My Grandmother Baker was an artist. She painted landscapes mostly of California wilderness settings like a grove of redwood trees, a carpet of ferns, aggressive carnivorous blue jays, and Pacific Ocean waves crashing on rocky shores.  She created oil-based portraits of me and each of my siblings.  She curated at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and was a decades-long member of the Santa Cruz Art League.  At the request of my father, after Dwight Clark caught the winning touchdown pass from Joe Montana to win the National Football Conference Championship game in 1981, she even painted “The Catch.”  I can still smell the tubes of oil paints, the numerous paint brushes in cans filled with turpentine, the wooden palette where she arranged and mixed colors and her wooden easel which folded up like a card table and easily transported in the trunk of her blue Mazda hatchback.

We would take family outings on Sunday’s after Church back when we all lived together on Wanda Court in Santa Cruz and Grandma had her own bedroom to sketch and paint.  During these drives out to Henry Cowell State Park or Big Basin, she would pack her painting gear in the trunk of my dad’s station wagon, along with our lunch, fishing poles and tackle, and picnic utensils. While we went out and played among the giant trees, she would set up her easel, pull out a blank canvas, and with a carbon pencil sketch out what she would later paint in her room.

It is thanks to Grandma I try to visit every art museum I can.  Over the years, I’ve seen exhibits at, besides the Santa Cruz Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fogg Museum on the Harvard campus, the Getty and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, the Portland Art Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, the San Diego Art Museum and the Chicago Art Institute, where my grandmother studied how to become a painter.  I even took an Art Appreciation class at Shasta College, where we studied numerous works in the Art Gallery and wrote about our impressions of the paintings.  Art teaches you the appreciation of our very existence seen through the eyes of another.  An artist expresses their point of view in a uniquely personal way.  Beauty is always in the eye of the artist and I’m so thankful they’re all willing to take the risk and share it.

In High School, I had this profound sense that painting was in my genes, doesn’t everyone like to draw?  But, alas, after one ill fated introduction to Art class, where I could no more produce a poorly drawn stick figure, my focus changed to literary art. I majored in Communication Studies in college and thought my career would turn into a sportswriting career but didn’t work out after several failed attempts.  I turned to work in the international logistics business (another story) and, during a particularly challenging  time when I had lost my job, I went back to school and earned a certificate from UCLA Extension’s Writer’s Program. Several failed attempts at getting one of my short stories published has discouraged me to the point that I now believe my real skill may be in writing essays.

This blog is my opportunity to fulfill my wildest dreams that my literary art may one day speak to someone like the master works from Leonardo da Vinci to Michelangelo to Monet to Frida. A well-written short story or novel moves me in the same way as an incredible painting and my fantasy would be to become that kind of artist. As my writer friend and UCLA professor Tod Goldberg, once said, “If you want to be a writer, you have to write.” Good advice.  So, I’m starting out by writing essays.  I’m writing because I have stories inside of me that I want to write about.  They may never reach the Hemingway level but at least I’m putting my art out there.  I’d like to think you, dear reader, are enjoying what I’m putting on WordPress but in the end my art isn’t about you.  It’s about, like my Grandma, finding one’s own art.