Speaking Sushi

They say one's early years are the best time to learn a second language, before the brain's circuitry gets set in its way. That seems as good an explanation as any for why I don't speak sushi -- I came too late in life from too far away to bond deeply, as most Vancouverites do, with raw fish and seaweed. Mind you, I've enjoyed some great lunches with my friend Rumi, but that's because of her tactful guidance in menu choices, her deft wielding of chopsticks, the gracious way she seems truly not to notice when my eyes are bulging from having carelessly downed way too much horseradish, and most of all, the pleasure of her company.

I guess that's why I tend to smile favourably on sushi restaurants and couldn't help but take an interest when a new one went up last year along my bus route, right where I sometimes get off to make a transfer. First the "for lease" sign was replaced by a scrawled "coming soon" notice. Then tradespeople went in and out the curtained doorway for several weeks, and eventually a homemade banner announced the next week's grand opening. Then, remarkably, fate intervened and that very weekend, a car went out of control, ramming right through the new windows. But the new restaurant rose from the ashes (or shards) and finally opened six weeks later.

The hand-made signs were replaced with formal graphics, and I made a memory drawing of a scene I'd glimpsed from the bus one dark autumn morning: A very tall guy whose splotchy jacket echoed the circular motif of the restaurant's graphic design.

Not long afterwards, the new Hime Sushi restaurant gave me an opportunity to observe how instantly and creatively the mind fires -- or misfires. One drizzly Saturday morning, I was standing under its awning waiting for my bus. Cold and a little sleepy, I absent-mindedly noticed the hand-lettered menu on a large whiteboard inside the door. Suddenly, my mind snapped to attention. I'd never heard of stuff like this! And in the space of what must have been less than a minute, I'd read and analyzed the six menu items as follows:

1) BORB FULGHAM
Why does this remind me of "bulghur wheat"?

2) ANAREA AGRO
Maybe this is their vegetarian menu? ...Because of "agro"? Oh, don't be silly.

3) MALANI MANSARAS
This doesn't sound anything like California rolls...or tempura...or
okinomi-yaki.

4) DEVE PANNER
In fact, this menu is sounding more South Asian than Japanese. Is this like
"paneer" maybe, that cottage cheese kind of stuff?

5) ASHOK PURI
Ashok? I think I once knew someone named "Ashok"....

6) COLLEEN RILEY
Colleen Riley?? Colleen Riley?? Wait a minute, what's going on here?

Now thoroughly wide awake, I noticed a small printed card taped to the top of the whiteboard: "Enter to win free dinner for two," and written across the empty lines where people were to record name and phone number: "Congratulations to first winners!!" I quickly reviewed the "menu": Barb? Andrea? Melanie? Dave? Lack of sushi fluency had led me astray, but it looked like Hime Sushi's management had done a pretty fair job of interpreting the bad handwriting of their customers. First the car crash, now the contest. Good fortune surely follows them.

Full Circle: Spices and Punk Cabbage

"Okay, I've started the last in the Astrological Plants series," I announced from halfway down the stairs after a mid-September studio session, excitedly calling out the name of the sign and its flora.

JT heard me from a distance and, with just a touch of yuk in his voice, called back, "Spices and Punk Cabbage?!?!?"

Okay. He knew I must have said "Pisces" -- which is not only the last in my 12-piece series, but with a nice symbolism, is also the final sign in the astrological year. (Unplanned; I didn't paint them in order). But from two rooms away, the name "Skunk Cabbage" had become distorted.

Pisces is ruled by Neptune, and of the plants assigned to Neptune, it's said: "Little is yet known concerning (these) plants...it is probable that plants possessing strange and occult properties...belong to (this planet)."

And there is something occult, I'd say, about the way the large yellow capes of Skunk Cabbage burst up through the coastal wetlands, as early as late January -- sometimes in an expanse of dozens of flowers, without evidence of the huge floppy leaves that follow. Far from occult, of course, is the plant's odour which contributes its common name.

Neptune's colours are black and white (as in skunk?) deep blood red, mauve, lavender, burnt umber, burnt sienna. From the first splash on the paper, I felt it would be eerie good fun to try to bring these colours together within my usual complex symbol system. You can see Pisces' evolution here.

-- and TA TUM, the whole completed series here.

