Let the games...continue

Through the seemingly endless rains of March, I let loose again with my lively game of The Colourful Past Series. The goals of the game have been described before with two of my paintings "Small Front Windows (Colourful Past #1)" .....

... and "Three Neighbours on Quebec Street (Colourful Past #2)":

The objective is to plunge adventurously into colour, to Do Something with my fascination with the details of Vancouver's old architecture, and to work in a more experimental style -- sometimes having a fun splash with texture tools like those pictured at the top.

By now, I've "collected" in my sketchbook dozens of small residential windows, with their almost endless variations as to overall shape, size, shape and numbers of leaded mini-panes, borders, colours, themes...and on and on. For Colourful Past #3, I decided to group samples of three different shapes -- octagon, diamond, and square -- and arrange them in a design that suggests the decorative bands on old buildings, an architectural element called "beading" as shown here:

Then, with the combination of windows and beading, I couldn't resist titling this piece, "Glass Bead Game," (copyright 2014) ,with a solemn nod to Hermann Hesse -- whose own Glass Bead Game was considerably more cerebral.

There are no competitors in my own game. No scores are kept. The tournament season is determined by when the spirit moves me. When does the game end? ...when it ceases to be fun. For now, here's the third in The Colourful Past Series, with its progression shown here.

The essential season

Isn't it time?  Isn't it time for winter to finally end and for spring to come into being? So many people have had a tough time of it this year -- even here on the wet coast, where we can scarcely complain when distant friends have endured one "historic snowstorm" after another. At The Yellow House, even frosty porch steps or a 2" snowfall present problems, and in the usually mild islands of the Strait of Georgia, my friend L and her husband have had a gruelling time -- uprooting from one cherished home and facing big bumps in the road (now beginning to smoothe) on the way to the next.

My earliest springs -- into young adulthood -- were spent in the magic realm of Eastern and Midwestern deciduous trees where, when spring finally pops after a frigid snowy winter, it POPS. It's the stuff that poems are made of, and it happens that my two earliest favorite poets (both New Englanders) each have their own take on the season -- each in a different key.

Robert Frost's perfect mini-poem (one of those stored in my memory) reflects on the transitory:

Nature's first green is gold,
her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower,
but only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief.
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
(-Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay")

e e cummings' poem celebrates the ecstatic. Still in my memory bank decades after I discovered the poem, its first stanza would recur to me often when spring finally popped among the deciduous cottonwoods and red alders at our cabin property:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(- e e cummings, "I Thank You God for most this amazing day")

I came late in life to the perfect poet Pablo Neruda. Regrettably -- and with apologies to my dear friends A and K who both, in different worlds, know and love Spanish -- I can read Neruda only in English. I first discovered him many years ago when I read Jon Kabat-Zinn's book FULL CATASTROPHE LIVING (worth a read!) which closed with a poem that begins:

Now let us count to twelve,
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language.
Let's stop for a moment
and not wave our arms so much.
(-Pablo Neruda, "Keeping Still")

Ever (or almost always) respectful of copyright, I've just nibbled
here at these poems. But the great paean to spring, Neruda's
"Deslumbra el dia" or "Dazzle of Day" must be consumed whole:

Enough now of the wet eyes of winter!
Not another single tear.
Hour by hour now, green is beginning,
the essential season,
leaf by leaf,
until in spring's name, we are summoned
to take part in joy.

How wonderful its eternal all-ness.
New air, the promise of flower,
the full moon leaving
its calling card in the foliage,
men and women trailing back from the beach,
with a wet basket of shifting silver.

Like love, like a medal,
I take in,
take in
south, north, violins,
dogs,
lemons, clay,
newly liberated air.

I take in machines smelling of mystery,
my storm-coloured shopping,
everything I need:
orange blossom, string,
grapes like topaz,
the smell of waves.
I gather up,
endlessly,
painlessly,
I breathe.

I dry my clothes in the wind,
and my open heart.
The sky falls and falls.
From my glass,
I drink pure joy.
(-Pablo Neruda, "Dazzle of Day")

I've done some reading about Neruda, and he strikes me as a great humanist. He came from a modest family in the Araucania region on Chile's northerly coast, a region even wetter than Vancouver -- thus "the wet eyes of winter." His literary gifts eventually took him to sophisticated intellectual and consular circles in Europe and then full circle home to Chile, as a trusted colleague of Salvador Allende.

The story is told that when Neruda campaigned for elected office in the most deprived area of the country, the harsh deserts of the north, the miners poured out of the earth to meet his train, chanting his poems and calling, "Neruda! Neruda!"  I learned also that this complex and sensitive man gathered an immense seashell collection -- and this, along with the lemons that appear often in his poems, inspired my 2002 painting, "Appreciation - For Pablo Neruda." (This is one of those Early Works that tells me that I am  making some progress)

Right now, we look out our front window to see nest-building crows snapping long twigs from the neighbouring trees. In and out of the massive clematis vine on our front porch, the pretty little house finches are bringing smaller bits of construction material to renovate two old nests and, we're sure, build some new ones.

So many good things are happening now in the lives of friends. Glasses raised?  Let's drink that glass of pure joy! It IS time.