Eyes on the Northwest

An ad for UBC's Museum of Anthropology recalled an old fascination and suggested my next summer camp project. As a child, I was given a small book titled (before the days of political correctness) Indian Children of North America that showed the lifestyles of "Indians" of the plains, the woods, the swamps, the deserts, and -- my favorite -- the Northwest coast. I loved the intricate carvings on the huge canoes and the zoomorphic artifacts, like a huge bear-shaped ceremonial bowl. When we came to Vancouver in the late 1970s, I was already predisposed to love the environment and the characteristic First Nations art.

For many years, we hiked or kayaked every weekend all year round, and every trip was an opportunity to indulge our shared weakness (or strength) for randomly collecting the stones, shells, and pieces of wood that captured our eyes. It didn't take many small bits of cedar, weathered or waterworn, for me to develop a personal theory about the origins of art like the Edenshaws'. Maybe it's very obvious, but I've never seen my theory referred to elsewhere. Take a look at these wood pieces of mine:

Get my drift? The rhythms, the concentric ovals, the eyes... Is there any doubt that these (and probably the swirl of oyster shells) inspired coastal First Nations art?

Here at summer camp, where the intent is to do a lot of splashing around, I decided to assemble some of my pieces in a long band -- like a silver bracelet perhaps?

I decided to work very loosely with a larger than usual brush on top of an old painting.

The final outcome -- "Eyes on the Northwest" -- was a personal amble into the past, recalling hiking trails and beach walks.


It was also an invitation to recall one of my all-time favorite works of art, a treasure at the MOA: Bill Reid's Raven and the First Men. Check out his exquisite piece (which stands about 10 feet high, as I remember) and see if you don't agree that its origin could be found in a morning's walk, gathering tidbits from the high tide line of a coastal beach.

A balancing act

Just before heading for summer camp, I finished a painting I'd been thinking about for over a year. I'd been reading about Berthe Morisot, "the female Impressionist," and came across a contemporary critic's assessment of the painting she submitted to the famous (in retrospect) 1865 Salon:

"Since it is not necessary to have had a long training in draughtsmanship in the academy in order to paint a copper pot, a candlestick, and a bunch of radishes, women succeed quite well in this type of domestic painting." (-Paul Mantz quoted in BERTHE MORISOT: THE CORRESPONDENCE, ed. Denis
Rouart)

Okay. Copper pot + candlestick + bunch of radishes = "women's work"? Very well. I can do that. I think I'll give it a try.


Some months passed as I finished my Astrological Plants series and then waited for radishes to be seasonable. Meanwhile, the idea came to me to use not just the named threesome, but three of each item and then to see how I could create a balanced, harmonious composition with the 3x3 subject matter.

Usually I play with compositional possibilities via thumbnail sketches, but once I had the June radishes before me, I saw that a quicker way would be to make small prototype objects which I could easily move around. By now, I'd realized that cast shadows could be an interesting design element and so I painted a small family of paper shapes: candlesticks, copper pots, radishes, and "shadows."

In one exciting session (which felt like a cross between playing chess and playing with paper dolls) I tried the pieces in various configurations. The prototype composition, shown here, was planned to sit against folds of background fabric which would run in diagonal opposition to the lines of the shadows.


Here's the final outcome -- which altered the 3x3 concept a bit when I split up one of the radish bunches. You can view the progression here.

The painting's title "Balancing Act" refers both to my compositional game and, with a small feminist salute, to Berthe Morisot herself -- and the immense balancing act she maintained between her role as the daughter of privileged 19th century Parisians and her compulsion, nonetheless, to be an artist.

Heading for summer camp

I have such happy memories of summer camp -- six 2-week stints at two different girls' camps in the years I was aged seven to twelve. What was so memorable, over fifty years later? Living in the woods in tents or cabins, swimming every day, hanging out in a relatively egalitarian environment, singing songs from around the world (Take it from the top: "Waltzing Matilda." I know all the verses and even the meaning of "jumbuck" and "billabong"). Maybe what was best was stepping outside the routine, doing different things just for fun.

