Getting back on track

 

Holidays are over, and it's time to reconnect with old thoughts and plans.  Almost three years ago, walking near the small creek at VanDusen Gardens, I was struck again by that age-old theme of life as a journey. 

 

It's true I've done my share of feet-up-lazing-about as the year changed digits, but now I'm aiming to get busily back to work.

 

One old idea that resurfaced:  You might remember my less than serious comment that my paintings would be truly recognized if I worked in very large size – "museum quantity" (if not quality):--

 

Over the past few months, I've been concocting a homemade solution to the size challenge.  That path at VanDusen had led me to a vision of numbers of walkers, moving along up a trail – with the destination not quite in view.  I resurrected a few studies like this one from two years back:

 

Then I made a plan:-- I'd paint the trail walkers in four sections, each section 12 x 16" canvas paper mounted on cardboard.  When each was finished, I'd mount them together on a large panel to make one BIG painting.  Got it?  Here we go:--

 

Well, this was going to be tricky – tricky to work across the seams of the panels to join shapes, coordinate colours, and keep the flow going.  Before I realized it, I was already outside the guiding lines I'd set up in a formal grid.  And with that oversight, a sizable empty space became evident on the left side. 

 

 

While I looked for someone else to join the expedition, I gave a white coating to a large thick piece of cardboard that I'd snagged from my neighbours' recycling pile.

 

I worked on the four panels partly at my easel and partly on a tabletop.  Occasionally I'd place them on the floor, trying to test the line-up across the cardboard that surrounded each piece of canvas.  Originally, I thought I'd add tree trunks in the top sections, along with other fine-tuning I might do when the four were assembled.  But by this time – many hours into the game – I'd decided no, on both counts.  

 

 

At last, I was at the stage of slicing the excess cardboard from each panel, with greater or lesser tidiness.

 

 

And here we are, the final assembly outside against my back fence:-- "Are We There Yet?" (copyright 2025)

 

My favourite painting partner from Summer Camp 2023, Roswell Morse Shurtleff, could only say, "We don't do it like this in the Adirondacks – but the colours aren't half-bad."

 

 

A whole year awaits!  We just have to keep walking.

 

And salute those, like friend L, who keep us inspired along the way.  Her perfect little inukshuk  still stands, almost eight years since she first delivered it.

 

 

Getting my ducks in a row

 

Into serious countdown mode now, as we wait for the year to renew itself.  For me, as for many others, these weeks at year's end are traditionally a time for wrapping up the old year and looking ahead to the new.  This year, though, recent months have often found me paddling around in circles, feeling more than a little daunted by world events.

 

The week after the U.S. election, though, I witnessed a hopeful sign.  Amidst the seemingly endless rain, there was a semi-clear early morning when rosy dawn began to touch the mountains I see to the north.

 

I felt so heartened by this crack of dawn, and there immediately came flooding back to me Leonard Cohen's phrase, "…that's how the light gets in."  His 2008 version now on YouTube gives the context, and many accompanying comments observe that the message is still relevant.

 

Well – here was the theme of my end-of-year painting, already rendered un-mailable in card form with no thanks to Canada Post's job action.  The starting point was easiest:

 

After that, it was a lot of back and forth:-- Lighter, then darker, then lighter, then pinker, then whiter.  This is slipping into a very bad rhyme and not the greatest painting, but enough to share for now:  "Crack of Dawn – That's How the Light Gets In" (copyright 2024).

 

Now on to the final days of celebration, remembrance, reflection – and gratitude.  Did you catch the last post's small photo of my table lamp?

 

 

Look what's taken centre stage now, with its own overhead light – a lovely little terrarium with an air plant in its own seasonal setting.  (Thank you, friend L)

 

And friend P – not only did you present me with a pomegranate but clued me in to the fact that many cultures consider pomegranates to be lucky, and the gift of a pomegranate even more so.  How did I miss all of this?  I had to take it to the studio one morning for a quick splash.

 

And while I was theoretically doing a year-end clean-up there, I couldn't resist trying another "Crack of Dawn" with a wider view than the first.

 

Hmmm.  I'd meant to place an even greater distance between mountaintops and viewer but there's no point in trying again.  That was then, this is now. 

 

By the way, if these two mini-sketches seem a little, er, corrugated – they are, having come from an old stash maintained by the Cardboard Club.  There are corrugated clouds, you know, and also corrugated mountains.

 

And corrugated pomegranates?  I guess not –just a mouth-watering bundle.

 

 

So let's move on to the words of 20^th century Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke – whose phrase I quote almost every year.  This time I've found his full long sentence.

"And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it, without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things."

Dreams and foretellings

 

What a storm we've had here for the past two days! But at last today, the skies were mostly clear and I could get back to the tasks at hand – my to-do lists and planning grids till the end of the year and on into the next one.

 

When I found the title image in my photo file, I thought….hmm…I know in the classical world, they read the oracles from various signs.  Maybe there was a process for reading the future by interpreting storms and the direction of winds.  Well…..here's more than you ever wanted to know about that – having to do with the flight of birds.  And in the season's spirit of good will, this saves you from wending through a lot of very weird stuff on the internet.