I've been asked about the source of the personality traits in each sign's painting. I select them from lists of "emotional characteristics" and "intellectual characteristics" in the book Astrological Keywords by Manly P. Hall (1958) -- and "select" is definitely a key word in the process. (Would I, a Gemini, have selected "duplicitous" as one of the traits for the Gemini painting?") I admit: I tend to reject the more negative descriptors and then check the positives against "natives" of each sign who are people I know and like.

It happens that two awesome Pisces women have played important roles in my life. One is an almost-lifelong friend, originally a penpal from the age of 12. The other is the remarkable Uber-Boss of the two non-profit organizations where I spent my last and happiest working years. Coincidentally, both have birthdays on March 13th. Characteristics: Compassionate; check. Introspective; check. Philosophic; check. Intuitive; check. Executive; check. Sensitive; check.

As for the success of the Pisces painting, I'm pretty pleased with it. It's kinda skunky. It's kinda punky. It's more than a little bit funky. And now, what to do with the whole Astro-Plants series? Maybe I should delve into my horoscope for....a sign.

Paper: The senses remember

With one last painting to go in the Astro-Plants series, I ran out of paper (the backyard wasp's nest wouldn't do) and had to hike out (2 bus transfers!) for a pristine 10-pack of Strathmore Gemini 140# Cold-Pressed 22" x 30" watercolour paper. The very description is mouth-watering. Back home, I savoured its weight and texture with a satisfaction that was almost physical. Well, no wonder. Paper and I go a long way back.

I spent most of my first eight years in a little paper mill town in the foothills of NY State's Adirondacks. In that simpler post-WW II era, it was a child's wonderland of endless summers roaming free and unaccompanied in fields and woods, and winters of deep snows and crystalline games. For adults, though, the horizons and pleasures must have seemed smaller. When our family had out-of-town guests, for example, the major entertainment was a tour of the mill, conducted by my father who was its Chief Engineer (shown here).

Of course, I would tag along -- ordinarily, the mill grounds were off-limits to kids. We'd go on a Sunday, when visitors wouldn't be in the way of the skeleton crew that kept things moving. In the timeless design of millworks, the building descended in steps along the slope of the falls. We'd enter at the street level of my dad's office and walk down deserted hallways to the wire-cage elevator that could carry a full shift of men to the depths -- a device open on both ends, which I found rather scary.

Scarier still (though I was an old hand at mill tours) was the clanging roar that literally shook the mill building -- the great metal rollers that (at tour's end) spewed out huge ripply expanses of newsprint, the mill's stock in trade. But it was an earlier stage in the process that's imprinted in my memory -- the pulp room, the place where sulphur hit wood chips in a great steaming mass.

Outdoors, the sulphur sat in a storeys-high yellow-green pile ("Why can't we play in it?"); indoors, its taste and smell pervaded the whole working part of the mill, and we'd be breathing it before the elevator hit bottom. (When we first came to Vancouver and I spotted the North Shore's conical sulphur pile, my heart skipped a beat). My father would hold us back a minute with a cautionary, "Careful now," and we would almost glide out onto the wet floor -- wet from the steam of the brewing pulp. Great vats of this greenish-yellow mash churned and burbled, producing a humidity that made your clothes stick.

Fast-forward to the mid-1980s, when I read a fascinating book that chronicled the reactions of American workers whose traditional industries were rapidly computerizing. One interviewed mill worker said (and yes, I remember it almost verbatim):

I've worked in the pulp room for 20 years, and my job is to keep the mash brewing with the right mix at the right rate and the right temperature. In my new job, I sit in this glass room looking out over the vats, and I look at these gauges and they're supposed to tell me. I used to work down there in the room, and you didn't even have to think about it. You smell it. You taste it. You feel it. The minute you walk in the room, you know if things are brewing up right. They say this new way is better, but I don't know.

I knew exactly what he meant.

Whether or not "the new way was better," the Gould Paper Company's days were already numbered. By the mid-1950s, my family and those of all my friends had moved on as the men (yes) found greener pastures in the post-war economic boom. The mill limped along, with different owners, until it folded in 2000. The town is still there, less vibrant I'm sure than my memories.

But for me, there are so many legacies from those days: Among them, a treasured friendship, an intense rapport with the natural world, and a thrill at the whiteness of paper.

