the cassandra pages

Greetings from the Deep Freeze

It's one thing to have a few bitter cold days now and then: that's just part of living in the north. But the cold has been unrelenting up here for more than a month; I can hardly remember a winter when it was below 0 degrees F. for so long. The Celsius readings have hovered around -19 to -23, and out in the country they've been in the minus 30s. Today is a heat wave - about 12 degrees F.! It feels almost balmy! The mountain of plowed snow in the studio parking lot has become a mountain range, and I'm grateful every day that I don't have to keep shoveling out a car that's parked on a city street: people are really having a hard time this year.

Between Christmas and New Year's, we built ourselves a new IKEA bed, and completely tore apart and rearranged our bedroom. Meanwhile, my husband's computer underwent an automatic operating system upgrade that trashed everything, so he spent a lot of the holiday week trying to reconstruct his digital life. Then the same thing happened to mine. We had daily backups, so there was little damage or loss, it was just a pain in the neck. He quickly got my computer back up and running, but yesterday I realized that all my accounting files for Phoenicia had been in a different location, and the data starting from the middle of 2016 was gone, and not backed up where it should have been. Today I began reconstructing them. Strangely, it hasn't put me into too bad a mood. Like many other things, I figure I'll just do a little bit every day, and eventually it will be done. The cliches run through my head: "No use crying over spilt milk"; "what's done is done."

We've also had the inevitable mid-winter colds, sneezing and coughing our way through the month. Unlike Europe, our January and February here in eastern Canada tend to be bright and sunny a lot of the time, so I haven't felt depressed by grey days. What the cold does is make me feel cooped up, because I can't walk: it's far too cold and far too icy underfoot for walking-as-exercise. So, although I try not to make New Year's resolutions, I did vow to get back to the pool and to some sort of exercise regimen. That began last week in earnest, and it does feel better.

A double-length cowl in progress, in Alegria yarn from Manos del Uruguay.

I'm working on the design and layout for the new book by Luisa A. Igloria that Phoenicia will be publishing in March, The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis. And I'm trying to draw a little every day, and finish a knitting project, and cooking soups and stews and baking bread, as well as reading The Odyssey again, along with two friends. We're each reading a different translation (I'm reading Fagles, the others are reading Wilson and Lombardo), one Book a day, and talking about them as we go - a perfect midwinter project that reminds me of Sicily and the Mediterranean, and the Greek cities we visited. 

Circe turning Odysseus' men into swine, from The Golden Iliad and Odyssey, by Martin and Alice Provensen: the book that first hooked me on the classical myths, and still has my all-time favorite illustrations. The look on Odysseus' face, in the background, is priceless.

Why these shells?

I've been drawing and painting more shells as the year begins.

 

A friend asked why.

 

I don't know exactly," I answered, and then thought about it...

I think shells are related, in my visual language, to skulls and bones; I like drawing them and adding them to still lives. And unlike the skulls and bones, clear symbols of mortality, shells are not exactly dead -- they're more like former homes, and related to the sea. So, for me they're evocative of the refugees who undertake perilous journeys across the seas.

But they're also quite challenging to draw properly because their growth is often an off-center spiral, not circular. I like the worn, broken ones especially, both for what they say and because they're beautiful in a different way from something perfectly preserved.

 

I've collected a lot of shells and beach stones, and most of them are sitting around in my studio. I'm trying to increase my fluency with them, but this is also therapeutic work when I'm feeling unsettled. And I end up with paintings and drawings: something real and tangible, rather than hours of aimless worry about a world I have little power to change. I've thought of writing and illustrating a small book about different land/sea edges: a sort of artist's journal, with essays like the one I wrote a few posts back about the sea. But it's just a thought.

What do you think?

(There are additional paintings and larger images at my artist's website.)

Drawing in Sicily

In my studio, before the trip, I indulging in one of my life's pleasures, putting together art supplies for travel. This is a tiny kit of hard pastels, about the size of my phone, from a box of NuPastels I've had (I kid you not) since high school. I used to sketch with compressed charcoal a lot, but lately it's been pen and watercolor, and I thought maybe it was time for a change. Pastels, of course, are one of my studio mediums of choice. After doing some Conté sketching in Mexico City last year, I wanted to expand on that. It was a surprise to be able to get thirty colors into this little box, including Conte in black and sanguine, and a soft graphite pencil. dithered about the paper, though, and finally packed a delicious hemp-and-rag handmade paper block from the Montreal paper-maker, St-Armand. I added a package of hand-cleansing wipes, and a mini-can of hairspray to use as fixative.

I did a few test sketches at the studio. The paper seemed a bit too soft, but I convinced myself it would work, maybe even force me to be looser.

So, one of our first evenings in Palermo, I sat down with the new kit and did this sketch of the artichokes we planned to eat for dinner. No problem with the graphite, but when I began to work with the pastels I found, to my dismay, that the lovely paper in my sketchbook was just too soft. The hard pastels kept tearing up little bits of fiber if I pressed hard enough to leave strong marks, or else they skipped over the surface if I applied too little pressure.

After an hour of struggling, I realized I would have to abandon my idea and just use ink or pencil for the rest of the trip. Looking sadly at all the beautiful colors in my box, I realized I had been seduced by the handmade sketchbook paper, but I had been wrong. I did discover that I really liked having a toned background, rather than white or cream, and it encouraged me to see the values of the subjects differently, and to experiment, so all was not lost! And the artichokes were delicious.