Live Painting for Healing Haiti

So, on the 25th of this month I’ll be participating in an event called Healing Haiti: An evening of arts, culture, and entertainment benefitting Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti foundation.  (Please visit healing-haiti for the info.)

I’m gonna do a live painting, which will be auctioned off at the end of the night.

This is going to be a challenge for me, because I have never done a painting in 3 hours.  But I will try to do something that is less detailed than the work I normally do, maybe something more abstract.

It’s been suggested that I incorporate the Yele Haiti logo into the artwork, so I was thinking I’d do Toussaint Louverture throwing up those signs.  For those who don’t know, Toussaint Louverture (May 20, 1743 – April 7 1803) was a leader of the Haitian Revolution. Born in Saint-Domingue, Toussaint led enslaved Black people in a long struggle for independence over French colonizers, abolished slavery, and secured “native” control over the colony, Haiti.

I’ve found a lot of renderings of him online, but all of them are different.  What did Toussaint Louverture really look like?  I don’t want to use an innacurate depiction as my guide.  Maybe I’ll just do a silhouette or something, since I don’t have a lot of time.

Here’s an image of Louverture that is on a bank note:

3/12

I’m reading this old book that I found in Mom’s bookshelf call “The Slave that Freed Haiti: The Story of Toussaint Louverture.”

The artwork inside has inspired me; it’s like a woodcut print or whatever you call that type of art.  Very simplistic, just black, green and white.

I think I could do something kinda similar, but the figure will take up more space and be faced forward.  I don’t know yet, might be too simple.  I’m gonna sketch it out and see what happens.  I would really love to get back to my Sade painting but this event is in a few weeks and I want to be ready.  I want this thing to come out PERFECT.  And I want it to hold great meaning, ya’ know??

3/24

So here’s a rough sketch of what I think I’ll do.  I used actor Jimmy Jean-Louis as a model because I don’t know what Louverture looked like.  His image came up when I typed Haiti and face in Google images, and I liked it.  I also used some sculptures from Nigeria/Benin to make his face look like a mask.  There is a legend that Toussaint’s father was Gaou-Ginou, an African chieftan of the Arada tribe from Dahomey (the current Bénin).

Visit The Louverture Project to learn more about Toussaint Louverture…

3/31

Didn’t finish the painting at the event, so I’m finishing it up now.  I will never again commit to creating a piece in such a short amount of time… Tried it, failed miserably, and not the type to make the same mistake twice.

I actually brought it home and started all over on the face.  I didn’t like how it came out so I just painted over what I had already done.  I am also going to add some lines to the face to give it a wood-grainy effect.  Then I’ll perfect everything else.

4/3

It’s coming together nicely, methinks.  I’m not going to do all the usual shading and drop shadows on this one.  I’ll just leave it flat.  But I will brush some gold dust powder on his jacket embroidery, because it looks kinda Ronald McDonald-ish like that.

p.s.  Today is Marlon Brando’s birthday.  That’s another one of my heroes who happens to be an Aries.

4/6

4/28

I’m almost finished!!  I’m just having some trouble with the gold detail on his coat.  I painted it yellow and brushed it w/gold dust, but I didn’t like that… So I got a gold paint pen and went over it, but I didn’t like that either.  No dimension.  So I’m gonna paint it yellow again and just do a few strokes of the gold pen around it to give it more of a realistic appearance.  Hope it works…

The marks on his forehead were taken from some ancient Nigerian masks that I found in a book about African art.  When someone passes and a mask is made in their image, they have a certain number of lines carved into the brow, depending upon sex.  For men, there are 3 lines, supposedly.  (I hope this is accurate information.)

12/20

I haven’t finished the piece yet… It is waiting in a corner for me to break out the wretched gold paint pen (which I am hesitant to do, because I hate the fumes).  Many thanx to Trisha, for being so patient.

Synchronicity, San Francisco & Suzie Wong

Have you ever seen “The World of Suzie Wong?”  It’s a 1960 film starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan, about an American architect who takes a year off in Hong Kong to teach himself how to paint and falls in love with a prostitute.  I think I love Suzie Wong just because Nancy Kwan is so gorgeous in it.  Her hair, her wardrobe… Just my style.  Anyway, it’s worth the watch if you’re into old movies…

But Suzie has nothing to do with what this blog’s all about.  I want to talk about synchronicity.

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.

Yesterday morning, when I woke up, I knew I was gonna have that feeling, the one that I mentioned in a previous blog,  that I could only describe as deja vu.  When it first started happening, I didn’t know what was going on, and I would get really scared and start crying.  I would just be doing some normal, routine thing and would start to feel like it all had happened before, and I’d get sick to my stomach.  As time passed, I started to recognize that I had dreamt of what was happening.  It happens when doing the most mundane things, like driving to work or folding clothes.  Usually, there’s music playing.  That’s what trips me out the most – that a certain song was playing in my dream and now it’s really playing.  It is NOT fun to me at all.  It makes me feel not only physically ill, but like I’m losing it.  I have to turn the music off and breathe really deeply… sometimes I pray or say Om Mani Padme Hum, and I’ll start to feel normal again.

