The Ferndale Laloli Collection

While I was painting all those years in Ferndale, California, many locals supported my work to fill the walls of their homes. Lots of these good people were descendants of the white pioneers that first settled this area, and so these paintings are, in part, historic documents of the first dairies that built here.

These are all scenes of the rich bottomland of the Eel River Delta, and all painted in the 1980’s.

I did a lot of paintings along this road. It was just north of downtown Ferndale California, 20 miles south of Eureka and 200 miles north of San Francisco. You can see the smallness of the town, how close the core is as indicated by the church steeple in the distance. These cypress hedges probably date from when these century-old barns were built. With Federal dairy subsidies, there was little effort to change anything here – and the new artists that arrived in the 1970’s (me included) were mostly not welcome.

Guache on paper

Enormous cypress rows were once all over this bottomland, sheltering the fields and buildings from the relentless northwesterly winds.

Guache on paper

Guache on paper

This house was just north of Ferndale. As I remember, one spring in the 1980’s, there was a stray migrant Golden-winged Warbler that happened to stop here for a few weeks. I broadcast this fact to Audubon (like a fool), and birders all the way from San Francisco arrived to see this tiny avian yellow wonder. Thousands of dollars were being spent in town by out-of-town birders from food and lodging because of this little bird, but it all ended quickly when the rancher shot and fed the bird to his dog! Ahhh, memories.

Guache on paper