Kids and me at the Filipino Fiesta

Anxious to finish another painting, I headed out to Kapiolani Park yesterday only to find the Annual Filipino Fiesta staged there. It’s Saturday. Duh. I didn’t care. It takes me an hour to drive there from the studio, and DH gave up the use of our one car, so I felt I had to take advantage of the opportunity.

I circumnavigated the park twice after deciding to not park illegally and before squeezing into a spot on Leahi avenue that my friend Pi‘ikea would term “in the next county.”

Plein air oil painters lug their French easels, paints, and what-have-you all over the creation. We need to be there for the light. So I hoofed it.

I visualized my painting spot empty as I walked toward the iconic ironwood-lined path, and it was! Right in the middle of a pedestrian aisle lined with two rows of tent booths and across from the food booths and their aroma, each with a long line of customers.

The tinikling and other Filipino and pop tunes from the bandstand blared, and I welcomed another of day of painting to music. The one I did at the recent Bluegrass Hawaii festival was successful.

“Bluegrass Hawaii,” 20″x16″ oil on canvas

As you might imagine there were a lot of spectators, photographers, and videographers who stopped to watch me paint. I’m happy to stop and converse. What I like the best are the children. Here’s a sample of their comments and questions (some adults ask the same things):

Kid: What kind of paint is that?

Me: Oil paint.

 

Kid: Did you draw that?

Me: Uh huh.

 

Kid: How long did it take you to paint that?

Me: This is my fourth or fifth time out.

Kid: Are the people in the painting still there?

Me: Try look. Are they?

 

Kid: What are you going to call your painting?

Me: How about “Ironwood Path at Kapiolani Park”? “Diamond Head” is too ordinary, don’t you think?

Kid: (smiles widely and nods approval)

 

Kid (noticing the vista): Oh, look! She’s painting that!

 

Kid: Wow, you have a lot of colors.

Me: Do you like to draw?

Kid: Yes.

 

Kid: Are you going to be an artist when you grow up?

Older kid (punching the first kid in the arm): She IS an artist.

Me: Yup, when I grow up.

 

Me and Taxx, who I just met, with my painting in progress, i.e., it is not completed. I am revisiting some places I painted about 20 years ago and painting them again. This is one of them. I hope to mount an exhibit to compare the art works. Is there any growth? Have I grown up?  (Photo by Taxx’s photographer)

Copyright 2013 Rebekah Luke

What allowing brings

“Red Trunks” © 2013 Rebekah Luke, 16″ x 20″ oil on canvas board

Learning to relax, accept, and allow has opened an intriguing period of Creativity for me, both in and outside of the studio. I feel like I’m on top of a wave, and I don’t want to reach the shore. I’m going with the flow, and I like it.

Nine canvases are in various stages of completion for a show scheduled for August. (The oil paint needs the time to dry. ) I’ve gone out with my plein air students every week, sometimes twice a week, to paint at different locations on O‘ahu. Every time I say, “I have an idea,” DH says, “Uh-oh,” but this idea’s pretty good!

I’m revisiting some spots that I painted 20 or so years ago and repainting the scene. At first I thought my earlier work was better than my current work, but, after a little reflection and some feedback from friends, I now think the current work shows clearer intent and inner perspective. Sort of like when listening to music; you can tell the difference between someone who is reading the notes and a musician who already knows the piece and is playing it by heart.

Still, it’s all about the Light. Recently I’ve met other artists with a lot of Light — oh, so brilliant! We’re starting to explore the idea of collaboration. “It’s a hui thing, never just yourself,” a former colleague Lono points out. For this show, I’m sharing the billing with a talented 3D artist. We’re having fun planning it, and I’ll be sure to let you in on the details when they are final.

Next, I’m allowing the idea of providing reproductions of my art at affordable prices lower than that of an original painting to occupy a place in my product line. I can’t wait to see what the proofs look like, printed on both on art paper and canvas. Then it will be fun to take them to market.

Teaching is going well. Painting I and III finish up this week, and I plan to start new classes in June for children and adults. I’m encouraged by parents of youngsters who’ve requested more art lessons, and by my adult pupils who manage to come to class despite challenging issues with family, at work, and at home.

Art and making art is healing, and it is a gift to me to witness the progress. The folks in Painting III, who are coming with me to Italy in September, are so enthusiastic that they are organizing their own show and suggesting subject matter and locations that they want to paint this summer.

One of the pleasant surprises is my return to music. Since my teenage years, my parents, teachers, choir directors, and DH noticed I had “some musicality.” The path has always been available to me — beyond music lessons, performing in a group, playing instruments, study in college. While painting is on my students’ bucket list, arranging and composing music has been on mine.  But until last Christmas I didn’t really know where to begin to learn how to do it, and I was too shy to ask.

