Near California

Bakersfield, Kern Riverbed 

I am taking an art class from a fellow named Art Sherwyn.  You can look him up; he is good, has written books, gives art retreats, and classes.  I went with him last summer on a camping art retreat in Sequoia Forest (near the national park, but not the national park).  I have scars to prove it.  I don’t mean from him, although let’s say we have different styles, like him being good and me being mediocre and sometimes just realizing that is a little scarring (but all part of the process of getting real and learning something).  But in June during the appreciating heat of the new summer the biting flies come out, and let’s just call this hatching of flies plague like, and being there in these June days was a lot like being an Egyptian from a Sunday school lesson.  You get the picture.

Puddle in Riverbed

I returned home one night early, swollen and deformed with some dirty attempts at landscape pastels.  Memorable. 

Anyhow, I signed up for a class once again, but carefully selected an indoor experience at our local and tiny Bakersfield Museum of Art.  I am limping along and wondering what in the world made me sign up for 6 weeks of humility, or humiliation depending on how I try to spin it.  Humility is maybe a good kind of hard that makes you want to try more, but humiliation is hard and it can be a little defeating.  It takes a careful balance between teacher and student and I cannot seem to find it.  But what I am enjoying is the group of 20 people who are also taking this class.  I am amazed at the natural talent and I love seeing how hands and brains working together can produce meaningful art.

Near Paso Robles

One of the women in this class has a lovely accent and tremendous talent, of which I am envious. I kept trying to guess her accent in my head: Italian, Russian?  No, when I got the nerve to ask, she is Columbian, from Bogota.  Her husband is with Occidental Oil Company, which in Bakersfield speak is Oxy. (Like, “He works for Oxy.”) She has been here 6 years.  And as if I needed proof that 6 years may make one a true Bakersfieldian, when she asked me if I liked Bakersfield and I said it is nice, but I missed nature (which is my best and least offensive answer), she responded by saying, “But the good thing is it is near California.”  She meant Bakersfield is near so many other Californian cities, but I think the way she said it is more apt. 

Cambria, CA

Fiscalini Ranch Preserve, Cambria

I mentioned this before.  I have heard regularly the best thing about Bakersfield is how close it is to all the other places.  Meaning the best thing is leaving and going somewhere fairly close by (meaning 2 hours or more).  And this is true. Keith and I went to the coast near Paso Robles last Saturday and it was 2 hours and we spent the afternoon hiking above the Pacific and watching the porpoises jump in gray arcs above the waves.  No kidding, it was amazing.  Just 2 hours away we saw nature and porpoises.  And (add Bethoven’s 5^th da da da dahhhhh) then we returned to Bakersfield, which thankfully, or on the bright side, is near California.