the cassandra pages

Direct Watercolor: Report on Week Two

This week I got more deeply into the underside of life along the tracks. The old warehouses, formerly used for manufacturing, have been turned into artist's spaces and light manufacturing. They're also canvases for graffiti on the sides that face the bike path and railroad, rather than the street above the tracks. It's not very artistic graffiti, either - mostly tagging and layers on top of layers, at that. When I walk or bike on the path, I find I'm kind of grateful for the sudden bursts of color, but it's also rather grim and decayed when you get up close and really look. Within the buildings, beyond the grilled windows, I can sometimes hear music and machinery; people are working and making things. But from the "back side", this is what you see.

The week's sketches actually began with this one. There's a contentious chain link fence all along the railroad. People continually cut human-size holes so they can cross the rails on foot or bring their bikes across; the railroad patches these holes, the next night they're re-cut. Neighborhood lobbying for a grade crossing has never borne fruit. I often cross the tracks via these cuts to get to the bike path on the far side from my studio building, and they're a big part of the reality of this zone for many of us, so I thought I should paint one. 

Trees and grapevines on the edge of the tracks: a much more classic watercolor, ore typical for me -- and frankly, a relief to paint.

And, finally, the appearance of a human. This path is used all year-round, by walkers, runners, cyclists, parents with various child-conveyances, and, in the winter, cross-country skiers. It's great because it's a long, unpaved, hard dirt path, and there's no car traffic whatsoever, not even any intersections with streets. That's because it's on the level of the railroad, and all the streets run below through overpasses such as the one I sketched last week. At certain times of the day it's quiet, but usually there are quite a lot of people using the path, especially in good weather. A few of the warehouses have makeshift picnic areas in back, beyond the chain-link fence, so sometimes I'll see groups of people sitting out there for lunch or taking a break. The city has also grouped some large flat rocks in several areas along the path itself, and I'll often pass people who are seated there, talking or eating, or just sitting alone. I also see photographers quite frequently, but I've never run across anyone with a sketchbook. 

So -- how's it going? I admit to a waning of interest, mainly because the environment is just not very beautiful, no matter how hard one searches, and in the present depressing world I don't think it's healthy for me to spend too much time focused on a grim subject for my art. 

I've also found it difficult to work in my sketchbook, since these are not really sketches but paintings that require a lot of water. I can't get it as wet as I'd like, and that's a problem. The paper is good, but it does buckle with even a small amount of wet pigment, and I've had to iron the pages to flatten them again -- so, all in all, I feel like I'm hampered by the sketchbook, not helped. It would be better to be working on a watercolor block or single sheets of a heavier weight.

On the positive side, the constraint of working directly to watercolor, without pen or pencil drawing first, has not been a problem at all. Drawing with the side and tip of the dagger brush works just fine, and saves a great deal of time -- so that's been a good discovery. For a more finished painting, I would use a pencil sketch, but I'm glad to have had this chance to experiment and find out that for a lot of the work, a brush drawing is sufficient.

That's even true for perspective and architecture! (Thanks, Liz Steel!) Having overcome my reluctance to draw buildings, I'm looking forward to doing some loose sketches of Montreal architecture, which is varied and interesting, with lots of detail in roofs, cornices, and steeples, as well as those iconic spiral staircases. I like the informality and liveliness that result when  perspective is loosely, but not slavishly, conveyed. This was a problem for me before, and one of the happiest results of recent experiments in Lisbon, and now here, has been the knowledge that this is a good direction for me to take.

I feel like I've done enough with the railroad subject to be free to let it go, at this point. Perhaps I'll return to it or do a few more of these, but I think I want to turn to some other nearby places for the remainder of the pages in this book. Next week I'll be going somewhere very different, and will take another sketchbook with me.

Do let me know what you think! Your comments have been illuminating and helpful -- thank you!

A New Direction, or a Short-lived Experiment?

This was the first week of June, and the first week of my new sketchbook project. As I'd figured, I only managed to do four paintings out of seven. My idea had been to paint scenes close to my studio, which is in a sort of no-man's-land near the Canadian-Pacific railroad tracks at the top of Plateau Mont-Royal. The subjects nearby are way out of my comfort zone: industrial buildings, the railroad, the bike path past warehouses covered with graffiti, scrubby vegetation. It's not at all pretty, and yet there's something more challenging about finding something to paint here. I'm not sure I can keep it up for a whole month. Maybe I'll add some flowering trees in the ruelles to increase my enthusiasm, or maybe I'll jump ship completely. 

One thing I've found about being older is that if I've made a wrong move, I'm no longer determined to stay on that path or else. With the Lisbon sketchbook, I really wanted to finish it as I had originally planned. Here, I'm not so sure. But still, I'm pleased with the work I did this week, and glad that I no longer shy away from urban scenes because of discomfort with perspective.

