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.

Gumption and luck make stars out of West Marin twins

In the hush of the high-ceilinged Kabuki Theater, the film Touching Home rolled before a sold-out audience at the 2008 San Francisco International Film Festival last week.

At the back of the theater, two identical young men in suits sat on the floor and watched the struggles of their early 20s play out on the screen.

After being inches away from playing professional baseball, Logan and Noah Miller landed back home in Nicasio. They tested their bond as brothers and their commitment to their dreams, while coping with their alcoholic, homeless and loving father.

Logan and Noah, twins from West Marin, had no background in making movies when they decided to write, direct, produce and act in Touching Home. What they did have was perseverance learned from years of being athletes, hope, and 17 credit cards.

After two years of gumption and luck, the pair had recruited actors Ed Harris, Brad Dourif and Robert Forster; secured a Panavision New Filmmaker grant, which gave them access to professional cameras and discounted film; hired a film crew; and learned how to act.

“Many, many people told us we were insane, but we’ve always loved the people who’d say, ‘Why not? You never know,’” said Noah and Logan, who complete each other’s sentences, tossing them back and forth between them like a baseball.

EARLY YEARS, AND BASEBALL
The brothers started life fighting, they said. Born six weeks premature and weighing three pounds each, Logan had a hole in his heart and Noah’s appendix ruptured. Several surgeries later, the boys grew up tough, athletic and prepared to take on unfavorable odds.

They spent their early years in Lagunitas, gradually moving east through Forest Knolls and landing in Fairfax, where they lived with their mom as they attended Manor School and then Sir Francis Drake High.

West Marin remained their stomping grounds. They fished, hiked, and spent weekends with their father, who lived in a trailer in the San Geronimo Valley. In the summer they would pull crawdads out of Lagunitas creek, and they played baseball on every field in the area, they said – guaranteed.

“I don’t even remember the first time that we played catch,” Noah said. “I mean, there were two of us; it was just something we always did.”

They do remember one of the first places they played, though: an old horse pasture on Tamal Road, which has since been built over with houses.

In addition to playing, the boys started working early on. Their father became homeless when the boys were teenagers – but he held down a job as a roofer and construction worker even when he was living in his pickup.

“We started going to jobs with our pops when we were really young,” they said, “We would clean up shingles that fell off the roof, and used to sell them in front of the Cala Market in Fairfax.”

Versed in manual labor, the boys pinned their future on baseball. They were good, and when they graduated from Sir Francis Drake High, they were drafted into the minor leagues. Close enough to taste the big leagues, the two worked hard despite the challenges.

Eventually, Logan played with the Blue Jays; Noah played college ball for Southern Arkansas. But at age 24 the two had become old men by baseball standards, and they landed back home with a resume that included nailing shingles, digging ditches, and not much else.

So they decided to make a movie.

CHANGING CAREERS
The idea hit them when they visited a friend in Los Angeles, the twins said. They call it their epiphonic summit.

“When you’re there, the allure of the movie industry is…” Logan said, and Noah finished with, “…palpable.”

Making a movie about their lives, and their father, seemed like a crazy but possible dream. Friends and strangers had always been fascinated with their life story: their father who was homeless but went to work every day; their charisma as twins who did everything together.

They bought a book on screenwriting and finished a draft of the screenplay on cheap spiral-bound notebooks within a month. It was terrible, they said, and though they wrote 11 different scripts they never put any serious effort into turning the drafts into drama.

Then, on January 5, 2006, their father died in Marin County jail. His loss, and the undignified way that his body was treated, filled them with a sense of helplessness and anger that needed an outlet. Turning their screenplay into a film became a way to heal, and they threw all of their energy and determination into the project.
“We said, ‘We have to at least try to do something positive with that guilt and pain,’” said Noah. “We bought a whole bunch of books on movie production.”

Less than two months later, the two had been awarded the New Filmmaker grant. Two months after that, they took their movie trailer to the San Francisco International Film Festival on a laptop, with the idea of finding some way – any way – to show it to Ed Harris.

“He was the only guy to play our dad,” Logan said. “He looks just like him.”

After failing to intercept Harris on the way into the theater, and after failing to get a microphone during his Q & A, Noah simply tried to walk backstage, with Logan on his heels. Though they were stopped, an employee pass on their request for a few minutes of Harris’ time, and they wound up showing the actor their trailer in an alley, while he smoked a cigarette.

He took their script and their phone number; he read it and liked it; the rest is history.

Everything about the creation of Touching Home is improbable. The twins first funded the filming of a trailer on credit cards; then they recruited a major star, who thought they had funding; then they found the funding –and they still had to direct, star in and produce the movie.

