the cassandra pages

Centering and Simplifying

When I posted this watercolor sketch on Instagram, one of the comments (thank you, Michael) was that it seemed to capture "the essence of carnation". I thought about that quite a lot, wondering what happens when this occurs. What helps the artist get close to the "essence" of a subject, and is it something that can be "explained," let alone taught?

Sitting down one evening to do this particular piece, several things were going on in my mind. I was drawn by a vase of evergreens and carnations remaining from the holidays, while also wanting some respite from a long day and the constellation of anxieties, sorrows, frustrations and anger with which many of us are living. So I wanted to do something absorbing and, hopefully, to capture some of the beauty and peacefulness in front of me. I decided not to work in my studio, but right there on the living room table, so I brought out my watercolor palette, a large jar of water, sketchbook and brush, and adjusted the position of the flowers for the light angle I wanted.

Then there were a few minutes of considering potential problems. I wanted to do a direct watercolor -- with no pencil under-drawing, or pen-and-ink line -- because I felt that a spontaneous watercolor would better capture the delicacy and emotional feeling of the bouquet. Another issue was how to handle the white flowers against a white background, because their edges would be very hard to see. I decided I'd paint the shadows on the petals, and then add some pencil lines afterward, if needed.

The final questions were the placement on the page, and where to start. I began by mentally calculating the proportion of vase height to flower height and width, and estimating where these would need to be placed on the page. I then started painting with a brush line indicating the top edge of the vase (the whole vase appears in the full painting, as you'll see in the video below) and built the picture from there, placing the flowers before doing any of the foliage. I painted far fewer flowers than were actually in the vase; I just chose representative ones at interesting angles. As soon as I began painting, I became very quickly absorbed in it.

The painting itself took about 30-40 minutes. When I'm working on something like this I'm in a state that's somewhere between meditation and extreme but wordless concentration. I'm not talking to myself in my head, and I'm moving pretty fast because I want the strokes to be quick and alive. I don't fuss over things, but try to create an overall impression as rapidly as possible. The color choices and color mixtures are intuitive and come from experience; this just comes with learned technique and practice. As Zen teaches, you have to master your tools and technique first, and practice over and over so that you can let them go, not think about them, but rely on them when you are in a flow of action. During that time, your attention can be concentrated not so much on what you are doing but on becoming one with the subject -- seeing it with fresh, clear eyes and penetrating to what is essential, while leaving aside whatever is not.

Obviously, that is a goal, but not something I usually achieve! Nevertheless, without understanding it as an ideal, and without having put in years of thought, meditation, and technical practice, I don't think I'd ever be able to come close. Oddly enough, children sometimes approach the essence of things better than adults. They have so much less of a filter; they haven't been told what matters by other people or society, and they haven't learned to care what others think of their efforts -- that judging voice we become accustomed to as adults is not in their heads yet, but --sadly -- it will be soon. As adults, we have to un-learn a great deal in order to open up again.

The result of this process is a picture, yes, but it can also be a period of time that is enormously refreshing. We center ourselves, we concentrate, we forget our ego as we work, absorbed in color and form and the wordless communication between eye, hand, and spirit. It's a journey, and a space in time. There is no way to describe this in detail; as with many things, it's easier to say what it's not.

The detailed drawing above was done on the following day. Here I was trying to see the difference between a careful rendering of the flowers and what I had done in the painting. It's the opposite of the extreme simplification of the watercolor. The drawing was a helpful study in understanding "Chrysanthemum:" its frilliness, the skirt-like stiffness of the petals, the whorls of tightly wound petals that form the centers, the way the darker pigment is concentrated in lines on the edges. Although the drawing is still quite loose and spontaneous, it didn't create the sense of time-standing-still and complete absorption of the watercolor painting, because I was thinking about all of those things and how to explain them in words.

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Some of you have been asking for some watercolor videos, so I made this short one, which shows me painting one flower from the previous composition, and talking about simplifying what I was seeing while painting. When I watch it, I notice technical things that I don't think about at all, like where I am holding the brush, how much pressure I'm applying. It's helpful for me to watch too.

(Click at lower right to view full screen.)

 

And here's that little sketch from the video so that you can see it better.

I wish everyone some moments of rest and renewal in the coming days. You don't have to be an artist to experience the kind of time-out-of-time that I'm talking about here. Look around you - something is calling for your attention. You don't need to paint it or write about it, just look... and then look deeper for ten or fifteen minutes, being conscious of your breathing, and see if you don't feel that something has shifted for the better.

 

What is Real?

Snow-dusted fields near Lourdes-de-Joliette, Quebec. Watercolor, 6" x 9" in sketchbook.

