Saturday, May 5, 2007

Black and White Series: Lion and Parrot Dream (2005)






















Right after I dreamed of a red-headed parrot outside of a house in the forest and a lion which walked through the house and then disappeared into the forest again, I got a postcard in the mail from a local independent bookstore announcing that the author of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill would be doing a reading and parrot slide show. In 1970, when I had been working for the post office as a letter carrier, I had been taken to Coyote Point, south of San Francisco, to practice parking large mail trucks. As I concentrated on maneuvering the various large trucks, I heard an unfamiliar bird-like sound. When I looked up in the trees, I saw a single red-headed parrot, which made me feel inexplicably happy. I was delighted to find out all those years later that there was a flock of wild parrots on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, not far from where I had seen that single parrot in the spring of 1970.

In 2005 and 2006, I began experimenting with the Appleworks6 Painting program on my iBookG4, my first computer and the computer I am still using, which I had purchased in February of 2004. At first I used the full palette of colors, but then decided to use just black and white. I played around with black and white, discovering the different effects I could get, eventually completing twenty-one images, after which I made three more images using the color palette of the Appleworks6 Painting program, along with four paintings using watercolor and gouache on paper, which will bring my 40-year retrospective to a close in early June.

Today, while sitting in my car, I drew this basket. Simply drawing something simple is extremely satisfying.

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