Strawberry Island...

 

I lived for 26 years on Vashon Island, Washington in the Puget Sound coming from Northern California.  I'd made a change in the bell business & was moving to be closer to the business and foundry in downtown Seattle, while enjoying a major change of viewpoint. 

A California friend had wanted me to meet Stephen Silha, a long-time resident of Vashon Island. I invited him to my 50th birthday-costume-fete & we clicked ... beginning a long-distance courtship until my move to Third Avenue between Pike and Pine, which continued easily, with just a ferry ride between us. We enjoyed having my pied-à-terre & his island home. After a few years & a remodeling project, I became a full-time Islander.

We remodeled a house built on a cliff facing Tahoma, the native name of the mountain white folks called Rainier. Over more than two decades it became a sweet home with a writing cottage we built for Stephen. I had a generous garden-level jewelry & bell design studio... all surrounded by a well-gardened series of terraced beds of vegetables & blossoms protected by a good fence. It was long known for its gentle hospitality. 

Stephen named it Soundcliff -- as both a description & a prayer for stabilizing its precarious situation. He is a writer/filmmaker, I am a visual artist. We both worked creating the garden. We've forged our several vocations into our own history. 

"Our" Island was a great bailiwick for this unique pair of creatives... bridging worlds of inner & outer travel with well grounded stability. Islands have unique ways to collect such adventurers! We each developed our separate as well as shared identities within a large community of acquaintances & deep friendships near & far.

A large collection of small wearable jewelry bells became the public aspect of my life. I quickly joined a very active group of artists residing on the Island who organized to host two annual Open Studio tours--one in May, when spring is blooming & the other on the first two weekends in December, during the holiday celebrations. Those have become very important rare opportunities for the artists in their studios to meet patrons in important, more intimate connection. 

Vashon Open Studios were very useful for the bells' visual intricacy to become evident at close inspection, and also their unique sounds. Busy or quiet, I had time to talk about my processes & to meet so many interesting, often stimulating minds. That tradition is part of the richness Vashon engenders. 

Soundcliff's garden gave rise to many conversations about plants & landscaping & ecology, as well. (Some people may have come just for the garden and the abundant pu-pus [snacks] for which we became known.) The studio also functioned as a "garden shed" between these open studios, so the GRB studio profited immensely for being well cleaned twice a year!

Another Island event useful for GRB Bells was the mid-July Strawberry Festival, with the livelier atmosphere of a fair including numerous vendors & information booths. It also for long provided a somewhat quieter area of spaces for artists to set up shop under their canopies. Easier for the bells to find space for their voices, while adding to the celebration... also one of their historic roles of joyful sound. 

Now the bells are evolving again as I am retiring & transferring the GRB Bell business to Monica [Momo] Street, who has been working with them for a decade at the foundry, as well as developing the amazing GRB Bells.com social media posts. They are still ringing out into the future... while Gordon & Stephen have moved from the island to Tacoma & the wide world the bells have moved back to Seattle to live in Momo's studio.

The news now is that the bells are returning to Vashon for Strawberry Festival this year! All three of us will voyage to staff our canopy in the Village Green... we invite you to return to the soundscape!

 Of course the Bells are always available from the website GRBBELLS.COM & plan to pop-up in an increasing number of art shows, including Proctor Arts Festival August 1 and Maryland Renaissance Festival September 19 & 20 (only).

We look forward to seeing you there, online, or in the ether... 

ONE LONG TIME a'COMING WALL...

We've been living with the major wall in our bedroom remaininging "a work in progress" for several recent months, while a selection of smaller pieces in our collection has been curated & framed & ready to hang. We've chosen several recently acquired pieces, like the amazing David Griessel drawings we bought in South Africa in December of last year... as well as some much older drawings by my doppelgänger named Leo Toye, which I inked in Sedona, stored for three decades waiting to join others in that series on the wall. 

