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Local Artist Captures Area Landmarks

Kathy Tyndall expresses her love for the South Bay via the watercolor scenes that grace her greeting cards. Uncorked in Hermosa sells her work.

Trump National Golf Club. The Manhattan Beach Pier. The Neptune Fountain in Malaga Cove.

Kathy Tyndall has captured them all in her line of greeting cards. The artist/Realtor, a resident of Rancho Palos Verdes for more than 37 years, is famous for her paintings of familiar South Bay landmarks.

A fun-loving blonde with a winning smile and merry nature, Tyndall, 63, said she’s always been an artist. “I can still remember going to a church program and sitting in the basement when I was probably about 7 years old," she said. "And there was a man there, an artist, showing us how to draw silhouettes.”

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She was so fascinated with the process that she learned how to do it herself: “I used to sign them and give them away to my friends.”

But her obvious talent never drew the entrepreneurial Virgo to fine art as a profession. Her father, an aerospace engineer, “always stressed the importance of making money,” said the New Jersey-born artist, whose family moved to California when she was 5.

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Rather than risk living the life of a starving artist, Tyndall, who likes to be called "a naturalized California native," intended to become an illustrator. “I actually have a degree in design from California State University at Los Angeles," she said. "But I also attended Los Angeles Art Center College of Design, Santa Monica College and Long Beach State.”

Wanderlust, which drew her to Mexico, Japan and Europe, easily lured the restless, impressionable student away from her books. Right after she graduated from Palisades High School, in fact, an exchange program that took her to Japan left Tyndall so transformed that she “came home and was Japanese for a year,” she said gaily. “I sang in a Japanese choir, went to a Japanese church, spoke the language…”

In 1976, after Tyndall married, she and husband Brian, a homicide detective, moved to Rancho Palos Verdes. She had gotten a glimpse of The Hill during her first job out of college as an art director for a photographic studio in downtown Los Angeles.

“One of my jobs was to come up here and talk to (the bakers at) Mayers Bakery in the Peninsula Center,” she said. “They were doing those cakes that look like photographs. And that was a really big deal in those days.”

What impressed her more was Palos Verdes, a place she was later to immortalize in her watercolors and cards. But when her three children came along, Tyndall heeded her maternal and monetary instincts and put art on the backburner.

Husband Brian, assigned to high-profile murder cases (Robert Blake; the Rampart scandal involving LAPD; Biggie Smalls, known as Notorious B.I.G.) had a job that worried her. “If anything happened to him, I had three little kids,” she said. “What was I going to do to take care of them? So that’s why I went into real estate.”

A Realtor at RE/MAX Estate Properties in Malaga Cove Plaza since 1983, Tyndall revisited her art in 2004, when her middle daughter, Kara, began planning her wedding at the La Venta Inn in Palos Verdes Estates.

“She had a lot of people coming from out of town, especially from the Boston area and Texas,” Tyndall said. “We wanted to think of something to give them as a gift. Chances are they wouldn’t be coming back to P.V.”

A physical reminder of Palos Verdes

So she decided to paint watercolors of local monuments and make them into cards so guests could have a physical reminder of their stay on The Hill. Later, Tyndall—who went on to render local attractions in San Pedro, Torrance, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach—was asked by representatives of the Palos Verdes Library District and Terranea Resort if they could carry her cards.

Aside from the main library on the Peninsula and the Terranea Resort Gift Shop, her cards are available at Stems in Malaga Cove, Uncorked in Hermosa, and Lemons and Sugar in Lunada Bay. She has also done a line of cards for Chadwick School.

From painting to printing to packaging, Tyndall’s process is entirely self-contained. She paints a scene in watercolor and then scans it. “Nowadays, scanners are so sophisticated you can get every nuance on a print," she said. "It’s amazing.”

She uses Microsoft Publisher to print, Howard Linen Cover Stock for paper, and writes all the captions, such as “R.A.T. Beach (Right After Torrance)”, by hand. Then she cuts, folds and packages the cards in sets of eight in clear plastic stationery boxes tied with golden cord; individual cards are slipped into acetone sleeves. “It’s nice, because I don’t have to carry a large inventory; I can (print cards) on demand.”