Whether we feel like we're gradually sliding, or hurtling, into the new year, I think most of us agree that it is not without trepidation. It's hard to think of 2024 with some sort of glittery, jovial anticipation - not after the year just past, and not with our awareness of how rocky the next months are likely to be. I, for one, feel like I'm hurtling headlong, with very little control over external events. Which makes me feel like it's more important than ever to slow down, look around myself, and do some thinking. Not making resolutions, which I generally find unrealistic, but considering some ways to approach life in these unstable and uncertain times.

The first thing I'm trying to do is think about what's real, and that's probably why the first painting of the year is the one you see here -- a Quebec landscape in winter. We saw this scene from our car window when driving out to see friends in the countryside the day after Christmas, and I painted it quickly, from my photograph, on New Year's Eve. The snow is probably gone now; the effects of climate change are undeniable this year - we've had very little snow at all and the temperatures have been right around freezing, which is unseasonably warm. But the landscape itself -- its flatness, the small copses of trees in the plowed fields, the low foothills of the Laurentians in the distance -- remains very real and very much itself.

I'm still comforted by nature, even though the warming climate is frightening. I'm comforted by the clods of earth in the fields, the winter clouds, the shapes of trees and the wind blowing through them, the tiny branches and black trunks of trees, the tall dead grasses in shades of ochre, russet, beige and brown, the way the cold bites my cheeks, the taste of the apple in my hands. All of it is beautiful to me, and real, reminding me that I too am a natural being, I too am alive, with the capacity to observe, feel, and think.

The world inside my computer, which reflects the outer world of human beings and their actions, tells me what is happening, and I pay attention to that and think about it a great deal, sometimes taking actions as a result. But I don't have to scroll very far to see that my reality is quite different from that of many other people. Around the holidays, I was literally bombarded with posts by people who wanted to sell me something, or were striving to say "look at me!," with no apparent awareness that 22,000 people who four months ago were also eating, breathing, putting on clothes in the morning and making something to eat, changing their babies or going to work, going to school, and loving their beloveds, are no longer able to do anything at all. They are gone, dead, many not even properly buried. And the rest of the world is divided between those who are deeply aware of this, and those for whom it mean next to nothing. How are we to think about reality in such a situation? And as extreme as it is, this is just one area of deep concern affecting our lives and our futures.

To make things even more absurd, when the news (let alone social media) attempts to "move on" from these difficult topics, what they offer us becomes ever more bizarre. Yesterday the New York Times ran a piece about the danger of not cleaning one's navel; all the stuff that collects in there, the writer claimed, can build up to a point where surgery may be needed. "Have we really come to this?" I wondered. As if we don't have enough to worry about -- or maybe because we do -- does the news have to manufacture such absurdities for the already-anxious to obsess about? Have our powers of reasoning become so distorted and weak that no one even calls such drivel out for what it is? But of course it is only a short distance from our culture's obsession with celebrity and wealth and consumption to its hyper-anxiety about health and mortality amidst great privilege. Many of the institutions we once had more faith in, from the judicial system to universities as a bastion of free thought, to women's control over their own bodies, are under constant attack. Meanwhile the extinction of species continues at a staggering rate, almost unnoticed.

Many of us are struggling with the resulting dissonance between what we know to be right and true, and how much of the society around us, the government, and the media are acting. I don't think this is going to improve anytime soon; it is a feature of our world as we enter 2024.

Therefore I think it is a time to gird our loins, as the saying goes, and prepare for a long haul. Our armor needs to be whatever is the most real to us -- the people we love, books, art, music, our communities of friends, nature, animals, our faith if we have it -- and in continuing to do our deepest and most heartfelt work. We need to be prepared to take care of each other, to find hope in unexpected places and to share it, and take a very long view of the future.

 

Someone said to me recently that one advantage of getting older is having the perspective of years. I find that to be true. The world has gone through many dark times, seen many despots and dictators, seen wars, famines, plagues, and natural disasters, and the accompanying tragic, devastating losses. And then things change. In my own lifetime I've seen many pendulum-swings in politics; I've seen conservatism and progressivism and conservatism again; I've seen greater justice and the backlash against it. At the same time, there have been enormous advances in science, technology, and medicine that have saved and improved countless lives. The Cold War didn't become a nuclear apocalypse. Children don't die of polio and measles; far fewer adults are dying of AIDS than we once feared. The story is not entirely dark, even when we seem to be in dark times.

So I refuse to believe that humanity is doomed, even though I may not live to see the breakthroughs that help turn the tide of what we're living through now. I don't know what will happen, be lost or irrevocably changed, before that happens. But I am going to choose to be a hopeful person while not being an unrealistic one, and to try to see what I can do in my own small corner to keep hope alive. Being more mindful of my senses is one way to immerse myself in what is real and present in each moment of life -- and it's the best way I know to keep despair at bay.

