I am ever in search of Shangri-La. And over the years I have found a few places that have some special quality — a particular view, a scent, the sensation of being in this mountain range or that forest or along this beach.  But if you ask, ‘but where is the one place you have been that suggests Shangri-La?  I can only say that it’s a place on the top of the world.

In fact, if this were in Greece, you would assume this must have been a spot where Zeus hosted parties for the Gods — since it’s close to Poseidon’s ocean and Apollo’s light….But it’s not in Greece; it’s in Big Sur, overlooking a particularly striking part of the Pacific Coast. It’s where vertical meets horizontal.  Between jagged mountain ridges and the long smooth curve of the earth. A perfect place, if there ever was, where Oscar-winning cinematographer and his wife, a novelist (her new novel, Our Lady of West Hollywood) find refuge from their busy Hollywood life.

For Vilmos, cinematographer for films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Deer Hunter, Deliverance, Black Dahlia and many more, this is the ultimate ‘set’, more compelling, more beautiful than whatever a scriptwriter can imagine.

It is a true refuge for both.  Here, Susan gardens, cooks, writes and receives lucky quests, who enjoy a pool and hot tub, and

the dramatic vista.  It’s a completely rejuvenating and revitalizing place. When you leave, it is with regret, of course, but also the feeling of the eyes having had their fill and mysteriously, the heart having found its range…

Susan’s new novel: Our Lady of West Hollywood

I met Thea years ago while waiting for our daughters outside their kindergarten school. She introduced herself as a photographer, but I soon discovered that she was far more than that, more an abstract artist who played with her images, painted them, and was always exploring different techniques. Indeed, the only constant in her work, her muse, was, and is, her fascination with Nature.

Her technique is elaborate and provides an extraordinary effect.  She uses heated beeswax to develop deeply atmospheric images, richly veiled with hues of honey and amber, soft gray and bluish tints.

Her ‘encaustic’ paintings remind you of ancient Byzantine iconic paintings but the role of the saint is replaced by images of swaying grass, ripe persimmons on the winter branches, and rolling hills where the only visitors are flying birds. Her work has a calming edge, a point at which abstraction and figuration meet.

Thea views nature in its most serene state. It’s also a vision of complete harmony between artist and subject.

Here is what my questions were to Thea Schrack

What is your favorite place in San Francisco?  North Beach

What is your favorite garden?  The Lost Gardens of Heligan in England

Who inspires you the most?  Writers in general.

The latest great book you read?  With Out a Map: a Memoir by Merdith Hall

The latest great show you visited?  Pam Sheehan at the Paul Thiebaud Gallery

Foreign Cinema reminds me of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Especially, the Inferno: you enter from Mission Street, which is dark, full of sinners and sins. At the outset you feel insecure. And then there is a door and you must pass through Purgatory, down a long narrow, grey hallway. Two little chapels with flowers on the side.  As though in a nave. And at the end of that endless hallway, a beautiful angel, Beatrice, the ideal woman:  a hostess with a smile and a question: Do you have a reservation? To heaven? Yes, of course, I have a reservation.

And here it is; an oyster bar, a movie theater, a beguiling dining hall with a fireplace and Modernism art gallery. Heaven, here I come! And a very happening place. Busy yet serene, waiters dancing their efficient dance to serve the guests. To make you fell like nobility. Your eyes wander up to the clouds, where the open sky movie theater is. And then the movies take your imagination to other places. Only the food is earthly, and divine.

And here are the masters of this drama, my dear friends,  the chefs, the couple that decide and provide: Gayle Pirie and John Clark.

Salute!

Flora Grubb Garden is located in the far reaches of San Francisco, off the 3^rd Street corridor in the Bay View district and is created by Flora Grubb, a young woman with an affinity for gardens, who set out to create this new ‘rustic urban’ ambiance. Reminds me of a trendy spot in Amsterdam, nested in what the Jordaan neghborhood has become.

At Flora Grubb Gardens you find colorful chairs and tables stored in Shakers tradition hang on the wall, suggesting the elements of a David Hockney painting. Flowers, palm trees, Japanese maples, shrubs, grass thrive and in the most beautiful pots. But here plants do not live just in artisan pots; you will be wonderfully surprised when you stumble on an old Edsel car overgrown with succulents and grasses.  And then a hanging bicycle giving a home to air plants.

Among my favorite things are the vertical succulent gardens, a living art gallery, where the art does not smell like oil and acrylic paints but has the sweet natural smell of the plants.

To make life even more perfect you want to sit down with a cup of espresso topped with a heart or leaf design and enjoy this perfection of the garden. The local coffee-roasting company Ritual has a café right there in the garden.