Doing direct watercolor --without an underlying pen or pencil drawing -- is a good exercise, too, I'm finding. By using a dagger brush, I'm able to draw the basic shapes with the edge or tip of the brush in a light color, and thus sketch in the basic scene before committing to large areas of color. Simplification happens naturally when drawing with a brush, and that's good. This week I ordered two new, high quality dagger brushes from Rosemary & Co, in England. Working rapidly also forces me to make swift color choices. I've been glad for a pre-mixed grey I added to my palette (a combination of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue), and overall I'm happy with my new, extended range of 18 colors, though I seldom use any of them without modification.

So, I'm learning some things, and not being too hard on myself. The point of painting, after all, is to enjoy it.

 

A June Watercolor Sketchbook

Studio still life with a painting of Thingvellir by Kjarval. A recent fairly loose watercolor; I want to do more painting like this.

About a month ago, I read about an online watercolor challenge happening in the month of June. The idea is to paint 30 "direct" watercolors in 30 days -- that means painting without preliminary ink drawing, just plunging in and painting or drawing rapidly with your brush. his is the second year for this challenge, the brainchild of Marc Taro Holmes, a well-known "urban sketcher" who used to work in the video game industry, and now happens to live in Montreal, and Liz Steel, an urban-sketcher and watercolor teacher  known for her watercolors of architecture. The point of the month-long challenge is to encourage lots of painting practice and less thinking and worrying about picky details or great results; like life drawing, this is to get people loosened up and moving from one painting to the next without judging themselves. I'm totally in support of that, because what I see in so many people who tell me they'd love to paint is fear of beginning, and then a whole lot of self-criticism which boils down to "I'm no good at this." There's no way someone isn't going to learn and improve if they paint 30 sheets of paper in a month, while just one a week, or one a month, leaves a lot of room for those self-defeating thoughts.

I kept thinking about the challenge, and finally decided I wanted to participate. The experience of doing my Lisbon sketchbook has taught me a lot. I've still got two pages left to go in that book, but by eliminating the ink lines about halfway through I've ended up with sketches I liked much more. And I really liked the fact that it's a complete book.

As for the "rules" of this challenge, I'm probably going to bend them. I'm in a different position from a beginning painter; learning to draw with a brush isn't my personal challenge; it's to pursue the work on a daily basis, sometimes painting very freely, at other times with more detail. At this point what I'm interested in doing is painting better (and more) watercolors, toward a particular style. Sometimes that means I need a quick preliminary pencil under-drawing -- so while I may sometimes go directly to watercolor, I'm not going to force myself to eliminate pencil drawing on every page. However, speed is going to dictate a certain amount of looseness, and that's always good for me.

Because I wasn't satisfied with the paper in my Moleskine watercolor sketchbook, I decided to make myself a new sketchbook for June. I used a single sheet of 22" x 30" Arches cold-pressed paper given to me recently by a friend. It's the lightest watercolor weight, 90 pounds, but still substantial. I cut it into smaller sheets that were 10" x 7 1/4", which folded down into 5" x 7 1/4" pages. The one sheet of Arches yielded three signatures of 12 pages each, for a book of 36 single pages, or 18 spreads. I made a traditional sewn binding on linen tapes, with cover boards made of acid-free matboard, covered with Italian marbled paper from my paper stash, added black Canson endpapers, and a spine covered with black leather. 

I wasn't sure how it would work, because I'd never made a book with such heavy paper. The only technical problem was that I didn't sew the signatures quite tightly enough, so even after gluing there is a small gap between them when you open the book to those pages.  But otherwise, it came out well.

The big challenge, I knew, would be to actually USE it. My own inner voice was already saying, "You're going to ruin that beautiful little book!" But I told myself I could make others, and on June 1, the same day I finished the binding, I painted the opening page. 

My goal isn't to do 30 watercolors, necessarily, since I don't have a 60-page book; what I hope to do is to completely fill this sketchbook with sketches and paintings from the area around my studio, which is near the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks. (We'll see what happens -- already it's June 3 and I've only done one painting!) I was shocked when I first put my brush on the Arches paper -- even though I've used hundreds of sheets of it in the past, I had become so used to using the Moleskine paper that the extra "tooth" and receptive surface felt like a wall of resistance, when really the high-quality paper was just begging for more water and paint. I'm not sure what will happen to the book itself when I get this paper really wet -- unlike a block of watercolor paper, the pages will ripple and buckle. But as a teacher once said, "Sometimes you just have to fight with it." At the end of June, I hope I'll have an interesting book full of paintings, and that I will have learned some more things. And you know what? If it's the end of July, that's OK too.

