The Hive Gallery & Studios: Studio Opening

The Hive Gallery & Studios: Studio Opening

A day in the life

So I woke up to a pounding, ‘your-house-is-on-fire’ knocking on at door. It was early morning, the bright California sun streaming in through the tree leaves and telephone pylons.

I threw on a dressing gown, ran down stairs and opened the door. Our neighbor, a standup comedian behind a big bearded blasted out,

“Nora’s escaped. She is down on Sunset Boulevard. The cops are there!”

“You’re kidding”

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I was holding a stack of colored paper trying to calm my beating, nervous heart, little beads of sweat glistened on my brow from the afternoon sun. I thought that in the low light inside, the bright white of normal drawing paper might be too conspicuous. I have been kicked out of clubs before. But I didn’t really enjoy it and I really didn’t want it to happen again.

I took a deep breath. I summoned all my courage; I armed myself with my big sunglasses and a NRA baseball cap and walked down Hollywood Boulevard.

The club looked closed. I had driven by before, cased the place, and there had been a big bouncer perched on a high stool out front. But now there was no one; just a wall and a black door. My heart beat and I pushed it open.

It was dark. There weren’t many people there; an old man hunched over a bottle looked right into my eyes. I crossed the room to the end of the long lacquered-wood bar top.

The barmaid leaned across to cover the din of the loud music; she said something that I didn’t hear.

“Can I draw here?” I asked, feeling like a twat. “Oh, and can I have a Cosmo?”

“Yea, whatever,” she dismissed. Flowing a disapproving look from the man in the baseball cap, she added, “ID”

Having just turned thirty I took this rather well. Armed with as girly drink as I could muster, I slunk off to a dark corner. It was not as bad as the English club.

The girl was chubbier than I thought that she should be. She vibrated her bubbly butt cheeks at the suited Asian man as he appreciatively deposited one dollar bill. Then I caught a sly glance from under the platinum blond bouffant in my direction. Being a girl in a strip club is a bit like being the mistress at your lover’s birthday party.

Strippers are much prettier than your average life drawing model. But drawing in there is like playing a computer game. Only the expert gamer, having left the room after getting up to the hardest level, passes you the controls. It’s dark, they move really fast, and sometimes they are upside-down.

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Down town Los Angeles is schizophrenic. It plays New York in most TV shows but is populated by the homeless, dragging their card board condos; toothless, limping crack junkies from the eighties and my favorite, a pirate bum who actually says ‘aagh’. Then on the second Thursday of each month, thousands of hipsters in haircuts from the west side and beyond come to see art.

I love the egalitarianism. Next to the high priced white walls, the locals sell $10 posters and finger paintings on the outside brick walls.

I arrived at the Hive; an artist collective gallery where I had a small piece. There are other galleries, some with marble floors, others with Charles Shaw wine, but the Hive is really about the artists; building communities, sharing ideas, seeing each other’s growing and changing practice. I was excited to get there and show the others my drawings from the club, and tell them how I woke up…

“I ran about the house, grabbing clothes, out to the back yard to get a crate. I hit the panic button on the car keys, waking the world with frantic honking, then the unlock button, and drove down the hill.”

I had a captive audience of two collectors in high healed boots, one very good oil painter in a brown corduroy jacket, and a lovely man with a huge, slightly distracting nose. “It seems that Nora, who dose look like she swallowed a watermelon, her pot belly almost dragging on the ground, went for a stole this morning to find something yummy to eat.

“It is only about two hundred yards but we live on a very, very steep hill. At the bottom was a pair or LAPD with a grumpy, sheepish Nora, a dog leach tied about her ample belly. There was a new hole dug in the apartment buildings nice lawn and she was very cross that the police were not letting her root in it.

“I leaped out of the car and flung the crate onto the street. The police sweetly asked if I would take a photo of them with Nora on their phones.”

As I stood there, jabbering away, I tried to remind myself to talk about the art at art shows, not my reprobate pig.

Night and Day

The moon was obese, its light billowing down on the salt flats to the east toward Death Valley; illuminating the mountains to the west like wolves’ teeth. Ahead, the center yellow line crawling unblinkingly up to the night blue horizon. In my rear view mirror, the same desolate gray slinking back to Los Angeles, the lights from the newly built tract housing on the outskirts of Ridgecrest humming orange just below the horizon.

My high beams swept upon the small green sign that had been growing out of the brush at the side of the road; the only object that we had seen since the last commercial break on the Christian country channel. We slowed and turned, felt the gravel of the country road beneath the small city- car tires.

Earlier that day the sun had peeked over the top of the mountains just enough to melt the few fat flakes that had drifted their way onto the three feet of snow. It had then dipped again behind the jagged mountains tips and the melt had bolted back to frozen.

We slowed to look at the depth of ice and snow on the first turn-off to the cabin. A wind had blown an impenetrable bank across the track, thick like a warm fat duvet.

The second road was a little further up the hill and nestled in trees. As we turned off the lane, the creaking of compressed snow crunched under the tires like Styrofoam. We slid a little onto the ridges of someone’s tracks, locking us into the road like a train.

The headlights turned each sagebrush and pinion pine into cardboard cut outs. Like painted scenery in a play, the stage sloping down to us sitting like an eager audience in the front row. ‘ooh’s and ‘aah’s and held breath as we slipped and skidded and bounded our way. We scavenged our way through the shafts of dappled moonlight on the forest floor toward the little cabin in the trees.

The heat of the Sunday sun prickled my cheeks and warmed my rock, its glair was burning my eyes. The south face, moistened by the melt, was brimming with life. The ground was muddy, the air hummed with flies. The tiniest of flowers, still wrapped up in their buds, were wriggling their way out to find the spring. Summer followed the night; the meadows are cut in two.