 

Something else I'm doing with this post is breaking it gently to the Commedia characters that they won't have quite the starring roles they enjoyed in 2023-24.  Still, they've managed to have their last word.

 

This autumn, as I looked through old sketchbooks and journals, I came repeatedly on references to dreams.  Somehow (hello, Commedia clowns?!) a Watteau painting "Dream of the Artist" made international headlines with a UK ban on its export.

 

 It was a sign, right?  I've been wanting to get back to figures and faces so I decided to work on copying this segment:

 

 

As I've found before, it can be very instructive to try to copy a masterwork.  From a preliminary small colour note in my sketchbook, I realized the dance of these figures would present a tricky challenge.

 

At first I thought I might do a careful layout on newsprint paper, then cut out the figures and trace them onto the canvas.  That, too, became quickly confusing – so I reverted to a grid layout and preliminary pastel line drawing – nothing like Harriet Shorr recommended!

 

Just trying to equate the colours and dark-light tones made for many mornings' efforts.

 

The final outcome wasn't completely successful, but here it is – "Dancers' Dream – After Watteau" (copyright 2024).

 

There's another lesson here, too.  Sometimes at first try, a plan doesn't materialize in the way I'd hoped – such as "Up from the Earth" from this year's Summer Camp:--

 

But then it comes around bigger and better at just the right time.  Greetings from the Seasonal Seal -- barking from the comfort of swirling seas and his moss-covered rock.

 

 

 

 

 

The familiar cycle

 

Despite rain and hint of snow and dark of late afternoons, I've managed to put almost all my spring-flowering bulbs in the ground.  I have more than ever this year, many saved from previous years with another dozen or so new acquisitions, for reliability.  In the coming year, I might forego the new purchases and be more selective about the oldies that I save.  Applied to daily life, this is exactly what six of my friends are doing – critically weeding through decades of stuff, moving things along, and getting down to what they really, really want on hand.

 

I started this, too, over a year ago, but I've bogged down in a good 45 years of sketchbooks – and of course, I'm not going to triage my art books.  Instead, I'm deliberately reviewing them one by one.  And so, I came across one of my early loves, one of my first painting books, "The Artist's Eye" by Harriet Shorr, a 20^th century American painter of extraordinary still lifes.

 

 

On first sight, I loved her vibrant colours, her eye for pattern, and often her wit – as in "The Carp Sings the Blues" – which, by the way, measures almost 5 feet x 7 feet.

 

About this same time, a painting by Watteau showed up in an art newsletter, and I mentally wandered off again into Commedia dell'Arte territory.  Here is Watteau's famous "Pierrot", related to the Commedia's Pulcinella.

 

The ribbons on this clown's shoes were a great enticement to me when I made one of my first paintings in the early 1980s.  ("The White Clown," c. 1982) 

 

 Maybe this was the reason I'd saved some ample ribbons over the years, just waiting for – the right shoe?  And maybe a selection I'd noted from Harriet Shorr's book would guide a new experiment.

 

"For many painters, drawing is the first step in painting; the structure…is worked out first in a drawing and the color is applied within the boundaries of that drawing.  I found…(this)..did not help me organize a painting.  It has been my observation that beginning with a contour results in a smaller form than beginning with a color and working out to the edge where that color meets another." (-Harriet Shorr)

 

I'm still not sure what this means in practice – I would love to have seen her at work.  But I decided to give it a try, setting up shoes and ribbons and playing with the arrangement.

 

Eventually, I dispensed with the red ribbon and repositioned the lighter shoe.  Then I plunged in, starting with only the faintest lines to guide their placement on the canvas, and starting with only one colour and "working out to the edge where that color meets another."

 

This was a very different way of working and required intense concentration – especially with the different tones and highlights within a shape.

 

Here's the final version of "Out of Step" (c. 2025).  It's an odd outcome, and you'll be glad to know it is not 5 ft x 7 ft, but only 12 x 16 inches.  I'm not sure what I learned from this that might be of lasting value. I'll have to see, as times goes on.

 

Meanwhile, some of you have inquired about the Darth Vader persona that saw me through the recent atmospheric river.  I'll take this opportunity to report that Darth has gone upscale (if Levi's brand can be considered upscale).

 

 

Murky waters, lost pathways

 

 

What a topsy-turvy week it's been – in a topsy-turvy world.  As a small example, assume the "creature" pictured above is facing left.  A fish, yes?  Now assume it's racing to the right—looks like a turtle. 

 

Are we coming or going?  The usual pathways are so obscured.

 

I remember a passage from Dante that was quoted in a long-ago self-development book:

 

"In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was…"  (- from The Divine Comedy) 

Underfoot, there are features half strange and half familiar:  (Red lava? – who knew??)

 

And then come unexpected objects in our path, tempest-tossed:

 

 

 

I've felt unsettled for most of this year, and it's scarcely a time now to figure out where I am and what I'm doing in my art.  A big project I've tried to focus on has been slow in materializing – and so much, everywhere, is unsettled, difficult to understand. 

 

 

What can we do but take a brief break (or a nap!) – and go forward?  ("Where Are We?" – copyright 2024).  No, I hadn't intended the deer-in-headlights sitter to be a self-portrait.