the cassandra pages

Willow and Stream

Willow and Stream near Otselic, New York. Watercolor, gouache, with touches of charcoal pencil. 6" x 6". May 30, 2023.

Last week we were in central New York for a visit to the lake, and, because Memorial Day was near, we also visited the graves of my parents, maternal grandparents, and great aunt -- I'll write another post about that soon. One afternoon we drove over the hills to the cemetery in South Otselic, NY where many of my ancestors are buried. Unlike the winter landscapes that had preoccupied me since January, the whole world had become green, lush, and leafy. It wasn't a particularly pretty day, there were no interesting clouds, the sun was right overhead, and the green felt relentless. But I stopped and took a few pictures anyway, and a few days ago, back in Montreal, started working with one of them.

Here it is, and it's pretty boring! I stared at the photograph for a long time, wondering what I could possibly do with it, and trying to remember what had felt compelling enough about the scene to ask J. to stop the car. The answer is in the title of this post -- the willows and the stream - but I didn't know how to make a picture from this: how to make it interesting, when there was so little color or even obvious, strong compositional shapes. So I decided to begin with drawing, and a few hours later, this was the result:

As you can see, the drawing is cropped in from both sides to focus more on the willows and downplay the field. It was fun to draw a verdant landscape instead of the snow-covered ones and I was surprised that it worked this well in charcoal, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with the composition. When preparing a set of details to post on Instagram, I had cropped into the image and saw that a much closer view was better. In the original, the stream forms a strong diagonal but it also divides the picture into two more-or-less equal triangles, giving the grassy foreground too much prominence compared to what had first attracted me: the shapes and growth pattern of the willows overhanging the stream, with the brightness leafiness above, and the dark, mysterious area where the willow overhangs the bank of the stream.

When cropped, that's much more what we see.

Then the question was how to translate this into color. The next day, I took out my watercolors to make a sketch, and ended up struggling with it for quite a long while, trying to keep it loose and interpret the scene with vigorous brushstrokes and beautiful color that wasn't necessarily in either the original landscape or photograph. 

The tree branches here are dark blue and brighter blue, not black or brown, and the blue is echoed in the grassy areas and the stream, contrasting with the bright yellow-greens of the sunstruck leaves. But it wasn't until I made the stream itself brown, and added the few strokes of orange, that the picture began to sing at all.

By then I had overworked the dark area of low branches at the left front, so I went in with just a little bit of opaque watercolor to add some leaves, and a few strokes of white charcoal pencil to highlight the tops of some branches and bring them forward. Then, fortunately, I forced myself to quit before messing around with it any further!

I'll probably do another version of this scene in a different medium, maybe pastel, maybe oil or acrylic, before letting it go. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts!

 

I Couldn't Keep from Singing

Sketching on the bulletin up in the choir loft, during the sermon last Sunday...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone back to singing in the cathedral choir. As the warmer weather appeared, the risk/benefit ratio between continuing to be super-careful and starting to live more normally seemed to change. My husband had started encouraging me to go back to the choir, but I was unsure. One day not long ago I went for a walk, feeling a bit morose and sorry for myself, but by the time I came back home, I had made a decision to write to the music director and ask if it would be all right for me to return. He said yes, and on the next Sunday, I sang in person with the group for the first time in three years.

It’s been a long history. I started singing in a church choir when I was about six years old, and have continued (which seems incredible, even to me) nearly all of my life.

I graduated to the adult choir in that Episcopal parish once I entered junior high school. After I graduated from university and was working in my home town, I conducted that small choir for two years. In 1976, I moved to New England, and joined a very good choir at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover, New Hampshire. I stopped for a few years when J. and I got together, because his father was the Unitarian Universalist minister in Woodstock, Vermont, and we started going to hear him preach on Sundays, and then often had lunch with his parents at their home afterwards. After my father-in-law left that position, I realized how much I had missed singing, and began again with the choir in Hanover. I sang there during all the years we lived in Vermont, until we moved to Montreal in 2006, and took private voice lessons for some of that time as well. When we moved, we joined the congregation of Christ Church Anglican Cathedral in Montreal but I was unsure if I could manage the commitment or the stress of being in the cathedral choir, which was on another whole level of rigor than anything I had experienced. Thank God I had the courage to try, and to sing with Patrick Wedd — the cathedral’s music director, extraordinary organist, and soon a fast friend — for twelve years, and then with Nick Capozzoli and Rob Hamilton, Jonathan White, and then Nick after he became the Director of Music following Jonathan’s resignation in the second year of the pandemic. But with my own age and my husband's immune issues, I didn't feel comfortable going back to singing when the choir regrouped in person, and especially not when the masks came off. It was only this spring, as the pandemic waned somewhat and we began to feel more comfortable after some medical advice, when I began to think about possibly re-joining.