I’ve been encouraged by thanks from the performers in my glee club for my help in teaching them how to read music and hula dance, for sure, and I love the strokes. As for the melodies and lyrics that are coming to me at dawn right after my dream time, that’s a whole ’nother vibrational level. Stay tuned! I am so very grateful.

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“Red Trunks” pictured above will not be in the new collection. I’ve framed it for this coming weekend’s Bluegrass in the Ko‘olaus Festival at Ho‘omaluhia Botanical Garden. I’m taking my easel to paint by music and a couple of finished canvases, including this one, to show folks what a finished painting will look like. My painting group comes here to Luluku regularly. I enjoy painting the mountains and the trees.

Copyright 2013 Rebekah Luke

Rain from Kaua‘i

From the beach this morning, this is what rain coming from the direction of Kaua‘i looked like. We have flash flood advisories. The wind has changed and big raindrops are starting to fall at the studio. The clouds are hanging low and down into the valley, not moving, covering any views of the waterfalls. I bet it’s raining already in the middle of the island. I cancelled my class en plein air in favor of everyone staying indoors to work on some unfinished paintings. I love the light of stormy weather, but I and my oil paint prefer to stay dry. Here’s hoping for a fairer-weather day tomorrow!

Copyright 2013 Rebekah Luke

Kamaipuupaa, the Prince Lot festival hula mound

Painting en plein air

One of my favorite sanctuaries on Oʻahu is Moanalua Gardens where I went with my students to paint en plein air earlier this month. A pleasant place to rest, picnic, and entertain, it is privately owned but open to the public. I find it peaceful and healing to go there.

We can go there for free during daylight hours most days. It is popular with young families, pre-school groups, Japanese tourists, artists, and lovers. That sounds busy, but the park is large enough that you can find a spot for yourself. Lucky for us at least a bit of the area of the cultured Gardens remains, for it used to cover three times the area. Imagine the beauty back when.

Every July, the day-long Prince Lot Hula Festival draws an audience of about 10,000 people who relax in the shade of the trees and enjoy viewing the dance by invited hula hālau (troupes) on the outdoor hula mound. This year the event is scheduled for Saturday, July 20, 2013, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

On three outings there this month, while busloads of Japanese tourists came to photograph the famous Hitachi tree (Hitachi, Ltd. pays for the rights to use the image of the grand, old monkeypod tree as its logo), while the gardeners operated their loud maintenance equipment, and while the elementary school children next door enjoyed their recess, I could still find my zone to paint the hula pā, romantically back-lit by the morning sun.

Japanese visitors come to see the “Hitachi tree” and have their photo taken in front of it.

A koi pond adjacent to a loʻi kalo (taro garden) attracts ducks, youngsters and photographers. The banyan in the background is just one of many mature trees here.

My finished painting “Kamaipuupaa,” 24″ x 18″ oil on canvas panel. The grassy hula mound is the venue for the annual Prince Lot Hula Festival at Moanalua Gardens in July. If you plan to go this summer, please verify the date in local news media.

Copyright 2013 Rebekah Luke

Hawaiian morning

“The lovely blue of sky and the sapphire of ocean…,” wrote R. Alex Anderson in his “Haole Hula.” That’s what greeted me on my morning walk today. Alice Brown and Pua met our neighbors Meda and Ian with squeals. Ian always has biscuits for them. Down the way the fishermen already had their poles out, and I wondered if it would be the gusty wind or the fish that would ring the bell.

Copyright 2013 Rebekah Luke

Revisiting Waikiki

Two Christmases ago, not last month but a year earlier, my brother-in-law Paul thoughtfully gave us a gift card to the Cheesecake Factory. Mmmm, dessert! Thanks again, Paul! I’m embarrassed to say the card stayed hidden among all the other cards until recently. The restaurant is in Waikiki, and we locals hardly ever go to Waikiki—the famous tourist playland in the shadow of the iconic Diamond Head landmark. We oldsters are nostalgic and like to remember what it was like in our youth. It’s our loss, really, not going there today.

Waikiki Beach in front of the Moana hotel. January 2013. Can you find Diamond Head?

When I think of Waikiki now, or more accurately going to Waikiki, I think of bad traffic, high-rise hotels, expensive stores, and crowded crosswalks in the Disneyland-ish manufactured environment that is Kalakaua avenue. All true. A lot of local residents work in the visitor industry, of course, and that’s a major part of the island economy. The streets and the buildings are refurbished regularly, with every mayor making an urban improvement and the hotels undergoing major renovations, too. I go to Waikiki so infrequently that it looks a little different each time. DH would get lost if I wasn’t navigating.

I decided on my birthday last week to have lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, so over the mountain we went to spend Paul’s gift card and play tourist. In the distance between the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center (where the restaurant is) parking garage and Kuhio Beach toward Diamond Head, I made many photos, but tossed out most of them, preferring to keep just of few pretty images of my old haunts.

