Listening, Watching

(click for larger image)

A story begins to want to be told but hasn't found its voice.  I'm going through the archives, the old clippings, yellowed bits from the Evening News, the Post-Dispatch of the 1920s and 30s, the obituaries and the news, the letters from my great grandmothers. I'm listening for the voices in the stories, making notes, jotting down fragments I overhear as conversations echo in distant rooms and photographs speak from their frames. But mostly listening, saying little. I'm online less; it's too noisy there.

Pictures also want to be painted, while the style of the painter remains elusive. And there is no solution for that except to draw and paint, every day, exploring similar subjects, watching and looking for the movement of the hand, the mark on the paper, the juxtaposed colors that unexpectedly lead out of what seems like an endless forested circle onto a still-indistinct but discernible path. A blaze may be put on a tree, then, and when I circle back, as I inevitably will, it will be there.

Meanwhile the blog waits hungrily, none too patiently, to be fed, and the people looking through the gate are probably getting restless and bored, while the humuggity increases. That was Cousin Elsie's word, my own cousin told me on the phone last night, a combinaton of mugginess and humidity. She was a unique character, he adds, and I say yes, they were all unique characters, our ancestors, and so are we. In her journal, my great-aunt Inez as a child rides with her father through the hills to visit her Cousin Elsie, behind the team of Jen and Charlie, hitched to the wagon. It's the summer of 1905, and very hot...

In my studio, vicarious coolness. I've been exploring the Montmorency waterfall, doing an ongoing series of drawings and watercolors, and instead of looking for pieces to put together, I'm searching out structures that I eventually want to deconstruct. Over and over, I draw the falling water, the folds of the rock, the trees clinging to the steep slope like furry animals, the threadlike cables of the suspension bridge and the curve of water in the pool below. I study the complex trees in the middle distance and the foreground, searching for shapes and forms, for patterns of light and darkness, the interlocking curves and lines, for what it is in this landscape that speaks to me. It's good for me; it's so not about words.

Traveling to the studio in the morning, and back in the evening, I see things. A huge pink dahlia in someone's front garden on a poor block, growing larger and heavier each day. A woman with a furrowed brow pushing her baby in a carriage, the baby with the same worried look on its face: the infant face of the mother. Two men in top hats and white shirts with waistcoats, riding Victorian bicycles, who appear and disappear like an apparition, leaving passersby staring after them down the street. There seems to be less of me, as I make friends with a stranger, uncertainty.

And at home in the evening, I write little bits, think, and read a great deal. Berger, lately, random pages of Lilac and Flag and last night, the first story, "Lisboa," in Here is Where We Meet:

"An old woman with an umbrella was sitting very still on one of the park benches. She had the kind of stillness that draws attention to itself. Sitting there on the park bench, she was determined to be noticed. A man with a suitcase walked through the square with the air of going to a rendezvous he kept every day. Afterwards a woman carrying a little dog in her arms - both of them looking sad - passed, heading down towards the Avenida da Liberdade. The old woman on the bench persisted in her demonstrative stillness. To whom was it addressed?

Abruptly, as I was asking myself this question, she got to her feet, turned and, using her umbrella like a walking stick, came toward me.

I recognised her walk, long before I could see her face. The walk of somebody already looking forward to arriving and sitting down. It was my mother."

Comments

[laurie]

i loved your pictures of the charlevoix, and here, for your enjoyment, is a story i wrote about being there a few years back. (i won't be offended if you don't read it.) travel story

and i am waiting to see what story emerges from your post today.

[Vivian]

From the Berger quote I felt a resonance with the drawings you have been making of late, in the sense that he was a generation older than himself in his (writing) technique and yet found a way to bend that technique to his own voice, matter & leadings.

[Diana]

If the painting here is what comes forth these days, then you just keep quiet and paint/draw! It is so very fine. So fine. Looking fwd to more as they emerge. No impatient hunger for words here.

Thank you for all the gifts you give us.

[Jean]

Oh, oh, this is all entrancing - and an entrancingly suggesetive piece of writing. I specially love the last drawing of the series, where the trees start to look like a Tiffany window and I want to see that in colour. But what I want is not the point, only where your artistic sensibility wants to go. I envy your being at the beginning of Here is Where we Meet - such a very wonderful book, my favourite of Berger's I think, for me the summit of his art, and just the perfect thing to read because it is so deep and satisfying and alluring, but it doesn't take you on a long, long journey that will lure you away from your own.

[Beth]

Hi Laurie, and thanks so much for sending your story, which of course I will read! And get back to you afterwards. Don't hold your breath about the writing from me, this is a longterm project and may or may not come to fruition, but I'm thinking about it more actively and positively than I've been able to for a while.

Thanks for commenting, Vivian. I'm not an abstract artist so anything I do probably builds on the past more than breaking new ground, but I hope, like Berger's work, it will ultimately be individual and somehow unique to me...

Diana, thank you so much for your kindness and encouragement. It means a lot.

Good morning, Jean! Thanks for commenting on the drawings, I appreciate hearing what you think. Different people respond to different things in art and in writing, and it's easy it lose sight of that when you have your nose too close to the work. So I'm always happy to hear what people think, whether or not it coincides with my own inner promptings.

I've actually read "Home is Where We Meet" already, I'm just going back to some favorite parts of Berger and other authors, trying to see more of what they were doing and how they were doing it. That first story, "Lisboa," was my favorite part of this wonderful book and I'm glad to hear you liked it too.

[dale]

Gorgeous, Beth. I've never seen it put so succinctly: searching out structures that I eventually want to deconstruct -- that restless prowl, when you're a wandering Shiva.

[Jan]

Oh Beth, this has to be my favorite sketch, of all the sketches I've enjoyed. So interesting to see the variations. And of course, I always like the images created within my mind from your writing. Keep sharing.

[Clive Hicks-Jenkins]

I've been absent from this site for too long. Blame overwork and house restoration. (In the thick of the latter again, trying to get as many sash windows restored as possible before the Winter is upon us.) But the good thing about having been away for a while, is that there's much to read and appreciate! I've also finally got around to linking The Cassandra Pages from the Artlog. I'm sorry it took me so long to get around to this.