I had almost resigned myself to the idea that my singing career was over; after all, I was not young anymore, and I absolutely did not want to be one of those people who is talked about behind their back: “Why doesn’t she quit?” I wasn’t sure how it would feel this time around, but so far, my voice has felt good, and not too fatigued even after a full day of rehearsals and two services. However, I’ve pledged to myself that I will stop when I can no longer contribute positively — and hope it will be clear to me when that time has come.

Making music hasn’t been the problem: I’ve been playing the piano a lot since moving it to our new apartment. This winter, working on some Schubert Impromptus, new to me, was a great consolation during the darkest months of weather as I dealt with change and grief. But if you have had a history of making music with other people, that experience is pretty irreplaceable. Singing in a choir is a particular kind of musical experience, too, and in one like ours, where we churn through a huge amount of repertoire in a short time, you have to like sight-reading and be good at it, have experience in a wide range of periods and styles, and be able to absorb and learn the music very quickly so that you can perform it confidently after only a couple of times through -- if that. It’s not the same at all as a choir that practices a few pieces of music intensively for, say, a whole semester, and then gives a concert. A choir like ours cannot work on each piece with the same level of attention to detail, but if the singers and director are very good, and they have a strong affinity and sense of singing together as a group, they can actually perform very well, week in and week out. Although we don’t repeat pieces very often — it may be a matter of many years — when we come back to something that we know, then of course we can work on the details with even greater finesse. It’s a particular kind of challenge, and it’s exactly what I like most as a musician.

The camaraderie of a choir is also a particular sort of bond, and I think some of that comes from the fact that our only instruments are our bodies. There's a physicality about singing with others that creates a greater awareness of all the other group members than I ever found when I was playing in a band or orchestra. The personnel of this choir has changed a lot in the years I was away. Most of the professionals who sang with us have left and been replaced by new and younger singers (all of whom are excellent); most of the volunteer singers are also younger — many are McGill students or recent graduates — and in addition to the eight paid professionals we now have three choral scholars. These are gifted college-age singers who are given a stipend in exchange for the experience of singing in this kind of a group, and doing some solo and ensemble work on their own. But there are several people who, like me, were in the choir for years and are still there, and some new, but older volunteers I’ve been happy to meet. One of them is a man in his late 80s who I talked to for the first time last Sunday. He had sung in the cathedral choir thirty years ago, and then stopped because of some vocal problems — and now he is back. After we had told each other brief versions of our choir histories, he smiled at me and said, “Yes, it just gets into your blood.”

Like him, I don’t know how long I will be singing, but I know how much I missed it, and that it means a great deal to me to be able to do it again. Of all the things I've done, singing is one that keeps me firmly attentive to the present moment, and is perhaps one of the best ways of finding the joy that being fully in that moment can provide. And it still seems miraculous to me that, with only our bodies, we can take a collective breath in silence, and, the next moment, bring forth the extraordinary music that only a choir of human voices can create.

For a quiet moment that illustrates this, listen to the introit (opening choral work) by going to 6:20 in the video below, of last Sunday's Evensong for the Feast of the Ascension. It's "My Peace I Leave with You" by the 20th century American composer Amy Beach. (All the works except one that we sang that afternoon were by female composers.)

 

 

 

On Not Being a Mother

Every year, Mother's Day comes around, and those of us who are not mothers feel a range of emotions. Likewise, it can be a lonely day for those of us who have lost our mothers. I always think of my own mother, who died on May 23, 2006, and who I miss every day of my life. So there is sadness, gratitude, appreciation, some regret about things I never said or did, but mostly a sense of love -- and awareness that her love for me showed me how to love others. There are many people for whom this day brings just the opposite -- a wish that they had had a sympathetic, loving mother, or perhaps a wish that they had not known their mother at all, or that she had lived longer... I also have friends who have lost their children. What can this day be like for them? There are so many individual stories that deviate from the idealized picture painted by this observance we call "Mothers' Day," and for those people, all the glowing tributes can be extremely painful.