 

A Brief Stay in Exarcheia

Today, November 17, marks the fateful day in 1973 -- fifty years ago -- when tanks were driven through the gates of the National Polytechnic University in Athens in an attempt to put down the student-led uprising against the military junta that had ruled Greece since 1967. 24 civilians were killed. Several days before, students had barricaded themselves in the main university buildings and called on their fellow citizens to rise up. These events are acknowledged today as the beginning of the overthrow of that oppressive regime. They are still commemorated with a permanent shrine, including the wrecked and twisted metal gate, inside the university entrance where many of the victims fell.

In preparation for today's expected 50th-year commemoration, we hear that 5,000 police have been stationed in strategic areas around the city, including at the US and Israeli embassies. The US embassy is the usual end point of student marches on this date every year, since the country is generally blamed by them for having been in league with the military junta, and now for being a partner in "imperialist wars." The police have said that drones and helicopters will be hovering and transmitting images to their operations center throughout the day. Yesterday, crowds of people, as well as the political opposition leader and the head of the communist party, laid wreaths and carnations at the Polytechnic site in memory of the students who were killed.

The surrounding neighborhood, called Exarcheia (or Exarchia) continues to be known as the home of anarchists, activist students, and bohemian intellectuals who oppose the government's authoritarian and conservative policies. In recent decades it also became a refuge for migrants who established squats in empty buildings, with periodic crackdowns by the government to clear out those settlements. The clashes between students and police have often included tear gas, Molotov cocktails, and broken windows. However, Exarcheia also one of the most vibrant and interesting neighborhoods in the city, and we've stayed there twice.

I drew this view into the courtyard of the historic neoclassical buildings of the Polytechnic University back in 2019, from our apartment balcony. At that time, students had taken over the main building and seemed to be living there, and in the evenings there were meetings with music and speeches in this courtyard -- all peaceful but continuing well into the late hours. These were the original university buildings; the main campus is now located elsewhere. 

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After arriving in Athens our taxi dropped us off at our small hotel, where we'd be for the next two nights, and after a nap we went out to explore. Many tourists would probably be freaked out by Exarcheia, with its Marxist posters, abundant graffiti, edgy vibe, and continual police presence. We were prepared for that because we'd stayed in the area previously and realized there was little to fear under normal circumstances. What got to us this time wasn't any perception of danger on the streets, but the greatly increased police presence since four years ago: large groups of helmeted police riding motorcycles through the narrow streets at all hours, and three huge buses filled with police in full riot gear, with shields, parked on a main street, apparently perpetually ready to confront a student demonstration. Maybe, as children of the 1960s and peace activists who have experienced plenty of this ourselves, it feels unfortunate and wrong, but not that abnormal.

The next morning, jet-lagged but hungry, we walked up to a block of small restaurants with outdoor seating that we'd passed the night before, coming home from dinner. We chose a little eastern-European café, and sat there for an hour and a half, watching what was going on as the street came alive, shops opened, and people began their days. The gentleman shown in the drawing passed us, wearing a long black coat and carrying an armload of heavy books. He sat down at a table outside the door of the neighboring café, where he was greeted by the server in a way that made me think he must be a habitué. Was he a retired professor? Were those clerical robes? He didn't seem to be an Orthodox priest. Whatever the case, I'm sure he was doing exactly what he did on many mornings in his own familiar neighborhood  - sitting at that same table, ordering coffee, reading, checking his phone, and having a few cigarettes. Likewise, the man who ran the small fruit and vegetable shop on the other side rolled up his awning and came out to chat with a fellow who pulled up on a motorcycle, then later a woman doing her morning errands, and two men who sat down at a table to smoke with him: longtime neighbors and friends.

When our young server returned to the table with our breakfast order, I asked how things were going, and mentioned the police buses we'd seen the previous night. He shook his head and asked softly: "You know about this neighborhood?" We nodded. "It's been getting worse and worse. Constant intimidation, on the orders of the government. It's to try to keep the students quiet, keep them from protesting their policies. And the problem is, say if something bad happened or you had an accident late at night and needed help, then no one would come." We had the impression that student opposition to the government's immigration policies was at the heart of this increased intimidation, and also their direct opposition to police brutality, but there were many other issues as well, from economic policy to the planned construction of a new metro stop in the heart of the neighborhood.

Typical posters pasted up on the streets announced demonstrations, and exhorted people to take action on various issues, such as migrant rights, anti-police brutality, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, war in the Ukraine. The large letters on the top poster here say something like (Greek speakers please correct me!): The Elector is Responsible / Remember / The people choose the leaders they deserve. It's accompanied by a picture of Karl Marx. (This is basically the same as Alexander Hamilton's famous quote: "People get the government they deserve" - an ironic comment from an American founding father, in the light of current world and domestic events.)  The next sentence in black letters, is a quote from the "national poet of Greece", Dionysios Solomos (1798-1857), and reads: "My poor people, good and beloved. Always gullible and always betrayed." The poster below says "Marxism 2023" and advertises an action that took place this past July in Athens.

There's a lot of graffiti everywhere. It ranges from spray-painted names and tags, such as those above, to some breathtaking murals like the one below.

