the cassandra pages

Montreal Welcomes a Modern-Day Prophet

Text by Beth Adams, all photographs (c)2019 by Jonathan Sa'adah

 

I participated in the climate march last Friday, along with more than half a million other Montrealers. We had a good-sized contingent from Christ Church Anglican Cathedral, and we all met up there, and walked to the starting point together. My husband, who's a professional photographer, roamed around the route of the march, and ended up just behind the official press area at the stage where Greta Thunberg eventually spoke. 

One of the young people who was marching with us said that this was her very first protest march - she grew up in the Midwestern U.S., and has just started graduate work at Montreal Diocesan Theological College. Several of us, who've already done this for a lifetime, talked to her about how she was feeling -- she was excited -- and she asked about the most recent, or most memorable, marches we'd gone to. 

Students climb up the Sir George Etienne Cartier monument, for a good view at the start of the march.

There were a lot of great signs in both French and English -- I thought the large poster of Greta as Joan of Arc, in armor and dark bangs, was pretty clever, and very French, but certainly hope she doesn't meet such an awful fate.

Who could not be impressed, buoyed, and encouraged by the spirit of this preponderantly-youthful crowd, who seemed determined and mostly cheerful in spite of the dire warnings on their signs? But I noticed that the faces of many of the older people looked much more solemn: we know the stakes and the opponents now, we've been here before: against war, against nuclear power, against apartheid, for the rights of refugees, the rights of women, blacks, the disabled, those who are LGBTQ+. We're worried that this movement, as large as it is, and as absolutely right as it is, will have great difficulty prevailing over the forces arrayed against it. Nevertheless, it was a great day, and I was proud of my city and every person who had come out to march.

We had a long time to wait before getting started, and the crowd was enormous. I never made it to the end because I had another obligation, and my feet were killing me, so I bailed out in mid-afternoon and walked back home; Jonathan didn't get home for several more hours. In spite of the city making the metro free for the day, it was still very crowded, and some of the stations had been made entrance- or exit-only to try to alleviate the congestion. I was impressed, too, with the orderliness and camaraderie of the marchers, and the benign, friendly attitude of all the police. A day later, when my husband and I walked around the area where the march had ended, there was not a trace of debris or destruction from those 500,000+ people.

The Rev. Jesse Zink, Principal of the Montreal Diocesan Theological College, wrote an essay titled "Thus saith Greta", likening Greta Thunberg to an Old Testament prophet. That wasn't a comparison that had occurred to me, and it really struck hpme, especially when I saw the photographs Jonathan had taken. She stands alone and vulnerable, a child, looking even younger than her 16 years, and she yet she has the courage to speak truth to power. Rev. Zink writes:

"Like many other prophets throughout history, her ministry has imposed a cost on her: she has given up school, she has changed her life, she has been subject to accusation, slander, and attack...

In both her UN address and her Montreal speech, Thunberg leveled a straightforward generational challenge: 'You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.' One of the reasons climate change is such an intractable problem is precisely its inter-generational nature: the actions of one generation are largely felt in another..."

Zink speaks of the Biblical covenant between humans and God that Moses revealed as being specifically inter-generational -- in fact, "down to the thousandth generation" - in other words, forever. Other cultures and religions have similar stories that pass down the idea of stewardship for the earth to subsequent generations. Part of why human-caused climate change is so malevolent is that it violates this long inter-generational responsibility, and, I might add, destroys it in such a short period of time.

"As we discussed in the ministry seminar on Friday, the world needs prophets, evangelists, missionaries, and preachers. But we also noted that it needs priests, people who can gather the community and enable its gifts to be released. We saw that in Montreal on Friday in the relatively low-profile and anonymous group of people who provided the forum for a prophet of our time to preach her word."

In my lifetime, I don't think I've ever seen anyone quite like this young David going up against Goliath. Montreal is not a religious city any longer, but it is a principled and progressive international city where people think, and are willing to stand up for their beliefs. Last Friday, it felt like part of what the crowd was doing was holding Greta up with our bodies and our voices, giving her that forum in which to preach, and also giving her "our ears to hear." Each of us must find our own role in this crucial struggle, and we can't allow ourselves to be discouraged: it is her future, and the future of all the young and yet-to-be-born of our precious and fragile earth -- not just humans, but all living things -- that we are responsible for protecting. 

