deliver speedily, I’ve used them for years. Easy shopping on line with PayPal.

Click on:   Australia’s RedBubble

and Zazzle: The Hawks Perch Clothing Line

To purchase an original Sparhawk oil painting or drawing, please email: hawk@hawksperch.com. to be sure the paintings are still available and discuss details.

Sunset and Cypress and Highway One

Last week, headed north driving a friend home, we both suddenly realized that a spectacular was in progress over our ocean. I pulled off the empty highway and we watched the sun sink in one of the

Sunset and Cypress and Highway One

most glorious goodbyes I’d ever seen.

There were close to zero clouds, nothing to catch the brilliant color against wisps and puffs, an empty sky but for that stunning sun. I don’t ever remember seeing that before, no clouds, only the slightest line of fog near the highway. And blazing unobscured sun.

Returning home was equal to it, a night of stars and moon lighting up the ocean, catching white wave tips.

In less than an hour I was at the easel to record the black and green cypress clump just above the beach that framed the orange orb with Highway 1 rocketing in front of it all.

Painting Holiday in Big Sur

Expressionist Painters Holiday in Big Sur, California!

Beginning April 2012.

Seven remarkable and stirring days among the exquisite redwood, fern, and purple sand beaches of heavenly Big Sur.  All inclusive: enchanting hotel rooms, three meals a day, transportation to and from airports and local guided tours. Open to painters who are interested in art with emotion, learning to break through the barriers that have made you feel distant to your work and the creative process.

There will additionally be instruction given in pen and ink sketching and its use for sharpening memory, leading to finished drawing technique.

Please leave a message here, or contact Barbara Sparhawk by email: hawk@hawksperch.com for details and scheduling your stay. 7-day, 6-night sessions are limited to four students only. Children under 18 may be accepted for instruction, but must have an accompanying parent. There will be be two of these week-long sessions a month from April 2012 through September. Guests of painters, not taking classes, are welcome with a reduced fee. Locals requiring no housing, only classes, will be charged for classes only. Please book your place well in advance.

It’s going to be intense, thrilling, and life-altering. You’re going to discover how to break through what has previously short circuited energy connecting your heart and soul to your brush filled hand.

 

SHARK ATTACKS SURFER, MONTEREY

This is from today’s UK Daily Mail

A shark attacked a surfer off a California beach on Saturday, biting him in the neck and arm and sending him to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Bless My Ride, West Coast Winter Surfer

Eric Tarantino, of Monterey, was attacked around 7am, just minutes after he and a friend entered the water at Marina State Beach, The Monterey Herald reported

The shark bit Tarantino, 27, on the neck and right forearm and left teeth marks in his red surfboard. Tarantino’s friend, Brandon McKibben of Salinas, helped him out of the water, and other surfers used beach towels to try to stop his bleeding.

 

Tarantino was taken to a local airport by paramedics and flown to the San Jose Regional Medical Center, authorities said.

His condition wasn’t immediately known but Tarantino’s injuries did not appear to be life-threatening. Following the attack, Tarantino’s damaged surfboard was placed in the back of a state park ranger’s patrol car in the beach parking lot. A few fellow surfers stopped to examine the board’s new gashes.

Signs will be posted along the area’s beaches advising of the shark danger and recommending that beach-goers refrain from water activities for the next week.

The sand portion of the beaches will remain open.

Holycowgirl Expressionist Painters Holiday

More details to be announced shortly. I am starting up a Painters Holiday with some unbelievable delights. The sessions will be seven to ten days, guaranteed to stun the world and Big Sur.

We are in for a good time. This comes of making our own revolutions.

The Art of Looking

Big Sur River Meets Pacific

The unexpected turns, the variations on a theme as you round a corner, done on purpose done indeed in order to change direction. Oh, life. Such abundance.

Last night near sundown I went to the state park that borders our beach, the place where the Big Sur River headlongs into the the Pacific. The river winds and turns gracefully, edged with reeds, logs, flowering bushes, the things of a river. Then the very air changes to some internally registered thrill, some dangerous anticipation. The flow alters. The banks widen. The air is doing unexpected current sweeps. There is titillating goosebumping excitement.

And from the increasingly dark overhangs and ruggedly twisted undergrowth is a diminishing chord as if a symphony has slowly limited itself to the single plaintiff mystery of one long note on one small string of one single instrument until silence is reached, a fuller silence than almost the body can bear. You plunge forward on the narrow dry path that changes color in quickening tempo until BAM! The ocean! You are thrown at it as mercilessly and with as much excitement as the fresh water feels.

Oh my God! scream the river blue green blues turning somersaults…I’m tasting salt, WOW! The unlimited surface of Earth and…I’M ON THE MOTHERSHIP!

Observation is about the single most important skill to nurture. It helps with everything from painting pictures to writing words to remembering faces. I’ve been taught and learnt my own tricks for picking up speed in that department.