That happened yesterday.  I knew from the way I woke up that it was going to.  And sure enough, a few hours later, while I was driving and listening to Anita Baker, I started to get that feeling and bit by bit, pieces of a the dream from the night before started coming together.  I switched off the music and repeated the mantra until it stopped.  The chaotic feeling usually does eventually subside, but there is always a kind of residue(?) left behind.  And for a while I’ll feel like I’m someplace other than where I am, like a specific part of town or another city.

Anyway, I was fine by the end of the day.  Until I fell asleep.  In the middle of the night, while I was dreaming, that same feeling came over me and I could hear Anita Baker’s voice.  I started to feel really sick and started breathing in and out… in and out.  I was asleep, but aware that I was dreaming, and told myself that this had never happened while I was sleeping.  And that scared me even more.  But I just kept breathing until everything faded into black.

Why does this happen??  After researching Deja vu, my sister found the term Deja reve, or “already dreamed.”  You can’t find much about this on the net, but I did run into some message boards where others described having a similar experience.  There is an old article in the World Dream Bank by Percy Bysshe Shelly (whoever that is) that I found interesting.  Deja reve @ The World Dream Bank

Someone in one of these message boards recommended reading Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s take on Synchronicity, which was funny, because I had already started typing this blog about SF and synchronicity.

That leads me to tell a story about the City by the Bay that I promise I will keep short.

I think it was last month, but maybe it was the month before – I dunno.  I caught the BART over to Civic Center station to take part in a protest in front of the Chinese Consulate to mourn the executions of Lobsang Gyaltsen, 27, Loyak, 25, Penkyi, 21, and an unidentified Tibetan who were executed in Toelung, near Lhasa, Tibet by the Chinese Government.  I was late, so I was only there for the last 45 minutes of the demonstration.  And afterwards I wasn’t ready to go back home – it was too beautiful outside.  So I put in my headphones and got to walking.  I walked ALL the way from Japantown to Embarcadero BART.  I walked past Union Square and up to North Beach, and ended up on something called the Barbary Coast Trail.  I’d never heard of it before this day.  It was lovely, but I had on the wrong shoes…

Last week I was @ a friend’s house and found a DVD about San Francisco’s original waterfront, Sin, Fire & Gold! The Days of San Francisco\’s Barbary Coast.  On this documentary they walked on that very trail and visited some important San Francisco landmarks.  I learned a lot!  And it got me interested in learning more about SF’s history.  After all, it’s a part of my history.  My dad and maternal grandmother were born there, and my maternal grandfather spent most of his life there, after he came from Switzerland at age 3.

Then, a few nights ago, I was hankering for some Sinatra, so I put on Pal Joey.  I had only watched it once, a long time ago, and I was working on a drawing while it was on so I didn’t pay any attention.   Come to find out, this movie takes place in good ol’ San Francisco.  In it, Frank plays a nightclub singer who comes to the City looking for work.  And ends up at working at a joint called “Barbary Coast,” believe it or not.

Is this synchronicity or what??

If you don’t know about Harvey Milk…

…Then you should really go and rent the movie MILK.  Better yet, watch the documentary entitled “The Times of Harvey Milk,” courtesy of YouTube.  This guy was a beautiful person and an important part of San Francisco’s history.

Watch: The Times of Harvey Milk

Harvey Bernard Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Politics and gay activism were not Milk’s early interests; he did not feel the need to be open about his homosexuality or participate in civic matters until around age 40, after his experiences in the counterculture of the 1960s.

Milk moved from New York City to settle in San Francisco in 1972 amid a migration of gay men moving to the Castro District in the 1970s. He took advantage of the growing political and economic power of the neighborhood to promote his interests, and ran unsuccessfully for political office three times. His theatrical campaigns earned him increasing popularity, and Milk won a seat as a city supervisor in 1977, a result of the broader social changes the city was experiencing.

Milk served 11 months in office and was responsible for passing a stringent gay rights ordinance for the city. On November 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, another city supervisor who had recently resigned but wanted his job back. Milk’s rise to political power was as symbolic as it was real. His election signified and was made possible by a shift in San Francisco politics. The assassinations and the ensuing events were the results of continuing ideological conflicts in the city.

Despite his short career in politics, Milk became an icon in San Francisco and “a martyr for gay rights”, according to University of San Francisco professor Peter Novak.^[1] In 2002, Milk was called “the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States”.^[2] Anne Kronenberg, his final campaign manager, wrote of him: “What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real, for all of us.”^[3] Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama on August 12, 2009.  (From Wikipedia)

Artwork for San Francisco Marathon 2006

(FROM AUGUST 2006)

I completed this watercolor painting of the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park for San Francisco Marathon’s mile marker number 16.  Go to www.runsfm.com to learn more.

Rita-ji ‘n’ Raj, Watercolor on Paper, 2006