A Beautiful Ending for the Summer

Our friend G. lives on a remote hillside in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where he has a garden of breathtaking beauty. Once every summer we drive out to spend the afternoon and evening with him. This year it was a perfect day - sunny, and still warm enough to eat outside, though by the end of our meal we were all bundled up in jackets and shawls. Here's J. on the deck overlooking the garden and the hills beyond, under the grape arbor. We spent some time trying and failing to find G.'s new glasses which had fallen or gotten snagged somewhere in the garden when he was picking the bouquet for the table-- he found them himself a couple of days later -- and I sat on a rock overlooking the pond for a while, watching frogs floating lazily on the surface, legs splayed. Aren't they wonderful, G. said, and I told him I aspired to the zazen of a frog. Then we had snacks and wine, and later, a cooperative dinner of salmon, corn picked that morning, fresh green beans, salad, strawberries.

G. gave me the flowers to take home, and of course I had to sketch them the next day.

What is it about certain landscapes that gives them their particular emotional resonance and feeling? G.'s place always feels the same to me, regardless of the weather or time of year: it's one of the calmest, most quiet and peaceful places I know, and I always feel restored after being there.  Some of that comes from the person who lives there, in an almost monastic lifestyle. It also comes from the way he has laid out the garden, with its stream and ponds, in the middle field, between the house and the distant mountains. Wherever you are, the garden beckons, and it is always present, like a symbolic home to which you can return but which also stays in one's memory, between the near and the far of our lives. It also contains a number of large standing rocks, and because I am tremendously fond of rocks, I revisit them each year almost like people with remembered individual personalities; I like laying my hand on them and feeling the retained warmth of the sun.

--

Last week I also returned to the Sicilian landscapes that have gotten so far under my skin, and did this drawing of hills and a patchwork of orchards and fields, seen from the top of the hill near the Greek theater at Segesta:

Olive trees and fields from Segesta. Charcoal on toned paper, 8.5" x 5".

I've planned to paint this scene but wanted to draw it first. The pastoral landscape of olive trees and planted fields remind me of the subjects of some of Van Gogh's late drawings. As I work toward refining a style of my own for this sort of drawing, I look for the subject's internal rhythms and the ways the shapes interact. This is partly about finding patterns in the ways things grow or are arranged in the landscape, and partly --again -- something about the emotional temperature of the scene itself. I've always been astounded at how Van Gogh was able to convey these qualities of "IS-ness" as well as how he felt about particular places on particular days. Without imitating him, I hope to continue to work on my own language for doing something similar, because landscapes and the individual elements in them -- like trees or the pattern of an orchard -- do speak to me almost as people do. The drawing or painting thus becomes a portrait of the subject, and secondarily a portrait of the artist at a particular time of their life...

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees, Montmajour, 1888.

 

In Memoriam

Photographer Robert Frank died yesterday at the age of 94.

Jennifer Lewis, artist, photographer, ceramicist, and one of our closest lifelong friends, died a year ago this week, at the age of 68; the day the photograph above was taken, we were together at the 2008 Robert Frank show at MoMA, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Franks' masterpiece, The Americans.

Aaron Moore, historian, professor, and husband of my dear friend Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, died on Sunday at the age of 47 -- just half that of Robert Frank.

I have no way to make sense of the unfairness of life, the time we're each allotted, or the way each of us meets our fate. What I do know is that each of these people used the time they had to be creative, to be productive and engaged, to connect with others, to try to make a difference, and to be courageous. Each of them touched me, in quite different ways, and I will always be aware of them and remember them.

Jonathan and Jenny looking at Robert Frank's contact sheets, New York City, 2008.

--

It's September 11th, a day of remembrance that goes beyond any one person. That morning, Jennifer called us in Vermont, from her roof in lower Manhattan: we were on the phone with her when the second plane hit the tower.

And on this day, I think, too, of what Robert Frank photographed in his iconic book, The Americans. Like Dave Heath, whose photographs we saw earlier this summer at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, like Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, all of whom knew each other, Frank was trying to express something tragic and destructive that he sensed at the heart of American life in the 1950s and early 60s -- something that would explode into violence later in the 1960s, and has never been resolved. Frank showed us America's racism, economic inequality and insensitivity, its feel-good culture, and above all, its denial. Now, much of the divisive toxicity that became an undercurrent after the 60s has been allowed, and encouraged, to boil over and come to the surface. So I think a post entitled In Memoriam today is also a requiem for an idea of America that is dying, and must die eventually -- but how long that will take, and at what cost, none of us can predict.

