There’s always a chance to begin again

 

 

Look closely within the circles and you'll see healthy growth on the small rose bush I acquired in 2018.  It flourished nicely on my porch for several summers, and then this past winter's extreme cold seemed to knock it out. A month ago, I clipped off the obvious deadwood and crossed my fingers.  Two days ago, those healthy green leaves greeted me one morning.  The 19th century author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote, "The beginning is always today."   And she should know – surely her Frankenstein wasn't built in a day!

 

I was still mulling over the business of cool and warm colours when my friend Y sent a photo of the magnificently garbed European Firebug spotted (ouch!) at her son's property not far from Budapest.  Here's a stock photo of His Eminence in all his glory.

 

That's all I needed!  I began working on small studies, playing on various tones of red, including one that showed a museum visitor assessing paintings of beetles!

 

 

I'd been recalling the lovely young woman I'd once surreptitiously photographed doing the same thing – with a view to one day painting her.

 

Then it happened that I picked up on Y's comment that she really didn't like these beetles, and I decided that producing another in the Beetlemania series would be no thanks for all the inspirations she's shared.

 

I was carried away, though, with the figure of the young woman and splashed onward chaotically.  For one thing, I'd decided to paint over and "re-purpose" a 2022 painting called "Chortle."

 

 

My friend G has noted the times I've painted over old stuff.  Hard to tell if she's serious (with that subtle gleam in her eye), but she's convinced that some day a famous (?!) painting of mine will be scraped back and beneath – voila! – there will be found something even more astonishing.  Maybe like the recent find of a small dog in the corner of a Picasso painting?

 

The fact is that at this point I was deep into chaos.  Not even organized chaos.  I thought of a new-to-me saying I'd learned from my neighbour pal, something that I might have known from childhood if I, too, had been born and raised in  Canada:  "Begin as you mean to go on."   This intrigues me as a more purposeful statement than, "getting off to a good start" or "putting your best foot forward" – instead, it offers real guidance on the process of planning ahead and moving forward.

 

Instead, with no preliminary studies, no colour experiments, I was splashing to the beat of the familiar (and perhaps contradictory) artist's observation, "The painting tends to take on a life of its own."

 

Somewhere along the way, I'd decided that the museum wall would feature, instead of the Firebug, the fabulous self-portrait by 20^th century Canadian artist Myfanwy Pavelic.  Thanks to a pamphlet shared with me by friend M, I'd met and explored her works late last year.

 

Initially, I'd assumed my painting would replicate the colours the young viewer was wearing in my photo of her:-- dark skirt and top against light museum wall.  But as things began to shape up, I saw that it only made sense to put her in the same grey-white clothing as Myfanwy's -- and to darken the museum wall.

 

And then -- when I began to work on copying Myfanwy's self-portrait, I found a whole art school education in trying to master the changes in tone from white to multi-greys to near-back.  Eventually, aside from this greyscale,  there would be little more than a slice of red wall, some yellow in the hair of both subject and viewer, and some grey-blue.

 

 

By now, I had a title for this painting -- "In Another Lifetime" – and something of a story line.  I imagined the young viewer speculating on whether she might wish to travel back in time to Myfanwy's artists' circle, The Limners -- or whether in today's world, she might want to travel cross-country to hang out with the Toronto teenager who was offered $4.1 million in art scholarships.  (For that matter, what if Myfanwy's own time machine took her forward to Now – what would that mean?)

 

Here's the final version (copyright 2023), which I'll be keeping for a good long while – because I learned so much from working with the range of white-grey-black. 

 

 

As I wrapped this up, I recalled a line from a poem by Stephen Spender --  "One more new botched beginning".  But I can't find the whole poem, so who knows?  Meanwhile, my reborn rose has no intention of botching the season.  Here's how it looked on May 30, 2018, with buds about to open -- and this year it can only be better!

 

The Handy Little House That Goes With You

 

You guessed it, didn't you?  That with a stretch, I'm using this mosaic snail and his house to signal a return to the Maison d'Etre series, first introduced here.

 

 

This time, I decided to focus on the verb tomber which means "to fall" or "to drop" – or to do a whole bunch of other things, when combined with other phrases.  By the way, if you've studied French and never heard of "la Maison d'Etre" you're not alone.  The three best French speakers I know, one of them speaking her native tongue, have never heard of it.  It seems to be a pedagogical tool that caught on in some quarters after its introduction in the 1960s.

 

I collected my source material – for which photos of dancers and drawings from my life classes were so useful -- and then did some small studies.

 

I started with one of those earnest ideas I'd picked up from a class – to begin each gesture with indications of the stresses or weights on the figure.

 

Typically, my earnest ideas don't last long once I begin splashing with colour.

 

Funnily enough, at this early stage I remembered my "Frolick and Detour" painting – and  how that wild scene might be hard to shake off.

 

But "Frolick and Detour" isn't solely to blame.  Back in the early 1980s, I'd produced this entanglement – from a collection of swim goggles.

 

 

Hmm.  Something of a resemblance.  Well, let's move right along to the final version of "Free Fall – Tomber - House of Etre Series" (copyright 2023).

 

What do you think of the outcome?  Is this a case of bien tomber (to be lucky) or mal tomber (to be unlucky)?  Check here to see if any of a dozen or more other possibilities apply.  (I'd looked for "to fall asleep" but that's a different verb entirely).

 

Back to "Frolick and Detour" for a minute.   I've realized that my mania for lively interacting figures goes way back.  A long way back – to my first artistic choice!  I hadn't reached kindergarten when my mother entrusted me for a day to a rural neighbour who had kids a little older than I was.   It was a weekday so I trotted off with them to their one-room schoolhouse.  There, the teacher kindly gave me crayons and suggested that I choose and copy a picture from one of their storybooks.  YES!! What better way to spend a day?

