The mural has been installed at Macrina's new headquarters! The building is huge and the front cafe has been beautifully designed to emphasize the historic warehouse architecture and materials.

Once the panels were hung I spent a day perched on a very tall ladder doing touch ups and making sure that the branches all match up from panel to panel. Though it was difficult working so high off the ground I kind of liked being in the building, with the hustle and bustle of last minute activity. It had the feeling of a play about to open. The baristas were huddled by the espresso machine for intensive training. The electicians and carpenters rushed around with hard hats and tool belts. The architect kept popping in looking worried. The owners lingered in corners having important conversations. And all the while I would see the bakery staff through large glass windows making magical tempting smells with enormous mixing bowls of raisins, chocolate and spices. The production area of the building was already open.

I got a call the night before from the carpenter who was installing the mural telling me that one of the panels didn't fit and they were forced to take a slice off one side and glue it to the other side. This should have given me pause...but he seemed like a careful and skilled person so I tried not to worry. Sure enough, it turned out to be a slice only about half a centimeter thick and it hardly showed at all. I had also asked them to put screws through the face of the mural to secure it to the wall really really well in case of earthquakes, which he was reluctant to do, but the screws were easy to cover with aluminum leaf.

I painted some chickadees in the branches of the tree in honor of the chickadee family that nested on my front porch this summer. There is a parent feeding a fledgling but everyone thinks they are kissing. Kind of nice, I guess.

Several people asked if I would include a weasel in the mural so I have signed my name in the lower right hand corner with one. This picture shows how the grain of the plywood tempers the shininess of the aluminum leaf. I was worried that the mural would glare as it reflects a lot of light but now I can see that it is ok

Drop by for a coffee and pastry or pick up a loaf of bread. The building is on First in Sodo just south of the stadiums across from Krispy Kreme. A tall grey building with an orange door.

I couldn't wait to get into the studio yesterday to start applying aluminum leaf to the mural. The leaf comes in 5.5 inch squares and is about as thin as one layer of a double layered kleenex. I had to close the studio door to stop the draft from blowing the leaf around the room.I paint glue wherever I want the leaf to stick, which is tedious, but pleasantly doesn't require any brain power. Thank goodness for NPR keeping me company. Then the leaf is stuck all over the painting and rubbed with a cotton ball. Where there is glue it sticks and where there is paint it rubs away. Or that is how it is supposed to happen...Oh no. Oh no. The plywood is rougher than I am used to working on and its tooth grabbed the leaf leaving it stuck to the paint in about a quater of the painted surface. There is nothing I can do but repaint on top of the unwanted aluminum. Very very time consuming. This may require more than the comfy voice of KUOW's Steve Scher to get me through. I might have to hit the books on tape... All this with a deadline of 15 September. It is going to be quite a week.

Still it will all be worth it in the end... Grrr.

Henry and I took advantage of the sunshine today to move the painted panels outside into the alley allowing us to see them together. (One was left inside as it wasn't painted yet.) Once we had laid them out in the alley we ran up to the studio roof deck to look down on them. This meant that I could see if the angles and placement of the branches matched where they crossed from panel to panel.

I had never seen the panels all together before and it was a shock to see how darn big this thing is. I am trying not to be freaked out by it.

I took notes and photos and moved them all back inside again.

Maybe something like this, sketched in Photoshop, will give more interest to my tree. After painting so many botanically accurate plants it is hard for me to add imaginary branches to this tree painting. A little voice in my head keeps saying "what if pear trees don't really twist like that..." Shut up voice. This one does.

I am having fun with the pear tree mural. While my studio is only large enough to see two panels at a time, I have figured out that I can photograph each panel and Photoshop them all together to see the composition. Cool!
The red background is distracting and rather pretty, like a Pompei mural, but will be covered with silver (aluminum) leaf.

Here is the great Vincent Van Gogh's beautiful painting "Almond Blossom" from 1890

Gustave Klimt painted this pear tree in 1903. I don't find it as interesting as his later, more graphic work.

A few years later Piet Mondrian started his journey towards the famous paintings of colored grids by looking at the patterns of tree branches Piet Mondrian Red Tree 1908
Piet Mondrian Grey Tree 1911

Closer to home here is a lovely painting by Canadian artist Garry Kaye who lives on Salt Spring Island, just around the corner from here. It is acrylic, measures 36"x48" and was painted last year.