 

So Sad, So Grateful: rest in peace, dear Patrick

Patrick Wedd during the rehearsal with our choir for his final Evensong before retirement, in June, 2018.

Patrick Wedd, consummate musician, choral director, and my dear friend, died yesterday. I was extremely fortunate to sing under his direction at Christ Church Cathedral for the past eleven years, to hear such a master play the organ, and to perform music he had written as well as the huge repertoire of Anglican liturgical music that he brought to us, week after week. He was a mentor to all of us, but especially to the young organists who were our assistant organists and organ scholars, and it was a joy to watch them grow in confidence and ability under his eye.

Patrick and I worked together on a number of projects, including educational programs, fundraising concerts, and a CD of contemporary Canadian liturgical music sung by our choir and published by Phoenicia, and during his last year, on the process for the transition to his successor. I'm especially grateful for his close and steady friendship over all these years: he was supportive, enthusiastic, and interested, and sympathetic whenever there was a problem, and I hope I returned the same kind of friendship to him and to his husband Rob.

Many people are writing today about him; I feel more like being quiet, and letting music speak for me. Last night I sat down at the keyboard and played some Bach preludes and fugues, and then a few of Patrick's own hymns from the Canadian Anglican hymnal. His music will live on, through all of us, and the person he was will continue to influence me all my life. Patrick, I'm so grateful to have known you. May you rest in peace. 

A Sketchbook as Bulwark Against the World

Altar frontal, polychromed faience, 1600-1650, from the Museu de Azulejos in Lisbon

I've kept working on my Lisbon sketchbook. Slowly, I'm realizing that a finished sketchbook like this is an object in itself, but also that the sketches could form the basis for some sort of expanded "book" of words plus art. I have five more pages to go, and then I'll lay it aside for a while and see what it says when I come back to it in a month or two.

What I do see, for sure, is that this has been a centering, grounding project during the cold, late spring, amid so much disheartening news. As I've said here before, my primary path and central mission is to be true to myself, which means doing my level best to be a positive and loving person who keeps creating, and encouraging others to do likewise. There is no better way to counter the destructive negativity of the current political world than to allow creativity and love to flow through ourselves and outward. Yes, it's difficult. Yes it requires digging deep inside ourselves and finding resources we perhaps didn't realize we had. Human life has always included both the worst of times as well as the best of times. We're facing huge challenges, and we each need to do our part, but in order to be effective and resilient, we have to find and embody the light wherever we can, as individuals with our own particular paths and relationships and passions.

Dunes in bloom, and cactus, on the national seashore reserve west of Cascais, Portugal.

I was in the U.S. last weekend for the 50th reunion of Dartmouth students who protested the Vietnam War, occupied the college administration building in 1969, and served prison terms as a result. My husband was not one of those jailed, but he was a close and supportive friend who documented that event and that time period photographically, and was invited to give a slide talk as part of the reunion. During the panel discussions and social times, I learned that nearly all of the fifty-some attendees were people who have spent their lives doing good, being creative, living with others in mind, working for the betterment of society -- and are continuing to do that in spite of the prevailing climate of hate and negativity. I was impressed, proud to be part of the gathering, and often very moved.

As one of them said, "we won some fights and we lost some, but 'success' is not the only measure of whether things are worth doing." And one of the current student activists said to these aging radicals with grey hair and achy joints: "It's not over 'til it's over -- you're still here, and we need you."

There's so much work that needs to be done -- on the climate, on rights for women and minorities, on freedom and justice, against hate speech and white supremacy -- the list is exhaustingly long. None of us can do everything, so just pick one thing, and work on it a little every day, wholeheartedly. Join a group of like-minded others; we can all accomplish more collectively. But do something real - don't just talk or, worse yet, add to the endless complaints on social media. And please, if you're a writer or artist or musician, keep doing your work. In a climate like today that attempts to suck the lifeblood out of creative people, and devalue who we are and what we do, making art can be a radical act. I certainly feel that way about publishing books, and about singing. 

In the woods yesterday with friends.

Nobody can be an activist, or in a position of helping and giving, 100% of the time. For me, the other side of the coin of action is contemplation. If I refuse to be defeated or silenced or worn down into depression and paralysis by the negative forces, then I need to find ways to continue to live fully, engage with the world, and to do my work, in spite of everything else. Each of us has a well to go to, when we need to re-center -- maybe it's the woods; a meditation cushion or a church; walking our dog in the park; reading; journaling; or spending time dancing or at a musical keyboard -- whatever it is for us, we need to find that place, know it well, and go there regularly for strength and consolation, not escape.

