My painting “Blue Baby Shoes” was chosen by another Etsy member for a “treasury” (these are lists of items for sale on Etsy that members find notable or interesting–usually they make up some kind of inter-related theme.)
“Blue Baby Shoes, Copyright 2012, by S. K. Cole. All rights reserved.
Here is another excerpt from my first novel, The Epiphanies of Western Waste*.
Since his big promotion to Group Publisher, [our publisher] Alan had basically stopped coming to the office. He made frequent trips to Omaha to check up on a whole slew of Mid-Western trade publications that had fallen into his lap. They served, of all things, the veterinary medicine industry, and were apparently among Simkins’ most profitable trade magazines.
“He’s up to his ass in brood mare insemination techniques and bovine diarrhea vaccinations,” guffawed Derek. “What could be a better match for a man of his talents?”
# # #
After one of Alan’s particularly long absences, Derek decided that we needed a firm course of action to steer our somewhat rudderless ship of a publication.
He called Stephen and me into his office.
“We have a publishing crisis on our hands,” he intoned gravely. “We haven’t had a publisher in twenty-two days. Twenty-two working days. I’ve kept track of them carefully.”
“Therefore, we need to create a publisher, or rather publishers, to make up for the one we are supposed to have, but don’t.”
Derek had a way of making ridiculous and outrageous proposals sound completely normal. Stephen and I glanced at each other with a look that read: “Why not? It’s a slow news day.”
We watched as our boss slapped two packages of rainbow-colored children’s modeling clay on his desk. “One for each of you,” he said.
“Your assignment this afternoon is for each of you to create a clay publisher. That’s so we always have a publisher on site, even when Alan, is uh, out of the office attending to his many important duties.”
Stephen and I picked up our respective packages of clay and trudged dutifully back to our cubicles. I spent a half-hour or so shaping an approximation of Alan out of mine.
My version of the clay publisher had lime green hair and a cobalt-blue face, and was a pretty fair job, I must admit. I used a pencil point to poke tiny holes in the cheeks, approximating Alan’s freckles, and drew a scarlet spot on the nose with a red razor point marker to indicate substance abuse markings.
Derek was delighted with our sculpting efforts.
“Our antipodean friend, Lord Kevvy, owes you both a nice lunch soon,” he said.
This was one of Derek’s favorite lines. He would often take us out to lunch on the company dime, and then later submit the bill on his expense report, claiming it was a meal with an advertiser or industry big-wig. It was the kind of thing you had to do when you worked for a cheap-ass Kiwi bastard like Lord Kevvy, he always claimed.
Derek later stationed the two Clay Publishers on his bookshelf just behind his Veri-Typer terminal. He saw them when he turned his machine on in the morning and again, when he turned it off at night. They were always watching over the Weekly Shipper’s esteemed editor-in-chief, their symbolic Plasticine protection extended over his editing efforts.
Alan eventually started showing up at the office again, at least a couple of days a week. Derek swore that his nose had been surgically reconstructed in the time he was away, but I was convinced that was just an uncharitable speculation, all too typical of Derek.
Shortly after Stephen and I made the Clay Publishers, Alan ducked his head into Derek’s office, while he and I were discussing a snout** for the First Call of a ship belonging to the People’s Republic of China.
“You wanna go make nice with the Commies, or should I send Stephen?” Derek asked.
Alan’s eyes alit curiously on the two Clay Publishers stationed behind Derek’s Veri-Typer terminal.
“What are those things?” he interrupted. “Creepy little buggers, aren’t they?”
“Figurines, Alan. Those are figurines,” Derek replied, admirably deadpan.
Alan shuddered. “Don’t know why you’d want to put them on your shelf right there near you like that. Damn, those things give me the creeps. I wonder what weirdo you guys met on the street inspired them—I really do.”
That story traveled around the office, and for a long time afterward, Derek could make me and several other people double over with laughter simply by repeating the word “figurines.”
# # #
* The Ephiphanies of Western Waste, copyright 2012, by S. K. Cole. All rights reserved.
**a snout: jargon for an industry reception where copious amounts of free food and booze usually flowed, to the delight of underpaid trade journalists.
I’ve lived a lot of different lives, and each one has a specific demarcation point, a place in time that I can put my finger on and say, “There is where it began, and there is where it ended.” So there was the art school period, the struggling single mom period, the corporate p.r. period, and of course, the journalism period.
