the cassandra pages

Seamus Heaney

I'm in Wilmington Delaware, in a suburban hotel, for a family funeral. The dead aunt-in-law was 97, the wife of my father-in-law's youngest brother, and the loving mother of five children, one of whom died in his early adulthood: today she'll be buried beside him. But because I don't know this part of the family well, my thoughts keep turning to Seamus Heaney, and I know today a part of my mourning at the graveside will be for him.

I can't even describe what his poetry meant to me: it often moved me deeply, and has given me unforgettable images, but his work is also one of very few high-water marks of English language usage written in my own lifetime: he is, for me, the contemporary Shakespeare, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot with whom I feel an immediate and personal connection. His love for the Greek classics as well as the great Anglo Saxon myths was a comfort and reassurance that my own inclinations weren't completely outmoded. It's his words that speak to me when I am in the British Museum looking at the Celtic and Roman Britain galleries; even though much of my family history took place on a different continent, this is my history too...

And at the same time he spoke and wrote of personal life, of nature and relationship to the land, of doing things with one's own hands, in a way that I understood: he was an integrator of all of this, not an academic or intellectual snob. And the English of his poems themselves was a living thing, breathing and  musical, meant to be spoken aloud.

So I am very sad at the finiteness of this death -- too young -- and also very grateful for all the poems he left us. In my imagination he appears not in suit and tie, as we often see him in photographs, but in a work jacket and boots, standing somewhere in Ireland, a chunk of peat in his hands.

---

I wrote about Eliot and Heaney back in 2007 in a three-part essay titled "Wastelands and Bog People." In that essay I quoted Blake Morrison:

"One does not have to look very deeply into Heaney's work ... to see that it is rather less comforting and comfortable than has been supposed. Far from being 'whole,' it is tense, torn, divided against itself; far from being straightforward, it is layered with often obscure allusions; far from being archaic, it registers the tremors and turmoils of its age, forcing traditional forms to accept the challenge of harsh, intractable material.... A proper response to Heaney's work requires reference to complex matters of ancestry, nationality, religion, history, and politics."

But the last word about the lifelong process we are talking about s is Heaney's himself:

"Perhaps the final thing to be learned is this: in the realm of  poetry, as in the realm of consciousness, there is no end to the possible learnings that can take place. Nothing is final, the most gratifying discovery is fleeting, the path of positive achievement leads directly to the via negativa.

More Fun with Color

Here are some little 5 1/2" x 5 1/2" color tests that became more like little paintings. Each one is painted with only one or two colors in addition to Azo Yellow and Indigo. This is lots of fun - try it yourself, and go fast!

Let's call this one "Spring Rain Over Mountains..."

 

 

maybe "Two Figures Running Through a Forest..."

 

 

and how about "Curled Creature and Stretching Creature in a Yellow Landscape?"

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I'll be back on the road tomorrow, and spent some time this afternoon cleaning and refilling the half-pans in my travel watercolor set. Hope to have some sketches to show you later this week!

 

Weekend Color Experiments

Inspired by Liz Steel's color notes and example, I recently revamped my own watercolor palette. Some of the tubes in my watercolor box were at least thirty years old: a lot has changed in the industry since then and I needed to get up to speed. For a couple of weeks I've been testing seeing how some new pigments behave and interact with each other, and how they're different from my standard ones. By and large, I'm super happy with the changes, and really impressed by the brilliance, clarity and superb mixing qualities of these newer pigments. It's been fun and exciting to learn more and explore the modern world of color (who knew that modern pigments have coded numbers that standardize them across manufacturers? Not I!) I was a kid who could happily spend an entire afternoon rearranging her big box of Crayola crayons, so make of all this what you will...

So, be forewarned, COLOR-GEEK tech talk coming up -- I'm really grateful to Liz, and if the following is helpful to anyone, that's great. Please bear in mind that the color reproduction on-screen is close but only approximate.

The new colors I'm using are Quinacridrone Gold, Quin Burnt Orange, Quin Red, Nickel Azo Yellow, Pyrrol Orange, Indigo, Indanthrone Blue,  and Sap Green. Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna will be phased out. My two standard yellows will be Nickel Azo and Winsor Yellow, with Cadmium Yellow still on the big palette but only used when I need its more opaque qualities; ditto for Cadmium Red. Cadmium and Cobalt are both toxic; and one of my goals was to move away from some of the more toxic colors. However, the Cobalts (blue, green, violet) will stay for me, since nothing has yet been invented to replace their gorgeous hues.

For blues, I'm keeping Cerulean, indispensible for skies; my beloved Cobalt,  and French Ultramarine, along with Indigo, which will help me create very dark darks. I'm not sure about the Indanthrone yet, that's the next pigment to test more extensively. I'm absolutely thrilled with Quin Gold and Quin Burnt Orange, alone and when mixed with blues and greens to create dark colors.

(Foliage painted with sap green, nickel azo yellow, indigo. Sky is cerulean blue.)

Most of the time, I like to mix my greens, though I do keep Hooker's Green Deep and Permanent Green on my palette, and Cobalt Green for occasional use. Sap Green is a unique color, very difficult if not impossible to mix, and because I paint so many landscapes and foliage, it seemed like it would be useful - and I think I'm going to love it. The photos don't show its exact hue, in spite of an hour of fiddling with Photoshop.