Street entrance of the Moana hotel bustles with guests, taxis, and onlookers.

The Moana hotel, a favorite. My parents’ wedding reception and anniversaries were here at the romantic banyan court by the sea. In my teens, my girl friends and I went to the beach in front of the Moana every weekend, right there as shown in the top photo. It is still the best beach. Once I performed on stage with a group, singing and dancing—seems like a lifetime ago. That was even before my time as a daily news reporter when the Honolulu Press Club was located there.

The International Market Place, halfway between the Moana and Royal Hawaiian hotels on the other side of the street.

At the start of my art career, I took my paintings to the Honolulu Zoo Fence to sell. Kapiolani Park across Monsarrat avenue from the Zoo remains a breath of fresh air and green space. From the Fence I went to the Arts of Paradise gallery at the International Market Place. Once, in my early 20s, I spent New Year’s Eve with my date in and outside a restaurant to the left of the crosswalk in the photo. It was wild!

Come to think of it, I used to live in Waikiki, but I never thought of it that way because to me those areas were on the edges. First at the Ala Wai Boat Harbor on a yawl, then in a highrise condo unit near the Ala Wai Canal. I denied it was Waikiki until a friend I invited to dinner declared, after finally finding his way to my place, “My dear, you are in Waikiki!”

Majestic garden entry to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. January 2013.

Beautiful as ever is the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the “pink lady.” I entertained there, too. I scouted it for Sunset, on special occasions dined at the Surf Room, my favorite restaurant, and drank maitais on the beach with my mother-in-law. We always appreciated the gracious service and royal treatment extended us kamaaina residents. But, no, you can’t see it from Kalakaua avenue anymore.

Copyright 2013 Rebekah Luke

New lessons in art, music, and healing

At my age I’m not setting any long-term career goals, but I do have some short-term objectives heading into 2013.

These objectives began as seeds who knows when, and it looks like now is the time they will have grown enough to be realized. The ideas were in my mind; I just needed a little nudge from outside myself to give me enough confidence to go ahead. Or perhaps it was just a matter of timing.

I lump these objectives into one category—teaching! Art, music, and healing. And I like it.

Last year I taught my first class in Painting I and II, and I co-taught my first class in Reiki. It is a pleasure for me to share what I know how to do with students who are eager to learn. In turn, I learn from them.

This coming year my first students will continue with Landscape Painting, I hope, and then they will join me in Tuscany, Italy, near Florence, in the fall to learn from an award-winning Italian artist I met on my November 2012 trip there. Imagine that!

Others have inquired about art and painting lessons, so I’ve decided to offer another round, starting with Painting I again for adults and adding a course for children in the neighborhood. I’m told that art is no longer offered in the public schools.

New and exciting is the go-ahead from the co-directors of my high school alumni glee club for me to come to rehearsals a half hour early to show singers, who want to learn, how to sight read music. I’m looking forward to that and the “Aha!”s I know I’ll see.

What were those seeds?

Most were questions posed by others, questions that I pondered before realizing, “I can help you with that!”

Rita, a sister Pen Woman, encouraged me to teach art to children, saying there is a great need. I thought about it and put the possibility on hold.

Then my glee club sister Linda said she was experimenting with pastels, but thought first she needed to learn some basics.  So I put together a Wednesday class for adults, and she recruited two more friends.

When Rae, one of my pupils, heard that part of our family now lived in Italy, she said “Let’s all go. We can rent a villa and paint!” So when I found out the owner of the villa Ari rented in Tuscany was an award-winning  painter whose work I liked, I asked if we could return so we could learn from him. He was delighted, and now I find myself coordinating the trip.

A children’s librarian who found my blog inquired about painting lessons on Saturdays because she worked during the week, hence the new Saturday class. As long as I’m doing all this, and as some parents have asked, I thought, why not start teaching the children too?

As for the music: At choir rehearsal, some of the altos sit near me to hear the note to sing. At best that means a delay in our attack. Many learn their part by listening to the piano and repeating. One time Carol asked what the rest signs and other symbols on the staff were. She was thankful for the explanation, and I could tell it was a revelation to her. So I boldly proposed to give a sight reading workshop “for those who have no clue or who once learned but forgot”— so people could learn the music faster, find accomplishment in knowing how to read music, and benefit the group.

And finally, to become certified as a Reiki Master Teacher, I need a few more hours of co-teaching with my teacher. I know she is looking to put those classes on her calendar, now that she will no longer be involved with her family’s restaurant business that is closing after many years. So I’m happy to announce plans for another round of Reiki certification classes coming soon as well, for we all need healing every day.

Copyright 2012 Rebekah Luke

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