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Last night I came back from downtown on the bus and walked home through the park. There were very few people on the paths; I was alone with the snow and the dark trees. On the white lakes below me, skaters moved silently; small notes on a large page of music, while under the lights of the rinks, sticks and blades thwacked and sliced: wooden sticks and steel brushes beating rhythms on the city's stretched, white, oval skin.
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Here are the two sides.
This drawing has the liveliness I try for but don't always manage. That's what I liked about the dog and his master in the previous drawing, too, though that one was -- as my friend David remarked -- even less "studied."
I'll be away for a few days and will probably post some photos from there. Stay tuned!
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While looking through a little Moleskin notebook in my purse, I found this sketch, from earlier in the winter, done in a waiting room. I like the way it captures something about winter life here in Montreal. The Burmese mountain dog was a guide-dog-in-training, and the young woman seated beyond him was his trainer. He's get up, look around, and then calmly lie down agian, settling his head onto the floor with a resigned sign. I like her layers of wooly sweaters, her oversized satchel, and her fur-lined Sorels. All pretty true to life.
While we're on the subject of things wooly and warm, this hat was my knitting project during the Olympics; I finished it last night. It's a super-easy pattern from The Purl Bee, adapted by me for knitting with two unequal weight yarns - a lightweight brown alpaca and a midnight blue lace-weight merino, both odds and ends from my knitting basket. The resulting hat, knit in a K1 P1 rib, is very stretchy and I think it will even fit underneath my bike helmet for early spring biking, if the snow ever departs!
Speaking of which, the basil is up, and already thinned to one plant per pot!
But by and large I haven't been very productive lately, for a variety of reasons. I'm hoping to get back into the swing of it soon.
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When I cross on the Rosemont/Van Horne overpass to Outremont, I always feel like I'm entering a different world. Down below, on one's bike during better weather, the change is less dramatic but still significant. The Mile End, with its boutiques and restos and young energy, is in the midst of gentrification. But this part of Outremont, close to the more industrial end of Van Horne, which then becomes a shopping street, is an enclave of Hasidic Jews. When I drive or bike on these streets I feel like time has gone backward, and that behind the hurried steps of the black-clad men and the women in black skirts and wigs with headbands or hats, often pushing old-fashioned baby carriages, lies a life about which I know almost nothing. I stop at Cheskies and buy a loaf of challah or some rugelach, but it is a commercial exchange, nothing more: ours are separate solitudes and will remain that way.
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Happy Valentine's Day to everyone!
(and this is NOT what it looks like in Montreal at the moment: we're in the middle of a big snowstorm, no sun in sight, and there's at least another foot of snow piling up beyond what you see here.)
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-12 C. When I open the blinds: sunrise through a fine veil of snow. A neighbor, waiting for her dog, sees me standing at the open window, but she is never friendly and only scowls, turning back to pull the poor animal along the sidewalk. They disappear and I remain, unperturbed, enchanted by the whiteness and the soft filter of snowy air above the more brilliant ground and shiny, packed paths, the straight black trunks and complicated curving branches written across the white page like Persian script, and beyond it all, the golden disk of the sun rising over the river.
We're more than halfway through the Canadian winter. The days are longer now, and yesterday, outside the metro, the maple sugar kiosk had already been set up, even though there's hardly been a day above freezing and no sap could possibly be rising in the trees -- they must be selling last year's candy maple leaves and boiling last year's syrup to make tire d'érable, sugar-on-snow: a romantic treat in time for Valentine's Day. I know better than to get too optimistic. March is inevitably stormy, April tends to be a cold month here, and May is unpredictable. Still, I'll be back on my bike in April, and the city will begin to open up again. Between now and then, it's better to find ways to love it.
In the meditation sessions I lead twice a month, I've been talking about developing a non-dualistic mindset, and opposites are perhaps more on my mind than usual. Cold/warm; winter/summer; light/darkness: I notice the freight carried by each word in the pair, how the scales tip, and also how other pairs, like spring/fall, shift the balance less. Always it's the judgement that's extra, that pushes us into positive or negative territory and emotion: I hate winter, I can't wait for this to end. And yes, the season comes with its difficulties, but I rarely feel more alive than I do during these months, or more entranced by the stark beauty of nature asleep. I stand at the window and merge with the figure walking along the fence in the distance, bent forward against a bitter arctic wind; I watch the Olympians and remember being on skiis on the tops of mountains -- that high-elevation world of krummholtz and rime ice and absolute silence -- and then pushing off: the rush of adrenaline mixing with gravity; edges biting into the snow, now velvety soft, now crunchy with ice; knees and arms somehow knowing what to do.
The days lengthen; the downward slope. I slit open a small package and plant tiny black Greek basil seeds in pots of dry earth that swell when watered, and set them under a plastic cover to grow warm in the sunlight. At the bus-stop I scoop snow into my palms, fashion a ball, and throw it across the street. As it shatters I remember a boy who had a crush on me, and shot his frozen arrows accurately all one winter, right between my shoulder blades.
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Now, that was a warming and fun way to spend last Friday noon. We were over in Brossard, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence.