While all these tree paintings are useful references for me I think that I need to draw more inspiration from the work of Arthur Rackham who illustrated children's books in the first part of the 20th Century. I want my tree to be twisty and fabulous like his trees. My daughter wants me to include fairies too, but I think I will stick with pears and maybe a few birds. So hopefully I can add more gnarly-ness to my tree. It needs viens and muscles and wrinkles.

I have started on a new adventure this week! Macrina Bakery and Cafe will be opening a new headquarters in Seattle soon and I am painting a mural as part of the interior. It will be based on this small painting I did last year of a pear tree but, instead of measuring two feet accross it will measure 16 feet! Yikes!
The mural will be made up of eight panels, each one so heavy that I can't move it by myself.
Henry helped me sand and prime the panels.


I have started with the trunk, which so far looks like a shiny disco ball. Oh dear. A little more work needed I think. Even though the trunk of the real tree looks like a basic grey color, I am including many different colors in the painted trunk. Why be boring when I can make something rich with color. The red background will be covered with silver leaf.

I am donating this little painting to "Art for Change", an Obama campaign fund-raiser. The event will be held in Seattle on Thursday evening. Fifty artists have donated small pieces and patrons will each pay $150 to choose one. For more info please check out the web site and come down on Thursday and support us. I think the web site says that the event is full, but I know that a few more people would be welcome. www.artforchangeseattle.com

I have taken a little time off to enjoy summer and am now back in the studio - still enjoying summer. I love geraniums and have some very fond memories of my Auntie Kathy's house where a large indoor geranium plant stood in its pot on the floor with fallen petals decorating the polished wood all around it. Leaving the petals on an otherwise well swept floor was a striking embrace of accidental beauty that has stuck in a happy place in my mind. Kathy is also the only person I have ever known to cut the buds of red geraniums and put them in a vase. She lives in New Brunswick, Canada, where she makes her extraordinary paintings and where she and her daughter Sue share their teaching and their beautiful garden with students at Hooper Studios.

I have called my geranium painting "Andy's Summertime Picnic" because of the soup can. It is a nod toward the Pop Art movement of the 1960s which had, as one of its iconic starting moments, the 1962 introduction of Andy Warhol's "32 Soup Cans". (Now at the MOMA in New York) My work is not very much influenced by this movement but I appreciate the message that explored popular culture as a subject. It was also a much needed breath of irreverence in the intellectual world of abstract expressionism. Some of my current work can be categorized as "Pop Surrealism", a largly West Coast American movement of the past 10 years or so which uses images of popular culture in a surrealistic way. From one pop movement to another this painting is a little hello.
(My painting measures 8x10 and is oil on canvas.)

Blueberries in my garden with Jolly Joker violas and thyme. Photographed today - before I eat them. Yum.

I was asked recently to paint a yellow chrysanthemum for a woman whose aunt used to grow them. She had such fond memories of her aunt and of her aunt's garden that it had contributed to her choice of career as a professional gardener. While I was uneasy about the subject (too many petals and an difficult colour on a gold ground) I loved the idea of painting something for sentimental reasons, so I accepted the challenge. It turned out to be a wonderful flower to paint with its swirling ball of petals and the Renaissance flourish of its awkward little leaves. I am very happy with it and hope that my client is too.

A few years ago my Mum wrote a book called "The Real Garden Road Trip" in which she and a friend drove across Canada interviewing gardeners whose gardens they found along the way. One of the things she learned was how common it is for people to choose garden plants that remind them of their childhoods. Many people were even unaware of their reason for choosing these plants until they were interviewed.

In my own garden I grow phlox because their musty, lovely smell takes me back to the Maritime gardens of eastern Canada where I was a child. I grow roses partly because their smell transports me instantly to the English gardens of my grandparents in Lancashire. I even found a David Austen rose called "Ambridge" which is named after a fictional village from the radio series "The Archers". I planted it for my wonderful grandmother who was a painter and who listened every day to "The Archers" after lunch.

Proust wrote about the visceral memories evoked by the smell of madeleine cakes and this kind of memory has become known as a madeleine. I'll bet that many, maybe most gardeners choose to include madeline memories and nostalgic plants in their gardens, maybe without even realizing why they do it.

What plants have you planted in your garden because they take you back to your childhood in a visceral or even unconscious way? What plant would you choose to commemorate in a painting if you were to honour some aspect of your past? These are two different things. The first subconscious. The second more cerebral.