Consider the possibilities

 

What a start to the new year!  -- a special delivery from friends L and B.  They brought even more vintage bricks than I'd asked for from their house renewal project, which involved dismantling an old chimney.  Pure gold!!  And no doubt as heavy.  L and I simply cheered and applauded while B modestly showed his prowess, carrying all 14 bricks in a sturdy box.  When I shot this photo yesterday, everything was frozen in place and I couldn't even reposition them for a closeup of their new-to-me trademark:  "MAINLAND."  Oh, it's going to be a verrrrry good year!

 

Of course I've been thinking about where my paintings might take me, and I continue to brood on developing more depth, more dimensionality, more facility.  In an email holiday message, along came another "blank slate," as it were – in the photograph of an old friend's beautiful grown-up daughter.  Because I haven't sought permission and, in any case, always refrain from posting identifiable people pictures, I'll share it here in authentic blank slate mode:

 

 

With this, I decided to experiment with some favoured artists' start-up procedures.  I've admired contemporary American artist Lea Colie Wight for years and last year bought her book, even though oil painting is quite different in many respects from acrylics.

 

 

Still, her start-up method was potentially useful, I thought.

 

And so I began "Daughter" with a Wight-style loose lay-in.

 

Eventually I reached the About-As-Good-As-It-Will-Get stage:

 

 

At this point, there was only one thing to do.  Well, actually three things:- Paint it over, turn it upside-down, and begin again.

 

 

This time, I chose again one of my heroes.  You've met him before – contemporary UK artist Hashim Akib.

 

His start-up method is quite different, more linear…

 

 

…and rather resembles that of my enduring hero, Mary Beth McKenzie.  So here's my second beginning for "Daughter":

 

 

This progressed to something of a not-bad finale (particularly after I'd decided to stow the glasses):

 

I can't say that this greatly resembles the real daughter but getting a close likeness hadn't been my goal – rather, I wanted to get back in touch with painting faces which still endlessly fascinate me.

 

I needed some grounding, too, in a chaotic week of being without my laptop (and all its related systems) and meanwhile worrying about extreme low temperatures and potentially frozen water pipes.  What to do?  Keep at it and aim for a couple more Daughter-ish images in the manner of one artist or another.  Paint over.  Turn sideways.  Begin again.

 

This time, I tried to emulate Alex Katz  – still going strong at age 95, with a blockbuster exhibit under way right now at New York's Guggenheim Museum.  Here's Katz's "Black and Brown Blouse":

 

I positioned Daughter in slight profile, aiming for those Katz cheekbones – but her lovely features were just too gently rounded to make it as a Katz.

 

Meanwhile, another friend sent me this link to a recent CBS special asking, "Have you ever heard of this artist Modigliani?"  Why yes, indeed.  While I was confident he'd never painted a rounded face, I looked for a prototype with shortish brown hair, and he came through on that count.  Like Alex Katz, he apparently painted his wife again and again.

 

And here's my very slimmed down "Daughter" spin-off:

 

One thing is for sure.  If these two images found themselves shoulder to shoulder at an art exhibit, they'd have no quarrel about which artist knew what he was doing.  They both do – magnificently, in so many perfect structural details that I couldn't begin to capture in small scale.

 

So where is all this going?  Places we've never been before, I hope.  In that vein, I can't resist sharing the amaryllis buds as they've emerged through all the recent cold dark days -- and my favourite saying for this season, from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:--

 

"Come let us welcome the new year,

Full of things that never have been."

 

 

 

Strange lands, strange lingo

 

Just before the holidays, I stopped at Science World to see what their gift shop offered in the way of kids' stuff.  As I strolled from Point A to Point B, avoiding children who were out to be heard loudly if not seen, I looked up at a giant screen and found that I'd been morphed into………Darth Vader!?!?  Was I a victim of an alien snatch?  Or an Artificial Intelligence scam?  Whatever planet I'd landed on, would I need to learn a new language?

 

And language was very much on my mind.  Through a friend who's a financial advisor, I've been invited over the past months to a series of on-line talks by experts in various fields related to aging and retirement.  Lately,  I'd sat in on a 3-part series to do with estate planning.  The expert was a bright, pretty, young lawyer who is dually qualified to practice law in Canada and in her native Britain. (Is it fair to have all those gifts in one package?)  Just think:  Here's a young woman who has walked in Charles Dickens' footsteps.

