Wandering Artist's Journal

Coming to you from my internet cafe. Only open from 4am-7am. I’ve been in Redwood City, CA for the last few weeks. My brother is a full-time RVer and he’s agreed to help me finish the van buildout. Since I got here the van buildout has gotten more expansive, involving a lot of electrical substructure, maximum insulation, a big air conditioner, solar panels, a rooftop passive solar water heater, a shower, and so forth. I’m realizing this phase of the van buildout is going to take longer than I had anticipated, and the plans going forward are in flux. I have a feeling I won’t make it to the East Coast this Fall. I’d like to spend the Winter in LA, but I’m not making any plans until I get a better handle on this current process. This process is challenging. But then, Life has been challenging for the last several years. Living in a van under construction is different in the specifics but not in the physical, mental, emotional requirements. The good news is that I’m still up...

This morning, from the window by my desk. My sojourn here in Virginia City is coming to an end and I’m headed back to my studio in Reno - in a much better state than when I got here (one month ago.) It wasn’t easy, but I did manage to learn a few things that I hope I can build on going forward: - I no longer need people around me all the time. I can pick myself up when I fall. - I can sleep alone in a safe place now (though darkness still scares me.) - My in-house source of advice and feedback is gone, but I have good friends who are willing and able to step in. I was reading Seneca’s letter of advice to Serenus recently and this stood out:  “Nothing delights the mind so much as fond and loyal friendship. What a blessing it is to have hearts with whom you are less afraid to share knowledge  than keep it to yourself, whose conversation soothes your distress, whose advice helps you make up your mind, whose geniality dissolves your sorrows, whose very appeara...

Looking East, from midway up Ophir Ravine A few days ago I went out for my evening walk, heading West, as usual (East in the morning, West in the evening, to take advantage of the mountains as sunblock.) West, in Virginia City, means uphill. I had no agenda, no destination, beyond getting some exercise and looking around. I was crossing a parking lot, looking up at the “V” on Mt. Davidson, when it occurred to me, “This would be a great time to try to hike up there.” Backstory: I’ve tried this mountain before. Haven’t gotten far. It’s been on my “to do” list for a year or so. Problems: I’m prone to altitude weakness and heat stress. After my last heat stroke incident (trying to find the grave of Julia Bulette) I promised some friends that I would knock it off and quit fainting in public, on this trip at least. But this evening walk was different. It was cool, low 70s and dropping fast (first clue ignored) and the sun was already behind the mountain. I felt strong, ready...

I’ve been living in Virginia City, Nevada for the last few weeks (a temporary, self-imposed, period of isolation and reflection.) I’m in a little RV, not much bigger than a gypsy wagon. It rocks and creaks in the daily winds, like an anchored boat. Sometimes at night, I partially wake and think I hear rigging, clanging on a mast. Sure, I’d heard about the “Washoe Zephyr” and neighbors had warned me about “the winds.” But, Seriously? This wind is relentless and almost sentient (demonic.)  Then there’s the humidity, or lack of it (many days in the single digits.) Visitors, and most of mine come from the coast, cannot comprehend the cascade of symptoms that result from a simple lack of moisture. They never drink enough, even when they think they are. And then there’s the altitude, and the UV index, and the unique personalities that are drawn to inhabit this strangely beautiful spot. But I’m going to save those for another day.  I’m thinking of starting up the...

"Inquisite" 24"x24" acrylic on raw canvas, ©2017 Anna L. Conti Who am I? Where am I? How did I get here? What next? When I first decided to move to Reno, my decision was based on the presence of the few factors I found essential to our (Dave's and my) survival: 1) Quality, accessible healthcare for Dave 2) Low cost of living 3) Low cost housing  4) Community of artists and independent thinkers  In the twenty months since we moved here, Reno has delivered on these essentials and given me much more - natural beauty in all directions and all seasons, the best friends and neighbors a person could hope for, and an astonishingly vibrant food, coffee & beer culture. Dave told me on more than one occasion that the last year and a half were the best of his life. For that, I'm grateful. But I was too busy keeping all those balls in the air to take more than casual notice of a few peculiarities about this place I now call home. Now that I...

Four recent paintings in my "Unreliable Memory" series. Reno has been good to me. It's only been a couple of months since we got here and I'm working at a great pace (six paintings so far - here are four of them.) Finally, a healthy place to live and a nice studio to work in. As I mentioned last year , I'm shifting to a new kind of work. These images are based on archival family photos (8mm film stills and 120 photo film) by my grandparents, possibly the world's worst photographers. Instead of the meticulous gridded transfer of a staged narrative, I'm doing an expressionistic, straight-to-canvas, visual description of childhood emotional memories. It's been fun and its been cathartic. Who knows how long it'll last, but I have a mountain of source material. Simultaneously, I'm working on digital (iPhone) drawings, paintings and hard-to-describe pieces: one or two per day, uploaded to Instagram and/or Facebook with tangible output to met...