I only bought one of the many shades of Quinacridone Red - Rose - Coral that are available. I wanted something stronger and more brilliant than Alizarin Crimson but still in the cool red range, and so far Quin Red is fitting the bill beautifully. Pyrrol Orange is a new pigment, very brilliant, and more transparent than Cadmium Orange; I like it but it's almost too bright for me. We'll see.

Except for Winsor Yellow, which is a proprietary Winsor&Newton color that I just happen to really like, all the new paints were purchased by mail order from Daniel Smith.

Summer in the Country

Corn near Sangerfield, watercolor on Arches cold press, approx 10"x 4."

This view isn't far from where I grew up and where my dad lives. When I was in central New York to see him a few weeks ago, the corn was fully tasselled and omnipresent; I stopped here the morning I drove because it's a favorite vista anyway, and this field of corn looked particularly lush. The roadside was filled with wildflowers: Queen Anne's lace, chicory, thistles, and when I stepped into it a cloud of grasshoppers rattled up, hopping onto stems a little further away. It was exactly the sort of summer-in-the-country moment I miss a lot, now that I live in a city, and I suppose that's one reason for the painting.

A few days ago I strained my back while gardening, and yesterday the muscles really unwound, as I'd feared they might. I can't take anti-inflammatories, so mostly I just have to wait things like this out, though I try to keep moving and do the gentle back exercises that work for me. I've noticed that when I'm feeling fragile I more apt to find myself doing realistic, detailed work -- this one's almost a miniature -- probably it's a way for me to feel like I'm in control of something. In any case, it seems to be therapeutic, and I was also more comfortable standing at my drawing table than anywhere else.

We went on a grocery-shopping trip yesterday afternoon too. On the way home we stopped at a favorite bakery and bought two chocolate-frosted, raised beignets (doughnuts): a treat that was worth the pain of being seated in the car. (It's not easy to get a good doughnut in Montreal, but this bakery's are great.) To hell with the diet...a refrain that was repeated in the evening over a gin and tonic. Therapy comes in many guises!

Sweet peas

Pen and ink; 6"x 6" (this is approximately lifesize)

Exploring Michel's Garden

Le jardin de Michel, watercolor and ink on Arches hot press, 13"x 8"

My friend Michel asked me to do an illustration of his garden for his birthday, which was on Saturday. Little did I know what I was getting into! The image above is the first one I attempted. This is more or less what I planned to do, showing what was really growing and blooming. It took a long time to draw all those ivy leaves, but they form so much of the backdrop and frame for the garden, I couldn't leave them out!

But I didn't feel finished with the subject yet. One morning I went back and sketched the garden again, trying to find its underlying rhythm.

While I was there, sitting on the median strip between the bike path and the street, a young man came along on his bike and stopped to watch. I was concentrating and didn't look up for a while; then he spoke to me, and we began chatting. It turned out that he is an artist himself, a comic-book/graphic novel artist who's doing a project where he interviews and draws Montrealers he finds doing interesting things on the streets. He asked if he could interview me, and I said sure, so we talked. That was fun, and unexpected.

But I kept wanting to do something more abstract too. I did some small sketches like the one below to try to figure out the essential shapes and forms making up the composition, and how I might alter them.

I did a couple of failed paintings, of which you saw a fragment.

Springboarding from these latter two, over the weekend I did a much more abstract watercolor sketch. It's not much of a painting, but reducing the scene to its essential elements was a very productive exercise. It captures more of the energy of the lively hanging baskets and emphasizes the baskets and the tall vertical towers of runner beans, without getting caught up in details, which is so easy to do when looking at a garden. What I don't like here is the color -- I'm not fond of red and green together, and adding the yellow made it even less pleasing!

So today I decided to go back to black and white -- always better for me when I'm trying to look at structure -- and did this charcoal sketch, from an angle rather than straight on.

Interesting. The color really isn't important, and previously I think it complicated things, making an already busy scene even busier. I'm particularly interested in what we see when we look at a garden, or a larger landscape filled with plants. Most people would probably answer "color," but I think I respond more to form, and then to form-within-form: the garden's shape itself, the structures and repetions within it; shapes of individual plants, the shapes of leaves.

Like sculpture, which they are, it helps to see gardens in three dimensions. As soon as we move into 2 things get harder - which is why photographs of gardens rarely manage to convey the sense of being there. But an artist can choose what to emphasize. This sketch finally begins to approach what Michel did so well in designing his garden: leading the eye across and upward, while the repetitive element of the softly rounded hanging baskets forms a linking structure across the whole scene.

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I couldn't sleep in the middle of last night, and I got up and studied the catalogue from last summer's "Van Gogh Up Close" exhibition in Ottawa. He was preoccupied with the same problem in many of his landscapes and garden pictures: how to move beyond the particular without ever relinquishing his love for, and great awareness of, that particular: for each single blade of grass, as he put it, and without creating works that are conventionally "pretty" or overly sweet. His work, with its all-over attention to structure and detail, rendered in various types of shorthand mark-making, are always built on attention to shape and form, even though we often think of their color first.