Can a 3 1/2" x 5" sketchbook, then, be a bulwark against the dark forces of the world? Actually, I'm finding out, it can.

Lisbon Travel Journal: A Process and a Search

The Logistics

I went off to Portugal with a new, blank, pocket-size watercolor sketchbook, and the intention of doing as much sketching as I could -- more, I hoped, than I had ever done on a trip. That's what happened -- but, as usual, things got complicated. We planned an itinerary each day, and were on the go most of the time. J. and I walked a lot and for the most part we were always together. This is my choice, even though it conflicts with drawing. Lisbon is beautiful, with many exciting and challenging views, plazas and monuments, and complex perspectives. Still, I found that I didn't want to take too many precious hours out of the day to sit and draw. And when I'm traveling with someone else, it's not fair to ask them to be patient for an hour or more while I sit bent over a sketchbook. My partner -- a photographer -- is really very understanding about this, but we both try not to impose on each other's good nature too much. I sketched before or after some meals in restaurants or cafes, and occasionally at a church or a miradouro -- one of the many "lookouts" scattered at high points around the city. I also did some still life and interior drawings in our apartment in the larger sketchbook I'd brought. Sometimes I did a quick sketch in pen-and-ink on location, and added watercolor in the evening after we were home for the night. But all of this still barely scratched the surface of what could have been recorded in my sketchbook.

After we returned home to Montreal, three weeks ago,  I plunged into choir duties for Holy Week and Easter, plus we had a big professional design job to finish up by the end of the month. The sketchbook kept calling to me, though, and when my friend Valeria Brancaforte, a printmaker and painter in Barcelona, suggested that I just use my photographs and my memory to fill out the pages, it was the encouragement I needed. I've tried to do one new drawing every day or two.

The Project

What started as a fairly amorphous idea -- a bunch of random sketches and impressions of a particular place -- became even less clear to me during this trip. 

Whenever I've traveled as an adult, throughout the past forty years, I've generally kept some sort of journal. Originally, before computers and long before phones, these journals were mostly words in a small notebook, maybe with a sketch or two. I took pictures with film cameras, and made albums of prints when I got home. Later, this same journalistic process evolved into blog posts. After we moved to Montreal and established a much more functional studio space, my blog -- which had been mostly words and photographs -- became more of an art blog, and I started drawing nearly every day. When I traveled, I still took along notebooks or sketchbooks, but the words went into my computer. Although I was drawing while away, I never tried to make a sketchbook that stood on its own. The sketches, along with words, ended up on my blog.

View of the Targus River and Castelo de Sao Jorge

During these same years, in the craft world, scrapbooking became a thing, while artists took it one step farther, making personal journals that combined elements of scrapbooks, sketching, and handwritten journaling, and teaching others to do it. Online, we saw the rise of the wildly popular urban sketching movement, with talented artists holding international seminars on techniques for drawing architecture, urban landscapes, and people. Local groups of avid sketchers have sprung up in many cities. These travel and urban journals are personal too, often combining words and paper ephemera along with pen-and-ink or watercolor sketches. People share their work not only in local groups but on personal and group blogs, and social media.

Natas (Portuguese custard tarts) in pen-and-ink and watercolor, with stickers and packaging from Pasteis de Belém.

All of this is fantastic, I think -- it's brought new methods of creative self-expression, as well as community, to a great many people. I've certainly been influenced by some of these trends, and they've found expression on my blog, but until I decided to make one cohesive paper journal of this trip, I hadn't thought it through. What exactly was I trying to do? What was this thing I was making?

The Targus River from the Alfama (the old Moorish quarter)

The drawings in my large sketchbook were not confusing: they were black-and-white line drawings done in my familiar style. I had made a somewhat subconscious decision to do the small pocket sketchbook pages entirely in color. But in what style? Good question! The answer that emerged was that I didn't have one -- at least, no style I was completely happy with. Most of the first pages were done with pen-and-ink, followed by watercolor washes. Sometimes the line felt too heavy for the small pages, giving a cartoon-like feeling. At other times, when I managed to stay looser, the result was more pleasing to me. I thought I'd try working in direct watercolor, over a lightly sketched pencil drawing. I did the two landscape sketches (above) over the rooftops looking toward the Lisbon harbor, as a comparison. Both were nice: they're just very different in feeling and even in purpose. 

When drawing tiles or ceramics, using line work made a lot of sense, and seemed effective. For sculpture or landscape, I wasn't so sure. I kept going back and forth between the two.

Madonna and Child at Igresa de São Domingos

Halfway through the trip I decided that this was the real purpose of the project: to explore and search out a style that I liked, or perhaps to refine two different styles for different purposes.