Everything in Exarcheia is not political. Because of the intellectual/artist/student vibe, the area is filled with small bookstores, art supply stores, vintage and ethnic clothing and thrift stores, small artist and craft boutiques, cafés and restaurants -- many of which are very good and far more affordable than those a few blocks away near the city center and Syntagma Square. One of our favorite restaurants is a mezedopolia, or "small plates" restaurant specializing in meze, located at the top of the hill. You eat at café tables in an outdoor terrace where vines climb on the rustic pergolas overhead, and cats wander between the table, in an atmosphere of convivial groups of friends. The food is fantastic, the wine and ouzo are great, and who could complain about jasmine blossoms falling on your table as you finish your coffee?

During our three visits to Greece, we've spent considerable time in Athens and grown to love this gritty, complicated city not just for its monuments, art, and cultural history but also for its people and vibrancy today. Most tourists sleep and spend their time and money in the city center and the area around the Acropolis. These are fairly sanitized and curated, with English signs everywhere, good restaurants that provide predictable menus and a "Greek experience," and shopping from the very high-end to souvenir shops filled with evil-eye jewelry, sandals, cheap reproductions of classical vases, olive oil soaps and Mediterranean sponges. You're much more likely to get your pocket picked in those crowded places than in Exarcheia. But you won't be as likely to fall on cracked and uneven pavement, or stumble over garbage and animal waste, or find yourself in a neighborhood populated by non-white immigrants wearing ethnic and religious dress. We've stayed in Plaka, the area near the major museums and monuments, and yes, it is pretty incredible to go up on your rooftop and watch the sun set over the Parthenon. But it's also much more expensive, and at this point we are less interested in seeing those sights again than in trying to understand the city and the country in a deeper way. When we planned this particular trip to begin and end in Athens, we deliberately chose two neighborhoods - Exarcheia and another, close to it and to the northwest - where we'd see a different side of the city.

Having said that, I am always skeptical about how much a visitor can ever truly understand a place where they don't live and don't speak the language well. You can read history from a book, and absorb plays and poetry and art, and enjoy the local cuisine. You can even get a college degree, like me, in "classical civilization." But there is no way to fully grasp the lived reality of present-day people, or the effect of politics, and economic and social movements over time, on actual lives, without living there for a long time yourself. I know that I've been extremely irritated by newcomers to Quebec who rhapsodize about how wonderful it is, and even pontificate about the political situation, when they actually don't know anything beyond the superficial. I hope - even after twenty years here - that I am always willing to listen to French Canadians about their own long, fraught, and particular history. Likewise, I've now lived in Quebec long enough to have my own opinions and experiences, as well as a personal stake in it and full citizenship, so I resent being made to feel like an outsider, while acknowledging how complicated such questions of belonging and identity can be. 

With an unfamiliar country, like Greece, if we want to learn, we have to get off the beaten path, live in real neighborhoods, talk to Greek people, and remain porous, inquisitive, and open-minded. I'll write more about my language adventures in another post. I just want to express my respect and humility at the outset, and try very hard not to write with more authority than is justified. Certain qualities, however, cannot be mistaken: the natural beauty of a place; the warmth, generosity and openness of the people; and an intangible sense of a history to which I do feel, in some soul-level and lifelong ways, connected.

Views of Edessa

View of Edessa, Greece, looking southeast.

After arriving in Athens on October 8, we stayed in the city two nights to give our bodies a chance to acclimate, and then took off in our rental car for the roadtrip portion of our Greek trip.

The first day's drive was the longest of the entire trip, more than six hours if we had gone straight north and not stopped, but we did take a break for a picnic lunch on the seashore, and then stopped a few more times to take pictures of cotton fields, orchards, and mountains on our way to the north of Greece. Our destination was Edessa, a city in the foothills of the Pindus Mountains near the Macedonian border, not far from Pella, the birthplace of Alexander the Great, and Vergina, where his father Philip II and many other Macedoniam royalty are buried. We were going there not so much for culture or ancient history, although there is plenty, but for natural beauty and a few days of quiet decompression as we began our journey. And spectacularly beautiful it was.

The old city, with its fortifications, sits high above the newer Edessa. We stayed in Varosi, the oldest inhabited part, above the fortification walls, in a stone building that has been lovingly restored and turned into a bed and breakfast inn. Our room was on the second floor of the heavily-timbered structure, with lace curtains and a wooden balcony that looked south across the broad valley, and east toward Thessaloniki.

View to the northeast. The mountains weren't snow-covered, just rocky.

One of the main attractions of Edessa has always been its waterfalls, which spill from rivers coming off the high mountains behind Varosi, and historically powered the city's textile mills. The cataracts were within walking distance from our inn, along with low-key restaurants, service businesses, and a tiny Orthodox church in a shadowed park filled with ancient plane trees, above an old grain mill, no longer in use. Now the water is channeled and collected for human use and water power in the valley far below the falls. Everything was very lightly curated, and because it was already the off-season, we saw few other tourists.