For a few years after I graduated from art school, I ended up as a reporter and editor for a now-defunct trade publication in San Francisco, serving–of all things–the Pacific maritime and transportation industry. How I got from art school to there is chronicled in my first book, a comical (I hope) roman-a-clef called The Epiphanies of Western Waste* (working title: not sure if it will stand.) Here’s an excerpt from the chapter about my very first day as a working journalist:
When I got settled in, Derek handed me a stack of press releases from a company that made a type of railroad car equipped with two sets of retractable wheels, so that it could move on the highway as well as on rail.
That was my first official story for the West Coast Weekly Shipper. I dived in with relish. I was amazed that my sources called me back, and allowed me to interview them about the new piece of equipment. At first I worried that they would catch on that I wasn’t really a professional journalist, but they treated me as if I was totally legit.
By lunchtime, I felt as if I had been a journalist all my life.
This is easy, I thought, as I typed my notes into the Veri-Typer computer screen and started to arrange them into the first draft of a story.
I’m actually starting to like this intermodalism stuff a little bit, I thought.
When noon rolled around, Derek, Tracey, Dal, and Stephen took me to a “first day at work” lunch at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant nearby.
“Be sure and try the Chicken Almond Ding,” Derek advised, as we pored over the menu and laughed at the hybrid “Chinglish” spelling errors. I did, and it turned out to be a passable vegetarian version of Chicken Almandine.
“Derek’s been a vegetarian for a long time,” Dal explained to me. “We tolerate vegetarian restaurants for his sake, if the food’s not bad.”
“Now, Dal, let’s get down to the important stuff. In other words, who should play Liz in Western Waste?” interrupted Tracey.
“Sissy Spacek,” replied Derek, not missing a beat.
“I can see it,” added Dal, giving me a somewhat disconcerting once-over.
“Sissy Spacek? Western what?” I mumbled through mouthfuls of Chicken Almond Ding.
“Western Waste, of course,” said Tracey.
“Western Waste?”
“You didn’t tell her about Western Waste?” she asked Derek.
“One can’t cover everything in a thirty-minute interview,” protested Derek. “Besides, I didn’t want to scare her off.”
“What is Western Waste?” I asked again.
“Western Waste is the hilarious, engaging, multi-episodic story of a small put profitable weekly trade publication, based in a colorful, wino-infested San Francisco slum. The trade mag’s called Western Waste because it serves the municipal waste disposal industry. And the story features the adventures of the kooky and quirky—but very lovable—cast of employees from diverse backgrounds, who come together every week to publish it,” explained Tracey in a bored voice, as if describing an established fact that nearly everyone should know about.
“At some point we’re going to write it all up and sell it to Hollywood, and then we’ll all be rich,” added Dal. “The thing will practically write itself. All we have to do is copy down things that happen daily in the office, and throw in a few wino stories once in a while. It’s a T.V. series—you know, sort of like Night Court or Barney Miller.”
“But why is the magazine in the T.V. series about waste disposal, instead of about shipping?” I asked.
Four pairs of eyes stared at me, with a distinct look in each of them that silently read “How can anyone ask such a stupid question?”
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair.
“Well, because waste disposal is funny,” Derek finally said, in a kind but condescending voice. “And shipping isn’t. Not funny at all.”
“These are small details,” snapped Tracey crisply. “The main thing is, we have to finish the most important part, which is casting ourselves, and after that, as Dal says, the thing will practically write itself. So, what do you say Liz? Are you up for Sissy?”
“Umm, I don’t think I look much like her,” I replied guardedly. “I mean, I think she’s known as ‘Sissy Spaced-Out’ – is that really me?” I didn’t pause long enough for an answer, fearing the worst.
“And besides,” I added quickly, “she’s years older than I am.”
“True,” said Derek. “I hadn’t thought of that. We have a rule that all cast members of Western Waste have to be approved by the person who is being portrayed by them. So how about, umm, Roseanna Arquette?”
Roseanna Arquette was one of the year’s Hollywood “It Girls.” I didn’t think I looked or acted much like her either, but I thought she was a more flattering choice than Sissy Spacek.
I decided to quit while I was ahead.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m in. Roseanna Arquette, it is.”
“Congratulations, Liz. You are now officially a member of the cast of Western Waste. By the way, this one’s on Lord Kevvy,” said Derek, brandishing his corporate credit card when the bill came. “Lord Kevin Simkins, I mean. You know about Lord Kevvy?”
I nodded. “I read that he owns half of Canada.”
“And half of New Zealand, too. He’s a cheap-ass Kiwi bastard,” said Derek.
# # #
*The Epiphanies of Western Waste, copyright 2012, by S. K. Cole. All rights reserved.