One is this, worth trying. Describe. Describe what is around you, far and near. Keep at perfecting it until you find the right words, the ones that match the experience, the color, the form, shape, bulk, sense of it. I learned that from two excellent reporters. One, Edward R. Murrow’s war reports from London. The other, NY’s venerable genius Gabe Pressman who knows a lot about wordsmithery. It works. It is as simple as Murrow’s writing, as direct as:  I am on a rooftop in London. Bombs are bursting around me. Gabe’s advice: The sidewalk is split, goes from gray to black. The curb I approach has 3 shoots of grass, one dandelion sprouts from concrete. Dark blue Chevy in front of pink marble facade…

Another is to get all your receptors going full steam. Force if you must, connect, think about all the parts you have to call into service for Sight, Smell, Touch. All the vanguards of the body. Get them vibrating into the atmosphere like feelers on a millipede, like muzzle whiskers on a cat, like a capable human drinking in the abundant resources to fill you up with information. Knowledge. Instinct. Impulse. All that good stuff.

Take notes. Mental and written. Make a drawing. It all connects to the experience of the planet we’re lucky to be living on. Free. Enriching. Life. Music of the spheres. We have it in us to not miss out on a single thing.

Big Sur Magic

THE TRAIL YOU ARE BLAZING HAS LED YOU TO…

this one extraordinary bit of land, this Big Sur, this sudden, rough mix of elements and hold-in-the-hand substance.

I see it with my eyes, I see it in the faces and eyes and bodies of strangers who stand to experience the shock, the embrace, the startling intake, the welcoming thirst to want more to never leave.

Do locals tire of it? Is a complacency reached, a saturation when all events turn non-eventful. No.

It is the redwood windsong that I hear, my neighbor’s halloo: Have you seen the flower on the river bank? Look, look at those clouds! The ocean was unbelievable this morning…at dawn. Come this way, stand here, look at the mist over Apple Pie Ridge, can you believe…it’s violet! 

There is no complacency, not in the eyes nor in the souls of all who come to this most west of western ground. It is perhaps the most welcome loss of innocence. It is perhaps the unmet friend.

Johnny Depp & Hunter S Thompson in Big Sur

Johnny Depp in Big Sur, buying paintings at the Hawks Perch Gallery. Anything’s possible as Lord Whimsy said.  And Depp is making The Rum Diaries, a Hunter S. Thompson book becomes film. And Thompson was a wild and violent eccentric in these parts. Big Sur remembers him with fear and loathing. 

This is an obvious progression of events. The movie’s done, Depp wasn’t around picking up local flavor except it’s all about Puerto Rico but what the hell. Maybe in pirate gear but we’d have noticed. Maybe. And of course Hunter S. Thompson isn’t around either. A lot of people are not saddened by that. I ran into a fairly young guy who caretook the writer’s property here and gardened for him. His first dramatic encounter with a drunk to the tits Thompson bearing and aiming a loaded shotgun, and insisting the intruder he’d hired and given housing explain himself. The kid quit. Prudent move. Thompson liked killing things.

Okay, back to Depp in my gallery (The Hawk’s Perch right off Highway One), a little bit of pradisical geography that’s drawn the likes of Steve McQueen (just finishing his portrait, come have a look) and Orson Welles (next in line) in the past so why not. I’d tell him I hadn’t seen every movie,  but I loved the Scissorhands one and the Don Juan with Marlon Brando, the Chocolate thing disappointed because it was such a blatant bad steal of Babette’s Feast. And Ed Woods is probably my favorite movie ever. Generally, I like how strange Depp is. Wouldn’t he like to commission me to paint his portrait. I’m good at reaching character in my painting, great with eyes. With actors it’s not easy to find that, the appeal of the stage and screen being the chameleon effect, so it’d take some long hard looking to find the brilliant machinery behind the flesh. But wouldn’t it be fine cool fun. Then too, art for art’s sake is okay, but life is more than sunshine, romance, Jack Daniels, and pigment. I’d want to get paid.

Surprise visit. Depp and his posse buy up every fabulous painting I’ve ever done that hangs (minus the sold ones) on my gallery walls. I spring for coffee. Dinner of salmon fish and chips at the Maiden Pub next door and their best Arrogant Bastard Ale. Or maybe cook them up some terrific Chateau Briand with Portobello mushrooms, garlic & fried onions. Wild rice. Mashed yams with coconut milk. Some green stuff. Pernod. Nice glass of port, Cointreau, Key Lime for a taste of the Caribbean, that sort of thing. Ready when you are, Depp and Thompson’s ghost. Welcome home. Turn a little more this way, that’s good, light’s good like that. Stop posing and sit still a sec. Expressionist painter paints Expressionist Actor.

The Gallery Bell

The Hawks Perch of Big Sur

Long day yesterday. Around 9 I was starting dinner and glad for the respite from business in the gallery. I was up to the third Poirot mystery on the set of 3 from Big Sur library and looking forward to watching the remarkable Belgium detective do his stuff, all symmetry and little gray cells at work.