Yep, I live in Reno. Who’da thunk it? I still get wistful about Los Angeles (especially the art museums) but I don’t miss San Francisco. People, yeah - I have friends scattered all over the planet and I miss them and I always have. I can’t be everywhere at once so  I’m always missing somebody. The solution, to paraphrase the old Stephen Stills song, is to friend the one you’re with. And boy, did I luck out with my gamble on Reno. Not only does one of my oldest best friends live here, but my new friends in the neighborhood are the best kind: warm, generous, sociable, and artistic! A real bonus here is my new studio. It’s large, private, has lots of natural light, plenty of storage, and a potential gallery space on site. I’ve already got a running start on a new painting series I’m calling “Unreliable Memories,” mostly based on vintage (personal) film stills.  Reno has a vibrant art scene and I plan to jump into it this year. Besides the studio painting, I’ve al...

I was going to title this entry, “Changes” but I’ve been reading Peter Clothier ’s book, PERSIST, In Praise of the Creative Spirit In A World Gone Mad With Commerce. (2013, Toad Rampant Books, ISBN 9781482536720) and I’ve come to admire persistence over changes. Maybe I always did - some have called me stubborn. Anyway, regarding the last post : we didn’t move. Not quite. We have the same address. We did get rid of a big house-full of stuff. We could pack everything we own into a small truck and hit the road tomorrow. But life intervened and here we are, still in San Francisco, still in the Sunset District. Still dreaming of L.A., frankly. But it looks like we’re going to be here for a while longer.  So. What to do with empty rooms in a rent-controlled house on the busiest transit line in town? Well, why not open a gallery? Dave & I make visual art, most of our friends make art of all kinds. There never seem to be enough venues for getting it out there and real ...

"Bondage" aka Taped Page 01, ©2014 Anna L. Conti Last night I dreamed that I was painting in a big studio - huge- the size of a house but it was a single room. I had several canvases going at once and the canvases were huge, too - bigger than anything I’ve ever worked on before. I was painting gesturally, with little or no pre-sketching and I was grabbing whatever was available in terms of paint. At some point I realized that some of it was oil (the rest acrylic) and I needed more paint. Waking up, I wondered what that was all about. It was a good-feeling dream, not anxious, not  nightmare. Fun, totally absorbing work. Yesterday I had a good studio day, working on a tape piece and some other projects (printmaking, handmade books.) I did a little more on the sky in the “Fat Cat” canvas. I remember right before I quit and went to bed, I put another blue on the sky and thought I was over-working it and I should just move on. The sky shouldn’t have taken this long. ...

I just spend three hours yesterday and nearly two hours today, signing up for health insurance via California's Health Insurance Exchange . It wasn't easy, or painless, but from what I've heard on Twitter and elsewhere around the web , I had it easy. It was a lot like doing your own taxes. Online. Lots of dead links. Verrrrrrrry long waits. Lots of WTF? questions. Lots of repeated entries of long numbers and the same old info every government program asks you over and over and over. (With all this loss of privacy, increased government surveillance, and secret buildings full of digital archives, wouldn't ya think they'd know all this about me by now?) But hey - it's done. Now I can go back to painting. I'm working on a shipspotting series these days. The one above is "Smokin," acrylic on canvas, ©2013.

Sunrise at Mt Shasta by meusheow on Flickr Fantastic pink & purple clouds over the mountain ( Mt. Shasta ) as I begin to write this. First thought was, "Get the camera!" Second thought, "Oh yeah, it's broken." Well, for the rest of this week, I'll have to exercise those old visual memory muscles. Look at stuff carefully enough and long enough to own the picture. Make it mine. I've been up here for a week now, visiting my brother Vern, who really lives in Santa Cruz, but is staying in Weed while he works on a construction job in the area. He's living in his "mobile office" - a 35ft fifth-wheel, installed at the Friendly RV park, right next to the truck stop, just off I-5 in South Weed. Yesterday morning it was 18 degrees and the pipes were frozen when we woke up. Not too bad, though - Vern got the water flowing a little while after he'd started heating up the RV. Wind is blowing again now and my bicycle, leaning against the picnic...

June flew by - I had an art opening at HANG (two pieces in their "Alumni" show) the first week, then Dave had a couple of days of treatment at Kaiser, then we left for Seattle - 22 hours on Amtrak, in coach. We went up there to see our nephew's graduation, and we stayed about a week, visiting with family and seeing some art in the area. Seattle had great weather, water all around, gold-rush history, good food, bookstores, coffee houses, lots of artists. I liked the city - it's basically a smaller version of San Francisco. And I like the emphasis on craft in the Seattle art world. The best gallery I saw on this trip: Greg Kucera . The best art show: Sherry Markovitz at Greg Kucera and the Bellevue Art Museum . Then the 22 hour return trip. It was grueling - not as bad as I'd feared, but bad enough that I don't want to do it again. Maybe if I won the lottery or something and could get a sleeper cabin it might be OK. The other nephew graduates in three ye...