My second film in my Mt. Tamalpais trilogy is a meditation on impermanence in the style of Buddhist sand paintings. The objective was to create a painting of the whole mountain as it was before the military decapitated it in 1950 and paint it inside of what used to be the mountaintop. And to do that on the day before a rainstorm, which would then wash the image of the mountain as it was when intact, back into the earth with prayers for restoration.
I had to find an artist to accomplish this feat! Since there was so much asphalt and concrete to paint on, I approached world-renowned chalk artist Genna Panzarella, also a resident of Mill Valley, if she'd be interested in collaborating.
Genna has spent a lot of time on mountains — trail riding in Novato, where she keeps her horses, hiking the mountains around Seattle where she grew up, even exploring the Himalayas. But Mount Tamalpais? Not that much, even though she practically lives in its shadow. When I asked her about that, she said: “I am way too busy, and that’s a terrible thing."
When I inquired as to her interested in making a street painting on the mountain in the middle of winter, she just laughed. We went up there to scout it out and it was a beautiful morning, probably close to 70 degrees, and no wind and beautiful vistas and she said, ‘Absolutely!’ And then I showed her the concrete (the floor of the old mess hall) where she could draw, and she pronounced it to be perfect.
And that’s how she found herself rising at dawn one day and driving with me to the top of Mount Tamalpais to draw a mural of the mountain as it looked before the top was removed to build a radar station in 1950. She was literally inside of what used to be one of the mountain’s peaks.
“Gary kept speaking about it as an emotional experience, but I had no idea,” she said. “It’s just a very spiritual place to be. I think that word is thrown around too much, but it belongs on top of that mountain.”
The five-plus hours Genna worked on the 8- by 10-foot painting is the heart of my second film in the trilogy to raise awareness of the mountain’s restoration. It was also my first narrative piece in the series, and I shot in part with a my first drone, version 1 of the DJI Inspire.
Of course, the day we painted and shot the film was nothing like the day they scouted the location — a storm moved in, and we got cold and wet. Genna says, “I’m working on my piece and it’s very intense. There’s a lot to think about, a lot to do. All of a sudden I felt this icy breath on my cheek and I thought someone was blowing something at me. I looked up and no one was there. So I looked behind me, and there was a little cloud going by me, a little puff. Then I look up and here comes this whole army of little clouds and they’re all icy,” she recalls.
That’s when she started drawing — fast.
Still, it was an experience Genna said that she’s never had in all her years of painting pavement from all over the USA, Italy and much of the world. “That feeling of being on top of a mountain and being in the clouds, it was very intimate,” she said. “It was like a reminder to look up, to embrace what’s around you, to notice and to care.”
The film is another way for people to explore their own connection to the mountain and, my hope is that viewers will feel called to give back to it.
I try to bring in the aspect of time and deep time, especially. I try to give people a sense that we’re only here for a moment, but time is something so much deeper. The work that the street painters do is so perfectly aligned with illustrating time because it’s so ephemeral.
Genna knows that all too well. She has spent hours creating masterpieces only to have rain or street cleaners wipe them away. That, she says, has been kind of a blessing. “I accumulate things,” she says, and indeed her house is jam-packed with her artwork and hand-painted necklaces, as well as antiques and precious finds.
“It’s a good way to make room for the new birth,” she says. “The problem for artists and writers is the blank page. It can be invigorating but it can also be daunting. The thing about street painting is that it didn’t matter. It’s going to be gone, so it didn’t have to be wonderful. It just needed to be fun and entertaining and catch the eye for a few minutes.”
And that is pretty liberating.
“I hope (people) see the connection between art and nature,” she says. “Art is a part of nature, and it all needs to be part of our lives to enrich and heal us.”
The next day I drove back up to the summit in the rain, wind whipping all around me, whistling through the trees. And I shot the last scene, of the chalk dissolving in the life-giving water, seeping back into the earth with my prayers for restoration.
As an bonus, here's a little example of my first attempt at grading the film using the highly-compressed data that the Inspire 1 produced. Was very challenging, and am happy now to by flying the Inspire RAW camera, which provides cinematic image quality. But that was then and this is now... had to do the best with what I was using at the time.
Thanks for watching.
I have a long history of inventing tools for animators and also making films and photographs. My wife, daughter and I live at the foot of beautiful Mt. Tamalpais on the San Francisco Bay and I've been using technology to tell complex stories for a long time. My biggest claim to fame? Leading the team that created Autodesk 3ds Max... the most popular 3D animation tool of all time. When I sold the Yost Group to Autodesk at the end of the last century I jumped headfirst into pursing my original love... photography and filmmaking. Now I spend all of my time exploring the mysteries of my world with my cameras, and revealing what I find in my images and films.