Edessa is thought to be where Caranus -- ancestor of Alexander the Great -- founded the first capital of ancient Macedon. Our waiter at dinner confided to us that Greece had it wrong in spending so much money on the archaeological site of Alexander's purported birthplace, Pella, because those who live in Edessa know that he was really born there. Whether that is true or not, ancient ruins have started to be excavated down in the valley. The city eventually became a major cultural center during medieval times, and has been the site of much fighting during all the centuries and all the wars since, because of its strategic border location and the clashes between Byzantines and Serbs, Ottomans and Greeks, Bulgarians and Greeks, Nazis and Allied powers, and Communists factions and Slav-Macedonians during the Greek Civil War.

The streets of Varosi are ancient and beautiful, and here we met the first of the many stray cats with whom we'd became acquainted during our journey. Some were in good shape, others less so, but many people put out food and water for them, and the cats are opportunistic too, hanging around restaurants where they know they're likely to find dropped tidbits, or sympathetic diners. This beautiful kitten spent most of her days on a rock near the door of our inn, and it was only later that we discovered she was managing on only three legs.

Within a short distance from our inn, I think I counted five Greek Orthodox churches and chapels. The main cathedral was open, and a tall bearded priest in his black robes sat talking with his assistants in the garden courtyard as I went up the steps. In the foyer I lit a thin beeswax candle for peace, placing it in the sand-filled container with other burning tapers, as war broke out in the Middle East. I sat for a while, meditating beneath the huge brass chandelier and its hanging ostrich eggs. The priest eventually came in, kissed the two main icons, and then paused near me to say a warm kαλημέρα, good morning, before he disappeared behind the iconostasis.

Someone's sunken garden, orchard, grapevines, and extraordinary woodpile.

I was able to draw in Edessa, on our balcony, and expected to be able to continue what I had begun throughout the trip, but it turned out to be almost impossible as our pace picked up and we had less time to just sit and observe our surroundings. I took lots of pictures though, and did as many fast sketches as I could, so in the weeks and months to come I hope I'll be able to fill in the gaps. Now I look back at our stay in Edessa as a particularly quiet and lovely few days -- and although I didn't draw the famous waterfalls, I'll try to paint them to show you.

Pine tree and a view toward the lower town, with orchards and vineyards.

Announcing my new book, "Snowy Fields"

I'm happy to announce the forthcoming (mid/late Nov 2023) publication of my book of drawings and written reflections, SNOWY FIELDS, done during the past year. It's a slightly oversized 9" x 10" paperback art book, printed on coated paper. It contains the entire series of drawings, a long reflective essay that I wrote about place, identity, grief, and my artistic process, and an essay about my work by the British artist, writer, composer and educator Michael Szpakowski. The book can be pre-ordered now at a reduced price, and you can find all the details about it on the Phoenicia Publishing website.

It's always exciting when a project that began in uncertainty gradually comes together, takes shape, and is finally refined into a finished form. The moment when it is launched, to find its own way into the world, is also my chance to thank YOU, my online readers, who encouraged me and offered feedback as this series of drawings took shape. I also thank all those who corresponded with me about the artwork, and supported me through a time of change, grief, and discovery. You helped me personally, and you helped this project come into being. I'm grateful.

Packing for Painting

For the first time in nearly four years, we're planning to go on a significant trip abroad, and I hope to do quite a lot of sketching. This is going to be a carry-on-luggage-only journey, so whatever I take has to be light and compact, including my bag of art supplies. As of the end of yesterday (which included a quick trip to the art supply store to buy two tubes of watercolor paint), I think I've got it all sorted.

The big decision was to take my larger travel palette rather than the tiny one shown in the top picture. This one holds 24 half-pans of color rather than twelve, has a considerably larger mixing area, and I can also fit several travel brushes into it, but it's still quite compact at about 6 x 4 inches. Today I worked on cleaning it up, refilling the color wells, shifting the arrangement of colors, and substituting a few new ones, mainly Potter's Pink, which I haven't used before, and a pre-mixed well of cool grey. Both of those will function as neutrals, be good mixers with other colors, and save time in the painting process. As usual, I painted a lot of swatches to make sure the pigments chosen are what i really need -- for instance, the greenish-grey swatches at bottom right above are tests for the silvery grey-green of olive leaves...a hint as to where we're going.

I'll be taking a new Stillman&Birn Gamma sketchbook slightly smaller than my usual landscape-format 7" x 10" book. This one is 6" x 8", with a vertical spiral binding, but I will most likely turn the pages and work horizontally. The painting at the top of this post is the first page in the new sketchbook. It seems like the format will be fine, and the paper is what I like best and am used to for both ink drawing and watercolor sketching. Sometimes I also take a watercolor block of high-quality paper but decided to buy one there if needed. I always go with great intentions to draw or paint every day, but when traveling it's not always possible to take the time. We'll see how it goes; I'm going to be as prepared, and as relaxed, about it as possible.