 

When I asked if British law students have a go at his novel "Bleak House" (click HERE to see why), she looked mystified.  That's okay because, in answer to another question, she volunteered her "favourite expression in English law – hotchpot, which gives us the hotchpot clause."  

 

Ooooh.  This was pure gold! Without at first even knowing what it meant, I couldn't wait to have as much fun with "hotchpot" as I'd had with those other legal terms, "frolick and detour" and "incorporeal hereditaments."   You can find official explanations here and here.  And if you're keen to learn about the culinary use of hotchpot – or hotchpotch, or hodge podge – try this for "pot" lore and more about the word's 14^th century origins.

  

But for simplicity's sake, here's an example of legal hotchpot that sticks in my mind:  A parent has several children and advances $10K to one of them for a down-payment on a house.  The parent wants to be sure that his children are treated equally in his will – so he adds a "hotchpot clause" that states that any sums like this are to be counted against that child's share of the parental wealth so that, on division, the others are not shortchanged.  Otherwise, the housebuyer might be said to be double-dipping.

 

Got it?  Sort of?  So how was I going to translate this into a painting?  I kicked around all kinds of ideas and all kinds of sayings that might apply.   Scrooge McDuck (Donald's uncle) in his money bin even made a brief appearance – my childhood idea of what a rich man's wealth might look like.

 

 

I wrestled with this for more than a week and finally decided…oh, heck, maybe this is a time to hunker down and do a semi-serious copy of an actual painting.  The idea of a card game came to mind – winners and losers, games of chance, etc.  Looking for a source, I happened on "The Card Game" by Lucas vanLeyden, a 14^th century Flemish painter, and I rolled up my sleeves to begin.

 

Who are these people? – perhaps three aging siblings who are playing the hands they're dealt and looking to get their piece of the pie?  (Note that no pie is evident in the original.)

 

By the way, as word associations go, "Early Flemish painting" always strikes me as boring – until I remember that one of my favourite all-time paintings is this one.  Another painting by the same Pieter Brueghel the Elder is entitled, "100 Dutch Proverbs"  and is said to illustrate just what the title promises.  Some are listed in the link.

 

 

Well, here goes with the hotchpot painting.

 

I knew that guy on the right was going to give me problems.

 

In fact, I should have paid more attention to the guy on the left, but I was bedazzled by his sleeves -- and his hat that would have befitted a Beetle Being.  So, with its many flaws (and many lessons worth learning), here's the final.  Let's call it "No Cheating" (copyright 2023) – and dedicate this post to someone who's a world-class legal mind and pie baker!

 

 

While we're upholding the right way to do things, let's go back to those British law courts for a minute.

 

 

Is it possible that at Science World, I was morphed into one of these barristers – minus the wig, of course?  Umm.  Doesn't have quite the same appeal – and now Darth Vader is walking off in a huff – or maybe Darth has gone to scout the snack bar for his piece of the P-I-E-E-I-P-Pie?  (You really must click on this link!)

 

Newsmakers of the Year

 

Another whirl of the old globe for all of us, and a friendly face or two to recall some close-to-home high times in 2022 – Panda and a 3-inch diameter slice of bamboo (a holiday thrift shop find – not from my back yard), a broken brick from three blocks away, and a new denizen and panda-pal for the Yellow House – a ladybug whose presence recalls her extensive clan.

 

It's a reflective time of year for me and, like Janus, the Roman god of doorways, I take time to look both backward and forward.  Unpack the time-honoured Xmas ornaments and audiotapes (20-30-40 years old) and I'm comfortably off in reveries for a good week or more.

 

One of this week's sentimental journeys was a spin on the Google bicycle that records Streetview with a plan to check out all the places I've ever called home, the actual houses I lived in.  Surprisingly, most of these are still there – including the London, Ontario, rental house where we made our cozy home in 1972-77 before heading west.

 

It's the centre structure.  To its left is the student apartment building, where some kids first adopted and then abandoned the sweetest tabby kitten.  She was a feisty little one with her Plan B, already hanging out in the yard (at spitting distance) from our own two cats.  When the students cleared out, she barged in through our screen door and within days was part of the family.  With a nod to the spy thrillers of the time, we named her "Intrepid – the Cat Who Came in from the Cold" – aka "Treppy." 

 

Another memory of that house seemed to resonate with one of my life drawings in a stack I was sorting.  I would sit on the sofa inside the front window, looking out onto the narrow front porch beneath the overhang of the roof.  Sometimes I'd think of the women who must have lived in that house before me.  Oddly enough, I'd often think of the Irish grandmother I never knew, who came almost alone to a new country (the US) and made her life there. 

