My 1970's

Me, 1974, pencil sketch.

I'm in a 70's kind of mood. Yesterday I stumbled onto the website of a guy from my high school class who posted pictures from the neighborhood. He is now a LMU professor; the LMU campus was my childhood backyard, a prime lizard-hunting site for my brothers and me. We usually went on campus to slide down the giant concrete "L" (for Loyola) on the hillside.

This is a photo of Dad and me, 1973, with B-1 bomber at Rockwell Aviation, where Dad worked.

Hippie pen & ink drawings...

There were dozens of huge, vacant, unfenced lots in the Westchester in my youth, owned by Howard Hughes or his companies. These vacant fields were our windows into nature up-close, gave us mental elbow room, places to play, romp, explore. They including the acres of mustard fields and wetlands owned by Hughes that became Playa Vista (I miss that formerly open area very much). The name Howard Hughes was a constant presence in the Westchester of my youth. My father witnessed the Spruce Goose's single flight; my oldest brother worked at Hughes Helicopters as a young man. Signs bearing Hughes' name were everywhere.

Pencil sketch of Leo DiCaprio portraying Howard Hughes in the film Aviator (I paused the DVD long enough to sketch this).

Cute Chick

I photographed this mallard female and chick in Santa Barbara last weekend. She had four chicks. I cropped the photo down to one chick so you could see it better.


Then I made a small etching out of a similar photo in my printmaking class:

Denbug on Harmonica

This is a watercolor painting of one of my brothers, Dennis, in 1964 or 1965. Grandpa played the harmonica (as did Dad and lots of men back then). We have several photographs of Dennis and Grandpa looking pretty serious about this harmonica-playing business.