I’ve been invited to visit Oliver Ranch a couple of times over the years; it is always a different experience, and yet the same sculptures, the same Northern California rolling hills, the same native oaks, never changing, there for centuries. But then on a long walk through the land you forget the sameness; suddenly, you find yourself in front of these sculptures that seem unseen, that always offer a fresh revelation.  And like the oaks and the hills they make you feel they have been there for centuries, not a mere 20 years.

The artists who come here, on a creative retreat as it were, must live on the ranch, experience the land and the result is born there on the spot. And it stays there, never to be moved, never to be sold. I deeply admire Steve and Nancy Oliver for that, for their vision and commitment to art and for sharing their collection with others.

All 18 installations on the land are poetic. They each tell a story, against the rhythm of the trees and hills around them. From a footprint in Miroslaw Balka’s childhood home in Poland, to Bruce Newman’s staircase sculpture….

And there is Ann Hamilton‘s Tower, where commissioned dance, poetry, theatre, and music performances take place. The Tower goes almost as far into the earth as it does into the air, with concrete piers driven deep into the ground and a large, thick concrete pad for the tower to rest upon. It’s open to the sky at the top, with a water cistern at the base.

I especially love Roger Barry’s steel bridge. On the summer and winter solstices, the shadow cast on the ground is only from its respective arch. On the spring and autumnal equinoxes, the shadow cast is exactly split by a strip of light that comes down through the center of the arch. The accuracy of this shadow split by the light is within one millimeter.

On the hike thru the hills you see other impressive sculptures by famous artists like Martin Puryear, Richard Serra, Terry Allen, Ellen Driscoll, Bill Fontana, Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, Andy Goldsworthy, Dennis Leon, Jim Melchert, Fred Sandback, Judith Shea, Robert Stackhouse and Ursula Von Rydingsvard.

Artists invited to the ranch live in a studio designed by Jim Jennings. The studio is actually a pair of residential units framed by two concrete walls that provide an elongated surface on which David  Rabinowitch has carved an intricate design — in dialogue with Jennings’s architecture The two seemingly parallel poured-in-place concrete walls cut through the hill.  Whenever I am there I think how this would make such a perfect refuge.

I studied Art History at the University of Ljubljana. My favorite lectures were on modern art; I was particularly drawn to the book, Art Now by Edward Lucie-Smith. Every student had a copy, and mine always opened to page 245: Mel Ramos’s Miss Cornflakes (1964). Such a happy painting, among many more depressing examples of modern art. Here is this woman with her girl-next-door smile, a purple ribbon in her hair and her naked voluptuous body sprouting out of corn. And all set against the brand, and the branding of America.  To me, then, it seemed more a play on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, but instead of a seashell, corn.

I’ve always admired Mel Ramos for his ability to extract the bright side of artistic expression. And by contrast, let’s say, Allen Jones for his talent to define a darker side. Once you’ve seen his work you can never go to someone’s house without examining the sofa or lifting up the table cloth to see exactly what’s holding up the dining room table.

And then some years ago I found myself at a New Years’ party hosted by Fletcher Benton, and who should be there but Mel Ramos and Leta, his muse, and wife, and the woman in the painting. Out of nowhere here was the one artist who could bring sunshine to my rainy Slovenia, and who caught the spirit of the effervescent woman I wanted to be… I can’t tell you the thrill.  To have been on the other side of the world, and here right in front of you is the person who you discovered in an art book, in a musty classroom in Ljubljana.

Since then we have become friends, and I actually modeled for one of his drawing series. But there’s more to it.  One evening Mel and Leta came for dinner, and they asked if they might bring a friend. Of course, I said, never imagining that the English gentleman in his Sherlock Holmes tartan plaid outfit standing in the front door would be Allen Jones.

It’s been 10 years; I don’t remember what we said that night. I don’t remember what I cooked or whether there was some trick moment, something said that you could repeat at dinners forever after.  I only remember that Mel Ramos and Allen Jones both sent me a thank-you card afterwards and, of course, the two cards become among my most guarded treasures.

I celebrate at the drop of a hat.  The first of anything; the last of something.  A foggy day that will not burn off.  The scent of something I can’t quite identify.  A flower in bloom, a blade of grass coming up out of the cement.  An old man striding down the street in new suit.  The dinner partner searching for the right word.  The odd feel of something, or someone.  Close, or distant.  Which is why I love champagne.  It’s the switch that turns everything on.  An expectation begins. And so you put on the prettiest dress, you linger with the mascara, you marvel at the bubbles, you acknowledge happiness even as it dissipates.