For tools, I've whittled things down to the bare essentials because pens tend to weight quite a bit. I'll be taking a mechanical pencil and an HB Dixon Ticonderoga, two Grumbacher charcoal pencils (hard and medium) and a tiny, light sharpener that works for two sizes (it's actually a makeup pencil sharpener that I got at Sephora.) For pens, I'm packing my Sailor fude-nib pen filled with my favorite Noodler's ink color, "El Lawrence", (thank you, Pohangina Pete), which is an olive green-grey; I have a small bottle of extra ink in the bag. For this I used an empty bottle of eye drops; the screw top is bullet-proof and I've never had trouble with it. I will probably also take a Faber-Castell medium fude-nib marker, a white gel pen, and a water brush. The other brushes in my kit are recent acquisitions that I think will work really well: it's a set of Princeton travel brushes, sizes 10, 8, 6 and 4 of which I will only take the larger sizes, plus a very small brush for details. They're synthetic sable, with handles that double as holders when the point-end is reversed. They'll be fine for this purpose and if they get messed up, it's not a loss of hundreds of dollars as sable brushes would be.

Add to that a small white eraser, some pieces of microfiber dishtowels (Trader Joe's) that are highly absorbent, washable substitutes for paper towels for wiping brushes and regulating the water/pigment load, and a small sea sponge, and the kit is complete. 

All of this will go into the plastic, see-through zip-top bag shown above (this one's from the Container Store; you can find similar bags online), which fits easily into my "personal item" bag rather than the carry-on, so that I can sketch in the airport or during the flight.

I'm excited! And anxious to start using the new set-up.

Learning from John Singer Sargent

I've done very little copying in my art career, but whenever I've taken the time to try, it's been instructive and helpful. Lately I've wanted to make some new progress with watercolor, which for me is the most challenging of all media, and where better to turn than to the great master, John Singer Sargent.

Sargent's watercolors have always been the pinnacle for me. After seeing a big show of his paintings in Brooklyn in 2013, curated jointly by the Boston MFA and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, I became even more impressed by his brilliance, and curious about his technique. Since then I've studied reproductions and, especially, enlarged details, read articles about his methods, and tried out some of his techniques, like the use of wax resists. Until this week, though, ten years later, I'd never actually tried to copy one of his paintings. I learned so much that I will probably do more of it, to try to understand the steps through which he's planning and building the layers of the painting, since this is crucial to good watercolor painting. I'm less concerned about studying his draughtsmanship, which is incredible, or his sense of composition. The biggest question for me is, "how does he get the paint down on the paper with such luminosity and brilliance?"

One answer to that is speed. Observers at the time concurred that Sargent worked amazingly fast, with complete confidence. He was such a master of drawing what he saw, and of the human body in particular, that this aspect of picture-making -- which slows most of us down cosiderably, and often causes us to fuss over details -- was not an obstacle for him in the least. Often, his watercolors include just the merest indication of pencil lines, just enough to place the elements relative to each other. At other times, such as in architectural studies, he drew considerable detail before painting. My guess is that Sargent painted this piece in half an hour or less.

Another answer is the way he used his pigments. He knew exactly which were appropriate for the subjects and type of painting he had chosen, and used the same ones repeatedly. He knew everything about how they'd behave in water and in mixtures with one another. In this way he was able to achieve brilliance, intensity, and luminosity, and to avoid the muddiness that comes from overmixing, or inappropriate choices of pigment to mix or layer. He also often used a quite limited palette, which contributed to being able to work quickly.

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To begin my copy, I drew the figure of the girl lightly and without detail, indicating her clothing and figure, placement of the head and features, and the rough placement of shadows. Then I wet the sheet with a wide brush, leaving the figure intact, and put in one layer of background in very wet yellow ochre, allowing the paint to run, and adding subseqent pigment mixed with a little ultramarine blue -- these were the pigments that Sargent probably used, and I think he painted this entire piece using just those two, plus a little warm brown and/or sienna. (Toward the end I also added a little Pyrrol orange - a modern pigment - in order to get the warm shadows such as appear in the reproduction.) I didn't fuss too much over the background and moved on to the figure as soon as the background was dry enough; the dark shadows beside the skirt were painted later. Sargent has at least three passes in his background; it was hard for me to tell when in the process he painted those except that the earlier layers were pretty dry when he did.

My version: bottom of the skirt - this is probably the best part of my painting!