Dark stars, autumn roadsides

Two more in the series Astrological Plants of the Squamish Valley -- and the year's not over yet! For several months, I've been looking forward to switching colour gears and working on these two signs together: Sagittarius and Capricorn. Sagittarius is ruled by Jupiter, associated with the colours blue, violet, purple, red-indigo, deep midnight. Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, associated with indigo, grey, black, dark brown, sage green, mottled tones. My aim was to "work in the dark" to create a strong tonal contrast within the overall Astro-Plants series.

Here's Capricorn, which can be viewed in progress here.

The plants assigned to Saturn include leathery-leaved plants like holly, ivy and wintergreen so my choice of our omnipresent salal seemed a natural. (To non-locals, the name's pronounced "sha-LALL" -- as in the Latin name. But maybe everyone knows this if salal truly is omnipresent -- years ago, we saw salal in a Parisian florist's sidewalk buckets). Salal's scrumptious-looking deep blue-black berries, dried in quantity to last the winter, were a staple of traditional First Nations diets. My mouth was watering as I tried my first -- and last -- salal berry. It tasted just like eucalyptus-flavoured Mentholatum. The painting's rather austere, but it's turned out to be one of my favourites.

Along our Upper Squamish roadsides, salal is often the background to an abundant autumn display of snowberries -- the plant chosen to represent Sagittarius.

You can view it in progress here.

Jupiter, the planetary ruler of this sign, is the champion of berries of all kinds so I couldn't miss with this choice. I know snowberries from our years in the East and, wisely I think, never gave them a taste. I don't remember their growing as abundantly there as they do in our coastal valleys. The sight of them hanging in bright white bundles against the rich dark coppers, deep magentas, and olive-blacks of wet fading leaves has always stirred me.

I spy...tiny little eyes

I've noticed the Province of BC has a new tourism ad based on the children's game, "I spy...." That's the game in which one person says, "I spy something purple..." (for example) and everyone else looks around and tries to guess what it is.

Nice try, BC, but not as truly spectacular as the real-life game I witnessed one hot day on a crowded bus played by an enthusiastic father and his two small sons. The dad spoke with an English accent and had a unique (English?) twist on the script, at least one I'd never heard before. His opening line was, "I spy with my tiny little eyes..." I wondered if he was on leave from the Royal Shakespeare Company -- he was that into the whole drama of the thing. The 5-year-old could barely wait his turn and had a witty originality in the objects he selected. The 3-year-old enchanted with his carefully enunciated lisp: "I thspy wiff my tiny little eyeth." Everyone in the front of the bus, including a tough-looking tattooed adolescent, was completely mesmerized.

The tourism ad and the memory of the tiny little eyes brought to mind a painting I'd made in 2007, another under the heading of "I couldn't resist giving it a try." I assembled all my cat figurines (most of them gifts, one hand-me-down, one outright purchase) and a bunch of semi-related stuff and tried to bring them all together. The outcome is "White Cats and Rumi-Blue" -- with a salute to my friend Rumi, originally a work-buddy with whom there was an instant bond on the subjects of cats and the mellow softer-than-navy colour that pervades this painting.

I know everything that's wrong here...so many objects, so many tiny little eyes...but I still like the cats and the colour! I thought I'd learned the lesson with a 2009 painting, "The Wishful Bird" ...but still too many small fiddly details.

The little guys below arrived too late for the "White Cats" painting -- a parting gift received as I walked out the retirement door at the end of 2009. I spy their tiny little eyes and know that I can just enjoy them without trying to put them in a painting.

Let's raise a glass!

This 2007 painting, titled Very Special, was an experiment in working with dark tones. Very Special indeed since it stars the bottle of Courvoisier (contents long since emptied!) we'd brought home from France in 1995 -- possibly our last ever, since this delectable cognac is now hitting $90 a pop in BC liquor stores.

But it seemed a good choice to help me savour some seasonal memories. So many notable events have happened for me in the August-September period; it's really beyond statistical chance. Every job change I've ever made, geographic relocations, family milestones,...and how about this August's 40th anniversary for John and me?!

Reflecting on this season, as I do every year, I realized it's a big anniversary for my art work -- ten years since the August vacation when I decided to hunker down and do art consistently, productively, regardless...regardless of not having gone to art school, regardless of working full-time, regardless of this, regardless of that. Oh, I'd been drawing steadily for more than 25 years, taking courses when I could, starting to paint from the time we moved to Vancouver -- painting and repainting, but never talking about it much, never showing people what I did.

