An Artful Welcome

A local artist helps us beautifully illustrate Passport Day 2011.

By Heather Huber

Each year for Passport Day, our campus is decorated with posters of our Seven Pillars of Character written in the language of the place we are visiting. This year, internationally acclaimed watercolorist Gabrielle Moore-Gordon has gracously allowed the reporduction of her original works of art to illustrate the values and to welcome the guests from our South African partner school, who were with us for two weeks in January and conducted the workshops on this special day to celebrate their heritage.

A native of Zimbabwe, Ms. Moore-Gordon began painting animals because of her grave concern for the ongoing plight of wildlife in Africa.  Her work  also sensitively portrays its people.  She returns to Zimbabwe annually to gather inspiration and material for her artwork.  She was trained in studio art in Switzerland, studied many years in Hong Kong, and lives and works during the remainder of the year on her houseboat, The Hippo, in Sausalito, California.

The inspiration for our welcome poster to the delegation is Gabrielle's Sunset over Africa, with the colors of the African sunset suggesting hope.  In the Seven Pillars posters, each value is written in issiZulu, the language commonly spoken in Maputaland, where our partner school is located.  Many thanks to Kindergarten parent Conny Fauser for her graphic design work on the posters.

Heather Huber is a Kindergarten parent at Saint Mark's and the coordinator of the Sausalito Art Festival

Water you doing here?

The Dingy Dame

Gabrielle Moore-Gordon's parents left England for Rhodesia and carved a new life in a strange land.

They lived in two huts of mud and poles which were connected by a long, narrow passage-way which was their kitchen.  Gabrielle was born and raised in Rhodesia, and considers it her home.  And Gabrielle has chosen our community as her home away from home.

Gabrielle inheritated her parents' spirit of adventure and her Royal Academist grandfather's artistic abilities.  She feels privileged to have been brought up in Africa.  She is an incredible artist, capturing the wild spirit as well as the gentle nature of species indigenous to that area.  With only watercolor and blank canvas, she waxes poetic  You can smell the dust, hear the roar of the beast, sense the love of the lioness for her cubs, and feel the pain of the people.  And while her heart is in Africa she leaves a part of it here in our waterfront community when she makes her yearly sojourn home.

When Gabrielle was a child she went to boarding school.  Once out of school, she worked on her parents' farm.  They raised cattle, tobaco and corn ... a-maizing at that time for her to be working in the fields with the natives.  She had a pet monkey for 12 years an she accompanied her on her journeys into the bush.  

"Those early days in the bush are what really got me in touch with animals," says Gabrielle.

By the time she was in high school, Gabrielle found herself in Scotland  After that she lived in Paris while studying at the Sorbonne and Berlitz School of languages.  Her intent was to study art.  Instead, she found herself studying French.

She then lived in Switzerland  for three years while she worked for the Untied Nations.  It was there that her interest in drawing really began, she says. 

Gabrielle married and lived in South Africa for five years.  She started Yoga training at that time and continues to study the art.  She is proud to have been trained in India.  After leaving South Africa, she and her husband traveled overland from Europe to Hong Kong by van.  That adventure took more than a year.  The idea was to get there by the northern route and take the southern route back.  However, Iran and then later Afganistan became  "hot beds", so they remained in Hong Kong for ten years where she studied watercolor and taught Yoga.

Her husband's career brought them to San Francisco in 1987, and when they parted ways, Gabrielle found herself in Marin, California.  She moved aboard a houseboat on East Pier, and had the feeling that "Marin would be good for her yoga and good for her soul."  She lived there for eight years before moving to Gate 6 1/2 where she has lived for many years, most recently on her home aptly called The Hippo.  She maintains  an art studio in her floating home as we as a studio in a hut in Zimbabwe.

Gabrielle is a self proclaimed "bit of a dare devil".  In 1990 she sailed to Equador and then to Costa Rica where she created and maintained a magical garden in volcanic earth for a resort.  It was then that she began to study Spanish.  A few years later she drove a van back to Costa Rica in unsettled times, actually driving through river beds where blown bridges once stood.

She has canoed and boated down the Zambezi River, and is going back back this year to collect more images for her artwork.  These visits, she says, "recharge my batteries and I visit a part of my soul".

Art is indeed her passion, and she says that she began painting elephants and rhinos to bring attention to their needless slaughter.  Here in our waters, she finds herself painting native birds, magnificent in their own right.

A bit of a dare devil indeed ... she speaks three and a half languages, writes short stories which reflect the same sensitivies and provoke the same emotions as her art, she creates riotous gardens and has a zest for life ... not just her own ... which makes her special indeed.  I, for one, cannot wait to go back for another spot of tea and more stories.