There are no areas surrounding the figure where the background bleeds a lot, but in some places --like the hair -- the edges are quite soft. Controlling the wetness of the paper and knowing when to add pigment, and how wet to make it, are the great challenges of watercolor. The type of paper also makes a huge difference. I was painting on 140-pound cold-pressed paper; Sargent's piece was on white wove paper, smoother than mine, and slightly larger. In any case, all of my edges ended up being harder than his, and my background lacked the subtle control of his original. I also had some trouble with the drawing of the arm and hands, and adjusted them after taking the first photo at the top of this page; the horizontal arm is still a little too low and slightly too angled, but perfect accuracy was not my goal so I won't be too hard on myself for that! I also softened the facial shadows and lightened the entire face.

My version, with adjusted left arm and softened. lightened face.

While making this copy, it was astonishing to enter Sargent's mind a little bit as I observed his decisions: how to abbreviate the drawing of the clasped hands; which shadows on the blouse should be warm grey, and which cool; how much detail to include in the face; how to show the volume of the skirt, and finally, what finishing touches to add. There is blue gouache (opaque watercolor) on the cap and in a few places on the blouse -- he must have added this because its reflective property is different, because the gouche "sits up" on the paper surface unlike the watercolor which tends to sink in more. I was surprised how much it made the painting come alive when I did the same.

So that was my first foray into copying this master watercolorist -- I'm pleased with what I learned and think it was time well spent. This was an early work of his; time to take a close look at some of his later pieces which are brighter and lighter, and use brilliant color.

 

Willow and Stream

Willow and Stream near Otselic, New York. Watercolor, gouache, with touches of charcoal pencil. 6" x 6". May 30, 2023.

Last week we were in central New York for a visit to the lake, and, because Memorial Day was near, we also visited the graves of my parents, maternal grandparents, and great aunt -- I'll write another post about that soon. One afternoon we drove over the hills to the cemetery in South Otselic, NY where many of my ancestors are buried. Unlike the winter landscapes that had preoccupied me since January, the whole world had become green, lush, and leafy. It wasn't a particularly pretty day, there were no interesting clouds, the sun was right overhead, and the green felt relentless. But I stopped and took a few pictures anyway, and a few days ago, back in Montreal, started working with one of them.

Here it is, and it's pretty boring! I stared at the photograph for a long time, wondering what I could possibly do with it, and trying to remember what had felt compelling enough about the scene to ask J. to stop the car. The answer is in the title of this post -- the willows and the stream - but I didn't know how to make a picture from this: how to make it interesting, when there was so little color or even obvious, strong compositional shapes. So I decided to begin with drawing, and a few hours later, this was the result:

As you can see, the drawing is cropped in from both sides to focus more on the willows and downplay the field. It was fun to draw a verdant landscape instead of the snow-covered ones and I was surprised that it worked this well in charcoal, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with the composition. When preparing a set of details to post on Instagram, I had cropped into the image and saw that a much closer view was better. In the original, the stream forms a strong diagonal but it also divides the picture into two more-or-less equal triangles, giving the grassy foreground too much prominence compared to what had first attracted me: the shapes and growth pattern of the willows overhanging the stream, with the brightness leafiness above, and the dark, mysterious area where the willow overhangs the bank of the stream.

When cropped, that's much more what we see.

Then the question was how to translate this into color. The next day, I took out my watercolors to make a sketch, and ended up struggling with it for quite a long while, trying to keep it loose and interpret the scene with vigorous brushstrokes and beautiful color that wasn't necessarily in either the original landscape or photograph. 

The tree branches here are dark blue and brighter blue, not black or brown, and the blue is echoed in the grassy areas and the stream, contrasting with the bright yellow-greens of the sunstruck leaves. But it wasn't until I made the stream itself brown, and added the few strokes of orange, that the picture began to sing at all.

By then I had overworked the dark area of low branches at the left front, so I went in with just a little bit of opaque watercolor to add some leaves, and a few strokes of white charcoal pencil to highlight the tops of some branches and bring them forward. Then, fortunately, I forced myself to quit before messing around with it any further!

I'll probably do another version of this scene in a different medium, maybe pastel, maybe oil or acrylic, before letting it go. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts!

 

At the Musée des Beaux-Arts

Our weather has been really grim this week, adding to the feeling of cooped-up restlessness that is always part of this long run-up to real spring in the north. Yesterday afternoon I couldn't stand it any longer, and went out into the cold rain and wind to take the metro downtown, and then walk up to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, my sketchbook and drawing supplies in my bag.

We became members of the museum again a few months ago, for the first time since the pandemic began, but we've only visited once since. Yesterday, I was hoping to see some drawings, but there didn't seem to be much of any on display - I think I'll contact the curators and ask if it's possible to see anything from the collection. So instead I took a close look at the permanent collection of European art. There is a room of impressionists that’s not bad: an early Cezanne landscape, several Pissarros and Sisleys, a couple of large landscapes by Armand Guillaumin that I liked quite a lot. The 20^th century contemporary art collection is very thin and not to my taste. There's a large canvas by Elaine deKooning, and an oil sketch of five figures by Barbara Hepworth that I liked a lot; one painting by Matisse. Above, there's an entire floor of French Baroque/Rococo-- I can't stand that period so I skipped it -- and on the next level, some excellent Dutch paintings, among them two landscapes by Jacob von Ruisdael, a number of still lives, works by Breugel the Younger, and a beautiful Rembrandt portrait.

