Endless horizons

 

  

I know I'm not alone in feeling shocked sometimes at the high number preceding "…years ago" when I'm thinking or speaking about my life's events.  It was 70 years ago that my family moved from northern New York State, from the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains where I'd spent almost all of my first eight years – and the rest is history.

 

In the transitions that followed, I've been not at all alone thanks to the amazing friends I've met and kept along the way:-- so bright, so sensitive, so aware, so creative.  They keep me alert with their insights and ideas, their suggestions and reactions, their book recommendations, their "art prompts" that set me off on new adventures.

 

Not long ago, my friend M introduced me to award-winning Canadian author Esi Edugyan via her book, "Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling".

 

"And if you can," M suggested, "try to get it at the same time as John Hartman's 'Many Lives Mark This Place'."

 

 

Well!  The library came through for me again, and I was blown away by both.  Hartman is a Canadian artist who embarked on a project of painting the portraits of Canadian writers against landscapes of the places where they grew up and/or where they live now – the places where they "fit" – that have influenced what they have become.  Esi Edugyan is one of these.

 

 

The project's website is worth a glean:  http://manylives.art/   Under "See the Work" are close-ups of many of these writers' portraits. Under "Watch the Film", you could skim from 2:40 to 3:40 to see the huge size of these paintings.  Then, at 12:17 to 12:34, you'll hear Esi Edugyan – giving Hartman's book its title.

 

Well, how could I resist putting myself in both roles as artist and subject, summoning with little effort, the background to my earliest years?  It was all there, the place where I "fit", the place that formed me:-- the wide sky, the buoyant clouds, the stately sloping peaks of the Adirondacks, the deciduous woods with their mix of conifers, the forest paths and all that's underfoot, the rivers, the lakes, all of it.  A vista like the one in the title photo – 80 miles as the crow flies from my little town – sets my heart beating.

 

SO:  Away we go.  Here's the initial sketch.

 

I placed the Old Lady against an imagined aerial view of the environs that long ago I could see from ground level looking east from our house – with the near foreground a continuation of the woods and slopes to the west.  Here's the first colour lay-in.

 

I didn't aim to include the town's buildings nor its famous 3-way bridge which, by the way, was once cited in "Ripley's Believe It or Not."

 

But, look carefully in my composition. and you'll see where the Moose River flows into the Black River – both famous in their time as working waterways for the once-thriving paper and lumber industries, with mills and small factories lining their banks all the way to the mighty St. Lawrence.

 

 Here's the final version:  "North Country – Marked for Life" (copyright 2023)

 

In a different context, the artist Ted Seth Jacobs writes in "Light for the Artist":

 

"…whenever we look at an object, whenever we see anything, our grasp of its existence and reality is not only visual but incorporates a host of other elements:  memories, other sensory impressions, evaluations, and qualifications.  In other words, while looking at things, we perceive them not only by the action of our eyes but with our whole being.  We 'see' things in the context of our total experience of life."

 

I smile a lot as I look at this self-portrait, thinking with gratitude of all that followed from those early days, that earliest landscape:--   Those Eastern forest paths with the first spring Trilliums (we called them "Stinkpots") to the riverbank Jewelweeds of Michigan and Ontario and then the Queen's Cup of our western woodlands, always blooming abundantly just in time for May birthdays… the unforgettable experience of swimming and paddling in the creeks and lakes of those foothills, then in the lakes and shorelines of the mid-continent, finally on to coastal seas and their freshwater tributaries.

 

The thrill of sky and water and heights on the horizon – it's all there for me, still – some of it luckily less than a mile away, here in the place that became home and heart 46 years ago this summer. 

 

 

Party House -- Making It Happen!

 

 

Sunny days are still few and far between – just enough now and then to go out and dance in the street and draw on the sidewalk.  (Original art courtesy of two boys next door – one, age 8, the other his uncle, age 50).

 

Meanwhile, wanting to make the best of rainy days indoors, I try to read at least a few paragraphs in French each week.  That enduring though not terribly fruitful endeavour brought me back to La maison d’être, that convenient mnemonic device illustrating a particularity of French verb conjugation.

 

 

Randomly, I decided to illustrate the verb "arriver."  Yes, it can mean in English what it seems to suggest:-- "To arrive."  But it can also mean, in various forms, "to happen" – and that's what I seized on when I decided to model my painting on a promo postcard from The Dance Centre.  

 

I started with a line layout and found I needed to make a few adjustments in size and position. 

 

 

At this very early stage, I planned to work seriously on a studied use of warm and cool colours, depending on the direction of light.

 

 

As I worked along, thinking about the Dance Centre morphing into a party house, an interesting memory surfaced – of a French movie (subtitled!) I'd seen decades ago:  "Le Grand Meaulnes" based on what's considered a 20^th century classic by the author Alain-Fournier.  When I double-checked on-line, I remembered that I have this very book!

 

 

It's in a small pile of Books I Wish I Could Easily Read in French.   Now oddly enough, what I most remembered about the film was what I thought (mistakenly) to be its opening sequence – a crazy-mad party scene at a mysterious chateau.

 

 

Perhaps it was this memory that led me to throw all caution to the wind – forget about my "assignment" to carefully analyze warm and cool colours and the effect of light – and just……….let 'er rip!  

 

Here's the final version of  "Arriver – Making It Happen" House of être Series, copyright 2023.

 

If I'd recalled "Le Grand Meaulnes" at the outset, I might instead have invited its party house cast to be my models: