Painter draws inspiration from her West Marin roots

In artist Susan Hall’s tall, airy studio in Point Reyes Station, paintings of West Marin cover every wall. Outside her windows you can see fruit trees, golden grass and the house that she was raised in.

“My sense of self has really been influenced by growing up here,” Hall said during an interview at her home on Monday. “I am the environment and the landscape; there’s no question of that in my mind.”

Hall, a trim woman who wore her hair tucked in a neatly tied scarf, spent 22 years as part of the New York City art scene before returning to spend another 15 years refining her craft in West Marin. A show of her work opens at College of Marin on Thursday. She will also read from her creative memoir about her life as an artist, River Flowing Home, which is due to be published in January.

“One of the reasons I wrote the book was to show people what I went through, and maybe inspire them to follow their deepest urges,” Hall said.

Even as a child, Hall knew she wanted to be an artist. She wrote poetry and played the piano, but was most drawn to painting.

Through sixth grade she attended the two-room Black School—where the fire station stands today—moving on to be in the first class at the West Marin School. After graduating from Tomales High she studied at College of Marin and later at the School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland before moving on to get a masters degree in painting from UC Berkeley in 1967.

There, studying under teachers such as Mark Rothko and David Hockney, she said that her life really changed. “Rothko would go to each student’s studio and spend a day there, looking at their work,” she said.

“Back then there was no…separation,” she added, waving a hand for emphasis. “The art world was really very small; I could make a connection that was very personal.”

After graduation, Hall worked alongside other bohemians, hippies and artists at the Post Office in San Francisco and also taught drawing, painting and design to undergraduates at Berkeley.

When she was 26 years old, she decided to move to New York City and paint. She traded her loft in an old warehouse that looked over the bay in North Beach for a musician’s apartment on Bowery and Grand in Manhattan.

Hall and her boyfriend took a taxi from the airport to their new home on an early morning in January of 1970. Homeless people were warming their hands over fires on street corners; the city seemed to be a raw, intimidating place and Hall wondered what she had gotten herself into.

“It was hard – it was the Bowery – it was the real thing,” she recollected. “At the same time, there was a very tight knit community of artists and writers and so on.”

Her first show opened a year and a half later at the Whitney Museum. It was an auspicious beginning that she credits to the welcoming art community, where she continued to thrive for the next two decades.

Hall’s work gradually evolved from the intricate paintings of women and their lives that first showed at the Whitney. First it began to include landscapes, which were often urban and surreal. In one, an orchid floats on an envelope above a city skyline; in another, a bathroom mirror inexplicably reflects a black and starry night sky.

Gradually, simplicity and natural scenes became more prominent in the paintings that she showed. Shortly before she moved back to West Marin, boats and silhouettes dominated her exhibitions.

By that time, she felt that the New York art community had become commercialized, and was ready to move. “Things had changed a lot,” she said. “I was longing for the poet’s life, and had done all that I could in New York.” Her paintings from that time were dark and graceful, with lots of water—closer to her current, spare style.

After the move, people and buildings disappeared from her work almost entirely, while hills, rivers and trees became prevalent.

On the surface, her early canvases looked almost nothing liker her current ones, but Hall said that the way she sees things has never changed. Even though her subjects and style were different, she said her compositions had an openness that wasn’t found in that of her colleagues.

“My friends who grew up in big cities have a very different way of taking things in,” she said. “For me every object has a lot of space around it. The atmosphere builds the objects, almost.”

Today, Hall’s work is viscerally evocative of West Marin. Bold blackbird silhouettes congregate on a telephone wire, against a background of reds and oranges that form the starkest suggestion of a landscape in one painting. On another, hills and trees are rendered in a wash of gray and green so fine the texture of the canvas shows through.

Others pieces are less abstract; cypress trees arch over a pathway illuminated by sunlight; white deer browse under a looming cloud; a grand and slightly canted barn dwarfs a landscape with a single tree on the horizon.

“I’m not a plein air painter, partly because I take out a lot and I put in a lot,” Hall said. “Personally, I feel the deeper part of the landscape requires editing to get at the core of it.”


Susan Hall’s work can be seen at her solo show, River Flowing Home, at the College of Marin from September 22 to October 24. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 25 from 6 to 8 p.m. and will feature a reading from her forthcoming book.

Annual mushroom hunt draws foragers to Point Reyes

Volunteer mushroom hunters fanned across the Point Reyes peninsula in the morning mist last Saturday, taking part in the third annual Mycoblitz.

The goal was to find as many different types of fungus as possible – hopefully, some that have never been seen before.

“It’s like an Easter egg hunt for adults,” said Debbie Viess, who co-founded the Bay Area Mycological Society (BAMS) along with David Rust. “You never know what you’re going to find. There’s something new every day.”

Over 100 people gathered in the auditorium of the Bear Valley Visitors Center at the Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS) before signing up to survey the mushrooms along one of 20 different routes. Men, women, and children of all ages came from as far away as Oregon to join an event designed in part to “turn people on to mushrooms.”
By 10 a.m. they had dispersed.

A group of 12 mushroom hunters carpooled to the summit of Mount Vision, where they spread into the forest, eyes on the ground and armed with collecting baskets and specimen labels.

Excited calls echoed back and forth through the pine trees: “Bolek found a blue-green Stropharia,” someone called, and later, “The girl in the red coat has an enormous hedgehog.”

The group would gather to admire each find, before meandering back into the trees and huckleberry bushes.

Amiable conversation ranged from how to tell whether you had found a tasty candy-cap or a toxic look-alike, to pickling edible ‘men on horseback’ in vodka.

Yellow lactarius, crimson amanitas and shiny maroon russulas piled up in baskets, each separately held in a wax-paper bag and marked with a label indicating where it was found, what it was growing on, and what plants were growing with it.

The first mycoblitz was organized in 2005 by Tom Bruns of UC Berkeley and David Rust of BAMS.

In addition to involving the public, the mycoblitz aims to provide a detailed inventory of mushrooms in the park. A sample of every species found is filed in a herbarium, and it’s DNA sequence is added to a database.

“The blitz improves our identifications, but also gives us a DNA database that we can then use for other types of ecological studies,” Bruns said.
In the North Bay area, mushrooms can be legally collected at the Point Reyes National Seashore, and Tomales Bay and Samuel P. Taylor State Parks, Rust said. Salt Point State Park in Sonoma County has the best hunting around.

Point Reyes is valuable because it is close to the urban center of the Bay Area, and the collection limits are generous – two gallons of edible mushrooms per adult per day.

A single extra mushroom is also allowed. “The one mushroom addition may sound silly unless its boletus season, and your one mushroom weighs like five pounds,” said Viess.

Bold and brilliant or small and drab, mushrooms come in an infinite variety. Shiny caps and stippled stalks bloom from logs, cow pies and the duff of the forest floor.

Describing the biology of a mushroom can be like narrating the plot of a science-fiction novel. The fungi are an overlooked branch of biology; a third kingdom of life that is neither plant nor animal but incorporates features of both.

They digest their food like animals, but are sessile like plants. Reproduction takes place in numerous and bizarre ways. The fungus Schizophyllum commune has 24,000 different sexual types (whereas most plants and animals only have two), Viess said.

Like apples on a tree, the familiar stalked buttons are just the fruits of a much larger organism. The body of the fungus grows hidden from view, a fragile tangle of filaments that weaves through soil, wood and things they can decompose and feed on. Certain mushrooms usually grow in association with a certain plant, or type of plants.

“To successfully hunt specific mushrooms you have to look under the right trees,” said Viess. ”For golden chanterelles you go to coast live oak. If you’re looking for an edible lactarius you go to the pines, and so on.”

The highlights of Point Reyes are seasonal; hefty and savory Boletus edulus, or porcini, are found under bishop pines in the fall. As winter progresses, black trumpet chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms arrive. Spring brings more edible amanitas, and morels in wood-chip beds. Shaggy parasols can be found in the summer.

Mushrooms are fickle, sprouting in response to rainfall and temperature and perhaps other environmental cues we still don’t understand.

“It can be kind of a bait-and-switch,” Viess said. “You go out in a boom year like this and think, ‘wow what a fairyland!’ but then you come back next year and find nothing.”

The majority of mushroom hunters only care about the edible species, but BAMS formed with the goal of broadening that focus. “We’re about the art and science of mushrooms,” Viess said. “Celebrating them for their beauty and helping the people who do the science collect, collate and also educate.”

It will take a few months to compile a complete list of all the species that were found on Saturday. Thousands of mushrooms were brought back to the Red Barn at PRNS headquarters in Olema, and experts spent the weekend sorting through tables piled high with fungi.

Once the best sample of each species was saved, the long process of keying them using spore prints, literature and microscopes began. To date, 435 different species of fungus have been identified in four annual mycoblitzes. Bruns expects that up to 40 mushrooms that have never been identified in this area before were probably found last weekend.

“We found a genus that I’ve never seen before in my life,” said Bruns. “It’s a pretty obscure little thing that could easily be missed. It looks like a little purple jelly-like blob.”