So, I'd like to speak about not being a mother. My mother would have liked me to have children, but I did not. She never said that this was a huge disappointment for her, but I know it was, and it makes me feel a certain amount of regret when I think of her. But it wasn't to be, and it wouldn't have been the best path for me. Looking back now, it's clear to me that not being a mother allowed me to be fully myself, earlier in my life, than many who spent several decades raising children. I was able to develop my talents and abilities from my twenties on, without feeling divided or conflicted, and to understand myself as an individual in ways that have often been reserved for men. I was also able to have a different relationship with my husband than many couples who are parents. Did we miss some of the most fulfilling and joyful aspects of a human life? Of course, but we also had a relationship that was extremely close in other ways. As a woman, did I miss one of the defining experiences of being female? For sure. But because there is a still such a societal taboo against speaking negatively about motherhood, or parenthood, few people talk openly about the positive aspects of being childless, and, in fact, being childless continues to carry a stigma in many societies.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I didn't see the point of bringing up girls to have dreams about what they wanted to do in life, and then making them settle for less in order to be mothers who would then bring up a new generation of girls with similar conflicts, facing similar obstacles. Very few of my friends were able to successfully or happily "have it all" at the same time -- marriage, motherhood, and a career on the same level as what men had. That was an illusion we had been fed, and it turned out to create many problems, not just for the women who thought they could do all three equally well, but for their relationships and for their children. If men and women are both going to work, then access to birth control is vitally important, and so is access to affordable daycare, laws to protect women against sexual harassments, and equal pay, equal rights, and equal opportunities for advancement in the workplace. This has not changed nearly enough in the intervening decades, and in some cases we are going backwards, to the detriment of women.

 

And on whom does the burden fall? In the printing industry, back when I was a graphic designer, there was a saying, often represented by a triangular graphic: "Price, Speed, Quality: pick any two." I've always felt this could be applied to women's lives with the triangle of "Career, Relationship, Motherhood."  The further you move toward any side of the triangle representing two points -- "Relationship and Career", for instance -- the harder it is to equally sustain "Motherhood". Prioritize "Relationship" and Motherhood", and it's harder to sustain "Career." Choose "Career" and "Motherhood", and you may jeopardize "Relationship." Mind you, I am mainly talking here about women who have a significant desire for their own, serious career, on the same level as men, and who don't hire other people to raise their children. And, to be fair, certainly in some areas of society today, men are doing much more childcare and home making than they did when I was a young woman.

Parenting is one of the most difficult and challenging tasks that anyone can take on, and it is getting harder, not easier, as our world becomes more complicated, more violent, and more uncertain. I am filled with admiration for those who try so hard to do it well, and for those who make enormous sacrifices on behalf of their children. For my husband and me, the question of whether it was responsible to bring children into the world was also a serious one. Loving him as I did, it was difficult for me not to have children with him: I wanted to give life to those people, to know them, to love them. So I am not here to judge anyone's choices, and I'm glad that there are still couples  -- and single people -- who choose to have children, and go into it with hope and courage. Let's also remember that there are many who did not make a deliberate choice to have children, but do have them, and are trying hard to be good parents, often with great difficulties.

But I also want to say to younger women: not having children is a valid choice, and you can have a fulfilling, happy, extremely rewarding life without being a mother. So don't let anyone talk you into doing it, or guilt you into it, if you don't want to, and try not to be sad and regretful if it is something you wanted that just didn't work out. Instead, try to see it as an opportunity, and do something positive with the freedom that you have.

I had, and still have, a lot of maternal instincts and desires. And I've found many ways for those to come out -- in relationships, in organizations, in mentoring, in giving. You don't have to be a parent in order to fulfill your natural desires, and in fact, sometimes you can do more, for more people, if you have greater freedom. 

In this era of recognizing gender and sexual diversity, I think we also need to recognize that there is not one, but a multitude of ways in which the fundamental relationship of  "Mother" and "Child" exists, and that while the idealized one may still be in the majority, it is not at all true or descriptive for a great many people -- so, please, be gentle and aware as we celebrate Mother's Day.

At the Musée des Beaux-Arts

Our weather has been really grim this week, adding to the feeling of cooped-up restlessness that is always part of this long run-up to real spring in the north. Yesterday afternoon I couldn't stand it any longer, and went out into the cold rain and wind to take the metro downtown, and then walk up to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, my sketchbook and drawing supplies in my bag.

