Wildlands Interface
A brief history of one artist's journey from LA City to LA County.
This is my first Substack post to introduce myself to people who don’t know me, and welcome my subscribers who followed me over from a different platform. Howdy!
A bit of backstory: I’m from NYC (born) NJ (grew up) and Philly (went to college), otherwise known as the “Tri-State” area. Back home my name is pronounced “Saaah-rah” and dog is pronounced “Daw-ug.” The entire focus of my life from 18 until my mid 20s was about immersing myself in as much urban culture as I could push into my face before (& sometimes including) puking. Punk clubs: yes! Drugs: yes! Bars: yes!
After graduating college in Philadelphia, I got an offer to couch-roost in a friend’s apartment in LA. One cheap flight later I arrived, hoping to live the louche life of a bohemian without the discomfort of East Coast winters. Though I had no aspirations to work in the film business, I found no lack of other people who did.
My friend’s Wilshire adjacent duplex apartment dripped with “Day of the Locust” style-vibes. Around the corner, a billboard-sized Angelyne hovered over a drugstore where I picked up my first “LA Reader” and discovered Matt Groening and “Life in Hell.” Within days I met screen writers (well, they were still looking for an agent,) the “Winston Man,” one of the Laemmles, “a famous actress”, and got invited to a party on Sunset where naked people were doing rails in a hot tub. My first impressions of LA couldn’t have been more on brand.
Du-Pars, Wilshire Blvd. 1978, from Vintage Los Angeles.
I didn’t have a car, but 2 bus routes, N/S on LaBrea and E/W on Wilshire, took me anywhere I wanted to go. LA County Museum of Art was just down the road. A walk in that direction took me past The Darkroom camera shop, shaped like a camera, and Du-par’s Restaurant, home of the most (to my mind) delicious pancakes ever. The La Brea Tar Pits were free to roam, and a trip to the Santa Monica beach and pier by bus cost about a dollar round trip.
North on LaBrea were some good art galleries, a couple dive-bar music hang-outs, and the New Beverly Cinema where I got my first LA job (and met Oingo Boingo at their “Forbidden Zone” movie debut.)
Downtown LA was too scary (for me) to go to by bus, but if I had a friend with wheels we would hit The Atomic Café, Gorky’s, Al’s Bar, and Yee Mi Lou’s.
It was easy meeting people in the film business. It seemed almost everyone was either working on a film or knew someone who was. Getting film work was about as hard as falling off a barstool. If you could show up and work long hours for not much money, you were basically in. I got my first jobs “in the biz” painting logo-murals for commercials and rock videos. I met an art director working for Roger Corman’s studio who asked if I wanted to create an “outer space mural” and some set artwork for a new indie movie, Android.
Roger Corman’s New World film studios were housed in an old lumber yard in Venice. Due to a zoning ordinance, Roger couldn’t, or wouldn’t, update the sign. So, as far as any passersby knew, the building was still “Hammond Lumber.” Working at New World Pictures pivoted my focus from painting to Art Directing, Set Decorating and prop making, where I stayed for the next 20 years.
When LA basin rents and housing prices began to soar, I moved to the San Fernando Valley with my then boyfriend, who later became my husband. We bought a 1950s vaguely Googie-style ranch house in Reseda with a huge picture window facing a very green back yard.
Burrowing Owl, 8” x 8” oil on wood, at Ghost Gallery, Seattle
In this yard I discovered bird watching. Hawks, Owls, Red Tailed Northern Flickers, hummingbirds, Orioles, Ladder-backed Woodpeckers, enough that I got my first Peterson Guide to keep track of them all. This is also where I began learning about climate zones, native plants, and the cycles of nature in Southern California, owing much to Lili Singer’s plant show on KCRW.
After the “Northridge” earthquake in 1994, which was more correctly the Reseda earthquake because the epicenter was practically right under our house, we moved farther west to the Santa Susana Mountains. The small house we found sits in an historic canyon (more on that another time) next to a large, empty field owned by the Department of Water and Power. The firefighting community calls this type of area a Wildland-Urban Interface. Like it sounds, the name refers to a place where urban development meets wild land.
Oak/Savanna field after 2023 rains, Wildland-Urban Interface, LA County
This canyon really opened up my awareness about the ways people and wildlife interact with each other. Right on a main road connecting Simi Valley to the San Fernando Valley (you can see it running through the middle of the photo above,) wildlife incidents are not uncommon. As more houses are built, deer, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, possums, skunks, and other wildlife are found wandering into our yards in search of food and water, often with bad results. Climate change has also altered the numbers and types of wildlife I see. We used to get clouds of migrating painted lady butterflies in the spring. Those have mostly vanished. Songbirds have stopped passing through. Weasels and foxes are gone, too.
Living in these foothills shifted my focus again, from city life to country life, from movie-making back to painting. A lot of my paintings are inspired by this human/wildlife interface. How do we see ourselves in relation to nature? Are we oblivious to it, the way I was when I first moved to LA? Or do we see ourselves as part of an interconnected and interdependent system?
Coincidere, 18” x 36” oil on canvas. In a private collection.
This painting, Coincidere, is inspired by this line of thought. The painting was recently purchased by a collector, so it gave me an opportunity to revisit the ideas that led to its creation. Latin for “coincidence,” the name refers to “the correspondence in nature or in time of occurrence.” In this painting I attempt to show that lives in nature and lives in the city reflect each other, and that our perspective, no matter where we stand, isn’t the only one.
Thank you for joining me on this Substack journey. I hope to be able to come up with something witty, fresh, and creative to share with you on a semi-monthly basis.
There are no paywalls on my posts, and I welcome your comments. If you like what you read, you can leave me a tip here. I always need new brushes. #hell-on-brushes
Until next time –
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I enjoyed reading your backstory. What a fascinating journey