 

When black-and-white doesn't make it.

Here's a charcoal sketch of the view at Segesta, Sicily, that you see if you turn 90 degrees to the right from the angle in the previous post, the picture with the Artemesia bush. This direction looks into a deep gully, with areas of exposed rock that may have been a source for some of Segesta's ancient buildings. After two attempts, one in pencil and one in charcoal, I still felt that it was almost impossible to capture the essence of this landscape in black and white, so I thought I'd try a quick sketch in oil pastel. It ended up being more than a sketch, and I rather like the feeling of it. Here, the mountains came alive with both rocks and trees, the fields sparkled with color, and the abyss of the gully fell down and away.

View at Segesta. Oil pastel on paper, 9" x 6.5 ".

Here's a detail, close to life-size on my monitor, that shows a little better what the surface is like. 

Oil pastels are an interesting medium. Using them is more like painting in oils, I think, than drawing in dry pastels, but with some of the qualities of both. They're also very messy - I was covered with sticky pigment by the end of this and so was my work surface. Fortunately, all Rembrandt oil pastels are non-toxic. They never really dry, though, so an oil pastel painting has to be presented behind glass.

The good thing for me is that it's almost impossible to get fussy or tight with them, because the sticks are soft, large, and blunt. You can layer and mix colors on the surface, and scratch through the paint to add some detail or texture, as I've done here, but you can't draw like you would with a small pointed tool. The palette I have is limited - about 45 colors - but that's OK for these purposes. And it's a good change from the demanding tension of watercolor.

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Choir started again this Sunday, and it would be hard to express how glad I was to be singing again. During the summer, I'm glad of the break, but eventually I miss the music and the challenge of trying to do my best, and I miss my community of friends there. At our first rehearsal last Thursday, we sounded almost tentative to begin with, but quickly found our voices again. Yesterday's two services were very good, and it always feels like a miracle to me that with only fifteen or sixteen singers we can make as much sound as we do, or sing as subtly. This past weekend, Montreal celebrated "Les Journées du patrimoine religieux" so we had a steady stream of visitors through the doors, displays of historical photos and memorabilia, and volunteers on hand to give tours and answer questions. It also meant that we had quite a crowd of people for Evensong, which gives us a lift. This year we'll be experimenting with singing from the chancel steps so that we're not so far from the congregation as when we're up in the choir stalls or in the organ loft at the back of the church. The tricky thing is that this makes a physical separation from the organ when we do accompanied works, and there's a slight delay in the sound, so the organist has to watch the director in his monitor and play with the tempo he or she sees, which will be slightly ahead of the beat that is heard. Most listeners would not know this is going on, but it's a musical reality in many of the large cathedrals of the world.

The point of connection with painting is that in any art form, there are challenges, but also ways to overcome them!

--

This week I'm also remembering our friend Jenny, who died a year ago, and thinking of another friend whose husband died yesterday, while we were singing. He had been in difficult health for a long while, and in a crisis situation for two days, so it was not entirely unexpected, but it was still too sudden, and far too young. Suffering and death seem, at first, to be black and white, but in fact they aren't at all, because human lives are not monochromatic. We need to look at the difficult parts of life in all of their shades, not just in black and white, but in color too. Even an abyss has color and form in it, if we have the courage to look. Art, however, fixes a moment in time, while music always moves.

With its capacity to express such a wide range of human emotions, music is one of the best and only ways I can deal with death; I'm grateful for it always, but especially now.

More Sicilian Explorations, and a Watercolor Disaster

An Olive Orchard, central Sicily. Transparent watercolor on Arches cold press, 13" x 9".

Thank you to everyone who commented on the last post. I appreciated what you wrote very much, and it made me feel better to hear your solidarity and shared sorrow.  One commenter, Robbie, said that he felt it was important to be informed and not turn away from the unpleasant facts -- and I agree with that very much. He also wrote: "I worry too about the exaltation I find as I delve into singing; might I be using music as a temporary insulation against a distinctly non-musical world?" My own answer is that we all need places of exaltation, because this is where we find the solace, strength, and --yes-- reasons for going on and continuing the fight for what matters. It's not insulation to spend time doing the things that make us feel the most human and join us with some of the best aspects of the human spirit throughout time, it's only insulation when that's ALL that we do. If I didn't make that clear before, I want to emphatically do so now.