Here’s a couple of shots from a drawing of a Musketeer I did in a Clothed Figure Drawing class at the Academy of Art in the summer of 2011, when I returned to my alma mater to take advantage of the free drawing classes they offer to their alumni, for the first time in almost thirty years. My old Clothed Figure Drawing instructor, Bill Sanchez, was still presiding like a lovable tyrant over Bradley Hall, the big, creaky, Edwardian ballroom at the 540 Powell Street building that has been the exclusive domain of the Illustration Department’s drawing classes for ever since anyone can remember.
Sketched in colored pencil and charcoal, my Musketeer drawings turned out rather well IMHO, considering that I hadn’t drawn a figure from life in three decades when I did them.
Clothed Figure drawing classes are different from regular figure drawing classes because the models dress up in costumes from storybooks and act out typical poses for their characters. The elvin keepers of Bradley Hall mysteriously maintain a vast store of props and costumes for their models to dress up in, as cowboys, Revolutionary War soldiers, doctors, Arab sheikhs, Frankensteins, and on and on.
They were great classes for learning all about how different types of fabric drape across the human body, and for how hats fit on human heads, and how boots and shoes fit on human feet. I took three whole units of Clothed Figure, but I did not save a single drawing from those classes–I just didn’t think they were worth carting around to all my various addresses over the years. Now, I kind of regret that.
As promised yesterday, here’s an excerpt from my book of short stories, Foleytown. It’s the opening paragraphs from a story called “The Frenemies” and it’s based on one of my aunts, called “Aunt Jewel” in the story, who was obsessed with succulents and cacti of all kids. So when I think of succulents and cacti, I immediately always think of “Aunt Jewel.”
The ‘Frenemies’ *
Two of our aunts, Abba and Jewel, had a peculiar relationship. They were a couple of older women, getting on in years, who, at heart, disliked each other rather a lot, but who, for some reason or another, kept up a decades-long relationship of pretended friendship.
Today, we would call such people “frenemies,” but the word and the concept didn’t really exist at the time that Abba and Jewel maintained their odd relationship. So we, the children of Foleytown, just called them both “strange” and “weird.”
Abba and Jewel were both my blood aunts, but they were not related to each other, and that’s one of the things that made them frenemies, instead of just relatives who argued with each other and didn’t get along.
Abba was my father’s sister and Jewel was my mother’s. The main thing they had in common was our family, the Foleys. That, and the fact that they both lived in the Inland Empire and had come out to California at about the same time, for the same reason: to get jobs in the munitions factories that had sprung up overnight in the state during World War II.
Aunt Jewel’s husband, my Uncle Dean, was a Navy man who had served overseas during the war. It was Jewel, bored and lonely after Dean was sent overseas, who convinced my mother to come along and apply for that fateful job in a World War II airplane factory, the place where she eventually met my father, Kenny Foley. As eccentric as she was, there was no denying the simple fact: Foleytown would not have existed without my Aunt Jewel.
In the 60s and early 70s, Aunt Jewel lived on several acres of land on the outskirts of a HighDesert town called HighlandHeights. She lived there because she loved the Mojave Desert deeply–unlike most of the people in the Inland Empire, who avoided it because they thought it was full of poisonous snakes, inhospitable wild donkeys, and Gila monsters.
The snakes and Gila monsters of the desert didn’t bother Jewel that much though. She adored the plant life of the desert–more specifically, she loved the native cactus plants and their cousins, the succulents. She was even known, on occasion, to drive out into the Mojave and dig a few of them up, to add to an ever-burgeoning collection she kept at her little, ramshackle bungalow.
In the far-right corner of Aunt Jewel’s front yard stood an impressively large blue agave succulent plant, seven feet high at the least, and as many feet wide. Prickly pear cacti and rosette-shaped succulents were planted in the flower beds all around her bungalow. Plus, her front and back patios were both crammed with pot after pot of cactus and succulents, and there were many more inside her crowded little home, as well.
They sat on coffee tables, side tables, windowsills, atop the TV and the radio, even atop the toilet tank in the bathroom. Perhaps she had three or four hundred of them in all–maybe more.
She liked the prickly pears the best, though, because they could be trained to grow in the shape of the faces of rabbits or mice, and she thought that was adorable. She would push the resemblance, too, by taking a razor blade and scratching eyes, mouths, and noses into her prickly pears. Sometimes she would even adorn them with little jackets or bow ties or hats, which she lovingly cut out of multi-colored construction paper or felt.
Aunt Jewel’s devotion to her cactus plants was no doubt excessive, but she was very fond of excess, to put it a bit on the mild side.
And that was the other major thing she had in common with Aunt Abba: they both loved things–vast, excessive, mind-numbing quantities of things. The more tacky and worthless and peculiar-looking their things were, the better.