And the film that eventually appeared in the Kabuki is a polished, tender film that may be, more than anything, an ode to West Marin.

TOUCHING HOME
The Miller brothers’ film is an emotional, allegorical version of their life. Facts are blurred and mythologized into what becomes, for the viewer, a greater truth.

Maybe the grandmother in the film was a great-grandmother in real life; maybe they worked with their father as roofers instead of at the Lunny quarry. But for the viewer, that doesn’t matter – and the twins were perceptive enough to know that.

The movie gets rolling when both Noah and Logan return home, temporarily spit out by the world of baseball.

On the long drive to California they had assured each other they would play ball again as soon as they regrouped; but failure, romance and working alongside their alcoholic dad strained their commitment to baseball and their relationship to each other.

While the plot of the movie focuses on the boys struggle to return to baseball, the emotional meat lies in its subtle exploration of the complexities of the illness that is alcoholism, and the many ways that a goodhearted man can fail himself and his sons.

To zero gravity and beyond: an interview with Astronaut Leroy Chiao

Dr. Leroy Chiao was a NASA astronaut for 15 years, logging over 200 days in space (and 36 hours on spacewalks) before retiring to aid a private spaceflight company called Excalibur Almaz and raise his 14-month-old twins, Henry and Caroline. Theme interviewed Dr. Chiao from his home in Houston. Though he went into space on four missions, most of our conversation involved his life on the International Space Station, where he lived for six and a half months with Russian astronaut Salizhan Sharipov, whom Chiao called “the brother I never had.”

Theme: Let’s start at the beginning. What does launch feel like?
Dr. Leroy Chiao: It depends: if you’re on a Russian Soyuz rocket, it’s so smooth you can’t actually feel liftoff. It feels quite different on the Space Shuttle—when those solid rockets light, it’s like someone kicked the back of your chair. You’re getting shaken around a lot and you feel the acceleration pushing you back in your seat as you take off. Then after the solid rocket boosters come off, it’s glass smooth. It’s not that uncomfortable, it just takes a little more effort to breathe. It’s like someone’s sitting on your chest.

Read interview at:
http://www.thememagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=203&Itemi
d=109

West Marin’s first hops plantation is just beginning to emerge from a field above Marconi Cove in Marshall. A few fuzzy leaves are the only indicators of what, if all goes right, will grow into a towering wall of vines by the end of summer.

The one-third-acre field is an experiment, planted by Lagunitas Brewery. If they survive on the windy hillside, the plantation will be expanded.

“At the end of the year we’re going to make a beer from the Marshall hops,” said brewery owner Tony Magee. “It’s going to be our harvest beer, more of an estate ale.”

He added that most beer is made from dried hops that are trucked down from the big hop-growing regions in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. But using fresh hops creates a beer with a very different flavor.

“Hops are like basil,” Magee said. “It’s one thing to cook with dried basil, but if you have some fresh stuff there you use it. The flavors are so much brighter and nicer.”

The hop plant’s bud is packed with bitter and citrusy aromatic oils, and different varieties have been bred to have different tastes. The traditional “spalt” variety lends beer a spicy and delicate flavor, while “cascade” is described as piney and assertive.

“There are only four different ingredients in beer: water, yeast, barley and water,” Magee said. “But you take these four ingredients and there are whole worlds of possibility in final flavor.”

Hops first came to be used in beer because their aromatic oils have an antibacterial effect, and acted as a natural preservative before refrigeration was available. Beer was also a practical way to sanitize drinking water.

“India Pale Ale is really bitter because it was developed by English brewers, so they could ship beer to troops in India,” said Michelle Palacios with the Oregon Hop Commission. “Extra hops were added to keep the beer from spoiling on the long boat trip.”

The fact that the crisp bitterness nicely balances what would otherwise be an almost cloying sweetness in the malt beverage is an extra bonus.

“Without hops it would just be drinking sweet water,” said Palacios. “They aren’t technically necessary, but hops are now synonymous with beer.”

California was once a prime hop production area. The fertile soils around the Russian River, from Ukiah to Guerneville, were ideal for dryland farming of hops, which didn’t need irrigation, said UC Farm Advisor Paul Vossen.

“When we didn’t have irrigation, people would grow things that thrive in the climate and with the soil moisture that we have,” he said.

Once irrigation arrived and land prices escalated, the dryland crops – such as hops, prunes, pears and apples – were driven out. Drying and production centralized in the Pacific Northwest, and California farmers could no longer compete.

There are still scattered hop plantations where breweries grow for their own use, Palacios said, but the last large-scale commercial operations left California in the 1980s.

