Today looking west, from Mount Diablo I see the network of modern civilization, a surveyed road grid visible for miles around. It captures each settlement along the rolling hillsides to the San Francisco Bay. Then it continues, gently up and down over the entire body of the City.
Many days I visit the higher ranges of Tilden Park, above Berkeley. From there I make most of my sketches for the dry point drawing. I sit by a solitary pine tree. Here I see the sunrise over the continent and sunset, sink into the Pacific Ocean. In the ravines below me, are oak groves, eucalyptus stands, bushes, shrubs, poison oak, brambles, and big, blooming thistles. The top of the hills are meadow, for the roaming cattle grazing grounds. A bunch of red tailed hawks hover over their prey, groundhogs, rats, mice, snakes, small birds. Quails call out. On the lower rim, Berkeley villas with palm trees, agaves, orange and lemon trees and many other exotics to me, bask in the sun.
The landscape has parallel rolling hills as far as I can see east past Mount Diablo. North is the Sacramento River, a vast flooded land around the delta and further still the northern coastal mountain range with its redwood giants.
I haven't been in a metropolitan area for a long time. The steady traffic on land, sea and air is stunning. I use the roads ornamental network in my drawings composition. All day long I could hear the rubber of the tires being rolled out to a fine powder, on the roads and freeways. This fine powder mixes with fumes and exhausts each day and night. It bonds together to a thin cloud as far as I can see. As the day warms up, the lid lifts but does not evaporate. It stays together in a brown-yellow band of cloud, only a big wind will remove it.
There is a huge oil refinery with an endless chaos of pipes that stretch from the Richmond harbour across to the train tracks and roads throughout the town. Containers, gigantic round swimming pools for oil, are spaced out everywhere through out the landscape. The trains chug through it, with endless chains of tanker wagons filled up and then off moving again. Tug boats pilot oil ships to cruise around shallow waters. Cargo ships full of truck and train containers come and go. Sand barges move around, towed all the way from B.C. Canada, where whole mountains get removed, for sand to build.
I tried to capture the authenticity of this time, the carbon emission fever that hangs over this breathtaking place and as well, the glimpse of nostalgia as seen in the idyllic foreground of the print.