One thing I try to remember is that there have always been stubborn people who have continued to do art, read and write books, make music, love and protect nature, cherish and guard all aspects of human culture, and take care of one another even when life felt the most hopeless. Often they have also been the same people who quietly sheltered refugees or the persecuted, visited prisoners, wrote underground tracts, participated in protests, smuggled food for people in need...the list goes on. These are not the people who get written about in history books, but let's try for a moment to imagine what would have happened if they had not existed. Where would we be? That's what is meant by action and contemplation as two sides of one coin. People who have found their own sources of strength and renewal -- what I like to call "wells" that we are able to go back to drink from again and again -- have more ability to see what needs to be done, and help others. So no, I don't think we need to feel guilty for spending time doing these things, not at all. We just need to try to see the whole picture, and move back and forth between the active and contemplative parts of our lives, keenly aware of what each is, and how they complement each other. As for me: our choir season starts this coming week, and I can't wait to be singing again -- for the joy and challenge it presents to me, for the community of other musicians, and for what it gives to the listeners who hear us each week. That music during the Sunday services seems more important than ever.

 

The painting of the olive orchard was done over two working sessions on two separate days. I'm trying for a more expressive use of color and brushwork, and it's not easy for me. Here, my original idea was to make the field (actually a very dull, uninteresting brown) a beautiful pinkish color, complementing the intense chartreuse of the grass in the orchard beyond. The shadows would be dark blue, violet, and dark green, with the painting unified by burnt orange and burnt sienna, as well as the silvery grey of the olive leaves. For a first attempt, I'm not unhappy with it, though I'd like it to be looser still. But I'm learning and progressing by pushing myself in this direction and thinking a lot about it. It would be easier in a different medium, too. A different approach might be to make the bare field violet or lavender, still complementary but toward the cool side of the spectrum rather than the warm. The feeling would be quite different -- less exuberant, but more harmonious with the silvery greens. Van Gogh and Gauguin are both great sources of inspiration for color ideas.

--

The painting at the top is the most recent. Earlier in the week I went back to the charcoal sketch from the previous post...

and made a color version of the same scene.

Artemisia bush at Segesta. Transparent watercolor on Arches cold press, 9.5 x 6.5".

I subsequently ruined this painting by running the top of it under the tap to tone down the contrast a bit, and then overworking it -- so this is my only record of it. But that's OK. If you're lucky, each watercolor painting has passages that are especially successful, or where something unexpectedly interesting (or disastrous!) happens. We can learn from these for the next one. I quite like the artemisia bush in the foreground - it retains some of the freedom of the original charcoal sketch. In hindsight, more problematic here were the brown hill and dark green vegetation at center right -- too much detail that competes with the foreground. You can see what I mean if you cover up that area with your hand. Before the rest got ruined, I washed over the brown with green, and it was much better. The strong color of the fields and the purple hill at the top, though, are important, and when I rinsed the paper, I lost that brilliance.

It was simply an error in judgement, and sometimes that can be the result of a mood, or an impulsive idea that isn't well-considered. In watercolor, unfortunately, those errors are usually fatal. I think it's important to share some of these problems here so you know they happen all the time!

 

Here's my studio working method for stretching watercolor paper. This is the traditional way that my mother taught me when I was young, using gummed, water-activated kraft tape that you must moisten and then attach to the sides of high-quality paper (in this case, Arches or Fabriano 140# cold press paper) that's been soaked for at least 15 minutes, and then laid on a block of plywood. It's fussy but really works to keep that paper from buckling no matter how wet it gets, and is so much cheaper than buying pre-made watercolor blocks, or extra-heavy watercolor sheets. To remove the tape when the painting is finished, you need to carefully moisten the kraft paper backing, without getting any water on the painting itself (I use a small sea sponge soaked in water and then partially wrung out) and then the tape will release. Sometimes it's necessary to use a single-edged razor blade to remove bits of tape residue from the margins. For working outdoors or when traveling, watercolor blocks are indispensable, and I always have several of different sizes on hand, as well as sketchbooks. For the moment, it's helping me a lot to work in a larger format, mostly 22" x 30" sheets cut in quarters and then stretched with 3/4" margins.