I did two full-spread seascapes using watercolor alone, and began to feel a little more satisfied. Both were too contrasty, and I struggled with the Moleskine paper, which is really not very high quality, but they had more feeling, depth, and emotion than ones that began with a pen line. Was it ridiculous, I wondered, to spend so much time on an 11" x 3.5" sketch, when I could have worked much larger on excellent paper, and gotten a much better result? 

Calçada do Combro, with tram lines overhead.

Then there was the problem of perspective. For years I avoided drawing buildings, even though I've studied perspective and know the basic rules -- I thought it bored me, but really I lacked the necessary patience. Doing complicated urban drawings of buildings and rooftops, which I'd first tried last year in Mexico City, gave me more confidence. In Lisbon, with its hills and endless angles, I tried to pay more attention, and take the time to get the drawing approximately right, but I was also learning how much to leave in and what to leave out to create an evocative impression and satisfying sketch rather than an architectural rendering.

In spite of all my second-guesses and self-criticism, the sketchbook itself was beginning to fill out, the pages adding up to a record and impression of what I had seen. I didn't have this from any other trip we had taken. So I kept going, determined to finish a standalone, completed book, rather than abandoning it mid-stream. Some pages would just work better than others; that was fine with me. It could contain a variety of styles. In the end, it would be a record of my own search and struggle, as much as it was a record of a place.

Dinner at the apartment: salad, fruit, and vinho verde.

A modern travel sketchbook can be so many things -- there are no rules. The most satisfying ones, to me, have a developed, personal style, but their "tone" varies just as much as we artists vary in personality; that's part of what makes them so cool and interesting. Some are detailed and architecturally accurate, some much looser; some are whimsical and playful. Some focus on food, or buildings, or people; some use more or less color or pen line; some incorporate a lot of ephemera. In the end, it's all up to the maker.

 

John Singer Sargent, Ceiling of Palatine Chapel, Palermo, Sicily, watercolor, 1897

But what did I most want to do? A few days ago, I spent some time in the library looking at some John Singer Sargent watercolors I hadn't seen before, including his travel sketches from Sicily. Back in 1897, he had sketched altar retablos, wall mosaics and pavements that I too had admired and photographed 120 years later. I felt a flash of connection and recognition, as well as gratitude, as I pored over his masterpieces. Each sketch, no matter how loose or unfinished, was worthy of framing. They confirmed my gut-level instinct: I was most interested in trying to follow in the footsteps of artists like Sargent -- whether that took the form of a book of paintings and drawings, perhaps to use later with words, or loose sheets intended as standalone paintings, or sketches that could form the basis for later paintings.

This, on balance, is the most important thing the process has showed me: that at least part of the time, I want to aim high and do something more serious, partly because I feel the press of years: I don't have unlimited time.

Like anything worth doing, drawing and painting require discipline and practice, and also passion. I really love to draw, and always have. Developing a lively pen-and-ink style, with or without color, has been a priority for me, and it's fun. Likewise, direct watercolor is a medium I love, even though it's technically difficult, and very easy to ruin. Better paper is a requirement. In the future, maybe I'll end up binding sketchbooks for myself to use, with the paper I like best -- I can guarantee that the traveling artists of the 1800s and early 1900s were not using cheap sketchbooks. I need to take my own advice, and use the best materials I can afford.

I was happy with the first direct watercolor I did after revisiting Sargent's. It took twenty pages to get to this point; I've got another ten to fill. 

 

 

 

Comment Question

Have any readers had trouble commenting here, such as writing a comment and then the comment not showing up? I would appreciate it if you could send me an email at  cassandra (dot) pages (at) gmail (dot) com if this happens, telling me what happened and which browser you're using. Thanks.

Why is 3-D Compassion So Hard?

Pieta, Igresa de Sao Domingos, Lisbon.

Holy Week has coincided this year with the fire at Notre-Dame, and the resulting debate about what the billionaires and governments of the world should be supporting. Each day, I've read the arguments on social media and op-ed pages. Every night, I've gone to the Anglican cathedral where I sing, put on my red cassock and white surplice, and participated in ancient liturgies that commemorate a great miscarriage of justice 2,000 years ago, when the powers of religious establishment and the government of the time came together to crush the leader of a movement whose teaching was based on entirely different values, and different authority. Thursday was the observation of the Passover supper when Jesus established the practice of the Eucharist, knowing he would die soon; on this night he told his followers that he was giving them a new commandment, more important than all the Jewish laws: "Love one another as I have loved you." If you do this, he said, I will know that you are my disciples. Sitting in a dark church hearing those words, it's impossible not to feel like an utter failure -- as his disciples often were, too. Loving was not enough to save Jesus from death. And yet, trying (and failing, and trying again) to keep that simple commandment has been enough to form the basis of my entire life, and many other people's lives. Lent is an annual time to think about this more intentionally, and Holy Week is its culmination. These seasons of penitence are not about guilt; they're about Love: seeing what blocks us from loving better, and committing to a renewed sense of love for all people, and for the world in all of its failings and ugliness, and its beauty and miraculous joys.