We became members of the museum again a few months ago, for the first time since the pandemic began, but we've only visited once since. Yesterday, I was hoping to see some drawings, but there didn't seem to be much of any on display - I think I'll contact the curators and ask if it's possible to see anything from the collection. So instead I took a close look at the permanent collection of European art. There is a room of impressionists that’s not bad: an early Cezanne landscape, several Pissarros and Sisleys, a couple of large landscapes by Armand Guillaumin that I liked quite a lot. The 20^th century contemporary art collection is very thin and not to my taste. There's a large canvas by Elaine deKooning, and an oil sketch of five figures by Barbara Hepworth that I liked a lot; one painting by Matisse. Above, there's an entire floor of French Baroque/Rococo-- I can't stand that period so I skipped it -- and on the next level, some excellent Dutch paintings, among them two landscapes by Jacob von Ruisdael, a number of still lives, works by Breugel the Younger, and a beautiful Rembrandt portrait.

Detail from Portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1530, oil on wood.

On the top, when I entered the Renaissance galleries, I finally felt my whole body relax. There is no single spectacular piece, but in the darkened rooms, with some stained glass and some good sculptures, and the brilliant carmines and blues and greens in the paintings, I was quickly held in the quiet ambience of the age. I had never been to these galleries before, or maybe they have changed. After looking around carefully, and spending time with a Memling portrait of a young man, and a Holbein portrait of Erasmus in a fur-trimmed robe, holding a book, I did a couple of drawings of early sculptures that particularly spoke to me.

 

If I hadn’t been tired of standing when I finished, I would have also drawn a German wood carving, titled, “Virgin of the Annunciation”, that I found beautiful in her attitude of reflection as she looks away from her book at something that has entered her room. I will go back and do that.

On the other side of the street, connected by an underground passageway, a different building houses the Canadian collection, as well as galleries with antiquities and art from other parts of the world. I'm more familiar with those and will go there to draw sometime soon. 

In two of the rooms, wooden sketching benches had been positioned near large sculptures, with sheets of newsprint clipped to an easel attached to the seat. But there were too many visitors in those rooms for me to feel comfortable using one of those benches -- you'd feel like a live part of the display. Off to the side in the dark Renaissance rooms, no one bothered me. If they looked over my shoulder I didn't notice, and they quickly moved on.

Drawing in museums isn't something I've done very much - I really started doing that in Athens, more than three years ago, and haven't been in similar spaces much at all since then. When traveling, I always feel like time is at a premium and the priority in a museum is to see more of what is being shown. In one's home town, that's obviously not the case! I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before now; it was good for me.

Not Springing Along, but Inching...

Spring is coming very fitfully to Montreal this year. One day, warm weather; the next, cold clammy rain. It's pretty awful today. But forsythia is blooming, and the first daffodils, and the magnolias have huge buds. It will arrive.

And normalcy in our personal life also seems closer this year than for the past three. This weekend we had dinner at a friend's house and met some new people - what a pleasure! Saturday night we drove out to Pierrefonds, a western suburb that is still on the island of Montreal, to see Albertine en cinq temps, an opera adapted from Michel Trembley's 1984 play of the same name, with music by Catherine Major, and is a production conceived, created, and carried out entirely by women. It tells the story of a Montreal woman, Albertine, who has had a difficult life, and at age 70 is spending her first night in a nursing home. She talks with her earlier selves -- Albertine at 30, 40, 50, and 60 - as well as her sister, Madeline - and the story of her life is revealed through their conversations. Albertine's history mirrors the history of many Quebec women who were unable to find much freedom in their lives, and were deeply affected by patriarchal and religious attitudes. Interestingly, too, the story of her life takes place on rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine, the exact part of the city  where we used to live ourselves.

Albertine en cinq temps is also the first opera ever produced in Quebec to be written and performed in Joual. This is a Quebec dialect of French that was spoken mainly by the working class and is now a source of Quebec identity; many of its words have entered the main language as Quebec slang, but for those of us who didn't grow up hearing or speaking it, it can be really hard to understand. One of my close friends, Catherine St-Arnaud, who I sang with in the cathedral choir, sings the role of Albertine at 30 and has been part of the production team bringing this opera to life. She sent us a bilingual libretto to read beforehand, in French and English, and there were projected sur-titles, but because the French was all in dialect, it was a little tricky, as well as being fascinating to a word nerd like me. All in all, Albertine is a brilliant and very moving opera, beautifully conceived and sung, and if you ever have a chance to see it, by all means do so - there are several more performances of this current Quebec tour. This was also the first big public performance we've attended in three years, so it felt like a liberation for us.