Nonviolence

Artemisia Bush at Segesta, Sicily. Charcoal on toned paper, 8.5" x 5.5".

I'm drawing: small charcoals that would like to become big ones. This work feels like my bastion against what's going on in the world: this week we've heard about an Icelandic funeral for their first glacier to disappear; the forest fires in Brazil, devastating the rain forest, the lungs of our planet; and the insulting suggestion of buying Greenland, which may in fact be exploited in the future by the U.S. or Russia. The heat and the extreme weather in many parts of the world this summer are part of all of this.

But underpinning these catastrophes are the male aggressiveness, bravado, greed, competitiveness, and desire for domination at all costs that have driven our world since the beginning. I feel like I've been in mourning all summer. In July I re-read Tolstoy's War and Peace, in which he despairs about the human carnage and destruction caused by the Napoleonic wars, showing us, through masterful depictions of human lives, how characters of differing personalities deal with being caught up in war. I followed that with Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy's theories of history, "The Hedgehog and the Fox." I've also been thinking deeply about the Iliad, and Susan Sontag's essay about it titled "The Poem of Force," as I draw and paint places where the ancient Greeks once lived. My thoughts are starting to coalesce.

 

Where do we find freedom in such a world? And by freedom I also mean fearlessness. Is it even possible? I think we must begin by sitting in silence, developing our own inner life, and sharing thoughts with a few friends.

The problem is both macro and micro, both "out there" and personal, both structural and more amorphous and insidious: it is the very air we breathe. Every day we hear bullying language and hate speech from the most powerful leaders and from right-wing media; we see women who disagree -- from the strong women in Congress to activist Greta Thunberg -- castigated, ridiculed and attacked to the point of suggesting they should be maimed or even die. There's an increase in aggressive rhetoric not just from the right, but from the left. And it affects all of us.

Because, like prisoners in concentration camps, or victims of torture, we are, in fact, imprisoned and tortured by forces that we cannot control. It is natural to want to fight back, to fight aggression against oneself by being more aggressive, more self-protective, more tribal, but this is not and has never been the solution. Neither is it a solution to anesthetize ourselves through alcohol and drugs, consumerism, online games or social media, or escape by going about our lives as if nothing is happening. The most sensitive and thoughtful people among us see what is happening, and have seen it for some time. I am not talking about naive liberals who think that electing a woman is going to turn everything around, or that by eliminating plastic from our kitchens we're making any significant difference -- not that we shouldn't all make that effort. As Tolstoy pointed out about Napoleon and, to a lesser extent, the Tsar, one single man, no matter how charismatic or powerful, cannot gain that power unless he taps into broad undercurrents of belief already present in the population. The systemic violence, greed, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and exploitation that feed everything from war to genocide to climate change run very deeply and broadly; what Walter Wink called "The Powers and Principalities" have been operating since human societies began. By and large these systems have been dominated by white males who have believed in their right to supremacy over people of all other races, as well as over women. Even today, with all of our progress, women of every race are still below men in nearly every measure except life expectancy. And even the most intelligent and well-educated of us are often in positions where, to help families and institutions function, or in order to have some influence, we end up serving the men who actually hold the power.

 

I'm trying to think it through as a woman, and yet transcend anger, bitterness, frustration, feelings of impotence, to see how these violences and constraints could perhaps be gifts that can make me (and members of other marginalized/dis-empowered groups, as well as all people) actually freer than those who are caught up in turning the wheels of domination. 

In order to do that, I see that I have to get off the wheel myself. One example: being largely off social media this summer has thrown what's going on there into sharp relief; I see it much more clearly. I have limited my consumption of news to a brief read of The Guardian and the front page of The New York Times every day. I don't watch television, but I've been reading widely, and choosing what I read carefully. I'm trying to get back into a practice of daily meditation and mindfulness in order to deal with my anger as well as my grief about what is happening to the natural world and our socio/political systems. I'm assessing all the ways I have been giving too much and allowing myself to be used, and considering how to be more effective with the energy, abilities, and yes, privileges, that I have.

Stepping away from time to time is part of the practice of nonviolence, which is made up of two sides of one coin: Action, and Contemplation. As Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Jesus and many others practitioners of nonviolence have taught us, these are not dualisms, but integral parts of one continuous whole; neither can exist without the other. For me, the contemplative practices of art, music, journaling and being in nature are part of this path, and so is silent meditation, especially in a world that has become cacophonous to the point of damaging our very ability to speak effectively to one another or listen to what is said. On the other side of the coin is Action, but action (of which speech is a part) must proceed from a centered, calm, free, and deeply considered place in order to have any power against the forces that threaten everything we hold dear.