The gasps of genuine shock and dismay that accompanied our first awareness that an 800-year-old medieval cathedral was burning were shortly followed by self-serving comments by French politicians, hoping to use it as a unifying  point in a society fragmented by racism and division. Hatred of the Catholic Church came next; many people didn't realize (or take the time to find out) that the French state owns Notre Dame, not the Catholic Church or the Vatican. Then, when French billionaires came forward with enormous pledges for the reconstruction, social media really heated up. In the UK, there were cries of "Where were the billionaires when Grenfell Tower burned?" In the US, it was "Where were they when the black churches burned?" We were admonished for not caring enough about Yemen, or Aleppo. Internationally, pictures were posted of dead coral reefs, with the poignant and appropriate caption "Rebuild this Cathedral!" 

Every one of these reactions is understandable and, to my mind, worthy. What bothers me is that we don't seem able to hold them all together, without shaming those who expressed sadness at the loss of irreplaceable architecture and art. As my friend Dick Jones said, "We don't seem capable of 3-D compassion." The reaction to the Notre Dame fire was only one example of this phenomenon.

When I lived in Vermont, for many years I was part of a grassroots activist group working to revitalize our poor neighborhood. Early on, we went door-to-door canvassing the residents, most of whom lived in run-down rental apartments. When we asked them what should be our priorities, they named things like better sidewalks, playgrounds, streetlights and safety, but the overwhelming consensus was on the need for beauty: they wanted trees and flowers, places to sit and see something other than the pavement and poverty that created a sense of shame and isolation. And they wanted to know their neighbors; they wanted a sense of community. It took time, and some grants from the local government and the state to accomplish some of those things, but building community and creating a more beautiful environment began immediately, from within ourselves and our own resources, not from outside. It is not either/or. Human beings need dignity and respect, they need decent housing, food and work, they need education and equal opportunity for their children, clean water, and health care. We also have an innate desire for beauty, whether it is found in nature, or in the arts. Somehow, we have to find a balance where we can hold all these human needs together, and have compassion and zeal whenever they are threatened or destroyed.

We are living in depressing and frustrating times, surrounded by increasing economic inequality and government inaction on the most pressing issues that affect all of humanity, such as climate change and the health of the oceans -- and nothing that we do to demand change seems to have an effect; the forces arrayed against the common people seem overwhelming, just as they did 2,000 years ago. So it's not at all surprising that people's anger is directed at powerful institutions, like the Catholic Church, or wealthy individuals who choose to give their money to a high-profile cause. These outbursts of frustration point out conflicts of priorities, but they also fail to acknowledge the many philanthropic individuals and small and large organizations who are already working tirelessly and often almost anonymously to support the environment, scientific and medical research, racial and ethnic inequality, the arts and education, and many other causes.  

More than that, though, I am concerned about the division created among good people through the tactic of shaming. The Left is particularly susceptible to this, and it's incredibly destructive. Ironically, the same people who totally get "Black Lives Matter" and were outraged when conservatives countered with "Blue Lives Matter" or "All Lives Matter" are doing the exact same thing when they insist that their cause is more worthy, and others should be ashamed of their own feelings.

Shame never brings people together, or creates lasting change of heart. We are individuals; each of us is drawn to different aspects of life, and it's natural for us to put our emotions and energy there; these proclivities should be complementary, not competitive. Some of us are meant to be guardians of the arts, or of children, or the elderly, or nature, or of immigrants, or of animals, or of human history...the list is long, because human beings and human culture are varied and complex.

I come back to that neighborhood group. At our very first meeting, which happened after a shooting, a lot of anger was expressed at "the authorities." People blamed the schools, the police, the town government, and they clearly expected these outside institutions to step in and fix the problems. But as we talked more, we began to see that if we waited for that, we might wait forever: we had to start within our own community, with ourselves, and with what we had in common. We had to talk to each other, ask questions, express our hopes and fears, get to know each other's strengths and limitations, and work together. In other words, we needed to "love one another."

It's worth remembering, perhaps, that medieval cathedrals were not built by like modern-day skyscrapers by multi-national corporations, or even by wealthy centralized church institutions. They were built by people who came together to try to do something greater than themselves that lifted their spirits and short lives above the difficulties of feudal societies beset by plagues and wars that spared no one. Yes, wealthy donors gave money, and so did peasants, each according to their abilities, and all were able to see the progress and feel part of a great process that would extend well beyond their own lives. It still astounds us that these huge works of art were built essentially by hand, and have lasted through the centuries.

