Thanks a million!

You don't have to read the biographies of too many artists to find dark and dubious doings in their personal gardens of Eden. Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe. Picasso and Mistresses A, B, C, D, Etc.

But there are exceptions, the sculptor Henry Moore among them. Looking back on his long career and recalling his wife's encouragement from their earliest days together, when he was an unknown artist with a vision of creating huge sculptures, he paid her a touching tribute -- so simply expressed, but no doubt of the greatest importance to him: She even helped me move the stones.

What would I say in tribute to my guy's lifelong (it seems that way after 40 years) encouragement? He bought my first sketchbook. He brought home the notice by which I found my first painting course. He gave me my drawing table and built all the rest of my studio furniture -- bookcase, mounting boards, compartmentalized table tray to my own specifications, huge flat drawers to store artists' paper. He took me to Paris to buy my Julian easel. And more. He even helped me gather The Giant Plants.

When we used to drive to Upper Squamish every weekend, I gradually came to notice along the highway the occasional patch of humungous plants that resembled Queen Anne's Lace -- very large Queen Anne's Lace, 10-12 feet high, flowerheads almost three feet across, surging upwards from dense thickets of 4-foot long leaves. As the summer ripened, the flowers gave way to giant seedheads...and I had to draw them! Once I shared my compulsion, my wish was halfway granted. Always too pressed for time to stop on our way out and back, we had to make a special trip, requiring one vacation afternoon...and a lot of trust. The plants' location nearest our house was just north of the Second Narrows Bridge, in a triangular patch of land surrounded by the highway, the cloverleaf access lane, and a busy Marine Drive.

John sized up the options, found the one place he could feasibly drop me off and pick me up, zoomed to the shoulder and said, "Now!" Armed with garden clippers (which proved barely adequate to the task), I jumped out and scooted through a gap in the cloverleaf traffic while he headed off, confident that some way or another, before too much time passed, he'd be able to double-back and pick me up.

I was able to clip the plants' 3-inch stalks only because they were hollow tubes, dried and brittle with the season. I grabbed three of them and made it back across the highway to my pick-up point, shedding seeds all the way, radiantly happy with these wonderful finds and with the man who made it all possible, shown here (incognito) holding the largest:

In the end, the largest drawing I made just wasn't large enough (but still so satisfying to work on) and I realized that nothing less than a 10-foot canvas would do this subject justice.


I've since learned that The Giant Plant is Heracleum mantegazzianum
(which sounds like another name for "humungous"), banally called "Hogweed" and considered a noxious weed that's said to cause skin rashes. In our own garden, it has produced a millions -- well, tens of thousands -- of seedlings since the year we collected it and this year, again, we'll let just one of these come to fruition. The seedlings grow rampantly and the ones I didn't weed when they were penny-sized now have roots like carrots and have to be dug out with a shovel. It's a task that nonetheless makes me smile as I remember the gift and the giver. Thanks a million, JT.

A Cat in the Studio

Looking through some old sketchbooks, I found a quote I'd copied by the artist Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978):

We must hold enormous faith in ourselves: it is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means absolutely nothing from the logical point of view...should speak so strongly to us...that we feel compelled to paint.

I remember being surprised that de Chirico had written such an impassioned statement. I'd thought of him as a cool customer, whose obscure symbolic paintings have never much appealed to me. In fact, when I looked for some examples, I was surprised to see the colour in them. The ones I'd first seen of his were all black-white-grey.

But then I remembered an anecdote told (I think) by Janet Flanner, who was The New Yorker magazine's Paris correspondent from 1925 to 1975 and whose collected articles and notebooks cover a delightful range of things 20th century and European. It seems that a young journalist couple of her acquaintance was travelling in Italy in the 1950s, when de Chirico was in his prime. They happened upon the village where they knew he was staying and dared to knock at the door and ask if they might interview him. Graciously, he agreed and the two young people entered the studio, bringing with them their Siamese cat who couldn't be left in the car.

It would make a good story to say that the cat's reaction to de Chirico's art led to the scene that followed, but more likely it was the dislocation and the unfamiliar surroundings. In any case, the cat took one look around, leaped from its owner's arms and roared around the room, tearing through drawings, upsetting finished and unfinished paintings, spilling a good bit of paint onto masterworks in the making. At last, the panicked couple was able to catch and calm the cat -- and survey the damage. Of course, they were overcome with embarrassment and mild terror at the artist's probable reaction. Remarkably, de Chirico's concern was entirely for the cat. "The most important thing of all," he gently said to them, "is that no living being should be afraid." Now there's a man who's not at all a black-white-grey kind of guy.

As for our own two cats, Nikolai and Sasha, don't picture them lounging comfortably in my studio as Nik is shown in the drawing above. They are greatly intrigued by the door that's always closed to them, and that's the way it will stay. Two other cats reside there permanently, both of them gifts, both of them deserving a special environment, both of them (especially the fabric one) needing a place to hang out -- that's safe from cats!