JIM MCVICKER
A half sheet watercolor from this morning at Navarro Beach here in Mendocino County. It’s been a great week here with a wonderful group of painters.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
I made my first on location, plein air, painting in 1973. My influences then were the French Impressionist, mostly Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. At the time I was working full time and attending art classes at Chaffey Community College in Southern California. I was born and raised in Ontario California, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. By the summer of 1975 I decided to become a full time painter. I quit my job, left school and moved to Santa Cruz in Northern Ca. I always loved the northern part of the state and wanted to get away from everything I knew up to that point and start a fresh life as a painter. I think I had about $5,000 dollars in my bank account. In my mind, enough money to make a start at really exploring and trying to learn how to paint. My work at the time was very rough but I had no doubt that I would grow and survive.
After a couple of years I move further north to Humboldt County and have remained here, with a couple of adventures elsewhere, since 1977. Humboldt is where my education as a painter really started. There were several painters in the area whom I met through a life drawing group. Three of them, Curtis Otto, James Moore and George Van Hook became close friends as well as the three painters I learned so much from for the next few years. We painted daily together and George and I shared a studio for a couple of years. Working so closely with artists beyond ones own level was such a great way to learn to see.
In 1984 I met my wife, Terry. She was working as a graphic artist at the time we met, but by the time we were married in 1988 she began painting as a fine artist full time. Terry has been another major infulence in my development as an artist. To have a partner and companion on a daily bases that sees in ways I don't, and paints her view of life, opened my work and continues to do so. We also both believe in painting from life, outdoors and in the studio. We both paint a lot of still life and figure painting when not working outdoors.
I paint small and large on location. I've painted as large as 54x84 outdoors, but normally work 9x12 to 30x40. I may work one to fifteen or twenty sittings outdoors. I have no set rules but work until I feel I've completed the painting. Sometimes years later I will re-work a painting in the studio when I feel it is not quite working. It is funny how time can often change how we perceive our work.
I always look at as much art as I can, historical and contemporary. I learn from all of it. I will always keep painting and trying to grow as a painter. I think that will never end.
Jim McVicker
(jimmcvickerpaints.com)
ED NOTES
I’d say the Anderson Valley, thanks to the wine industry, has devolved from a coherent community to just another roadside boutique booze stop, ice cream slurps for the kids. The wine juggernaut, beginning around 1980 with the importation of roughly a thousand unassimilable Mexican peasants and their families for whom the industry provided zero housing and other amenities, transformed Anderson Valley into two separate and mutually uncomprehending cultures, which took a generation to bridge unto today’s fully integrated but dramatically two-tier society — rich people and the rest of us, Mex and Anglo, most of us serving the tourist economy. Myself, I think the Mexicans were a radical improvement over the ‘necks. The mighty AVA chronicled the changes. (Quick anecdote: A Mexican guy I’ve known casually for many years came into the office one day, looked around and said, “What do you guys do in here?” He was totally unaware that there was a local newspaper.)
I’ve functioned more as a kind of ringleader for a variety of attacks on local, state and national government, all for naught of course, as recent events make emphatically clear. I have such little respect for traditional media I can’t imagine functioning in any of their seraglios.
I’ve managed to outlive most of my enemies, but over the long years I’d say the editors at the nearby Santa Rosa-based Press Democrat have served as both my favorite and least favorite enemies, them and a variety of local officials of the pseudo-liberal, Democrat sub-species. (Judges have been a ripe target over the years as they preside over an utterly corrupt justice system. One of them, and a DA, were particularly upset when I described the County Courthouse as the Proletariat Processing Center. Like a lot of libs they were and are delusional as to their true function.)
Successes? Quite a few I say in all modesty, one of them a series we did on the Fort Bragg Fires of ‘87 during which a couple of crooks burned down the town center. And got away with it. Predictably, the DA let the statute run on the case but we had to go to five printings — our best ever sales — because Fort Braggers had no idea of what had happened.
A minor triumph which has always pleased me is a story I did about how the local judges kept the public out of the publicly-funded law library. To get access you had to go to one of their majesties to get the key, an inconvenient insult to people trying to use the library. This story led to a total reform that included unimpeded access and a full-time clerk.
We’re much more locally focused now that print has gone away, but we still manage about 1500 subscribers behind an on-line paywall, making us uniquely semi-successful in this area. (At our most successful in the early 1990s we had about 4,000 paid subscribers, including a modest national circulation. Local authorities always tried to steer public advertising away from the AVA. I sued, won locally in a jury trial during which the jury was out for less than an hour, but the County beat me at the state appellate level. (The state’s opinion was a minor masterpiece of moronic reasoning, but I didn’t have the money to appeal it.) Public notices are crucial, or were crucial, to print papers. I remember two Frisco dailies suing each other over legals.
