Ars Longa Vita Brevis

What a difference a month makes. Our lives suddenly transformed by a virus.   

Normally, I would have booked a return flight to Maine by now. Instead, my wife and I are hunkered down in Southern California, unable to visit our grandchildren, making only the most essential trips out of the house, mainly for food.  It is incongruous. The weather is springlike. Roses are coming in. A carpet of magenta, white and yellow margaritas beckons from the little hillside behind our house. 

I have no idea when we’ll return.  After the coast is clear, I guess, whenever that is. 

I'm glad of the studio time, though. There is always plenty to do.

On Crisis Leadership

Television attracts and repels these days.  I want to know what’s going on, but it is disquieting to witness the lurching crisis response of our federal government. During a 35-year career with the Foreign Service I trained repeatedly in crisis management. All of my diplomatic colleagues did. So do our military officers. So do senior managers of large organizations everywhere. I managed large embassies in crisis mode, in wartime, and under threat of terror attack.  So I am shocked at the disarray and ineptness on display at the highest levels of our government. It’s not like we don’t know how to do this. The most elemental contingency planning either did not happen at the outset, or worse, was ignored. The most basic and obvious need to communicate early, fully and truthfully as a crisis unfolds, has been badly fumbled. Thank heavens state and local leaders know to act without waiting for the feds.

I still have the materials from my last crisis leadership training at the Foreign Service Institute. One loose-leaf binder has a discussion of leadership before, during, and after a crisis.  “Leadership is the art of inspiring people to want to do things that they wouldn’t normally want to do,” it says. “In the aftermath of a disaster, leadership will be required to start from scratch, seize and maintain the initiative, rally and inspire the troops to pick up the pieces and start rebuilding.  Nothing can happen without it.”

Between now and November, and very likely beyond, the coronavirus crisis and its effects will severely test our leaders at every level.  We have to wish them all success. In any case, there will be a report card on November 20.

On Staying Inside

Lately I have been delving into “Watercolour Painting with Aubrey Phillips”.  This book was published in 1997 and is an absolute delight – concise and straightforward, full of practical advice -- I highly recommend it to any of you who picks up a brush in this challenging, but rewarding, medium.   

Pier, San Clemente

For some time I have meant to do a painting of the pier here in San Clemente.  I have done some small watercolor sketches, looking for the right composition, and a few days ago I did another, bigger one, applying some of Aubrey Phillips wisdom, and adding figures on the beach for perspective.  It is at the top of this piece.  The painting is a 9x12 watercolor, currently unframed and unmatted.

Framing

I recently discovered a very good frame shop in San Juan Capistrano, and took two of my California paintings to them. So now Mission Bells (view of the bell wall at Mission San Juan Capistrano)

and Winter Beach Walk (inspired by walks at South Beach, San Clemente, featured in this space last month)

are framed up with museum glass and ready to go.  Both are in my website's California collection, under “Works” in the Main Menu.  I will be adding Pier, San Clemente to the same group after I write this blog.

Going Postal – On the serendipity side, I decided after a totally cursory and unscientific market survey that San Clemente needed more post cards. So I designed two, using  early watercolor sketches of the San Clemente pier, and made up two batches of 100 cards at Coastal Blue, a printing company in San Juan Capistrano. 

These highly collectible cards were printed March 16, 2020 on 100-lb Mohawk White Coated Silk cover stock that I had provided to Coastal Blue.  As unique artistic products of what will likely soon be known as the late Pre-Coronavirus Era, I am confident that these cards will quickly become scarce and special collectibles for discerning value-seekers, especially if I sign a few.  I may even add a stamp, possibly one of my 44 remaining P111 (lower-right corner plate position) 2018 "Honoring First Responders" commemorative Forever stamps.

Dreaming of the Inverted Jenny

In addition, I will keep aside just two initial test proofs of each Pier type, with slightly different font sizes and margins from the main 100-piece March 2020 runs.  These will be the rarities of rarities, prized finds for seekers of collectible San Clemente post cards.   

One need only recall the case of the 24-cent carmine rose & blue “inverted Jenny” 1918 air post stamp to imagine the possibilities.

I once dreamed, in my long lost stamp-collecting youth, of owning an Inverted Jenny.  The celebrated 1918 stamp was a misprint of an issue commemorating the start of regular air service, via a Curtiss Jenny biplane, from Washington DC to Philadelphia and New York City, on May 15, 1918.  But in those days, to print the two different colors of ink, sheets of stamps had to be run through the printer twice.  Inversions were thus a hazard. Several sheets with the inverted center image were in fact caught and destroyed. But one sheet of 100 stamps got past the inspectors, and became the holy grail of US philately.  One of them reportedly sold in 2018, a hundred years after its issuance, for $1.6 million.  It is also worth noting that the new air mail rate of 24 cents also stirred controversy in 1918 because it was so expensive in an era of three-cent first-class mail.  

So what is all this about post cards and stamps?  Do I digress?  Of course I digress.  What else is there to do in the New Coronavirus Era?  Plus, I find some solace in going postal.  

My best to all.  I hope you and yours stay safe and well.

David