X-ray vision

X-rays have been ordered. Yay! (Double yay because they're routine ones for monitoring purposes; nothing to worry about). While one of us gets X-rayed at the hospital outpatient department, the other will sit in the waiting room, viewing a particular piece of donated art that once evoked a visionary experience.

The pre-vision began in my final working years when I rode the bus to and from work, passing through Vancouver's oldest streets -- now part urban decay, part tourist mecca, part controversial gentrification. I have a thing about old buildings, and this route made for an an exciting ride. Boarding the bus, I'd dash for a window seat, take out my small sketchbook, and each day record a passing glimpse.

I love the varieties these early 20th century buildings offer of windows, bays, mouldings, columns, "elbows" (the V-shaped supports beneath roof overhangs), decorative stone, terra cotta, and brick. Many of these buildings have been designated "protected" and many others preserved in photos, thanks to the organization Heritage Vancouver. Some of my bus-ride buildings can be seen in one of their albums here. And closer to home on a more stable stretch of Main Street, I've recorded my own examples of the kind of things that catch my eye.

In the photo below, the small strip of "beading" at the top of the moulding, I learned coincidentally from the dictionary, is a design called "egg and anchor".  Seen close up, that's just what it is -- alternating rounds of "egg" divided by tiny "anchors."

As my sketchbooks developed, I started to imagine a series called "Downtown Details" -- although I was never quite sure how I'd use these fragments in a finished piece. One studio morning, I decided to do a purely experimental combination of architectural elements, each segment in a different mix of media -- pencil, coloured pencil, ink, pastel, oil pastel, watercolour, acrylic.

It was not long after this, now about three years ago, that an earlier X-ray brought us for the first time to the hospital outpatient department. There, in a little used waiting room, I happened on a magnificent framed engraving (lithograph?) by the 19th century master printer André Durand  from what I later learned was his collection entitled Album Toscane.

It showed a fantastic imaginary building/cityscape that combined architectural elements of notable buildings from all the cities of Tuscany -- "my" concept taken to an elegant, expert level. What a vision!

But now the double yays have turned to double disapppointment. First, the hospital has reorganized some spaces and we were sent to a different building for X-rays. Second, despite extensive searching, I cannot find Durand's Cities of Tuscany on the internet.

I'll just have to hold the vision and eventually see what I can see.

Depths of Winter

Dark winters.  Rivers and their environs.  Rural France and the Pacific Northwest. -- A combination of emotions and memories led to my latest painting.

One of the most moving paintings I know is Camille Pissarro's "The Banks of the Marne in Winter." I came late to an appreciation of Pissarro the painter although I'd always liked what I'd read of Pissarro the person -- his doggedness in pursuing his art in the face of grinding poverty, the unfailing encouragement he extended to other artists, his warmth for his family (even if he couldn't feed them properly).

As I began to look at reproductions of his paintings in recent years, "The Banks of the Marne in Winter"  struck me with all the force of his writings and biographies -- please view it via this link although the small digital reproduction is scarcely adequate. If there is any question about whether painted landscapes can convey feeling, this painting to me is the answer.

I made a study of its tones:

...and whenever I see this simple reminder in my sketchbook, it evokes Pissarro's story and, through it, the painful lives of the rural poor in 19th century France, the exhaustion of never-ending physical labour, the daily effort to put food on the table, Pissarro's family's constant relocation from one cheap inadequate cottage to another where -- credits to Mme. Pissarro -- he was enabled to continue to paint. There's a feeling in this painting of loneliness and desolation but also of determination and endurance.

Far removed from that time and experience, I've found myself as I age to be more and more affected by dark winter and its depths. In the last few years, I've tried to plan a "depths of winter" painting to shine a little light in the darkness. This year, before we'd even hit the depths, there was a convergence: I noticed my old sketchbook study. Then one of my upside-down photos  caught my eye in a certain way:

...and I was reminded of another river -- the Squamish, whose banks we used to observe in every season as we drove to and from our cabin. I made a rough drawing of these river bank memories, in a layout suggested by the upside-down photo.

Then I faced the fact that I'm still without a stash of artists' paper, and I hauled out an old but large (24" x 36") panel (pressed board "cradled"/stabilized with cross bars on the back) that had seen two false starts on a collaged surface -- one (horizontal) a view of Cloudburst Mountain, just above our cabin; the other (vertical) some Rembrandt tulips.

I grabbed some tissue paper that had just arrived, wrapped around mandarin oranges, and began to develop the base layers of "The Banks of the Squamish in Winter." You can view its progress here --and see how the underlying collage of the earlier false starts presented a problem that eventually was solved (or not?) with the addition of a patch of salmonberry bushes in centre stage.

Here's the final outcome:

The solitude of these Squamish river banks has less to do with humankind than with vast nature verging on wilderness. Old stumps remain from early 20th century logging days, and one doesn't have to travel far up the river to see new depredations -- accelerated logging practices and "run of river" power stations. But our stretch of the river was marked in winter by deep slow water, eagles overhead or feeding on the shoals, and the occasional call of ravens -- an "aloneness" rather than a "loneliness."

Reviewing my goals: Have I done "my best painting yet"? -- not by a long shot, I'm afraid. In fact, I have a hunch that this panel is destined to be reinvented again some day when I'm short of paper. For now, though, I've immersed myself in the depths and come through feeling heartened by memories of winters past.