Print journalism is over, dead. The internet killed it. Everyone has their own paper these days. I think we’re doing pretty well surviving among all the cyber-tumult. I think there will always be a place for long-form print journalism of the LRB, NYRB, Harper’s etc., but mass circulation print publications are museum pieces. The few print papers still around are doomed, mere shadows of their pre-net selves. In a way, if you can sort through the daily deluge, journalism is better than ever with lots of good writers out there doing honest work, but the Orange Monster sails on, impervious.
My mainstream critics have always said I was irresponsible, but look who’s talking? The aforementioned Fort Bragg series was so popular because NorCal media had ignored it. I did a satire way back on the local congressman, a hack called Bosco, that was effective satire because the whole journalo-gang — Bagdikian in the Washington Post, that fat guy and alleged journalo-expert on the faculty where your mom taught, to name two I remember — denounced me as irresponsible for doing it. (The DesMoines Register threatened to sue me because I attributed the thing to one of their pompous reporters I’d seen on tv.) My enemies brought up the Bosco Interview for years as a primo example of my “irresponsibility.” It was a great success!
The paper has attracted a lot of good writers over the years because, I think, we were instantly accessible and, of course, welcoming to dissenting and/or off beat stuff that was shut out most places.
Here’s a confession I hope is not too startling. My book, ‘The Mendocino Papers’ was a draft but due to my confusion wound up in print.
We left Honolulu after Pearl Harbor. Lived in SF for a few years then moved to Marin where I went to high school in Mill Valley. In ‘55, my school was the site of a terrible race riot, the first and only of its kind in marvy Marin. The student body then was an odd mix of very wealthy kids, working class shlubs like me and black kids from the ghetto of Marin City. My main interest was sports, but I was already a proto-lib in close friendships with black teammates. From high school I went into the Marine Corps during a time of two-year enlistments and six years of reserve eligibility, and from there to junior collleges and two years at Cal Poly SLO where I played baseball on a kind of jock scholarship. I read a lot from high school on.
I joined the Peace Corps in ‘63 after a couple of years in early SF demonstrations with CORE where I first met a lot of commies and com-symps I re-met as editor of the AVA. I met my wife in Sarawak. We married in ‘65. Without her my life would not have been possible. She did all the grunt work at the AVA for all its years. In ‘67 I drove a cab in the city while trying to overthrow the government and support my young family doing work that didn’t add to the general oppression. I became a full time foster parent to delinquents in Boonvile, work I did until I bought the paper in 1984.
GRANDDAUGHTER, age 11, and a dedicated Swiftie, is not happy about Taylor’s engagement. She thinks Travis Kelcie is dumb and that Taylor could do a lot better.
BILL KIMBERLIN:
“Ray’s Resort” probably late 1940’s. $60 a week for a cabin, almost a mile of river front for swimming, croquet, tennis court, rec. building with pool table and three meals a day from the gardens, the chicken house, the cows etc. But the best part was for the mother…No cooking. Just take the kids to the river for swimming after a delicious lunch. The father was fishing.
CSD BOARD CHAIR VALERIE HANELT RESPONDS TO ‘GINA’
Hello Gina, this was your question during the CSD meeting Aug 20 when we were discussing the Sewer project:
Gina: “As of now the problem seems to be too many people living on one property with a septic system for a single family home. I do not see this solving the problem. There will still be more people on the system / hook up than estimated per hook up.”
Valerie Hanelt:
Here is my response:
The problem that the sewer system is addressing is the potential threat to public health due to untreated or partially treated wastewater contaminating neighboring wells or surfacing in the community.
The wastewater collection, treatment and disposal system is being planned conservatively to be able to serve the entire service area. The service rates can be developed to account for the specific production of wastewater from each connection.
The current documented contamination of groundwater is likely from most, if not all septic systems in the densely developed portions of the study area – not just those with “too many people living on one property.” The septic systems are not sufficiently separated from private wells.
Thanks,
Val Hanelt
THE YELLOW ROSE OF BOONVILLE , is the only one for me.
It blossoms in the garden, and never smells off key.
Its loveliness is striking, and it’s such a rarity.
That only passing cameras can confirm identity.
A SUPER FUN WAY to participate in the fair festivities is to help the AV Grange with the annual award winning agriculture display! We’re getting together Monday eve, Sept. 7th, at 4pm to begin the seed gluing process to the colorful display.
Please join us if you can! This year’s fair theme is “Mendocino Coastal Adventures” so we’ve got a great display plan!
PENNYROYAL FARM, Boonville
It emerges from crevices along the sidewalks, takes root under the vineyard canopy, and flourishes along pasture fence lines. It’s pennyroyal season on the farm! Take a whiff of our aromatic namesake on your next visit!
DANIEL GARIBAY:
Hi Valley People. I am still offering my mobile mechanic services. From routine maintenance to emergency repairs, I’ve got you covered wherever you are. I am Mazda certified and can work on any brand. Reliable, efficient, and hassle-free. Feel free to call or text my phone number at (707) 391-8899.
ALLAN GREEN:
My latest book is now available, hot off the press!
https://www.blurb.com/b/12503758-pioneers-of-anderson-valley-wine
Be First to Comment