 

Young women who dreamed their dreams – and, along another thought train, young women artists who might even have made something of a name for themselves at one time but are forgotten now, like those in the book I'm coincidentally re-reading over the holidays.

 

 

Do you recognize any of these names?  Gwen John, Ida Nettleship, Gwen Salmond, and Edna Clarke Hall.  Before reading the book, I knew only Gwen John, as sister of her well-known brother Augustus.

 

And so – in this sentimental season – my memories, the life drawing, the book I'm reading, all came together in a plan for a painting – a young woman dreaming at a window.

 

It's not a self-portrait although I borrowed my once-brown hair – rather, it's a kind of reverie on…oh, let's say, one of youth's tasks.

 

 

It wasn't painted in the spirit of "What might have been…" or "If only…".  At different times in my life, trusted listeners have advised me that both these phrases are less than helpful.  And in the broad brush, it doesn't apply only to females.

 

Here's the final version – much less than I'd dreamed, but I can always paint over!  "She Was Young Once – and Dreamed" (copyright 2022)

 

Today, New Year's Eve, I grabbed a not-bad weather forecast and headed for a long ramble along Kits Beach where I found lots of dogs and walkers and, happily, no lasting damage from the week's King Tides.

 

On the way home, at my last transfer point, I spotted just the right message for the New Year – or any year.  Painted on building walls that will soon be hidden by the new subway station being built there, these young and old faces and their message seem to have been waiting – just for us.

 

 

 

Festivities and surprises

 

For me, the festive season started over a month ago.  Suddenly, it was as if the logjam broke, and it became possible again for meet-ups once or even twice a week with a friend here, a friend there, who I hadn't seen in however-long-it-was.  Almost every reunion would begin with, "I can't remember the last time we were able to do this."

 

One happy marker that kicked off the late fall get-togethers was the arrival of my friend M, home for a long-awaited weekend to see her Vancouver family – and friends like me, for whom it's been a very long time.  We found a familiar place for coffee and talked almost three hours straight.  As we parted M said, "Oh, I thought you might be interested in this – from an exhibit I saw recently."

 

 

The title didn't entirely make sense to me (more about that in a minute) but when I turned the simple 2-sided card to the reverse ------- OMG!!   I'd found a new hero(ine).  Yet I had never before heard of this B.C. artist.

 

 

"Interested" indeed!   Let's start with the artist's name, which I googled as soon as I reached home:  "How do you pronounce 'Myfanwy'?"   The answer:  "muh-VON-wee – a Welsh name that means 'dear one' or 'lovely little one.'"

 

As you'll read here and here,  Myfanwy was a well-known portrait artist and member of a group of prominent Victoria B.C. artists called "The Limners."  Our own Emily Carr –(talk about belated recognition!) -- had noted Myfanwy's talent as an 8-year-old child and had given her some lessons and encouragement.

 

Our Vancouver Public Library could offer only an exhibit pamphlet from 1978 – twenty pages of about 60 small reproductions of paintings, drawings, collages.

 

Here's a self-portrait:

 

 

And a quite dynamic view of her husband.

 

 

So far, I haven't discovered how she came to paint musicians such as Yehudi Menuhin and Mstislav Rostropovich.  There are several Menuhin portraits on-line; here's one from the exhibit pamphlet:

 

Among subjects of hers are Queen Elizabeth II, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau (his official portrait that hangs in the House of Commons) – and Katharine Hepburn!  But the painting that I loved best of those in the library's 1978 pamphlet is this one:

 

 

And so – I resolved to try to copy it, as a memory of this happy discovery of a "new" artist.  Here's the preliminary layout:

 

And here's an early stage – often these are more engaging than the later ones.   Look carefully and you'll see that I'd already drifted into a mistake I wouldn't catch until a few sessions later – putting five fingers (not counting the thumb) on her left  hand!

 

Here's my final version.  It was so satisfying to spend time with this small reproduction as a way to lock in this new discovery -- brought to me across the waters of the Salish Sea by my friend M.  It's a happy coincidence that Myfanwy's original is titled "Mary."

 

 

As I thought of these happy autumn reunions with so many cherished friends,  I remembered a passage from novelist Lawrence Durrell's series "The Alexandria Quartet."  In that letter-writing era, the character Balthazar writes to a friend:

"…how much better it would be if we could talk… I think it is perhaps the only real lack of which one is conscious in living alone:  the mediating of a friend's thoughts to place beside one's own, just to see if they match!"