I haven't been painting or drawing much this week, except for the watercolor here -- the bowl of fruit on the blue-and-yellow platter just begged to be painted, especially the brilliance of the pomegranates. This was somewhat bigger than usual - I did it in my 14" x 11" sketchbook and used large brushes.

Instead I'm working on a text to go with the charcoal landscape drawing series, which I hope to publish later in 2023. Because it's personal, as well as being about the art, it's been rather slow going, but it's coming along -- like the slow progress of spring.

Departures and Arrivals

Paper birch catkins. A watercolor from 2017.

Today is Good Friday for most of the Orthodox Church, and I wish my Orthodox friends a blessed Triduum and a very Happy Easter.

And it's a day when we can feel spring arriving. Last week at this time, Montreal was in the throes of a destructive ice storm that left much of the city without power, and devastated the city's trees. Yesterday it was 22 degrees C. here, and it felt like everyone was sitting out in the sun, blinking with amazement. I had coffee with my friend K. at a favorite café (Café Parma, on the north-western edge of the Jean-Talon market), and we could hardly believe we were sitting outdoors, wearing only light sweaters -- and sunglasses, because the light was so bright. We may have more snow, we all know that's entirely possible, but we also know it won't last.

Yesterday was Seamus Heaney's birthday; he would have been 84. I miss him. Here's a small section close to the end of his poem "Station Island," where he talks about meeting a blind stranger who gives him advice in a voice "as definite as a steel nib's downstroke"-- earlier this person has grasped his hand as he disembarks, but the poet cannot be certain "whether to guide or to be guided." In the poem the stranger, or blind seer, also mentions fasting and penitence -- appropriate for Good Fridays present and just past. 

(Read aloud for you, if you like, below.)

Heaney_station island

From "Station Island" by Seamus Heaney

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutor's or a singer's,

cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib's downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basket

with his stick, saying, "your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite,
What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don't be so earnest,

So ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget,
you've listened long enough. Now strike your note.

 

 

Color and Light

We recently returned to Montreal after a week in central New York. In Montreal, there was a terrible ice storm last Wednesday, with power outages that lasted days for many people, and devastating damage to the city's trees, especially in the parks. Friends sent us pictures and their own accounts, and while our building was without power for a long time, and then again last night, we clearly missed the worst of it. I also missed the observations of Holy Week at the cathedral for the first time in years, but we got back in time for Easter. Renewal, warmth, color, and sunlight are exactly what everyone needs -- myself included.

300 miles to the south, spring was already in the process of arriving, and on our last evening there, I got out my watercolors and painted this field that we had seen a few hours earlier in the late afternoon light. The luminous gold only lasted for a few minutes on this cut cornfield and the hill beyond, but it was breathtaking enough that I had cried "Stop the car!" and rushed out into the muddy road with my camera.

It did me a huge amount of good to be out in the countryside for a while after this long urban winter. We saw a nesting bald eagle, a flock of mergansers on the recently-unfrozen lake; rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, and wild turkeys; Canada geese, herons, robins, cardinals, and dark-eyed juncos...and someone -- maybe our weasel -- had generously left its scat on our front porch, full of hair and tiny bones. The stiff, bright green and purple noses of skunk cabbage had already poked through the water in the swamp, and spring peepers sang in full chorus even during daylight hours. No leaves showed on any trees or shrubs yet, just on one honeysuckle that faced the southern light, but there were pussy willows in the swamp, one of my mother's yellow crocuses was in bloom, and the woods felt tremulous, as if you could actually feel the pent-up power of all those tightly-furled leaves inside the millions of buds, ready to burst forth.

At the same time, I've been finishing my series of winter snowscapes in charcoal. There was still a lot of snow in the Adirondacks, and I was able to take reference pictures for a few more drawings, and stay within that much colder frame of mind while I was working on them. I'm also beginning an essay to accompany this series of drawings, about the central New York landscape and why it is under my skin. But I can feel my heart gravitating toward color and light, and coming back home to Easter only reinforced that sense of new beginnings, and new life.

We attended the Great Vigil of Easter at the cathedral on Saturday night. It begins with a fire in the courtyard, which is then carried into the dark church via the lighted Pascal candle, from which everyone's small tapers are lit, and we sit together in that near-darkness while the foundational stories of the Hebrew scriptures are read and music is sung; finally the dry bones of Ezekiel are brought to life, and we move to the resurrection story, the organ peals forth, bells ring, the lights go on and the candles are extinguished, and we find ourselves in a church bedecked with flowers and spring color. Pagan in some ways; ironic in a city ravaged by an ice storm, with so many families still in darkness and cold -- and utterly welcome to my own tired spirit. 