I'm pleased with this collection, which will now be finessed with several landscape prints we brought from Stephen's mother's collection, recently re-framed as well. One is a lithograph by Birger Sandzén, an artist whose history in Kansas she & I share an interest in.  He was an art professor at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas, near Manhattan, where Helen's father was head of the Dairy Department at Kansas State Univerity (KSU, where my sister graduated), so Helen spent her younger years living in Kansas. 

That is a link between Stephen & me, predating our 31 years together. Helen is so sweetly & spiritually important to us! Her & Otto's proclivity to collect art certainly influenced Stephen's & my ongoing resonance with similar appreciation.

So... a view of this wall... generous, under our condo's spacious 10+-foot-high ceilings, which might first suggest choosing big artwork; but being a jeweler, I love smaller art works. I invite you to tour with me to look more closely.

 The grouping must work viewed from all angles as one moves around the centrally positioned bed [in spite of Feng Shui warnings about protection from assassination] because that gives both of us the best views of Tahoma -- our mountain. [Indeed, we do nonetheless honor Eastern thought...]

 An initial bit of explanatory orientation begins at the doorway to see the simple old chest of drawers which I claimed from the attic on the farm. I've long loved this piece & have hauled it with me through each & every move of the seventy years since. 

 Its drawers have funky action, but the top has habitually collected small objects, precious to some moment. It functions much like an altar, having long been presided over by a wood sculpture of a bald head with a beard, which might be seen as a possible portrait of me, carved well before I ever saw it, by a acquaintance named Michael Urchioli in Sedona. The watercolor above it is one I made while also living in the Arizona Red Rocks. 

The current arrangement has a reproduction of a Pre-Colombian figure; a black Acoma pot; an acrylic skull by my friend Cigale; an egg; a whimsical plaster sculpture; & below that an Maori bone carving which was an early gift from Stephen; then, in the center, a Chinese ivory carving of five spheres carved one inside the other... a quite baffling accomplishment to this craftsman! 

 

Of course, as you see, I have a thing for collecting small boxes... in which to keep yet tinier objects! Thus this becomes only a tiny mania...  

Moving to the right, first a painting of an elephant we bought in Udaipur, a favorite city of ours in India, where we know a family of traditionally trained painters from several visits to their gallery. Above my favorite exotic animal hangs another watercolor, by my high school prom date Catie Boufault, who was the Colby Kansas High School exchange student from France. She & I have retained our relationship through years of correspondence & several visits between both countries, through 60 years of life changes, predictable & not. 

The next two identically sized frames also have other obvious similarity in that both have circular composition & even resonance in subject; both are images based on tree forms. The upper is a drawing by South African artist David Griessel, whose work we met there late last year. The cat-like image in the yellow frame is another of his. Both are parts of a larger collaborative animation art production.  

These quite affordable drawings would be even more odd choices for us, but for the further facts that we'd become intrigued by the complicated digital aspects of a lively form of storytelling... Stephen being a filmmaker & both of us being writers of various sorts. 

The actual experience of discovering this work, on a similar image, with a digital link on a shadowy wall as we walked along the water back to our hotel after dinner in Capetown... the link took us to a site opening to an exotically active visual and audio introduction to new stories. All of that enticed us to visit the gallery on the day we flew home. We purchased these rather more impulsively than is our usually more studied manner. We continue growing into them...

This wall also contains much history! 

Continuing down the line brings us to our iconic Indian painting by Jeetu who, with his brother Naresh in Udaipur, were trained by their father in the traditional style, as his father, in turn, taught him. Deep tradition... 

 

 

They grind their colors by hand. We love their vivid blue... & the perspective which can be implied by its many values of intensity. I've seen numerous compositions using not only that color, but telling stories of wedding processions through the symbolic landscape containing actual architectural parts of the palaces & temples of Udaipur... including the royal barge. The formula becomes lively in a wealth of subtle options in the light, spacial perspective placing the action in the time of one event, with potential emphasis on qualities of royal court or religion. Tradition works well because it has history's confidence in variability... India is an ancient teacher. I am a happy a student. 

