"That Time of Year"

With our new retirement schedule, I'm in the studio early weekday mornings instead of on the bus headed for work. That means I've been able to complete three paintings this month that had lingered on the easels since early fall. When I found a turban squash at the grocery store in late August (I've longed for one for years!), I knew it was that time of year again to begin a painting of autumn treasures, a perennial theme of mine.

Usually a painting's title comes to me almost as soon as I've selected the featured object. As I thought about the special resonance that autumn has for me, I realized that more often than not I've heard other people express the same feeling, "This is my favourite time of year" – something I can't recall hearing about spring or winter or even summer. And so the planned painting immediately took shape with its title, "That Time of Year."

As the title phrase sounded in my ear, through hours of planning , set-up and eventually putting paint to paper, I kept feeling that it reminded me of something. Why did it seem so meaningful? Where had this particular phrase struck me before? Finally one day, I turned to Google. And look what I found:

William Shakespeare - Sonnet 73 That time of year thou mayst in me behold

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Wow. Of course. I had read this sonnet long ago. And now, it's made quite a synchronicity...for the painting I started just when we decided it was time for me to retire, time to venture on to the next stage.

This painting has other associations for me. The spiky oak leaves blew into our yard from the magnificent tree down our block. The round-edged ones I spotted on one of my daily excursions to John at the rehab centre in fall 2008. I prepared a reinforced bag to bring them home intact and on the bus, a very elderly sari-ed Asian woman gestured at them and asked, "What will you do?" When I told her they would go in a painting, her eyes lit up: "My son. He is artist, too."

I'll soon be posting a sequence of images showing how "This Time of Year" evolved from the arrangement of objects, through colour choices and preliminary study, to its finished state. I'll send you the link for, I hope, painless viewing via Picasa. In this blog spot, you can click on the photo to enlarge it, (Thanks, PD, for letting me know!) and "Comments" should now be fully enabled.

Signpost for the next stage of the journey

In August 2008, I went overnight from being a pampered chauffeured passenger to being a pedestrian/bus rider. By the time my chauffeur came home from the hospital in November (with chauffeuring on the backburner for now, I’d joined the sisterhood of grey-haired ladies with shopping carts and learned a lot about my new mode of transportation. For one thing, I found that quite an interesting walk can be experienced along city streets. For another, I learned that distances by foot were far shorter than they seemed when travelling by car and that even on the grid of city blocks, there were shortcuts to be found along occasional diagonals.

And so it happened that after four months of being a full-time walker, I decided one Saturday morning to get off the bus at a different stop and walk a route I hadn’t previously travelled. Pulling my blue plaid cart behind me, I reached a pedestrian crosswalk along diagonal Kingsway and marvelled to find this witty signage.

Whodunnit? I was intrigued to imagine who would see the possibilities, whip out a waterproof marker, and leave the message for all to see. Let’s say: Female. Under 20. Rings in eyebrows. Wearing skeleton-motif hoodie. Whoever – I loved it and hoped the graffiti busters would spare it. The next Saturday, it was still intact and this time my thoughts turned to The Message and Me. “Destined to be walking forever.” Right. Here I am. Saturday morning. Blue plaid shopping cart. A bit of a wry commentary on how things get done these days.

I lived with the wry commentary for a few weeks and at last became confident that the City of Vancouver had greater things on its to-do lists (like bailing out the Olympic Village) than cleaning up the street signs along Kingsway. And after a few weeks, as I looked for and greeted this message each week, I came to see it in a different way.

“Destined to be walking forever.” Seriously, isn’t this a cheering exhortation for the great roadtrip we’re all on? Right. It deserves an exclamation point: “Destined to be walking forever!” Open the door. Put one step in front of the other. Just keep walking.