Cottage Garden,Vincent Van Gogh. Reed pen, quill, and ink drawing over graphite, 1888.

When that color is taken away, in his drawings, often done in sepia with a flat-nibbed pen, you can see how he was approaching the compositions, integrating a great deal into one unified whole, with a surface flatness that reflects his great interest in Japanese prints. There are no washes here, just larger and smaller marks, all very directional and consciously shaped. When I first saw his drawings, many decades ago, I didn't appreciate them. Now I find them very moving. Van Gogh was able to see the complex interlocking structure formed by plants, and to reduce it into an abstract texture of form and movement that, to me, resembles music.

It was hugely helpful to me to revisit these works, and I shut the book last night with a sense of profound gratitude and connection with this sensitive, suffering genius.

"In spite of everything I shall rise again:
I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken
in my great discouragement, and I will go on
with my drawing."

Vincent van Gogh
24 September 1880

Back to Brooklyn, via the Village

From The Strand, I headed back downtown toward Greenwich Village.

Antiques in a shop window.

Pickled peppers.

Greenwich Villagers. I love her sharp gray peplum suit, and the pink baseball hat with his seersucker.

Just in front of Washington Square.

A great striped sweater-coat. And a bow in the hair.

Washington Square: fountains, guitar music, hanging out.

 Dog-walkers. (There's a dog-run in the Square; always a scene.)

Oops, he caught me. That dubious look over the specs...

After that we met our friend at her nearby apartment and went out for pizza, and then walked  down Lafayette to Chambers Street.

The new tower, from the back of the courthouse.

And back across the Brooklyn Bridge.

A Walk Up Broadway

So...back to New York. This was the view when we emerged from the Fulton Street subway station in lower Manhattan; that's the new building at the World Trade Center site in the background. It's incredibly tall, and looked almost unreal in the early morning light.

Two spires: St. Paul's Church in the foreground. J. and I stopped in a deli for a bagel and coffee, and then we split up; he went off to a camera store and then to visit a cousin whose office is nearby, and I decided to walk uptown on Broadway. I was headed for 12th Street, about 30 blocks north, and we planned to rendezvous at our friend's apartment in Greenwich Village around 2 pm. The only problem was the heat, which was beastly. My solution was to walk until I couldn't take it anymore, then step into an air-conditioned store for a while, of which, of course, there are many. But the focus of my walk was the street.

Pretzels.

Construction. Always. In the middle of everything. 

Suddenly, upscale retail: this is a window display at Kate's Paperie, SoHo.

Street scene looking north, Chrysler Building in the far distance.

Street fashion and make-up.

Typical, incredibly beautiful building facades of lower Manhattan. When I reached Canal Street I took a detour to Utrecht Art Supplies, where I bought some blocks of Arches watercolor paper in interesting sizes, and stood letting their big fan blow on me for a while. Then I headed back to Broadway and resumed my walk.

And we've got some for you...a whole store devoted to Converse All-Stars.

At Dean&Deluca, an ultimate deli. I went in to cool down.

Some of their fancy cookies. Those purple octopi are $4.50 each, but they're certainly cute. I didn't buy anything to eat, but somewhere around here I bought a loose black tank top, much cooler than what I was wearing, on sale for ten bucks, and changed my clothes in the store's dressing room.

Houston Street, the dividing line between SoHo (south of Houston) and Greenwich Village.

Grace Episcopal Church, Astor Place.

And its interior.

Finally, my destination: The Strand: "18 Miles of Books." I had a quick sandwich across the street, and then went in to browse. A whole huge store of English language books!

Ahhh.

 

(next post: back down to Washington Square, and a long walk back home across the Brooklyn Bridge.)

 

 

 

 

Fragment

This little 2 1/2" x 1 3/4 " fragment was the only interesting or salvage-worthy piece of a much-larger painting I did this afternoon. I drew in the morning and it went well, but this afternoon - yeech! It's amazing what a disaster a watercolor can turn into! This one went into the poubelle, but long ago my teacher told me to look at every painting, good and bad, using cropping corners if it helps, and see if there are areas that stand out as better than the rest, and then figure out why. Throw the paintings away if you want, he said, but before you do, cut them up and save the good pieces.

I always do that. It's funny how much it helps me feel like I'm learning something. What's pleasing here? The two pairs of clear complementary color -- the yellowish-ochre and the slate blue, and the pink and yellow-green. The well-defined round shapes in the back contrasted with the spiky shapes in the front. That doesn't make a painting, but it gives me some reminders. And tomorrow is another day.

Right now I'm going to walk home -- it's a gorgeous day here in Montreal, and I hope you're getting some good weather where you are, too. Go out and enjoy it!

Every Blade of Grass

I'm just back from a visit with my father. One morning I woke early to find fog covering the lake, and went down to the shore.



It was cool, and very still, but nature had been at work.

There were fairy cobwebs.

And alien spaceships.

And jeweled tapestries.

I sat and watched the sun slowly become visible through the fog, as swallows skimmed silently over the water...

...and every single blade of grass seemed precious.