 

Here is the brothers' website: https://www.pacificartudaipur.com/  

  

To the right of the subcontinental wedding hang the drawings which my doppelgänger, Leo Toye, made as newspaper "columns" in the 1980s. The plain white frame holds a fragment of a gold foil acanthus from some unknown archaeological source. A gift long ago.

 

  

The wonderfully gutsy oil below it was a gift to me a few years ago from our Downs Syndrome brother, Mark Silha, who is delightfully wise & a loving character, whose big love is popular vocal music from the Broadway shows, Sinatra's "rat pack" & rock & roll dance music up through the Seventies... but no later. He's educated himself about details which he's studied from the album covers. We often test his facts & become impressed with his arcane bits of knowledge.

 

The Kansas image with which I began this post completes the tour while the wall still awaits a couple more  frames... the corner space contains more calligraphic images & another drawing I made decades ago. There will always be adjustments & potential additions... possibilities which have not as yet presented themselves.

That is what entices our own history of collecting & culling interesting objects--found, gifted, made or acquired. Some are more "valuable" by dint of various reasons... our individual tastes or changing critiques. It is a process of how we present our life histories at home as a couple. Our teach/learning collaborations help fine-tune our mutual definitions. All becomes part of our fun. 

Visiting Joel & Nana

Joel Singer is a our long-time friend, who was married to James Broughton, the poet & filmmaker about whom my husband, Stephen Silha, made the film BIG JOY over a decade ago. 

Joel has been living in Bali for many years & we've visited him & his late husband Nirgrantha, before he died five years ago. We went down to Northern California several years ago to celebrate Joel's wedding to his new love, Nana, who is Indonesian. Now both couples (we and they) have developed a further mutual friendship. We traveled together around Sri Lanka in late 2024, with our friend Orlando.

Nana is an aesthetician & herbalist who peruses the early markets to collect the best of exotic fruits to offer for our breakfasts when we visit. He is a charming & sensible healer... always making some tasty tonic, with spices fruits & herbs... like his amazing jamu. 

But the black garlic, aged for two weeks in a simple appliance (which is now my next desire), astounded because it was so rich that he served it like a side "candy" (see right, below durian and above pineapple) to the fruit plates, which were arranged like brilliantly colorful paintings, with sculptural fruits in their shells... I can only appreciate his skills, with a healthy appetite for more!  

Joel now has acquired a significant portion of ownership of this wonderful property. It is called Villa Vajra (vajasra) -- that being the name chosen for the first & largest of several villas now built on the land. All in cooperation with the owner, as foreign owners are not allowed; just investors. They have a long-term lease. This, it seems, is the way the Island encourages the rampant growth which is the base of its current economy. 

These villas are built on the edges of still-planted rice fields, with farmers herding ducks to clear the fallow patties of pests & grubs, to begin tilling the patties... before the priests of the nearby temple, the controllers of the irrigation system, allow them to flood again to plant with the rice seedlings, sprouted in a small nursery bed nearby.  There is only a single bit of noise from a motorized machine to prep the mucky soil before the farmers settle them quietly by hand into remarkably regular rows to grow until the harvest.

That quiet lifestyle has been the way this gentle culture has become fabled for its art, dance & music... all as good & well-grounded living. 

I feasted on this scene of humans wielding hand tools as a vignette one day...  a slice of traditional life adjacent with the new.   

 The view from the new opening dining room doors of one Villa looks across the reflection off the flooded paddy of the landscape around the larger part of Villa Vagra ...

 

When we returned a month later, that water had become an established crop. 

A boardwalk which bisects the patio & bridges the space between these two original buildings...

 

 

 

A stone walkway over an irrigation stream & through a small forest of large-sized bamboo brings one up to a handsome gate into another welcoming terrace... where one can walk left to Villa Sati 2.