Detail from Portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1530, oil on wood.

On the top, when I entered the Renaissance galleries, I finally felt my whole body relax. There is no single spectacular piece, but in the darkened rooms, with some stained glass and some good sculptures, and the brilliant carmines and blues and greens in the paintings, I was quickly held in the quiet ambience of the age. I had never been to these galleries before, or maybe they have changed. After looking around carefully, and spending time with a Memling portrait of a young man, and a Holbein portrait of Erasmus in a fur-trimmed robe, holding a book, I did a couple of drawings of early sculptures that particularly spoke to me.

 

If I hadn’t been tired of standing when I finished, I would have also drawn a German wood carving, titled, “Virgin of the Annunciation”, that I found beautiful in her attitude of reflection as she looks away from her book at something that has entered her room. I will go back and do that.

On the other side of the street, connected by an underground passageway, a different building houses the Canadian collection, as well as galleries with antiquities and art from other parts of the world. I'm more familiar with those and will go there to draw sometime soon. 

In two of the rooms, wooden sketching benches had been positioned near large sculptures, with sheets of newsprint clipped to an easel attached to the seat. But there were too many visitors in those rooms for me to feel comfortable using one of those benches -- you'd feel like a live part of the display. Off to the side in the dark Renaissance rooms, no one bothered me. If they looked over my shoulder I didn't notice, and they quickly moved on.

Drawing in museums isn't something I've done very much - I really started doing that in Athens, more than three years ago, and haven't been in similar spaces much at all since then. When traveling, I always feel like time is at a premium and the priority in a museum is to see more of what is being shown. In one's home town, that's obviously not the case! I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before now; it was good for me.

Color and Light

We recently returned to Montreal after a week in central New York. In Montreal, there was a terrible ice storm last Wednesday, with power outages that lasted days for many people, and devastating damage to the city's trees, especially in the parks. Friends sent us pictures and their own accounts, and while our building was without power for a long time, and then again last night, we clearly missed the worst of it. I also missed the observations of Holy Week at the cathedral for the first time in years, but we got back in time for Easter. Renewal, warmth, color, and sunlight are exactly what everyone needs -- myself included.

300 miles to the south, spring was already in the process of arriving, and on our last evening there, I got out my watercolors and painted this field that we had seen a few hours earlier in the late afternoon light. The luminous gold only lasted for a few minutes on this cut cornfield and the hill beyond, but it was breathtaking enough that I had cried "Stop the car!" and rushed out into the muddy road with my camera.

It did me a huge amount of good to be out in the countryside for a while after this long urban winter. We saw a nesting bald eagle, a flock of mergansers on the recently-unfrozen lake; rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, and wild turkeys; Canada geese, herons, robins, cardinals, and dark-eyed juncos...and someone -- maybe our weasel -- had generously left its scat on our front porch, full of hair and tiny bones. The stiff, bright green and purple noses of skunk cabbage had already poked through the water in the swamp, and spring peepers sang in full chorus even during daylight hours. No leaves showed on any trees or shrubs yet, just on one honeysuckle that faced the southern light, but there were pussy willows in the swamp, one of my mother's yellow crocuses was in bloom, and the woods felt tremulous, as if you could actually feel the pent-up power of all those tightly-furled leaves inside the millions of buds, ready to burst forth.

At the same time, I've been finishing my series of winter snowscapes in charcoal. There was still a lot of snow in the Adirondacks, and I was able to take reference pictures for a few more drawings, and stay within that much colder frame of mind while I was working on them. I'm also beginning an essay to accompany this series of drawings, about the central New York landscape and why it is under my skin. But I can feel my heart gravitating toward color and light, and coming back home to Easter only reinforced that sense of new beginnings, and new life.

We attended the Great Vigil of Easter at the cathedral on Saturday night. It begins with a fire in the courtyard, which is then carried into the dark church via the lighted Pascal candle, from which everyone's small tapers are lit, and we sit together in that near-darkness while the foundational stories of the Hebrew scriptures are read and music is sung; finally the dry bones of Ezekiel are brought to life, and we move to the resurrection story, the organ peals forth, bells ring, the lights go on and the candles are extinguished, and we find ourselves in a church bedecked with flowers and spring color. Pagan in some ways; ironic in a city ravaged by an ice storm, with so many families still in darkness and cold -- and utterly welcome to my own tired spirit. 

My other cathedral this year was this circle of hemlock trees on a small ridge near the lake. I had gone there on Good Friday morning, climbing up onto the ridge to stand under the trees, listening to the wind, the invisible amphibious chorus, the calls of nesting geese on the pond beyond, and let the peace of that place, along with many memories, permeate my body and heart.