Winter Mysteries

If there is an ultra-typical view of central New York that feels like it embodies the sense of "home" to me, it's this sort of scene: pastures bordered by hedgerows, wooded hilltops, tall deciduous trees and scrubby brush, all arranged in a zigzagging patchwork that carries the eye up and down and across the rolling hills. It's beautiful in every season, but you can see the shape of the land better in the winter, when the contrast is greatest between the fields and the trees; in the summer, pretty much everything is green, or shades of green, brown, and yellow. After this winter's deep dive into the landscape, I'm sure I will be making paintings or doing pastels in the more colorful seasons too, but I'm learning a lot about looking and about what has always attracted my own eye, attention, and heart to this particular type of terrain and its ecology. 

The picture at the top of this post was done after the one below. These are two views of the same range of hills, north of Hamilton, NY, as you're heading toward Rt 20. 

The top picture took a quite a bit of time - an hour or two -- but the bottom one was a deliberately fast 13-minute sketch. In the video below, you can see the whole sketching process condensed to a minute and a half, which I find both amusing and also mystifying; I've watched it a number of times and still can't figure out how the brain and eye, intellect and intuition actually do this. There's a lot about the arts, as well as many other human endeavors, that will always remain mysterious to me, and beyond the realm of what we "learn" to do or can explain. 

For instance, this weekend we watched Mikaela Shiffrin break Ingmar Stenmark's record for world cup skiing victories -- a record many thought would never fall. The qualities that set her apart are vastly more than flawless technique and great physical conditioning; there's her uncanny feeling for the snow in a wide range of conditions, her ability to "see" the course in her mind, and then ski it tighter, faster, and more perfectly than anyone else, and the whole constellation of mental and emotional mastery that's necessary to win so consistently over a period of years. My husband was a ski racer in his youth, and we both skied a lot in our 30s and 40s; he was incredibly good and taught me a lot about the sport, while I became a rather foolhardy advanced intermediate. We stopped, eventually, after some injuries that threatened to become chronic problems as we aged -- and also because skiing with people with cell phones began to take away the solitude and quiet we loved in that other world of the mountains. But those long, cold, sunny, foggy, snowy days remain etched in my mind, and in my dreams I am sometimes still skiing -- and it still feels fantastic.

I never understood exactly how the mind and body managed to coordinate themselves in order to allow this. You learn "how", but then there is a kind of letting go, where you aren't thinking about it in the same analytical way all the time. For me, that was always a tenuous balance, because I didn't grow up on skis, and I was never that good at it, but under optimum conditions, sometimes I could experience the freedom. The gulf between me and a top racer like Schiffrin is, well, about as big as the distance from here to Switzerland, and yet I can appreciate what the human body is capable of doing, both for someone like me who grew up among little un-skied hills like these, to learn to ski on much bigger ones, and for the people at the top of the sport -- or music, or art, or dance, or many other disciplines. It's nothing short of amazing. The thing is, we all do many things every single day that are an astounding combination of learned and intuitive actions. We seldom stop to think about them, but we should marvel at ourselves now and then, for simply being able to read, brush our teeth, cook an egg. It is not insignificant at all.

Comments

[Jackie M]

I can almost see the wind generators peaking over the top of the hills of the first drawing...

[Ann]

I enjoyed this post, Beth. Beautiful art can be breath-taking, whether in a concert hall or on the radio, in a museum, a magazine or an online blog. At the very least, it can help us all cope during difficult times like grief, whether personal or world-wide. I admire artists of any genre who are so skilled at reminding us of the universal spirit with its human connection..

And sports can also help us feel better about the world, as we root for a favorite athlete or team. If we lose, we'll do better next year! I'm glad you became an accomplished skier; that must have been fun and so satisfying. Thanks for the reminder that we all have super powers!

Your pictures represent our area so well. They remind me of scenes of our family's farmland. Thanks!