My other cathedral this year was this circle of hemlock trees on a small ridge near the lake. I had gone there on Good Friday morning, climbing up onto the ridge to stand under the trees, listening to the wind, the invisible amphibious chorus, the calls of nesting geese on the pond beyond, and let the peace of that place, along with many memories, permeate my body and heart.

Can We Reprogram our Brains?

Yesterday I read an article in The New York Times titled "What Killed Penmanship?" The teaching of cursive handwriting has fallen out of favor in schools, and been dropped from many state curricula. The reasons cited are obvious: we are living in the digital age; we spend so much time on our smartphones, tablets, and computers, that hardly anyone needs to be able to write by hand anymore, and certainly not "beautifully". Today, the most handwriting that many people do is to scrawl a note to themselves, or write a grocery list (though even I use my phone for that!) - so it's hard to justify forcing kids to learn to write well by hand, practicing all those loops and consistent slants. However, the article went on to talk about a site on Reddit called "Penmanship Porn" where people post and look at examples of beautiful handwriting, and also about remedial courses some people are taking, as adults, to try to improve their penmanship, or even learn how to write in a way that might make a splash on that Reddit site.

This is all quite interesting to me, as a former calligrapher, and granddaughter of a teacher of the Palmer Method who instilled that exemplar of cursive into me at a young age. I still have some of the Palmer Method pens she used - the kind with a nib you inserted and then dipped into an inkwell. Imagine that. My own handwriting, however, has deteriorated a lot over the past thirty years: proportionately, no doubt, with the marked improvement in my typing.

I'm not as concerned about whether or not kids learn cursive handwriting in schools from a motor-skills viewpoint -- after all, no one can argue that there's not major dexterity involved in typing on a phone with both thumbs at high speed, and most young people seem amazingly good at that. The brain's ability to form ideas and thoughts and transform them into words is probably not hugely different when the end result is written with a pen than when it's typed - although, let's admit it -- there's a big difference between texting and writing a long, thoughtful letter to a friend. 

But because the development of writing, as symbols made by hand, was such a critical part of human development itself, I do suspect that some sort of evolutionary neural pathway is no longer being used when we do not use our hands in this way. Maybe another question to ask is, "What Else Died when We Killed Off Penmanship?" I'm being somewhat facetious: plenty of people, like my left-handed husband, never learned cursive handwriting, and that fact didn't interfere with either his dexterity or creativity. It's not cursive that's at issue: it's what happens when we write words and thoughts down by hand. It's a slower process, related to drawing, that requires us to think carefully -- there's no delete button -- and use fine-motor coordination, as our brains navigate a complex communication pathway between mind, eye, and hand -- and from there to the intended recipient of whatever we wanted to record or communicate.

What specialized and complex tasks DO we actually use that mind-eye-hand pathway for, anymore? We brush our teeth and dress ourselves, we might prepare some food; some of us play sports; we certainly type. But fewer and fewer people play instruments, learn to draw, learn to write beautifully, know how to do needlework or woodworking, make a really good meal from scratch without taking all night, throw a clay pot, know how to fix their own cars or a leaking faucet -- the list goes on. Cars are a good example -- even if someone might want to learn how to service their own car, most vehicles have become so complex, with computer-controlled systems, that it's not even possible. In this sort of world, where the knowledge, desire, and need to do such things are disappearing, I wonder if the human being isn't becoming something quite different from what we were in all the preceding centuries. How are our brains changing in the process?

When I searched for information on this topic, it's predictably voluminous, but also rather vague. Scientists acknowledge that technology has contributed to weaker memories, attention spans, and information-processing ability. On the other hand, so many tasks that we once had to do in our heads, slowly and carefully, have become rapid and automatic -- and who doesn't prefer that? Going back to the old ways has become inconceivable.

But in terms of the loss of specific practices like handwriting or drawing, there is less written. What science does know is that our brains adapt and change in response to external stimuli but also what we tell them to do: we actually have some control over this. Repeated behavior reinforces certain neural pathways, and causes disused ones to atrophy -- though in many cases this can be reversed. Being repeatedly exposed to disturbing media that upsets us, for instance, can cause our brains to form pathways that automatically end up stimulating negative thoughts, worry, and stress.  When we are under stress, certain hormones are also released that affect our bodies. One of the best ways to interrupt this destructive process is to reprogram our brains through making time for creative activities that help us to focus and concentrate in different ways.  When we draw, write by hand, doodle, play an instrument, knit or sew, whittle a piece of wood, make a paper collage or scrapbook -- as when we meditate, or do yoga -- we are giving our brains a break and stimulating them to strengthen positive pathways, relax our bodies, and decrease stress. But those activities need to become a regular practice in order to have a real effect.