And in this spirit, I decided it was time to go off to summer camp -- every morning, in the studio. All kinds of preliminary plans for paintings routinely drift in and out of my mind and sketchbook (I'd just finished a big one that I'll post next time), and I'm putting this mental list on hold for a while. Instead, I'm going to play, just for the fun of it. Oh, some of this will be painting, but maybe I'll try some odder ventures than usual.

My first session at camp started two weeks ago. I cracked into an unopened pack of modelling clay and summoned up the spirits of Campfires Past. By the solstice, I'd assembled a tent's (or teapot's) worth of little girl campers.

This was not without its challenges. The clay began to dry within the 45 minutes I worked on each figure and would dry further with each passing day. This meant that the first figure, securely anchored to the edge, lost its balance overnight -- and required firmer seating on a little deck chair (and a hat to hide her embarrassment).


I had to invent some odd poses to connect the figures to the teapot.


One small paddle-like hand broke off and had to be reattached with a
"towel" -- leaving this camper looking like a snake-handler.

And I admit, even for little girls, they all look quite asexual.


I thought I'd have clay enough for only four figures but saw, with some scrimping, I could manage five -- but she's pretty anorexic.


So what camp-in-a-teapot is this, anyway? I could borrow a page from the book of my friend B, tea drinker and out-of-the-box leader extraordinaire, who did a whole employee recognition riff with custom-made tea boxes with labels like sereni-tea, facili-tea, curiousi-tea, flexibili-tea. But these girls (and their counsellor) seem to occupy another dimension. In fact, they strongly resemble extraterrestrials. Maybe it's a place called Camp E-Tea. ??

Rembrandts rule!

A few years ago, I came across an article about tulipimania , the 17th-century Dutch rage for exotic and hugely expensive tulip bulbs. The phenomenon is now billed as one of the first economic bubbles since fortunes were lost when the inflated tulip market collapsed. What's more, the intriguing tulips of old Dutch paintings owed their stripes (called "flames") to a virus -- so they turned out to be a botanical bust, as well. The flames in today's versions have been hybridized (no virus), and once I understood that the now so-called "Rembrandt Tulips" are easily and inexpensively available, I had to have some and I had to paint them!

Serendipitously, I found them in my favorite mail-order garden catalog, and while the bulbs wintered in our garden, I had a chance to consider what I'd do with those stripes in the spring. (You know my methods, Watson. If one patterned object is good, two or more must be better...) Some months later, the tulips, a Gala apple, and some striped fabric converged in "Rembrandt Stripes" (copyright 2008).


This year, there's been a further convergence. The Rembrandts again bloomed in our yard, my series of "Plate" paintings was on my mind, and meanwhile, I'd discovered the most marvelous book and author/art historian:

The time was right to haul out that striped fabric and do something more with the Rembrandt tulips and a golden-yellow plate. I adjusted my original set-up, changing the plate's placement vertically (more fabric at the bottom) and reversing the colours of the fabric's stripes. Here's the outcome: "Yellow Plate Special" (copyright 2011)-- you can watch it materialize here.


I see it as the middle portion of a triptych, with "Blue Plate Special" to its left, and "Orange Plate Special" to its right. And for now, I'm putting the "Plate" series to rest.

Plate tectonics

No sooner had I finished my "Blue Plate Special" -- after wrestling with how to position the plate -- then a plate appeared in a painting every time I opened an art book. I saw them flat, flat with objects on top, tilted, stacked, upright, dead centre, moving out of the picture...what else?

This world of possibilities rekindled my long-standing interest (dating from the time I bought the blue plate) in doing a series of paintings, each with a different coloured plate. I have some odd plates but none with a gorgeous design like my thrift store blue plate's. So I decided that in my second painting -- "Orange Plate Special" -- the rich pattern element would come, not from the plate itself, but from accompanying objects: a small Mexican dish and a piece of fabric. I did a small study with these three elements, and overall I thought the composition would work.



Guess what? It didn't -- and this became evident rather early in the process. You can follow its evolution here and watch a fourth object recruited almost at the last minute to fill some space. Not the way I like to work -- but here's what we have so far in The Plate Series: "Blue Plate Special" and "Orange Plate Special" .