One wall in this villa is a water feature of quietly dripping moisture over a stone wall. Now the previously total enclosure tall vaulted space oroof has been cut open with wide sliding doors giving a broad view over the water of the rice paddies, ducks & the occasional farmer. 

Just out of sight is a grill kitchen, so that the space functions as a dramatic dining room... freeing the Villa Sati, which Joel & Nirgrantha designed for themselves... another tall traditional roof, quite a bit smaller, more intimate living-dining-kitchen space as an airy cube of glass in a lush tight garden with a small lap pool & a generous hot tub. 

A separate bedroom with a bath, shower & a huge tub... big enough for both us us when Nana treats the two of us to one of his hand picked herbal baths. We so appreciate being spoiled by his artful craft.

A boardwalk, studded with pots, guides one on the traverse across the adventure of flooded rice-fields toward the largest villa, which is busy as a multi-use gathering & entertaining pavilion, with three bed/bath suites & another, used as a versatile library or guest suite.

Inside its front gate are stone pads to walk over a pond teeming with always hungry fish... following you until one gets to the two suites, 

or... take the stairway down to the lower pools or the large room...

 

 Beyond the villa, with its pools of lily pads & papyrus with active fish, then a cascade down to the swimming pool and hot tub alongside the vaulted roof sheltering a large open living area. 

The core of the various reasons Villa Vagra was conceived & built as a versatile space, which has recently been used to be a part of Nirgrantha's bequest to invite selected serious souls to sit in silent meditation for a periods of at least a month. Other times it has been reserved for larger families or groups of friends, as part of the income to support this property. We are honored & pleased to have been included in the sometime guest list.

 

 

 It is an open, airy space protected only by shades to be rolled down during inclement weather... 

 

 

 

 Across the pool is the lower suite, which we'd never yet been given as our quarters before, but the meditators were leaving as we arrived. 

 It became a fine arrangement, particularly because we met a painting from their large collection which I'd not yet seen & which I love & still lust a bit for...

  

Like most of the bathrooms, this one is mostly open to an outdoor garden...

 

Just beyond the room, down the slope, is a roofed area where folks meditate and where Nana gave each of us massage. 

 Beyond are stairs down to a roofed  bale... then more stairs down passing the small & well outfitted gym before continuing to drop through numerous landscaped terraces down into the steep ravine, ending at a small river... all of this originally landscaped by Nirgrantha, when he was more spry. I was quite inspired by my exploration of this walk on an earlier visit some years ago... when I too was more spry. I'm glad for that memory! 

Returning from the deep slope to walk back along the boardwalk to Joel & Nana's Villa Sati, one can see the front complex of structures which we've watched develop over our years of visits, spanning quite a few life & social evolutions with accompanying changes of design. 

  

 

 Some  like the big dining room doors (just out of view at the far right side of this image)... feel like improvements, but others... like the structure topped by a problematic railing behind & above, which is not very "traditional" & jars my eye... can easily removed as they anticipate remaking much of it into a kitchen & 'lab' for Nana's evolving food explorations. 

 

These final videos might tell a several good, if subtle stories, of the four of us interacting while observing  Nana attack & wrestle with a huge durian... 

 

 

We played with a variety of domestication as part Bali this visit. 

 

 

We certainly felt more "at home" this trip!  

BEING BALI… Post two...

 

Our Bali experience was more fulsome than I shared in the first post. I am offering more about the month of February during which we leased the Bali Beach House in the fishing village of Amed...

 What I called the "Water Spider Boats" were the traditional fishing boats - a constant feature of the visual environment, whether at sea or moored on the beach. Graceful & quite useful for fishing or touring visitors to the many underwater wonders of the Amed coast. Narrow deep hulls stabilized by twin bamboo out-riggers & an engine made them graceful & swift... a bit of romance to the eye.

They could also use triangular sails... adding yet more spice... 