For paints, she uses Windsor Newton Watercolors and Doc Martin Dyes. Doc Martin Dyes “are very, very concentrated colors, (a) liquid and perfect for the kind of work I do,” she said, explaining how she achieved the glorious colors of the Manhattan Beach Pier at sunset.

But Tyndall wanted to expand her art, and a friend suggested she seek out colleges.

Since two of her three children had gone to the University of Southern California, she decided to approach the school. “We gave them a proposal and they gave us the job of doing watercolors of the university,” Tyndall explained. Up to then, she said, USC had no official greeting cards.

USC did, however, have massive licensing restrictions. “They give you a book about two inches thick of rules and regulations,” she said. “It was crazy. I had to carry a million dollar insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London in case someone got a paper cut from my cards.” Special licensing requirements pertained even to Traveler, the white horse so popular at USC football games.

After doing a second set of cards for the USC School of Pharmacy, Tyndall decided she had had enough. "It was just too much work to jump through the hoops for them all the time."

Very much her own person, Tyndall likes to have her own say in things. She was that way even as an undergrad in the early '70s.

There was “a lot of sexism at the time,” she said. “I remember all my male counterparts saying, ‘You’re never going to get a job in art because we can’t get a job in art. What makes you think you can get a job in art?’ Anyway, I was bound and determined I was going to get a job before I graduated college.”

And she did: as an art director at the photo studio in downtown Los Angeles. Although she exhibited her watercolors during those years, and created decorative ceramic tiles in her kiln (“I made them into trays,” she said), Tyndall traded all that to generate an income and sell homes.

One thing that has revitalized her real estate career, she said, was partnering up with her youngest daughter, Rachel, in 2003. The team (they call themselves The Tyndalls) “totally revamped” her marketing style, Tyndall said. “My daughter had this idea that we had to have recyclable grocery bags with our name on it.”

'All the wackiest stuff'

They purchased black bags and stamped them with their logo, “Love in the South Bay,” the “O” in "Love" heart-shaped. For the 2013 New Year, they gifted their clients with “a New Year’s Party in a bag,” she said, explaining how they filled the sacks with party hats, noise makers, sparkly glasses, crowns, fortunes and “a silly poem that explained why we were sending the bag … all the wackiest stuff.”

This time, Tyndall has no intentions of giving up her art. Always looking for new ways of expression, she joined a group of friends to explore different mediums and methods.

“The PV School District has a thing called ‘Art at Your Fingertips,’ where they introduce children to different kinds of art,” she said. “And a friend of mine started ‘Art at Your Wrinkled Fingertips.’ So we’re a group of women who get together whenever we can come up with something that we’ve never tried before.”

They’ve made their own paper, designed altered books and learned to marble with paint. Tyndall introduced cards made from old Atlases she buys at library sales: “I tear out the pages and use a template and make them into greeting cards with envelopes and embellish them with stamps or whatever … to make them really neat looking.”

In 2006, Tyndall made the cards for the troops in Iraq, “because they’re the only ones who write letters anymore,” she said. Her care package effort was given a front page spread in the Palos Verdes Peninsula News.

In the story, Tyndall was quoted as saying, “They keep getting their tours of duty extended and they aren’t complaining … These people are willing to sacrifice their lives. How many people do you know who would do that?”

Supporting troops who are sacrificing so much for the U.S. was the least she could do, she said at the time.

Giving is in Tyndall’s nature. When each of her daughters asked to move back home with their families for months at a time while looking for homes to buy in the South Bay, Tyndall and her husband welcomed the kids and grandkids into what she calls “a halfway house for my children.”

Only in the past few days has the nest been empty of off-spring, said the artist, who can free up her art room upstairs, the place that had been given over to her kids. She was eager to remake it back into a studio.

“I’d love to grow my business,” the artist said. “I got an order yesterday and printed 24 cards and packaged them up and sent them off. It’s easy.”

For more information on how to order cards, contact Kathy Tyndall at 310-809-8221 or email her at KathymTyndall@gmail.com.

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