The point is not that a western cathedral is inherently more precious or worthy than art of any other part of the world, or more important than insuring the safety and well-being of the neediest among us, or rebuilding black churches, or caring for the oceans. It is that human beings can do astonishing things when they work together, and when we decide to make love of something greater than our own selves a priority. The question for each of us is where we want to put our energy, and how to care for one another during these difficult times so that we can actually work together for the common good.

 

Goodbye, Beloved Piano

The year is 2006; my friend Jon Appleton, composer and professor, and I are at his piano in Jon's former home in Vermont. These pictures were taken before my husband and I moved to Montreal and several years before Jon moved to Hawaii, taking his piano with him. Jon and I look quite a bit younger; the piano, of course, always looks just the same. It's an 1895 Steinway B, and is my favorite instrument among those I've had the pleasure of playing. 

Jon loves to give dinner parties, and during those evenings back in Vermont he'd often sit at the piano and play for a while, before or after the meal. Sometimes it was serious, but there was always some goofing around too. If other musicians were present, which was often the case, he'd get them to play or sing something. That's where I met the master shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki, several Russian friends of Jon's, and many other people who came through town and stopped to visit their former teacher, friend and colleague -- Jon traveled widely, and had musical friends from all over the world.

My husband was a student at Dartmouth College around the time Jon first came there as a professor, so they knew each other, but our acquaintance deepened when we began doing design and advertising work in the 1980s for New England Digital, the developer and manufacturer of the Synclavier, one of most successful music synthesizers. The hardware and software geniuses behind the Synclavier were Sydney Alonso and Cameron Jones, and Jon was the musical adviser. These three were the founders of the company, but Jon didn't stay on as an active business partner -- instead he became a pioneer in electro-acoustic music, composing and performing on the Synclavier all over the world, and developing an influential electro-acoustic music program and state-of-the-art studio for study at Dartmouth. In the summers, New England Digital hosted a summer seminar for users, with technical workshops by the company staff, and concerts and lectures at Dartmouth given by invited guests and Synclavier users such as Lorrie Anderson, Pat Metheny, Oscar Peterson, and John McLaughlin. There was always a picnic at Jon's house where everyone could talk and mingle. Needless to say, it was an exciting time, and we were fortunate to have been involved in it.

I think it was after those years, and after New England Digital had gone out of business, when Jon and I really got to be close friends. in spite of the fact that his international reputation was based on his electro-acoustic compositions and recordings, Jon was a classically-trained pianist who had been a prodigy as a child, but suffered from stage fright and eventually gave it up in favor of composing. All the while he was doing the electronic music, he kept practicing piano for his own pleasure, and wrote compositions that he termed "neo-classical." As we began to know each other better, he learned that I was a serious amateur piano student, and we would talk about classical piano music, sharing favorite recordings and listening together. It was hard for him to get me to play, though, because I was very shy about it and, I'm sure, intimidated. I hated giving recitals and had always had trouble with nerves during solo performances -- my hands would shake and sweat. But Jon understood this, and he kept after me, in a gently encouraging way. For some reason, I also felt drawn to his beautiful piano, and rarely visited him without touching the keys, but seldom sat down to actually play.

The breakthrough was four-hand piano music. Jon loved playing four-hand pieces, and he had composed some marvelous works for his friends Julia and Galina Turkina, a famous Russian four-hand duo in Moscow. He gave me a couple of books of much-easier four-hand pieces and suggested that I learn one part, and we could try playing them together. I'd heard him play four-hand with other people, and I was secretly dying to try it, so I dutifully took the scores home and practiced, and the next time I was up at his house -- not at a big party -- we played. It was such fun, I began to relax and enjoy it. Jon was, as always, very encouraging. "Don't worry about the mistakes!" he'd say. "You play really well! Just have fun!" Of course, nobody could be harder on themselves than he was -- he hated making mistakes! But over time, largely because of his help (I had a very good teacher but she wasn't nearly as kind or gentle as Jon) I gained confidence,  and eventually I was able to play in front of other people, both four-hand pieces and on my own -- things like Brahms Intermezzi, Scarlatti sonatas, or Bach Partitas that I'd been working on in my lessons. Sometimes I brought my flute, and Jon would play the piano part. He loved Scarlatti's piano sonatas, and Bach, and we often played favorite passages for each other and talked about the technical difficulties. We worked hard on a suite of four four-hand pieces he had written called Quatre regards sur le Parc du Roy d'Espagne, and hoped to perform it as a farewell party Jon gave for us at his house when we moved to Montreal, but the birth of his grandson intervened. Eventually, I would produce three CDs of Jon's music through Phoenicia Publishing, including his Scarlatti and Couperin Doubles.