Agrigento

Rock wall and olives at Agrigento. Watercolor on paper, 15" x 11".

The day we spent visiting the ancient Greek temples at Agrigento, Sicily, is etched in my memory less for the temples themselves, as spectacular as they were, but for the landscape and the feeling of the long walk that leads from one building to another. It was a beautiful day, struck with that strong, bright Mediterranean sun that sets shadows in sharp relief and shows colors at their brightest; as for generations of artists before me, that light and color are compelling to my northern eyes that, once experienced, I continue to long for them. Maybe that's why I keep coming back to these scenes, trying to capture something of that feeling.

The "Sicilian wall" in my studio.

The painting at the top of this page was done over two sessions, on two days. Below is the earlier stage, at the end of the first day. I was dissatisfied with my photographs of this painting. I think the reduction in size as well as the photographic process itself results in a loss of immediacy and vibrancy -- probably that's just an inevitable limitation of sharing work online. The bottom detail below captures it best, but it also looks more accurate in the photo of my studio above.

This is after about an hour of drawing and laying in the first washes.

 

Detail of the finished painting.

 

And another detail. 

 

A niche that once housed an early Christian burial, long after the Greeks occupied this valley.

The vibrant ochre color of the rocks at Agrigento, which were full of fossils, created a stunning but entirely natural contrast with the bright blue sky and the sea beyond, and yet that was softened by the silvery olive trees, some of which were very old, with their twisted trunks and branches. At the end of the ancient temple road was the oldest olive tree I've ever seen; I made a drawing of it recently that, I'm happy to say, was bought by a dear friend, perhaps for some of the same reasons I loved it in person. That tree seemed to embody the spirit of the Greeks for me. I went up to it, laid my hand on its trunk, and stayed with it for a while.

NOTE: In a radical move, I've changed the layout of the blog slightly, putting the sidebar on the right (better for phone viewing, since the images sometimes got cut off in mobile view) and taking away the sidebar's black background. Please let me know what you think or how it works for you. Do most of you read the blog in a feed reader anyway?

 

 

 

 

 

Vessels

July flew by in a blur of trips to the U.S., and friends visiting us here in Montreal. It was also also unremittingly hot. I had less time to draw and paint than usual, but during one of those visits, we went to the Jean-Talon market with our friends TC and K. TC and I sketched for an hour or so while our spouses went off to Little Italy to buy spices. Because I almost always work by myself, I'd forgotten how much fun it is to sketch with someone else. TC set up the empty bottles and a coffee cup from our lunches, and we both got to work, on opposite sides of a table. He was using my Moonman fountain pen on smooth paper, and I was using my green Sailor fude-nib pen on rough watercolor paper.

Here's my sketch, with color added:

and here's TC working on his, a very good contour drawing. 

I liked this detail of my sketch:

But later, the bottles were what stuck in my visual imagination. Vessels in a still life arrangement always take on a slightly anthropomorphic quality, which is interesting on its own, but also made me think about the way we are all vessels, with a variety of appearances, qualities of solidity or delicacy, and larger or smaller openings to the world -- while inside, we hold very different things that we may reveal transparently, or partially, or not at all. 

Earlier that week I had done this fast sketch of the water jars and containers of brushes and tools on my drawing table:

But then, during the following week, I was inspired by the earlier bottles to paint a still life of some vessels at home, chosen for the variety of their shapes and materials, from opaque to transparent. While the fast studio sketch, above, is just a study in colors, forms, and transparency, the one below had the challenge of the glass, metal, ceramic and plastic materials, but it also seemed to take on a more psychological aspect, as vessels tend to do when organized in a group. Whether it is a family, or a temporary relationship of five, how do the individuals relate, inform, echo, or even distort each other? Can I, as the "director" of this scene, make the objects relate to each other in particular ways? And what is going on subconsciously -- what did I not even notice as I was putting the still life together?

I think about these questions somewhat when I'm choosing and arranging the objects, but composition is pretty intuitive for me, and happens quickly. The questions become much more interesting as I study the painting over the days after it was made.

Vessels with maple syrup jug. 9.5" x 7"; transparent watercolor on Fabriano cold press.