Magee’s plot is far from being a large-scale operation. His brewery uses roughly 15,000 tons of hops each year, and if he’s lucky 200 pounds – enough for 6,000 cases of beer – will come from the one-third acre Marshall plantation. The comparatively small brewery makes 47,000 barrels of beer each year, as compared to Sierra Nevada, which makes 650,000, and Budweiser, which produces around 100 million barrels each year, Magee said.

Instead, he sees experimentation as an important part of his role as an innovator and owner of a microbrewery.

“Since we’re small, its our job to experiment,” he said. “We can try new things very easily. Budweiser would waste 6,000 cases of beer just turning on a tap. It’s incumbent on us to pioneer and play and engage in the spirit of adventure.”

In a wood shop, son polishes his dad's legacy

Woodworking and water are the themes of Tripp Carpenter’s life. Sleek wooden furniture inspired by waves and other natural forms crowds the small showroom he inherited from his father, Arthur Espenet Carpenter, who was a world-renowned furniture maker.

“Like dad said, what we’re doing here is the jazz of woodwork: everything is untraditional and innovative,” said Tripp, a lanky 52 year-old whose broad hands reveal a lifetime of surfing and working with wood.

He runs the shop as a working museum and a tribute to his father, who went by the professional name of Espenet – in part to avoid the nickname “Arty Carpenter.”

In the 1950s, Espenet was one of the pioneers of California Design furniture, which is characterized by organic forms and a cavalier flouting of convention. He helped shape the field with his sensuous, simple designs and unconventional construction techniques. His work is now displayed in the Smithsonian and other collections worldwide.

“Espenet’s wishbone chairs were an incredible solution to making furniture because they are essentially lag bolted together,” said Yale art professor Edward Cooke about the sleek, popular chairs. “He celebrated the gnarliness that is part of the wood.”

Today, Tripp is carrying on his father’s legacy in the long, narrow building full of wood shavings and windows. He fills orders for his father’s designs, creates his own pieces, and also does refinishing and repair work.

“I don’t really think of myself as an artist or a craftsman,” Tripp said. “I’m just trying to make a living. But it helps that I have an aesthetic; I know what good form looks like, and it’s fun to make beautiful things that are going to outlast me.” He added that exposing the beauty of wood is one of his inspirations, as are the sensuous forms waves – which is fitting for a man who describes himself as a surfer above all else.

When Tripp’s family moved to Bolinas he was two, and the town was on the cusp of changing from a sleepy farming community to a bastion of liberal artists. At the age of six he started working in his fathers shop, making wooden candlesticks that Espenet sold for him.

By the time he was eight, he was bodysurfing. He was also the first boy on the baseball team to have long hair.

“I was rebellious, and very antiestablishment,” he said. “I got called a girl a lot but didn’t cut my hair until I was 40.”

While attending college, Tripp worked in the woodshop along with Espenet’s many apprentices. But he kept his schedule flexible so he could split when the waves were good. At 17, he went to Peru for a year to surf, later following the sport across much of the globe. He spends several weeks of each year in Rio Nexpa, where an old woman keeps his surfboard for him.

Eventually Tripp left Espenet’s shop, moving to Sausalito when he was 28, and later buying a tiny cabin on the eastern flank of Mount Tam. He worked as a carpenter and a grade-school art teacher off and on for 15 years, and rarely saw his father other than on holidays.

“I basically let go of the shop,” Tripp said. “Dad was just out there doing his own thing, and he kept to himself a lot. He was kind of a curmudgeon.”

When Espenet was in his 80s, things changed. One day he called Tripp, frustrated because he couldn’t see well enough to finish a table.

“I came out and finished it for him,” Tripp said. “And ever since, I’ve been here.”
Espenet’s death in 2006 ended his lifelong lease on the property, and Tripp was relieved when the owners continued to rent it to him. “I hope there’s a way to keep the shop going like it was in the old days, whether I’m here or not,” he said. “This should be a working museum and a library, with artists-in-residence and apprentices. I’d hate to see it die.”

He added that the legacy of his father’s shop is a sanctuary and an inspiration for artists: a supportive place where people can live cheaply and have the freedom to experiment with form and style. “Bolinas is a great community to be an artist in, and the shop is a part of that,” Tripp said.

Espenet trained over 130 apprentices, many of whom are still nearby. People come in and use the equipment to make things and fix things, or just to say hello, Tripp said. This week one apprentice’s son came in to make a breadboard for a Christmas present.
“People have made masks, a huge 40-foot sailboat mast, a coffin for one apprentice’s daughter,” Tripp said. “This place really has some history.”