After I pulled this off (more or less), I recalled a comment by Matisse in a wonderful collection of his writings I've recently discovered. Originally, his point about "squaring up" didn't entirely make sense to me, but I see now that "Orange Plate Special" -- in its small 5" x 7" study versus the finished 15" x 20" version -- is an example of just what he talked about. The guy knew his business!

"Composition, the aim of which should be expression, is modified according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of a given size, my drawing will have a necessary relationship to its format. I would not repeat this drawing on another sheet of different proportions...nor should I be satisfied with a mere enlargement....An artist who wants to transpose a composition from one canvas to another larger one must conceive it anew in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just square it up onto a larger canvas." (- Matisse, Notes of a Painter, 1908)

Horse Projects then and now

Almost every week, I'll have reason to think of a friend's talented daughter K and something that happened several years ago. One morning, her mom (then my boss) was almost late for work, and K for school, because of K's Grade 5 project on one of her passions -- horses. As I heard it, the project was huge, complex, and creative, and K worked on it every available minute. When it came time to leave home one morning, K was not only still in pajamas, she was IN THE ZONE.

...or, as creativity guru Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi coined the phrase, she was in a state of flow:

"...being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." (This quote courtesy of Wikipedia, which provides no guidance on the pronunciation of his name!)

On good studio mornings, I've been IN THE ZONE myself...until suddenly, Omigod, what time is it?

K's story touches me for its own sake and also because of its pre-quel and sequels.

The Pre-quel: At a much younger age than K was then, I had my own personal Horse Project. For endless Saturday mornings (in my memory), I sat at my little desk, writing and illustrating a multi-volume geneaology of "Blackie the Colt," my most prized stuffed animal (though hand-me-down and threadbare).

A sample page shows Blackie with her uncle and the aunt named after a friend's older and greatly admired sister.


A couple years later, we moved to another town where a new classmate was a cool kid with a horse. Yes, her own real horse. Coincidentally, she was named Judy, and she could draw horses like a dream. Of course, she knew everything about horses, and I realized from something she said that "Blackie the Colt" must, in fact, be "Blackie the Filly."

Sequel #1: K takes riding lessons and she's progressed so much that she's teaching younger kids now. She's going into high school next year and is getting rave reviews for projects even more sophisticated and comprehensive than The Horse Project. Obviously, this gal spends important time IN THE ZONE.

Sequel #2: Judy-The-Person (vs. Judy-Blackie's-aunt) has grown up to be, in her daughter's words, "still a cool kid, but now with two horses." After a lapse of some decades, she reignited her career in professional photography and as you'll see here, she spends a lot of time IN THE ZONE.

Sequel #3: In my adulthood, my mother retrieved my own Horse Project from her treasure trove, and I was astonished that it comprised only three folded pieces of cardboard. Time (and a realistic view of output?) warps when you're IN THE ZONE. These days, the author/illustrator of "The Books of Blackie the Colt" makes about one painting a month and writes a blog about..............Omigod, what time is it?

And now for something completely different

Over the years, I've done dozens of drawings of wild and garden plants in their various stages of unfolding, and finally I was struck by the obvious: For so many plants, each aspect of its being -- buds, leaves, roots, seeds -- is as striking as its flower. I had the idea of a series of paintings on this theme, an idea now partially realized with my March 2011 painting, "The Seed is the Flower."

It started with September's hastily gathered bouquet of crocosmia and rudbeckia seed heads, which sat on the front porch through the winter. One day, the time was right, and I brought it into the studio and placed it on a box well below eye level.

I made a quick study which almost immediately planted the seed of an idea.

As I worked at the painting, something kept nudging my memory. It wasn't just that the stems reminding me of my own "A Brown Study" -- but the spaces between the stems suggested...something. But what? I finished the painting -- as shown below, it's rather different from my recent still lifes. (You can view the whole progression here)

It was only then that I recalled a series of drawings/paintings in one of my art books by, surprisingly, Mondrian, master of stern geometries. Look at this sequence, and join me in wonder, at where "the spaces between" took him:--