 

Drawing Our Past and Present

Last week I spent several days visiting my father in central New York State, where I grew up. He lives in a different town now, but I was staying at the house he and my mother built when I was young, mostly with their own hands, on a small lake. It was extremely quiet there, unlike the busy city where I now live. We went to sleep to the sound of bullfrogs, and woke up to songbirds at dawn. Wild rabbits grazed on the clover-filled lawn, and the woodchucks and chipmunks and squirrels paid no attention to us. I saw birds I haven't seen for a long time, like flickers, orioles, and a scarlet tanager, and whenever we drove through the fields and pastures of the surrounding area, we saw deer. At night, countless fireflies illuminated the edges of the woods, and crawled on our shirts like tiny, living flashlights.

Every day I walked along the shore, watching the fish in the still edges of the water, making a mental note of the plants in bloom. I was both in the present moment, and remembering being in these exact places at different stages of my life, alone or with people who are now gone or far away.  There's a stone wall that my father built along the shoreline, and one place in particular where I always liked to sit. I thought about fishing there with my mother, and swimming with friends and cousins; I saw myself at seventeen, filled with romantic dreams, waiting for my boyfriend to come driving around the lake to see me late at night. I thought of standing in that spot throwing stones out into the water, as far as I could, the day we buried my grandfather.

The lake was impassive, reflecting my memories back to me, and also insisting that I notice what was going on right then. A catbird hopped in the the trees behind me; a chipmunk chattered. Large fish broke the surface farther out. Ducks flew low, quacking. And I saw the reflections of swallows in the water before I raised my eyes to follow them in the sky, flying at dusk just the way they always have.

I had brought my sketchbook and watercolors, and I did several drawings inside the house, which has remained almost exactly the same way it was when my parents lived there. We'd stopped at a farmer's market outside Utica and bought some fresh peas in the pod to shell -- we ate all of them raw. I'd also picked some crown vetch, which is in the pea family, and put it in one of my mother's Wedgwood vases, so the drawing became a sort of ode to legumes. 

After returning home this week, I did the two small watercolor sketches of the shore. I don't know why exactly, except that I enjoyed trying to capture the delicate quality of the evening light and the stillness of the water, and perhaps it was my way of staying there a little longer. I don't think I've felt like I had the skill before to tackle this particular subject in watercolor, but the practice over the past couple of months has helped. I'm happy now to have these paintings in my sketchbook -- they take me back instantly to the place and its emotional feeling in a way a photograph somehow can't -- and maybe they'll be a step toward something else.

That's the challenge with subjects to which we're somehow attached. We may want very much to draw or paint them, or write about them, but because of the familiarity as well as the emotional charge, whatever we do may always seem to fall short of the mark. But as we make those attempts, over time, they also reveal a lot about ourselves: think of Van Gogh's self-portraits. About thirty years ago I did an oil painting of the same basic view of the lake as the second watercolor; it now hangs in my parents' house. It's detailed, accurate and well-painted. Most people would probably prefer it, and when I did it I was pretty pleased. Now, not so much. These little watercolors come much closer to the feeling I have when I'm actually there, and if I pursued that even further, maybe I could come even closer. The difference between the two has less to do with skill, and more with years of living. The place may be much the same, but I'm not the same person I was then.

The Book of the Red King

I hope that readers of this blog will want to know about this beautiful new book of poems, written by Marly Youmans, illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and designed and published by me. It's available as a hardcover with linen covered covers and a printed dust-jacket, and a paperback, and the pre-order pricing extends until this Friday, July 19th. All the ordering information and full book information is on the Phoenicia website.

"For those who love well-formed poems and for those who love fantasy, this is a must-read and a distinctive, evocative voice. There is no one like Marly Youmans." --Kim Bridgford 

"The reader will be spellbound." --Kelly Cherry

"It is the territory of Yeats and Tolkien." -- A.M. Juster

A short book description:

From Marly Youmans, author of the epic poem Thaliad (Phoenicia, 2012) comes the story of the mysterious Red King, the metamorphosing Fool, and the ethereal Precious Wentletrap, told in a series of connected poems of rare beauty. Whether read as fantasy, symbolic story, or simply poetry, the world Marly has created is a spellbinding place where we can glimpse truths about our own lives, and the world. The Book of the Red King is illustrated with drawings by the acclaimed Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins.