Places in the heart

It's a season for memories. Almost 25 years ago this month, we began living part-time at an old cabin in a beautiful coastal valley north of Squamish. That's how we described our situation -- "we live there part-time" -- because it was so much a part of what we lived for, so much where we preferred to be, if earning a living in Vancouver hadn't been the bigger and necessary part of the equation.

For almost 15 years, we were there virtually every weekend, every vacation, all year around. The cabin itself was old, but habitable enough (it's mouldered into the ground now), with windows looking south onto our big lawn and gardens -- JT's vegetables and my flowers. If the spring had been wet, as it has been this year, our June task would be to tame the respective jungles.

It was hard work and pure joy -- the happiest years of our marriage.

Our cats snuggled down in their travelling box and slept most of the way back and forth. When we hit the rural road and stopped at our gate (20 feet behind me to the right, in the top photo), they'd begin to purr. Like us...but with leashes....they spent all their days outside there, weather permitting. When I wasn't gardening or gathering wood, I was doing art. When I turned 50, I vowed to follow an art book exercise to "draw on a roll of paper every day for a year, and at the end of the year, unfurl your roll of drawings."

And I filled sketchbook after sketchbook with scenes of the forest, wild plants, Cloudburst Mountain to the north (which gave our getaway its name, "Cloudburst"), sometimes a deer family, the wild and cultivated flowers, and the endlessly fascinating scene from our front window -- tree shadows and silhouettes on the bright front yard, with "The Studio" (an old horse stable where I briefly experimented with sculpture) almost hidden in the deep shade of the woods between our clearing and the road.

 

One June, I made a pastel drawing of the dramatic shadows of early morning, just as the sun rose above the high treetops to the east and raked across the front yard.

This drawing had its flaws but it hung in my old Vancouver studio and came with me in 2012 to the new studio in The Yellow House. This June, when I realized I'd accidentally smeared it with the edge of one of my makeshift work tables, I decided it was time to turn it into a painting.

I decided to work over my earliest painting from London, Ontario days, which is firmly embedded in a JT-made frame. I taped the inner edges of the frame to protect the wood and set to work.

I wanted to work loosely, but with my first lay-in I realized I hadn't placed the shapes correctly.

I washed over the whole thing with yellow-green and began again. Many times, it was an emotional experience -- the memories surfacing as the painting became more distinct.

The painting is finished and sits against a bookshelf now, handily in its own frame -- "June Morning at Cloudburst."   You can see its development here.

I have several friends who live their own version of this double life -- travelling back and forth between the city and their special place, their "real home," for however many days of the week it is. These places in the heart become deeply imprinted.

Even now, eight years since we last rode up to Cloudburst, I can look out the window here in Vancouver, at any season of the year, in any kind of weather, and make the memory-based adjustments that will tell me exactly what it's like now in that valley, along that road, on that magical piece of land that's now given up to ferns and thimbleberries and fallen trees. In my garden here in Vancouver, the Black-Eyed Susan is blooming now -- a descendant of the original 3" plant we bought in our first summer at Cloudburst. There are good memories.

Incidental music to “Tiny Desk Concert”

Encore! Encore! If you dismissed -- or relished -- "Tiny Desk Concert" as just one more of Kelly Mo's whimsical wonders, you have a surprise in store. It's actually the overture to some little known byways in art history.

I hadn't realized this myself until, setting up for "TDC", I gave some thought to the figures on my mother's ceramic pitcher. I'd used this pitcher before in a 2003 painting called "Melon Jug and Carnival Squash" ...

...but never until working on "Tiny Desk Concert" had I closely considered its musicians and their instruments:

Okay. This looks like an archaic Greek scene. Were there actual  ancient Greek instruments like those on the jug?  Let's start with the triangle, that standby of elementary school music performances. 

There is an ancient triangular Greek instrument, the "trigono" -- but it's a string instrument, rather like a balalaika. However, the Percussive Arts Society gives the familiar metal triangle its due and claims it as a Turkish instrument from the Middle Ages.

Peter Lastman, one of Rembrandt's students, makes a Greek connection in his early-1600s painting "Orestes and Pylades Disputing at the Altar."

Now, how about that long-necked lute-type instrument on the jug? It looks like this is what's variously called a pandouris or tambouras -- the first known fretted instrument with just three strings, its credentials going back to a 4th century BC scene on marble in the Athens Archaeological Museum.

I'm sure its pedigree is more than adequately explained on the website that's the source of this mural -- but it's all Greek to me.

This is heady stuff -- and it gets headier and, yes, bewhiskered, as our analysis continues with my painting's rackety, er, melodious cats.

I'd just finished painting "Tiny Desk Concert" when I happened to see an ad in the paper from Early Music Vancouver.

Why, it's....another Tiny Desk Concert of singing cats! It wasn't an easy internet search, but eventually I found the original -- "The Concert of Cats," by 17th-century Flemish painter David Teniers theYounger (son of David Teniers the Elder; does this surprise you?).

On my way to this particular concert, I discovered that there are plenty of genre paintings from the same period in the same vein. Here are more musical cats from the Lombard School, about 1700 -- "Cats being instructed in mouse-catching by an owl."

 I also came across a totally weird guy from the late 1600s, Cornelis Saftleven.  He, too, has his singing felines, "A concert of cats, owls, a magpie, and a monkey in a barn."

 
Did I hear someone say, "This is not my monkey"?  Click here and scroll down slowly through about ten rows and you'll see a number of Saftleven simians.

His animals don't just concertize -- they do a whole lot of other stuff.  No wonder this painting needs two alternate titles.  Sometimes it's called "The College of Animals" and sometimes "An interior with a goat eating an oyster, a donkey at a school desk, a cat playing tric-trac and other mythical creatures." 

Having established that my modest "Tiny Desk Concert" is continuing two great traditions in Western music and painting, let's conclude on a harmonious note. From the same period, here's Dutch artist Melchior d'Hondecoeter's "Birds Singing from a Music Book." (Who said owls and ducks weren't melodious??)

"Tiny Desk Concert" strikes a chord

Sometimes I'll hear a word or phrase and think, "That would make a good title for a painting" -- and then I might envision a painting to go with it. A few months back, I kept seeing the phrase tiny desk concert, and this made me think of a small brass ornament I'd once bought (dare I again say "thrift store find"?). It's a flat brass ring about 4" in diameter, with three upright seraphim playing musical instruments.

YES! Its time had come. But after opening virtually every box and drawer in my studio, I couldn't find it. Still: The show must go on so I finally assembled a lovely old pitcher of my mother's, a recorder, two of my odd-ball clay figures, and a cacophony of singing cats.

I played with this idea while I chose the next of my old paintings to be sacrificed on the altar of Economy and Recycling -- "Shards," from 2003.

Then I decided my set-up needed something more. I know:-- One of my little vases with a tall bamboo shoot. After a quick trip to the store, I had just what I needed -- a bamboo swirl that just says, "Doodly-doodly-do."

In its early stages, as I began to paint over the old shards, my picture had a fascinating abstract quality:

After several sessions, I'd reached this point:

Still, it seemed that something more was needed. Ah-ha! I'll put a pattern on the drapery -- and what would be better than some musical notes? How about some recorder music, such as a multi-barred section from the score of "Simple Gifts"?

Getting this more or less right was slow going and sometimes confusing.  The coloured pencil lines show the "slice"of the score that appears in the painting.  After two weeks, I'd finished laying it all in.

-- and then it was just a matter of bringing the whole thing to a great crescendo (you can sing along with its progress here.)

Usually by the time I'm ready to sign my name, I'm incubating the plan for my next painting. Knowing that I wouldn't be setting up a still life again soon, I dismantled the little "stage" that had held the objects and drapery. And there it was in a small overlooked box -- the Lost Chord, the original tiny desk concert that I'd been unable to find:--