 

I can still visualize the view out that schoolhouse window as I earnestly settled to my task.  And then -- My first show!  My first review!  The teacher was blown away (okay – I know; good teachers are the ones who make you feel good about yourself) by my copies of the six poses in a sequence that showed a pig falling down a flight of stairs!  And what do you think I've always remembered when I see Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase"?

 

This is getting rather silly, isn't it? And who's laughing loudest?  The sleek fellow who drops and falls fearlessly and makes a soaring recovery every time.  (Hmmm….if pigs could fly??)

 

 

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:

 

Annals of eccentricity

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy April 1^st!   

 

Did I once foolishly suggest that I found the very mention of early Dutch or early Flemish painting to be….yawn…boring? Today's Special proves quite the opposite:  "The World Feeds Many Fools" by an unnamed someone of the "Netherlandish School of the 16^th Century."  Far from boring – and it's certainly very eccentric!

 

Actually, when I first learned the word "eccentric," probably at around age 10, I knew it was one of MY words, and eccentrics were among my kind of people.  This affinity for eccentrics was mightily tested in the dark days of the winter just ended.

 

It started innocently enough.  I'd realized that the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) offered music streaming among its digital resources.   I wondered if the offerings might include my favourite cello suites by the renowned long-gone cellist who performs them best – Maurice Gendron.  Our old audiotapes had been retaped at home at least twice over the decades – before they finally gave up the ghost. 

 

Wonderful!  Thank you, VPL.  Gendron and Bach are on tap – and in the catalog search, I'd noted a neighbouring listing of another Gendron:  Adelard A., author of "The Artist and the Line."  Never heard of it.  Never heard of him.  But I was intrigued.  Certainly, line is a key element to be considered in visual art, and I was reminded of the great 20^th century artist Paul Klee....

 

who wittily wrote:-- "Drawing is taking a line for a walk."

 

Before long, Gendron's somewhat yellowed 1954 book was in my hands.

 

In the introductory pages, he describes himself as having been a young art student in 1920.

 

He's not exactly an engaging writer, but after more paragraphs of similar tone, he begins his "lexicon of lineology."  Here's a sample page – "caprizant line" is rather irresistible….but a "carefully drawn line" vs. a "carelessly drawn line"?

 

In total, there are 132 similar pages!  Can you imagine?!?  He's like the unstoppable Sorcerer's Apprentice, bringing line after line after line….many of his own devising.  Beyond eccentric.  Certainly obsessive, to say the least.  And now I really wanted to know:-- Who was this guy??  

 

It was a dark and snowy night in early January when I set to work – quickly discovering that Canada was full of Gendrons – Quebec in particular, where almost every generation and every branch had an "Adelard" of its own.   No wonder "Gendron" is a name as common for the French as "Smith" is for the English – since it derives from the Old French for "son-in-law."  And with all the kids in these families, there must eventually have been plenty of those.

 

My internet searches led me to pages like this:

 

I could barely believe one old handwritten record listing 14 siblings, born one year apart -- each with one of the old French-Canadian names like Celestin, Agénard, Evrard, Achille, Bonaventure, Aubin, Rosaire for the boys; and Aglae, Apolline, Hyacinthe, Scholastique, Theoriste, Cephise, Mathurine for the girls.

 

Whew!  Time to take a break and, in the spirit of Old Quebec, watch the snow fall.  There were so many byways, so many false leads.  The author had described himself as an art student in 1920 – yet he had an LLB?  (Canadian designation for a lawyer).  If he'd gone to art school – when and where?  Ditto, law school? And how old would he have been for each?

 

Canadian Census data was if-fy – formal census procedures and timetables didn't even kick in for all provinces in the same year.  And I'd wandered fruitlessly in the byways of early art schools, law schools, history societies large and small, Canadian government data, Quebec government data, French-Canadian equivalent of Ancestry.com, maps and vintage photos of small towns – and on and on.

 

I had found one plausible connection to Aylmer, Quebec – a family listed in the 1911 Census with a 10-year-0ld boy named "Adelard."

 

His birth date and parents' names even connect to a 1975 obituary in Nashua, New Hampshire – Adelard L. Gendron, born in Quebec.  But – oh, no! – the library book shows the author as "Adelard A."  Yet, not to be completely discouraged, I recalled somewhere seeing an Adelard with "Adolphe-Leopold" as a middle name.

 

Is this how people go quietly bonkers when they're isolated in the midst of a blizzard?  I wasn't going to let that happen!  I needed to stop searching, ground myself, and have some fun interacting with this eccentric literary production. 

 

Here's the man who would help:

 

Handsome dude, eh?  I found him among photos of McGill University law grads and borrowed him as an Adelard Wannabee.  I drew a simple outline of his profile and also drew deeply on Adelard A. Gendron's counsel:

 

"An unartistic line is an inartistic line."

 

And then I began to fill in the blanks, starting with a line related to my own blepharoptosis  (about which I have no cause to worry):

 

I looked for other possibilities to match the line to a context – a CONVEX one in this case.

 

And I just plain enjoyed some JOYSOME lines.

 

It was a memorable weekend, after all – the drain pipe thawed, the snow was deep enough for fun with a shovel, and I still had a gift of delectable holiday fruitcake to nibble.  I even invented some lines of my own:

The wistful line is one that traces the entanglement of wisteria and suggests the emotion of wistfulness that Adelard A-L Gendron could not himself be definitively traced.

As for Adelard, was he an eccentric?  Why, it's written all over his face!