They collected knickknacks and figurines of all kinds, in plaster, plastic, and porcelain; bowls of rubber or plastic fruit, flowers and vegetables; enormous piles of costume jewelry in Bakelite, plastic and glass; black velvet paintings of celebrities or hillside Tuscan villages, and vast closets full of polyester double-knit pantsuits in every pastel and Day-Glo color available.
At the very heart of the frenemy status of the two aunts was an intense, fought-to-the-death shopping competition. They both haunted discount stores with names like Pic ‘N Save, Two Guys, Sir Save-a-Lot, Wheelin’ & Dealin’, and Pixie Pack ‘N Pay, as they pursued their quest for things, more things, and even more things.
Prisoners were never taken, and mercy was never granted. They kept up their competitive shopping for fifteen, eighteen, twenty years—I’m not sure exactly sure of the dates involved, because they knew each other long before I was even born. And a truce was never even contemplated, if memory serves me well.
It went like this: if Aunt Abba bought a new bunch of plastic bananas at the Fontana Pic ‘N Save to add to the vast fake fruit collection proudly displayed on her dining room table, Aunt Jewel would buy two of them. And then call Abba on the phone afterward, providing a lengthy, highly detailed play-by-play of her shopping triumph.
Aunt Abba would listen patiently and pretend enthusiasm for Aunt Jewel’s competitive purchases, but she always managed to get in her own subtle digs, too.
“Yes, Jewel, that’s wonderful, dear. I’m so glad you found those cute bananas on sale for two for a dollar. When I bought mine, they were a dollar apiece—highway robbery. Although I do think the ones they put out later for sale weren’t as nice as the ones they had earlier. Mine has a sticker on the bottom that says ‘hand-painted in Korea.’ “
And of course, when they hung up, Aunt Jewel would run off to find her two new bunches of fake bananas, grimly in pursuit of certain stickers reading “hand-painted in Korea.” And God help the hapless manager of the Fontana, California Pic ‘N Save if there were no such stickers to be found on Aunt Jewel’s bananas.
*Copyright 2012, by S. K. Cole, 2012, “The Frenemies,” Foleytown. All rights reserved.
Succulent plants and cactus play a big role in one of the semi-autobiographical sketches from my nearly finished short-story collection, Foleytown. I plan to publish excerpts from that particularly succulent story tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy my watercolor/colored pencil renderings of a jade plant from my own humble potted plant collection:
“Jade Plant, Watercolor and Colored Pencil, 2012,” Copyright S. K. Cole, 2012. All rights reserved.
“Jade Plant ACEO, Watercolor and Colored Pencil, 2012.” Copyright 2012 by S. K. Cole. All rights reserved.
ACEOs (Art Cards, Editions and Originals) are baseball-card sized original paintings or collages that are collected today by art enthusiasts from all over the world. They are an affordable way for an ordinary person to acquire and display a large amount of original art. There are ACEO trading parties in most major metropolitan areas, and stationery manufacturers sell special albums and display boxes to keep collections in order. I have a selection of ACEOs–all original, signed mini-paintings–for sale on my Etsy site. I find them quite fun to do–usually while watching cult TV shows and B-movies on Netflix–and many of them would look great blown up into conventional-sized paintings.
Chuck Pyle was my “Beginning Head and Hands” teacher at my alma mater, the Academy of Art University (it was just a “College” back when I went there.) Chuck is now the Director of the Illustration Program at A of A. He was a stickler for traditional drawing a la the Golden Age of Illustration (Norman Rockwell, Wyeth the Elder, that other Pyle) and he was tough as nails. I don’t think I ever pulled more than a “B” in Chuck’s class and that was after really sweating it. I caught up with Chuck last year when I sat in on some “Clothed Figure Drawing” classes that are kindly offered to alumni, free of charge. He was a young instructor of about 25 when I took his class all those years ago, but he looks pretty much the same today as he did then. If you nudge Chuck, you might get him to admit that he might, possibly, be distantly related to that other Pyle, one of the greatest of the late 19th/early 20th Century illustrators.
Francis Livingston was a young instructor at the A. of A. when I was there also, about the same age as Chuck. I never took any of his classes that I can remember, but he subbed several times for a couple of my Illustration teachers. He had loads of talent and his early work was posted all over the A. of A. Illustration Department’s bulletin boards, intimidating the hell out of all of us humble Illustration Dept. students/wanna-bees. He’s now a top-ranked illustrator and fine artist specializing in Old West art scenes.