While these kinds of activities have declined since their last resurgence in the 60s and early 70s, it does seem to me that there is a counter-reaction now, and that more and more people want to step away for a while, slow down, and learn to do something contemplative -- and perhaps also useful or beautiful -- with their hands and bodies, perhaps driven to it by wanting something, anything, that will help with the anxiety of living in our chaotic world and the constant barrage of upsetting news. Last week I went to an evening meeting of a new knitting club at the local library -- and it was eye-opening. More about that in a subsequent post!

Inspiration and Perspiration

I can feel that I'm starting to be ready to wrap up this series of winter drawings, at least for this year. There are two or three others I'd like to do if I can. But this one beckoned persistently, and because I knew it would be a real challenge, I decided I'd better go for it while I still felt inspired.

On the day I saw this scene, we had been fortunate enough to drive through the Adirondacks just after a heavy snowstorm that had thickly coated every single branch of every tree -- the atmospheric conditions must have been very particular. Since the snowfall, there had been no wind, and we were nearly alone on the roads, so it felt like a sort of suspended animation. We left the main road at some point and drove up through deep woods on a narrow dirt road to its top, and then back down into a hollow where there was a stream. The road was icy, and we figured we'd better turn around while we could. Jonathan got out to take a picture of the water, but on the other side of the road, long ago, someone had made a semi-circular clearing, now ringed by this group of trees, completely covered with thick fresh snow: mostly spruces and larches with lacy branches, standing heroically like characters in a play, or guardians of the woods behind them, flanked by a chorus of bare deciduous trees raising their white arms and fingers. No wind blew, no birds sang or hopped from branch to branch to cause cascades of snow -- just the utter stillness of deep midwinter woods on an extraordinary day.

At the time I hadn't planned to do any drawings, but as this series progressed, I kept coming back to that semi-circle of trees, and felt I needed to try.

The complex nature of this forest scene required a preliminary sketch (above). The overall approach was too simplistic and too contrast-y, but I was just trying out different approaches. I wasn't too happy with the spruce tree, but liked the larch on the right, and felt that the handling of the trees in the background would probably work. So then it was a question of beginning again for real, and summoning the patience for what I knew would be a long, challenging effort.

In most of the drawings in the series, I've been able to work back and forth across the whole scene, or from top to bottom in a logical way. But here, I couldn't do that, because there was so much going on that I kept losing track of where I was. So I developed the picture in vertical slices, worrying all the time that I wouldn't be able to integrate the entire drawing across the picture plane. It was complicated, eye-fatiguing, and seemed like it took forever -- I worked on it off and on for three days.

Then, once I was almost done, I had to work quite a bit on the picture as a whole to make the different areas relate to each other, and bring the overall greyscale into harmony. There are some things I'd do differently if I were to do it over (that's not going to happen!) but in general I'm pretty happy with the final result.

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This process made me think a lot about what happens when inspiration is hard to hold onto -- how do we keep going toward our original goal when things get tough? It's so easy, and tempting, to give up at that point. Part of being a professional artist, designer, writer -- or pretty much any other artform -- is learning how to stick with a project, no matter how difficult it is or how many obstacles come up, and bring about a satisfactory conclusion. If the client has hired you, then that is your part of the contract. Likewise, if the public has bought a ticket to the concert, there is an expectation of excellence.

But for the professional, this also creates a difficulty. When is the result "good enough," and when is it extraordinary? Because most of us know, deep down, that there is a difference. In music, as in all the arts -- and in sports, for that matter -- peak performances do not happen every day. The public may not know, because technical virtuosity may be there, just as facility in drawing or painting may be there, and the public tends to recognize and reward virtuosity. But technical brilliance alone doesn't create an inspired performance or a truly special work of art; it is not the same as artistry that somehow, intangibly, conveys what is going on in the heart and mind of the artist and conveys that to the audience in a truly moving and memorable way. For that matter, the artist often doesn't know why a particular performance felt different, or why a particular painting or drawing or poem happened as it did: you can't "will" it to happen. The hours and hours of practice and preparation that add up to technical facility are the means to the end, but they are not the end in themselves.