Here's what the river looked like as we drove back across the Pont Jacques-Cartier, looking toward the Olympic Stadium. It looks like the shipping channel is still open in this direction, toward Quebec City, as far as the Port of Montreal, but the Seaway is frozen to the west, beyond Montreal.
However, the billboards that don't advertise vacations in sunny climes are touting the joys of winter -- the one on the right, below, is for the Quebec City winter carnival. As for me, I like the bright sunny days (today is one of those) and am glad for the lengthening hours of daylight...and am trying to keep up a good attitude toward it all.
Dumplings definitely help.
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Two nights ago I made another drawing of the candelabra and rosary, this time with a jade plant (I had burned the Christmas greens in the fireplace!) My thought was: Mexico, desert, succulents, blue sky outside and a suggestion of snow drifted against the window. Once the drawing was done -- and I try to do them quite fast -- I already felt in trouble. Instead of the relationships I had intended between the objects, each of them just sat there on the page, separate, and - I felt - looking bored with each other. Or was I unexcited by them? I went ahead and added some color anyway, on the somewhat-receptive sketchbook paper.
Better, but when I flipped back through the sketchbook to see the original drawing I was dismayed - it was so much livelier and freer (as is often the case with first attempts!) There were some passages in the new sketch that I did like, though: the right side of the terracotta pot, some of the rosary beads, the yellow birds at the bottom of the candelabra, thr dripping wax, and the interplay of the browns/oranges and those bright blues.
Once the drawing was photographed and in Photoshop, I was able to play with the cropping. Sometimes moving in on a pictures will force the objects into relationship, and improve the balance of the positive/negative space. (It's nice to be able to do this in the computer rather than with scissors!) The result below seems a lot better to me, but of course it's quite a different thing. What do you think?
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A photo from my archive that I came across today, and wanted to post especially for my friend Vivian.
The painting on the card is an oil from 1924 by Lawren Harris (one of the Group of Seven) titled Maligne Lake, Jasper Park. It's in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, which must be where I bought the card. The prism is from a box of unmatched chandelier prisms we had in our attic, probably picked up by my grandfather at an auction. This one somehow came with me to Canada, and hangs on the lamp near my piano.
Lawren Harris had a long correspondence with the Canadian artist Emily Carr, whose memoirs and relationship with Harris I wrote about a while back.
And what can I say? Snow and arctic winds today: the photograph just feels like Canada!
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Still life with a Mexican candelabra and rosary, and Christmas greens in an Egyptian brass jug.
Doing a drawing like this is as much a psychological exploration as anything. It started with the painted ceramic candelabra from Oaxaca, which had been on our mantle at Christmas. The leftover greens in the brass jug need to be thrown out. The holly is dried up, but the evergreen branches are still all right, and so I've left them. When I put the two objects together I felt there was some affinity between the little holly berries and the hanging "dingleberries" on the whimsical candelabra. I needed another object and this Huichol rosary suggested itself: more round things, and also from Mexico. On the glass tabletop, the candelabra was slightly in front of the jug, but when I drew them, I somehow placed them standing side-by-side, like married couple. I thought that was odd. I noticed the liveliness of the little birds on the one, and the greenery and berries on the other, and then across the front, the wooden "berries" of the rosary. I'm not Catholic, so I don't use a rosary, but this one called to me when I saw it at a stand in a Mexico City market; the vendor told me it was carved by the Huichol Indians. For some reason, it touches me, and I always keep it on my little meditation shrine.
This is just an exploratory sketch, but it's interesting to study pictures like this. Why did I pick these particular objects? What are their affinities in terms of form and color; what can be exploited and emphasized, what should be changed? Do they suggest an idea, or set of ideas, or relationships? Can they tell a story? Which objects seem to want to be dominant, which are bridges or connections? How could they be rearranged to say something different, or to convey an idea more forcefully? What could be added or taken away? How can I change the colors to create a different emotion or mood that helps speak of the relationships in the picture?
In my own home, there are many objects that have personal significance, and many things that suggest place, people, relationships. Perhaps dominant among them are thigns that represent my anglo-saxon heritage, and my husband's in the middle and near east, but there are also objects that sound echoes of my personal search for meaning, that I have kept for a reason even though thos ereasons may not be obvious to me, even yet. Drawing and painting these things helps me see myself and my path more clearly, like thinking back over a significant dream.
A while back I placed some Cycladic figures in a Quebec landscape. This Christmas, I did a relief print of a star over an iconic Quebec mountain. Combining objects with landscape is another way to explore relationships and personal movement - both physical and psychological; I've learned a lot from seeing how Clive Hicks-Jenkins has done this in his own work.
So, in the above drawing, there is the start of something, perhaps, about New and Old world expressions of religion, and there's also a contrast bewteen the live greens and berries in the old jug, and the ceramic depictions of flowers, fruit, and birds in the Mexican candelabra. For the time being, the round forms of the bulbous jug, the base of the candelabra, and the multiplicity of berries and balls are what interest me artistically; the color needs to be simplified, and the rosary may or may not need to be replaced with something else.
All of this works better in the drawing I posted a few days ago, partly because the color is handled better, but also because that particular assemblage of objects has been consciously evolving on my desk for a long time. Anyway - it's a curious way to approach still life, but far more interesting to me than just sketching the forms and shapes and colors.
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