the cassandra pages

Catching up while nature steams on ahead

During the four days we were in Florida, two weeks ago, my garden exploded. The entire spring had been cold and rainy here, so the plants had emerged very slowly, and I got used to that pace. Not so after a weekend of 95 degree heat: everything from poppies to peonies burst into bloom, and faded almost as rapidly. I haven't been able to keep up at all, plus there was the huge pleasure of having guests -- our dear friends from Iceland visited us last week! So, in this post I'll show you a few color studies I did earlier in June.

This is a clump of Pulsatilla in the alpine garden at Montreal's Jardin botanique. I'm crazy about plants with this sort of blooming habit - hellebores, hepatica, anemones. Pulsatilla is a genus of small plants with finely-divided foliage and fuzzy stems and buds. I found it devilishly hard to capture their delicate, hairy essence - this was the third attempt (detail at top of page.) (Watercolor and ink on paper.)

 

The pea-like, trailing flower clusters of a large blooming tree, the thorny locust. (Watercolor and ink on paper.)

And this is an acrylic on paper of an elderflower branch. I was curious to try using acrylic washes, thinned a great deal to resemble watercolor, over a pencil drawing. Because the acrylics are opaque, it was also possible to add a few lighter details later. I'm pretty happy with the result here, especially in the leaves on the right, and I'll probably do more experimentation. The acrylic dries extremely fast, so it's tricky and quite different from watercolor, which has a delicacy that can't be matched by any other medium. Every medium has its own advantages and disadvantages, and it's only by working with them a lot, fooling around, and refusing to get discouraged (!) that we find out what works for different situations, different desired results.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins was talking on Facebook recently about his use of acrylics, which I found fascinating. Like Clive, I use professional quality Golden Acrylics, made very near my home town in upstate New York; lesser-quality paints can become gummy or granular. Clive mentioned that using acrylics with just water, without adding a medium to extend the drying time, forced him to work fast and that it had been good for him -- "It made me a more confident painter and speeded my output" he wrote. I can see that this would be true. While watercolor also requires speed, it's for somewhat different reasons -- an overworked watercolor loses the spontaneity, delicacy and brilliance that are the medium's greatest strengths. It's a different process to create loose, transparent effects in acrylic, and you can't count on being able to go back and blend colors on the paper with your brush, or remove pigment to create highlights: the paints are plastic, and they don't dissolve! With watercolor, I'm often able to erase pencil marks right through the painting, but here, the pencil is embedded permanently beneath the acrylic coating. That can be used as an advantage, with pencil, ink, or many other types of media; acrylic lends itself to mixed-media work, but it requires planning and experience, just like watercolor.

 

Florida, briefly

I am not a hot weather person, nor a beach person, but the ocean compels me. We were in Jacksonville, Florida last weekend to attend a memorial service for J's Uncle Anwar, who died a few months ago at 99. It was a family reunion as well, with cousins gathering from Texas, Toronto, D.C., Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, other parts of Florida, and, of course, Montreal.

The place where Anwar and MaryAnne have always lived is the opposite of the dazzling brightness of the white beaches that stretch along Florida's Atlantic coast. Just a few miles away, their property forms a long rectangle stretching away from its frontage on the St. John's River. When you turn into the driveway from Atlantic Boulevard, which, as its name implies, runs straight from Jacksonville to the ocean, you enter a perpendicular world: palms and palmettos, small cabins in overgrown wilderness, enormous live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, the deep green punctuated only by the occasional bright gold of a kumquat or orange hanging on a low tree. We get out of the car to a deafening buzz of insects, tiny lizards scatter into the underbrush, feral cats slink behind boxes, their eyes glinting from the shadows.

For me, Florida is never its highways, cities, and endless suburbs, but rather the blinding, bright limitlessness of the ocean, and the dark Gothic of the old deep south: frighteningly unfamiliar, fascinating, bewitching; temperamental and changeable; enigmatic and slow. I am never there long enough to understand anything, and always leave with the echoing, dismissive words of one tenant, to whom we were introduced over a papaya plant, as thirty cats sat at a distance waiting for their evening handout: "Oh: Northerners."

Zen and Line Drawing

Tulips and embroidered shawl on a Druze chest.

In addition to the paintings I've been posting this spring, I've also been drawing a lot. Here are a few recent ones.

Apple blossoms, pine cone, and two Chinese bronze horses.

When I look back over the past few years, I can see the evolution of a personal style, and increasing assurance, in these line drawings. Like anything else -- from cooking, to a sport, to getting along in a relationship -- it takes practice and time and thinking about what works and what doesn't. But in something like this, which is kind of Zen -- in that you don't have second chances, and the line needs to appear effortless, as if it "drew itself," with a pleasing balance of forms and positive and negative space -- the only way to get there is to "polish a thousand tiles" or shoot a thousand arrows - i.e., do it over and over until the technique has become totally ingrained -- then you can stop thinking, let technique take care of itself, and at least have a chance of becoming one with the object of your attention.

Some of the drawings are busier, some more minimal.

Still life with three mangoes.

Hitting a bulls-eye is rare, and the near-misses are always worth studying: I try to ask myself what works, what do I like, what doesn't seem to work so well? Where did I get involved in "drawing", where did I start thinking too much? Where does it feel the most free?

 

Still life with fruit, faded tulips, and Mexican jar.

I could keep doing this all my life: it's that challenging, that elusive, that satisfying.

Tulips, mirror, and bowl of fruit.