I have installed a doorbell on the gallery downstairs that rings upstairs, and a bit of a peculiar contraption that urges visitors to ring if the shop’s closed. PUSH ME printed on a big yellow wooden one-time cart handle, that adjusts to the ringer’s height and predilection. It’s been a delightful solution to painting in the studio and not missing customers.

Around 10pm as Hercule Poirot was solving murders in 1939 near Egypt’s pyramids, that very same bell rang. I trotted out and peered over the balcony.

A fine young man, reveling with buddies at The Maiden Pub next door, glass of beer in hand, wanted to go through the gallery and buy something. Sweet. I went down and opened the doors to him and turned on the lights.

He was all bright-lit himself with cross country adventure, the kind of glow I’ve seen often from voyagers to Big Sur who can’t believe they made it or believe how perfectly wonderful it is. Tall and strapping, looking like transplanted mid-America farm and ranch. A total delight whose name is Dylan. He hadn’t seen his parents for close to a year and his mom was on her way for a visit and he wanted to get her a present and he was up front right away, he had ten bucks for it.

We did some searching and negotiating and came in on budget. I gift-wrapped, we hugged, Dylan returned to the pub, an ebullient spirit of good nature and fine character who is clearly finding answers to his liberating dreams at the blossoming start of youth.

As for this painter, it’s become the kind of experience that never ceases to amaze or sweep me with strong emotion. The pleasures found at the other end of a small red bell on a chunk of yellow wood with PUSH ME writ large on it are awesome and sweet.

Big Sur & Movie Stars

A traveler came through my gallery this morning and stayed to talk a spell. His first trip here was in the 60’s. His last trip was three years ago when he volunteered to fight the fires.

In the 60’s he’d stopped in front of a Big Sur bulletin board posted with local events. DANCE TONIGHT AT THE GRANGE was on the top with comments scribbled below. Rain expected? and an answer. Will there be food? And an answer. Who’s playing? And an answer. Then, in possibly the best description of this small, proud of itself community, the question Where does Elizabeth Taylor live. Followed by, Who’s Elizabeth Taylor?

Morning stirrings outside the gallery from July 4th revelers, Wanna get a beer and donut?

I love my town.

Happy Birthday America

The Hawks Perch, Big Sur

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA     We’re 235 years old today. The spirit of revolution is never far from our hearts. Nor should the men who were the first American politicians be who pledged their “lives, their liberty, and their sacred honor” on that declaration of independence from European tyrants. We need a long hard look for a single politician today with any honor much less sacred. Americans are good in a crisis and excellent at accomplishing the impossible. In due course we’ll throw the scoundrels out, drain the DC swamp, and continue changing the world for the better by example. The past decade has been an educational intro to cultures which need getting up to speed, discovering the enlightenment of human potential, individualism, and independence. We’re still a beacon. Happy Birthday sweet land of liberty, shine on.

BIG SUR SUMMER      We really are in the most spectacular Big Sur summer, enveloped in gorgeous sunny blue-skied air. The recent short rain set all the aromas loose again, the potent bay, sweet fern and jasmine, sharp acacia, and dark rich riverbank earth. There’s a waft of salt mixed in from the ocean.

Big Sur is in a sweet pocket of sun with fog and cloud banks just to the north and the south of us.

Sold a large painting yesterday,  “Wild Bearded Iris by Riverbank”, (shown), it’s headed north above San Francisco with a wonderful couple. They didn’t say a word for a good ten minutes, walking around the gallery, looking, looking in silence, then the woman stopped in front of a painting she’d kept returning to and out of dead quiet said, “It’s beautiful! It’s so beautiful!” and I swear I saw her heart leap.

There are more pleasures with my gallery than I can sometimes count and sometimes am barely aware of. One is the joy of connecting work I’ve done with a stranger. Good day. Business coming back, roads open, campers and thrilled travelers, and the air rife with the happiness of being alive.

The Economy

I opened The Hawks Perch in Big Sur a year ago. Still here. There’s a lot of hysterical chatter about America tanking but, as always, I recommend flying in the face of conventional wisdom. I started selling paintings on day one and still haven’t stopped. I’m selling cheap, and not every day, but hot damn I’m still afloat. The human heart needs art in hard times as well as good, or that all the doom and gloom only applies if you stick on preordained paths without looking for your own. John Muir, in his triumphant campaign for America’s first national parks, said: “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread. A place to play in.” Paintings are like that.

SPARHAWK CHILDREN’S BOOKS

This gallery contains 6 photos.

Published Sparhawk books, THE GANDY DANCER & OTHER SHORT STORIES, Illustrated with pen and ink drawings. CO CO NO!! Children’s book, color drawings. Available on Amazon.com, by BD Sparhawk THE TWO PILLOW CAT © is a story for children, their … Continue reading →

Greetings…..

This gallery contains 4 photos.

THE HAWKS PERCH Located in Big Sur on California’s central coast where giant redwoods dip their toes into the purple sand of Pfeiffer Beach and the air is pungent with bay, acacia, lavender, and fern….the first stop in Big Sur … Continue reading →