There are an awful lot of professionals who do coast along on a combination of technique, repetition of what has been praised or popular, and doing work that is "good enough." Pushing yourself to do better, to continually grow, requires taking risks -- and that means some of the time you're going to fall short or fail. It also means once in a while, maybe not often at all, you're going to do something that confirms why you began this journey in the first place.

I'm not saying that this drawing is extraordinary in any way, just that it was more challenging than the others I've done so far, and required digging deeper into myself to keep going and pull out a result that felt satisfying -- it asked more of me. Looking back on the last two months of work, I can see that I've learned a lot.

I always pay attention when I feel my inspiration running thin. Perspiration - pushing through to a good result - can only take you so far. The poet Osip Mandelstam once made the enigmatic comment that he always knew when he was getting close to the end of a cycle of poems when he started writing about the stars. He had discovered a clue in his own work. I don't have that; I just have a feeling that I'm not quite there on the razor's edge, the way it was when inspiration first hit and the first works were coming. But concentration and persistence can bring you back to a place where inspiration once again takes over: that's the intangible lesson of this drawing, and maybe of those moments standing in the circle of snow-covered trees.

Cassandra at Twenty

Today this blog celebrates its twentieth anniversary. I almost forgot, because I was focused on it being the first day of spring: an event we're eagerly anticipating up here but about which there's been precious little evidence, other than the maple sap running, and brighter, longer days. However, I'll post these grape hyacinths in the hope that we'll be seeing real ones -- in about a month.

The craziness of living in, and enduring, such a northern climate may be matched by the craziness of having blogged here for twenty years. Or perhaps I'm just stubborn. Social media was supposed to be the death of blogging, and it did do-in most of the blogs that started when mine did. Other platforms were touted as the next best thing, but I think most bloggers just got fatigued. Keeping up a blog, trying not to repeat yourself, and finding something personal to say is hard enough over years and years, but when the readers and commenters start to go away, it's even harder to remember why you began it in the first place.

But I do remember: I was a journal writer and determined letter-writer, with a well-established practice, and blogging fit me to a T, not only because it satisfied those same urges, but because it also added the possibility of a visual component. The latter, of course, became the raison d'être for Instagram, and I have loved being part of a community of artists and photographers there. But for those who want to write regularly and seriously, nothing has really worked as well as blogs, and for someone like me who's a visual artist as well, and wants to own her own website rather than be data-harvested at every click of the mouse and keyboard, blogging has continued to be the best choice. I guess stubborn perseverance has just kept me at it, because first of all I write and make a record of my art for myself -- I'd do this anyway -- but how much better it is to share it with you, communicate with you, and get to know each other.

Jacaranda blooms in Mexico City, back in March, 2017.

The doubts I was having about blogging a few years ago have mostly disappeared. It's clear to me that this is where I belong, and that it works for me. Adding an art education component will satisfy another strong urge in me: to teach and encourage others who may have always wanted to draw or paint, or who want to do it better; or encourage those who loved making art when they were kids, only to get discouraged or distracted along the way.

A recent change is that I have begun mirroring this blog on Substack. The content will be exactly the same, but if people want to subscribe there and receive a notification via email when there's a new post, that's an easy way to get one. (I know some of you don't use feed readers, which is another possibility. While I do always post a link to new posts on Facebook, you may not be there either.) Substack posts also receive a link on my Twitter feed. Many Substack writers are trying to get people to subscribe for a monthly or yearly payment. I'm not going to do that; the content here has always been free, and I see no reason to change that. The only possible exception would be if I decide to offer formal online art courses, but that's a ways into the future and won't impact the blog at all.

Red bottle-brush tree bloom, from the same Mexico City trip.

Whether you have been reading my words and looking at my pictures for twenty years or have just found me recently, I want to say thank you. It's humbling to know that people come here repeatedly, looking for some solace or calmness in the difficult days we are all facing, and I'm glad that the writing and art which help sustain me also, sometimes, help to sustain you. After all, that's why we think deeply, why we create, and why we are here together. Thank you for visiting, and for encouraging me with your presence. If you've never left a comment, that's absolutely fine, but please don't be shy -- I try to respond personally to all comments, and will be really glad to hear from you. And for those of you who've become my friends over the years, whether virtually or in real life, and in so many corners of the globe -- how amazing it is that we found each other, and how everlastingly grateful I am for the ways in which we enrich each other's lives!