These fishing boats are simple, while being also complex, with wrappings of rope or tape to hold the out-rigger parts to the hull. I made observation of the devices when I accompanied Stephen's snorkeling exploration one day... also experiencing the feel of the ride at various speeds in quiet water & with a rainstorm pending. Unfortunately, our captain did not have enough English to answer my curiosity questions. But I was impressed by the boats' engineering, which allowed them to be quite efficient for moderate skills on a beach acting for a dock or dry-dock.

The beaches frequently were crowded with these boats, as they were mainstays of livelihood.

We hired one of them to take SFS out to snorkel, giving me the experience of the ride & to examine the way they are put together...

Pardon me if I get repetitive. It's one of the blessings of maturity!

There are so many ceremonial observances in their daily lives; here we are almost posed with the very friendly owners of the house: Nengah & Putu. (I'll write more about her later in this post.)

I'm sharing several rather long, not much edited videos of the House-Blessing-Cleansing Ceremony  which took place while we were there, & to which we were invited....along with all the staff, who are like family...

We practiced new rhythms for our days... finding bits of unusual play & fun... sometimes even quite silly! 

SFS in Hammock demonstrated hanging-out comfortably...

I was drawn by the pool during sunny morning hours...

We enjoyed the staff, who, after making our breakfast, tidying the house & cleaning the pool... left us to our privacy

The three guys, each being named Wayan, which means they were first born in their families, each acquired descriptive nick-names we used to identify them in our stories. One Wayan liked dancing to our music & would dance playfully as he went about his yard work. 

He also had the job of doing some clean-up out on the beach in front of the house... beyond the purple door in the enclosure of the wall...

 

 

 

We loved the complicated sculpture of the roots of a tree close to the Balle [the roofed outdoor bed with views over that wall to the constant sounds of the surf... ]

 

The interior structure of roof of the Bale, above its cushion was dramatic...

 

From there we could look up to the balcony/deck of our second floor bedroom...

The bedroom on the ground floor below that was nice... 

... but that space felt too-enclosed... with heavy furniture.

 

 We preferred the more open & airy one above it, feeling more like a tree-house, with views of the sea & weather from its deck. 

But, I certainly liked to choose the bathroom on the ground floor... which was almost not a room at all, being more like a greenhouse with a shower... open to the sky.

I am also certainly choosing to share more "food porn" from the kitchen...

One of the cooks made us a cake with a Jack-fruit... which was over-the-top- delicious

The bakery also furnished delicious pastries...

A tree by the pool proved to be a Calabash as we researched on-line... curious about which grew the hollow bulbous gourd-like fruits having been tucked into the forks of its branches, which have been used historically as containers... ... a fascinating sighting & discovery to me as a gardener.,,

This simple shrine hung on the wall facing the sea...

 

It was part of the example of the way their culture, even as it is Hindi, was also quite animistic... honoring the life of the mountain & sea.... of plants , home & daily life itself. There were several stations where honor was paid... from the altar just inside the purple gate at the street, inside the courtyard of the house's front door then at this shrine marking where would be the house's "back door" entrance from the purple gate opening through the wall to the sea where, when we'd first arrived, there had been a similar shrine, mounted on a stone pillar, still remaining outside the house's wall... having been taken temporarily away to the temple for a larger ceremony, not yet having taken place before we left.  Putu, the lady of the house, left floral offerings & lit incense every morning at dawn. I would often be wakened curiously, given my life-long proclivity to sleep late... but that habit seems also to be changing to enjoy earlier morning activities. Proof that this ol'dog can learn new tricks... & enjoy them!

 

 

 One of those early mornings I caught the  incense  still smoking, tucked in a crevice... 

 

Mount Agung, a volcano still frequently active & considered sacred,

reminded us of our own volcano Tahoma temporarily sleeping at home...

We could see Gunung Agung from one of our favored restaurants... with one ambitious young waiter who we liked & could jokingly have brought home with us... we do love sweetly collecting memories of attractive young men during our travels.. appreciating their presence & their potential futures, as booty of our travels.

 

In all, we had a grand, indulgent month of education in ourselves!

This is how we practice the arts of "retirement"!