Randy Berrett was yet another one of the Young Turks of the early 1980s at the A. of A’s Ilustration Department. He was my “Advanced Head and Hands” and “Clothed Figure Drawing III” instructor. Like Chuck, he was a toughie who insisted on Norman Rockwell-levels of draftsmanship. Today, he’s a highly successful background illustrator for Pixar movie studies and has created background scenes for almost all of their famous films.
Heather King was my “Illustration I” and “Illustration II” instructor. She’s now retired from teaching and free-lance illustration, but still sells her fine art online.
Bill Sanchez was my “Clothed Figure Drawing I and II” guru/drawing god. He’s still teaching Clothed Figure at the A. of A., thirty-four years after I took my first class with him in the fall of 1978! I sat in on one of his classes last year, and he’s still yelling the same things at students as he always did: “Wrapping around! Contrasting values! Push the foreshortening!” I never learned to push the foreshortening very well, sad to say. Bill was in his mid-thirties and had a big, poufy shock of red hair when I first took his class; today he’s got the same poufy shock of hair, but now it’s paper-white.
My first venture into the art of giclee printing (fancy, archival-quality digital prints on good paper) was created from my popular “Crazy Salad” watercolor/colored pencil painting. The original painting was sold a few weeks ago to a lady in Illinois. It was a sample illustration for a book jacket for the hilarious 1973 Nora Ephron book of essays entitled Crazy Salad. Nora Ephron’s three early collections of essays — Crazy Salad, Wallflower at the Orgy, and Scribble, Scribble, plus her autobiographical novel Heartburn–were all big influences on my own comedy/autobiographical writing style (excerpts of which I will post here at some point.)
The giclee prints of my Crazy Salad painting came out very well. The Decor cold-press paper is gorgeous and the printmaker captured the colors fairly accurately. I’m selling them for $30 apiece at my Etsy site, plus shipping and sales tax (if applicable.)
“Crazy Salad,” Copyright 2012, by S. K. Cole. All rights reserved.
According to the stats from my Etsy site, the painting that is most admired on my site by other Etsy artists is this one, entitled “Harlequin Birthday Party, 1990.” Huh. It’s one of my personal favorites–in fact it was posted on my walls in my old condo in Concord, Calif. for years–but I never would have figured it for “most admired.” Like some of my other paintings from the early 90s, it’s got a white glue underpainting with watercolor washed over it.
“Harlequin Birthday Party, 1990” Copyright S. K. Cole 2012. All rights reserved.
I started this piece in 1980. No seriously, it was thirty-two-years ago. It’s a painting of an old supermarket in the West Portal shopping district of San Francisco. I did it it for an assignment in illustration class at the Academy of Art College, my alma mater (now called the Academy of Art University.) I never finished it. We were supposed to do a street scene for the assignment and I don’t even remember if I turned in something else instead, because I had put this one aside as a failure. I probably just took an incomplete for that assignment–I used to do that in those days.
I started in conventional watercolors on a really expensive piece of watercolor board, copying the composition from a black-and-white Polaroid print I took down at West Portal. (It was the really old-fashioned kind of Polaroid where you peel off a tan film covering after the print develops. I still have the camera–not sure if it still works, or if they even sell that kind of film anymore.) The conventional watercolors weren’t working out that well and the thing was getting overworked and muddy looking, so I switched to Dr. Martin’s watercolor dyes. Then I made a few mistakes and I decided that I would white them out with acrylic gesso; then I turned the whole piece into a white gesso board, with watercolor, dyes, and colored pencil all used over the gesso. Some of the effects were interesting, but on the whole, I thought the painting was a failure.
But there were parts of it I thought were really nice. That meant that the unfinished piece was in the too-good-to-throw-out, but not-good-enough-to finish, league. I carted it around from place to place as I lived my life, and have kept it in a flat file for the last fifteen years or so.
Finally, I took it out earlier this year and looked at it and suddenly I knew what had been wrong with it all along: the values (what artists call the pattern of lights and darks in a composition) were too busy and scattered, and not unifed enough. A major problem was the figure in the foreground of the lady in the pantsuit–the pantsuit was originally white with blue shadows, and she just blended into the background instead of being a focal point. I took out some colored pencils and colored her pantsuit yellow, and then I started to complete the rest of the picture in colored pencil. (I lost the Polaroid print years ago so I had to make do with memory to complete some of the detail.)
The completed piece is not perfect, but I like it well enough to take it out of my unsuccessful pile of work and put it in the successful one. I’m not sure if I will sell the original or not–it kind of seems like a shame to let it go after all these years. I may just have some giclee prints made of it and sell those instead. In the meantime, here it is: the painting that took thirty-two years to finish:
“Outdoor Market, West Portal,” copyright 2012, by S. K. Cole. All rights reserved.
foleytown 