Almost all of Jon's neo-classical compositions were composed at his Steinway, and one of my great pleasures during those years was hearing the latest progress he'd made on a composition, and sometimes sitting down to play through parts of it myself -- that's what's going on in these pictures (all taken by my husband Jonathan Sa'adah.) The painting in the background is by Matt Bucy, and to the right in the upper pictures is a print by Matisse. I like how this third picture reminds me of Matisse's own "Piano Lesson," minus the rather ominous but universal figure of the teacher in the background!

I always loved playing that instrument. It had the rich, warm sound that older Steinways are known for, and a fairly light action that made it easier to play music like Scarlatti or Bach than on my own stiffer-actioned Schimmel upright; plus, it had personality -- it's a fine piece of woodworking, and always occupied a central place in Jon's home; it felt like a member of his family, to be greeted and touched and given its share of attention during any visit, to which it responded by helping to make beautiful music and nurture relationships between people.

A few days ago, Jon posted a video on FB in which he says goodbye to his beloved piano, which he is donating to his alma mater, Reed College. The movers were coming later to pick it up. Now in his 80s, and having had some health problems, he says he's not composing anymore, and soon he's moving from Hawaii back to a smaller apartment in Vermont. I read his news about the piano with bittersweet sadness. Because I witnessed the relationship he had with this instrument firsthand, I know how painful it must be for him to let it go, while I also know he's glad to have found a good home for it. I'm also a little wistful because it means I'll never play it again myself. So, along with Jon, I wish this beloved instrument a safe trip to its new home, and I hope many generations of Reed students will appreciate it and perhaps sense a little of the history and love that have been absorbed by those keys. As Jon says in his poignant video, "Goodbye, old friend."  

Lisbon, Incomplete

Something about this picture embodies the last two weeks spent in that city better than all the tiled façades and wrought iron balconies and pastel loveliness, more than the hilly streets and clanging trams, and much more than the throngs of tourists eating their natas, and buying shoes and clothing from international fashion shops. Beneath all of that is a melancholy solitude that is difficult to glimpse or grasp, but seems as deeply embedded in the city's spirit as the two-inch chunks of black and cream stone, laid in geometric patterns, that pave the sidewalks and plazas: installed originally, I learned, by prison work crews.

The tradition of fado, and the now-overused Portuguese word saudade... these seem increasingly exploited as commercial expressions, losing meaning rather than being an entry into the soul of the place and the people. Saudade, which has no English equivalent, means a longing for an absent something or someone who may never return; saudade brings both happy and sad feelings, but it is more than nostalgia. It is  described as "the state of mind  that has subsequently become a 'Portuguese way of life'': a constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that's missing, wistful longing for completeness or wholeness and the yearning for the return of what is now gone, a desire for presence as opposed to absence." Fernando Pessoa, the greatest of Lisbon's poets, wrote an unfinished work called The Book of Disquiet:

"The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies – wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis – inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet, which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie."  --George Steiner

 

So, I walked. Where do all those kilometers of pattern lead? I wondered. To the plazas, certainly, but then they wind out, up another hill, into a narrow maze of streets, curving out and down again to the edge of the sea, along the edges of buildings the color of marigolds, lavender, sky, up into the maze again. It is a city that leads the walker to walk, but toward what? Toward incompleteness itself, perhaps. The image at the top of this post shows the only conclusion I found: a place where the pattern changed into green growth and light, at the end of a small dark tunnel.

I also kept a journal with some drawings, which I'm still adding to; I'll probably share them here as time goes on. But I struggled with making art there. I had the sense that drawing and photographing were, to some extent, futile -- I left Lisbon feeling that it was impossible to capture its essence, because we cannot capture incompleteness, absence, and longing, even in the present age where the emphasis is on having a "complete experience", of checking items off a list, taking selfies at the proscribed spots to prove we were there. The Time Out Market, a concept that was first tried in Lisbon, is a perfect example: the tourist doesn't need to discover anything for him or herself; they can just go to a centrally-located and packaged "destination market" -- an upscale food court where a curated selection of restaurants and shops have stalls with the same signage, the same style, offering a sample of their wares, with long tables for seating in the center of the space. It's enticing and exciting on the first visit; on the second, not quite so much. All major cities will soon have these markets, and they will all look alike, too. 

Better then, perhaps, to write in fragments, like Pessoa, or to express feelings in music, or simply to reflect on experience in solitude. Even as a brief visitor, I sensed Lisbon's elusive, melancholic undercurrent, and I find I'm appreciating it even more now that I am home.