Spring on Fisgard Street

I’ve been making the most of an amazingly long blossom season here in “Victoria” (Coast Salish territory) and drawing street scenes in my beloved Chinatown. A boon for me, all these beautiful flowering trees; not so much for my lovely man, who is allergic to pollen. Glarck.

I only draw from life (with rare exceptions) so if I want to do a street scene, that necessarily means drawing on the street. Well, I like to be comfortable, so I have been using Carlos’ car as my studio while he is at work. It’s great — moveable, comfy, I can have music, even a place for my coffee cup. Best of all, it only costs me parking change.

The day I did this picture, about a week ago, it was sunny and unseasonably hot for April. I didn’t want to sit in the car, so I sat on it. I attracted unwanted attention.

It’s odd to me (and, depending on what kind of mood I’m in, extremely annoying) that many people think that if you are making art in public, what you must REALLY want is a big old conversation! With them! I mean, art is just larking around, right?

Wrong.

Without going on a rant, which is all too easy for me, suffice to say that since I KNOW people will do this to me, it behooves me to come up with strategies for coping with it. I’m not sure what to do, though. When I am in the “zone”, or what I call my “artist brain”, I am not fit for conversation at all. All I want. ALL I want. Is for this person. To fuck off. Far away. Immediately.

It’s as though my ability to go into the kind of zone I need for making a truly original and beautiful image — the thing that, after all, is supposed to justify my not having a “normal” job — is a delicate bubble, and people just heartlessly come at me with needles. That’s what it feels like. I get so upset inside, even more so knowing that they can’t possibly know what they are doing to me. I actually want to cry when someone pipes up with whatever well-meaning but vapid thing they want to say, and place that burden of being somehow polite on me.

I think I’ll stop there, because I know there will be other times when I write about this particular challenge of urban plein air painting.

On another note, I love this drawing, but the funny thing is I HATED it when I first did it. I mean I actually hid it under another piece of paper on the way home so I wouldn’t even have to glance at it. I refused to look at it for days until I was fishing it out to basically go throw it under a bus. I got it out and burst out laughing. It was like elves had come and redrawn it in the night. The brain is a strange thing.