The glass is all-important.  Which is why I’m always searching for new flutes, for better fish tanks in which to see the bubbles, to see the rising, to hear the proper clink.  The sound has to be strong, not fragile.  Bad luck otherwise. The other day I found some very fine, hand-made glasses by Henry Dean at Gardner. It’s one of my favorite stores.  Highly recommend.  The glasses stood on a table just waiting for me to take them home.

And now I’ve used them, had them as it were, and what strikes me is the way in which they magnify the sparkle, draw me into their lightness. Salut to good life.

I am memory’s captive, and for that reason I’ve always been interested in documenting great moments and adventures, and then finding ways to keep them in a stylish way.  And so my fascination with journals, diaries, notebooks, and boxes.  The first book I designed was a photo album with pictures of my dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback with an elegant slim body. Using a special technique I developed, I raised a bold image of his profile on the leather cover of the book. It was unusual effect particularly when you think of books decorated with engraved or printed images.  After this first attempt I was inspired to do more than just photo albums, and so expanded to other forms, including leather books and boxes. I made book covers with the raised images of simple objects such as a pen on a journal or a camera on a photo album. These became an instant success.

My purpose was to make a book or a box a work of art in itself and that’s how I started my company On Your Marque. Soon after celebrities and successful companies paid attention to my work, and I was asked to make personal and promotional gifts using their brand images. One of my favorites is the Oprah “O” I put on the gratitude journals, which I made for her network.  My work has been honored in many publications, but the most prestigious was the show in The American Craft Museum in New York City, accompanied with the book,Objects for Use/Handmade by Design.

I remember the January, it was January 18th,  the year I arrived in San Francisco from Slovenia, wearing my vintage-style clothing that I was so in love with, including my handbag, which I inherited from my long dead aunt, Frederica. And then a doctor’s bag that I salvaged from a trash bin in Ljubljana.  It even had old hotel stickers from exotic places like Venice, Bombay and Monaco. And here I found myself in San Francisco in my little vintage summer dress in the middle of January. Nobody told me that California could be cold.  It was not how I imagined it at all.

But let’s get back to my handbags. I have this tradition that I put things I like on a pedestal. Shoes; photos; sometimes, my favorite fruit, and just then, my two bags. They tied me to the place I came from, they held the excitement of anticipation, and the feeling of giving way to life,  to the will-o-the-wisp and oblivion.  And so that’s how I got inspired to design and make handbags. I bought a very heavy industrial sawing machine. I found some fine leather and started to put pieces together. First, I made a bag inspired by Frederica’s handbag, with pockets on the side, in crocodile impression cowhide leather. With a zipper on the top. It made me think of safaris, for no clear reason, and warm places, and train rides, and the smoke trains leave behind when they depart the station.

As I make these bags, I live a double life in my imagination.  I don’t think about the work; I follow a string of fantasies. The next creation was a reincarnation of my doctor’s bag, actually a variation on a theme.  When I think of that bag I think of jaguars slinking around, and unnecessarily dangerous adventures.  But, of course, people may wear elegant clothes in those situations as well. I asked a friend, a talented artist and carver, to make frames for my bags, and I asked him to carve jaguar heads on the both ends of the frame. I sketched a design, made a pattern, cut the leather and embossed with stripes.  Both bags were a success and I have gone on to make many different styles of handbags but those two remain my favorites.

A simple thing done well, whether it is a memorable paragraph or a black dress or a swan dive cutting through the air and into the water without notice is always memorable. The food at Adriana’s that night was like that, simple but not really. Into the mouth without splashing. Warm, but not heavy. Warming not just to the body but to some other appetite. Good company perhaps, or the closeness of a warm kitchen in the San Francisco fog. Risotto, meatball soup, salad, and a massive chocolate cake somewhat resembling the Great Pyramid at Cheops. First the risotto. It must be the native Italian blood Adriana gets from her mother, that makes the rice kernels open up instinctively just for her. What is the secret sauce, not a bland buttery broth as in my attempts but something red and spicy. Slighty sticky, and real, something that dances soft and wild and deep and rich across the tongue. Flamenco rissoto? Something you could live on. And then the meatball soup, but meatballs are the wrong word. More like meat dumplings, little and floating and light like clouds. You chase them out of the brothy bowl with your spoon like the wind chases clouds. Savory, the whole thing, and the conversation like spice through out. Wine, candles, the long bank of candles that cross the table like an altar. And this is the church we have come to worship at, the church of nourishment, of glad company. The heat of the candles, the flush of the wine, the love that is in the food made by friends. I haven’t forgotten dessert. Chocolate cake, thick as the night up over Twin Peaks.. Real chocolate cake. The Aztec Gods were winking at us like the city lights. Dinner at Adriana’s. A fork is recommended.