In August 2000, that changed. I would produce. I would talk about it. I would exhibit --digitally, at least. I gathered all my resources, books, sketchbooks, notes, and decided to set annual goals -- and meet them. I chose as my log book my newest sketchbook from my May birthday and inscribed a frontispiece with the counsel that has meant so much to me from the time I first read it in Balzac's novel Cousine Bette.

/

In the novel it's a cautionary note, reflecting unfortunately on Stanislas, the young artist who has so many gifts and possibilities -- but whiles away his attentions and comes to nothing.

In that first year of my new program, I focused on drawing intensively, based on an exercise I'd read about: "Draw on a roll of paper. Draw every day for a year. Do not unroll your work until the end of the year." With the support of my priceless home team, the roll was never left behind as we travelled back and forth on our weekends, and in 365 days, I missed drawing only on three. At the end of the year -- on our Aug-Sept 2001 vacation at the cabin -- John took my picture at the roll's unfurling.

/

From then on, I set an annual goal for painting, sometimes based on volume, sometimes on a particular area of study. In my fourth year, I gathered my paintings and had a personal consultation at Emily Carr -- a big milestone in itself, which yielded some new insights. Fast-forward to the 2009-2010 goal to complete the Astrological Plants series, a goal I'll achieve on schedule, finishing the final one in September. Looking in my log book this morning, I discovered something kind of neat: When I finish Astro-plants, I'll have completed 64 logged paintings since my resolution of ten years ago. I think I'd better hunker down, whip out an additional painting this September, and make that a total of 65 -- for my 65th year.

Now there's cause for celebration! Cheers. Good Health. Happy Days.

Airheads: Sublime to ridiculous?

Working on two paintings at a time (as I did with Scorpio and Aries)
seems to be the best way to bring the Astrological Plants series to harvest.

This time, I decided to work together on Libra and Aquarius, the remaining Air signs, playing in different ways with the same design elements I previously used for Air in Gemini -- the upward-pointing triangle with crossbar, the whirling symbol from Neolithic patterns, and the butterfly reminiscent of the swallowtails that visited our Upper Squamish garden.

Libra is ruled by Venus and thus shares its colours with Taurus -- green, blue, yellow, pastels, and the metal, copper. The wild columbine is surely a plant Venus would smile on (so I'vedecided -- Venus' plants are many, prominent among them are roses and lilies). I've read that the "columbine" name comes from the flower's shape "said to resemble a dove (columba)" -- I don't quite get this, but it's nonetheless a graceful association for this joyful plant of coastal fields and highlands.

You can view Libra-in-progress and then switch to something completely different....! Aquarius.

Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, a planet which (like Pluto and Neptune) was unknown in classical times. Their discovery presented a dilemma for later astrologers who had to think fast to make some creative connections between new planets and known astrological signs and the things the signs connect with in human affairs. The colours that have come to be assigned to Uranus are described as "electric tones, light azure, silvery white, striped; a profusion of glaring colors creating a harmonious result." Check out the evolution here.

My sourcebook continues: "Little is yet known concerning the plants of Uranus...(They) may be similar to those of Venus and the Moon...It is probable that plants possessing strange occult properties such as mistletoe and orchids belong to (Uranus and Neptune)."

Well, Lobaria pulmonaria is certainly "strange" and I've loved it from first sight -- it's a flat hand-sized lichen that grows in leathery fistfuls, often in the clefts of trees, bundled with licorice ferns. Blown to the ground, a clump could last for weeks in the moist air of Upper Squamish but whenever I brought some back to Vancouver to sketch and study, the ripply sheets would dry out and flatten within a day. And it's "occult" enough that, after my first sighting and a lot of searching, I had to contact UBC's Hort Line to find out what the heck it was.

Interestingly, the common name "lungwort" is attached to some other wild plants, probably because they were used in healing lung disorders. (And here's an odd reminiscence: The sheets of Lobaria resemble the dessicated paper-thin section of a cancerous lung that I happened upon in the filing cabinet of my first Canadian boss, who was a pulmonary specialist.)

It was fun to work on these two paintings in tandem -- switching back and forth between the soft greens of Libra and the electric tones of Aquarius.