the cassandra pages

Hermit Diary 54. The Illusion of Controllable Worlds

Every morning when I get up and open the blinds near my desk, I take a moment to peer into my terrarium. It's changed since I planted it in the fall: some of the mosses have died back while others seem quite happy; the liverworts are thriving; there's a green film of algae growing on the beige shelf fungus, and the fern has put out three adventurous fronds. A small gnat seems to live inside the glass, even though it could easily escape. I think the moisture level has been too great for the lichens, and not quite enough for the moss. There's life and growth happening, as well as decay. I'm doing my best to take care of this little world for which I'm entirely responsible, drawing on a certain amount of knowledge and common sense, but the fact is...a lot of the time I'm guessing. Should I slide the top open a little more, or less? Should I mist the terrarium today, or wait? I make decisions based not only on what I see, but on the smell of the interior, the dampness on the pebbles, and the warmth and humidity I sense when I quickly put my forefinger inside, close to the soil.

This little experiment has filled me with renewed awe for the balance of life on our planet, an even greater awareness of its fragility, and the amazing harmony with which these small life forms colonize a tree stump in nature to form a garden far more beautiful and complex and self-sustaining than anything I could ever create.

I'm also learning something about myself: the strong but almost subconscious desire I had to create a little world, care for it properly, and see it thrive during this time when almost nothing in our real world -- where I am the gnat, but can't escape -- seems controllable or even predictable.

I suppose we all want that. Nobody really likes chaos, or fear, or one change on top of another to which we have to adapt. We'd like our homes to be comfortable, secure places of refuge during this time, and instead they've sometimes felt like traps. We haven't been able to pick up the glass globe in which we're living and give ourselves or others what we need; instead we've sometimes felt like hapless inhabitants looking out as some large invisible hand shakes our world around, turns it upside down, and surrounds it with toxins or threatens it with violence.

Nevertheless, this globe on my desk is somehow very serene, and reminds me every day of beauty and continuity: the moss stays green, the fern stretches and grows even while storms blow outside my window, bending trees and snapping branches with the weight of heavy snow and ice. Here, last fall's dill blossom has dried into an explosion of tiny yellow flowerheads; the brass Peruvian llama stands watch; the snail shell from Mycenae doesn't know it's traveled in my pocket across two oceans; the collection of seed pods now form a sculpture-park in miniature, but they all once bore life.

As hard as this period of time has been, I appreciate that it's forced me to slow down, and look, and think, and try some new things. This was a different sort of watercolor for me to paint, for instance, and that's good. Sitting at this desk, talking to some of you via Zoom or through this blog or various messages, I've realized more than ever how connected we all are, how much we need each other, and how much ability we actually have to support and encourage each other. We are not plants, after all, or inanimate objects, or shells that were once inhabited: we're highly intelligent and adaptable social animals whose primary purposes are to learn, to share, and to care for each other and this strange place we call home.

Hermit Diary 45. Microcosm

I've made terrariums since I was a little girl. These miniature worlds fascinated me, perhaps because they reflected the natural places where I often played with my dolls: the mossy crevices between tree roots; the lush gardens of moss and lichens and fungi growing on stumps and dead trees in the woods, the little glades of clubmosses, ferns, wildflowers, and tiny tree seedlings in spots that caught a bit more light in the understory. In the fall, my mother and I would go on a gathering walk, collecting these small lifeforms for a terrarium that would stay green through the long winter, often in an old aquarium tank that no longer held water well enough for fish.

My husband and I recently brought all our plants inside for the winter, and, for the first time, set up grow-lights and humidifiers to help them out and increase the range of plants we could maintain during the days of short, dim northern light -- and also to help ourselves endure and enjoy what promises to be our own long winter captivity in a small apartment. We have an area for herbs, we've got orchids and begonias and many houseplants, and another place for cacti and succulents, all of which seem, so far, to be thriving.

The plants in a woodland terrarium are very different from these: mosses and ferns are primitive plants that reproduce by spores rather than flowering; lichens are composite organisms of a fungus living in symbiotic relationship with algae or cyanobacteria. Mosses are non-vascular plants that have been around for 470 million years; ferns, which have a vascular system, first appear in fossils in the Devonian period, 360 million years ago. Today, primitive plants persist in environments on the planet that reflect early conditions on earth: at the volcanic rift valley of Thingvellir, in Iceland, I spent one of the happiest days of my life exploring the riches of that tundra landscape where mosses and a wide variety of lichens thrive on volcanic rock. In geologic history, slow-growing mosses like these absorbed CO2 and dissolved the underlying rock, releasing chemicals into the atmosphere that caused marine die-offs and C02 absorption that ultimately led to the formation of the polar ice caps. Today, the reverse is happening.

Thingvellir, Iceland

My field-biology mentor, Herm Weiskotten, increased my knowledge of these species during the years I worked with him in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. A botanist by heart, he loved nothing more than primitive plants, and we roamed central New York together in search of rare clubmosses and maidenhair spleenworts and other specialized plants to be grown in terrariums for our educational exhibits, or carefully transplanted into limestone outcrops or acidic woodland environments on our interpretive trails. One of my most precious possessions is a bent and water-damaged Peterson Field Guide to the Ferns and Clubmosses with Herm's name in the front, and several pressed fern fronds between the pages: he gave it to me after a misadventure where we both fell into the water of some remote bog.

I haven't had a terrarium for years, but as the leaves came down and the weather turned colder, I kept thinking about making one. We have a perfect glass bowl that originally held miniature succulents, a gift from our friend Jenny. Last weekend I brought it home from the studio, lined the bottom with stones and charcoal, added a layer of woody soil, and started gathering moss from northern sides of buildings on the city streets. Yesterday I went for a walk up on Mount Royal, the large hill we Montrealers call "the mountain", where I hoped to find a greater variety of potential inhabitants. It was a warm day, and I was happy being in the woods; I left the regular paths and wandered through the blanket of fallen leaves, checking out fallen tree limbs and moss-covered boulders, climbing higher and higher to where I thought I'd be able to find some lichens. After an hour or two, I came back down to my bicycle and the city with my small backpack holding treasures: mosses, a liverwort, grey-green and chartreuse lichens, a tiny shelf fungus, bits of shale and birch bark, a small fern.

This small and symbolic act has a lot to do with the election. As I’ve worried and waited, my thoughts keep returning to two issues in particular: the struggles of blacks, people of color, and migrants, and the peril facing our climate. The damage already done to both by the current administration is incalculable, but four more years could be irreparable.

I’ve lived a long time, and recognize that, like the lichens, my life continues to exist in a delicate balance with the other lives on our planet -- human, animal, plant, single-celled organisms, bacteria, and those, like viruses, that inhabit a shadowy zone between the animate and inanimate.

The terrarium is not a sealed, balanced, self-sufficient and self-perpetuating biodome, but a micro-environment for which I’m responsible: it can succumb easily to mold, drought, or neglect. As such, it’s a microcosm of the responsibility we bear for everything and everyone more vulnerable than we are, and thus subject to our destructiveness, indifference, and self-interest.

In the end, I find I care less about the survival of the human race than about the survival of biodiversity: the extinction of species at our hands has always cut me to the heart. I shudder to imagine a future for human beings that involves artificial environments or other planets where "trees" and "animals" only exist in giant, controlled biodomes isolated from a toxic exterior. The climate crisis will dwarf anything we’ve experienced so far, increasing human migration and threatening every remaining species as well as the air we breathe and the water we drink. The election of an American president who respects science and understands what we’re facing is perhaps one step back from the precipice, but we haven’t a moment to lose. This little world will remind me of that fact every day; unlike the larger one, I can hold it in my hands, admire its fragile beauty, and try to give it what it needs.

Hermit Diary 43. Moving Inside

We call him "Mr Fang"

The days are getting shorter, the nights are colder, and there's already been a frost out in the countryside. This past weekend we disassembled our terrace plantings, and brought most of the plants inside. For the first time since living here, we've set up full-spectrum LED grow lights and are keeping most of our plants here at home rather than overwintering them in our studio. We have one area for succulents, another for culinary herbs, two others for our many houseplants that live outside in the summer, including some geraniums and begonias in the hope that they'll keep flowering. We thought both the plants and the additional light might help our mood and brighten the rooms where we're now spending so many of our waking hours. After only a few days it already makes a big difference.

Of course the proximity to all those shapes and textures inspires drawing! One of our most spectacular plants is the aptly-named Kalanchoe beharensis "Fang", at the top of this post, a gift from our friend and excellent gardener Guylaine.

Last Saturday I cut off the dragon wing begonias, which had grown to a huge size, before bringing them inside, and put the flowering stems in vases:

Last fall I'd done the same thing, and went back to look at the watercolor/ink drawing in my previous sketchbook. Maybe I'll manage to do another watercolor this year before the gorgeous crimson and hot pink flowers all fade.

And in another still-life painting, I tried to catch the last of the sweet pea blossoms, of which I had so few this summer, but the flowers got way too fussy:

Sweet peas in a Syrian glass vase, and a pebble. 6" x 9."

The best part of the painting is the lower section, with no plants at all!

Hermit Diary 42. A Greek Hillside,Pigments, and a Thorny Problem

Greek Hillside with Blue Agaves. Watercolor in sketchbook, 11.5" x 8.5".

This is where I ended up after working more on the previous sketch (below).

 

This sketch seems to be another example of my lifelong obsession with the thorny problem of how to depict the varieties of natural vegetation and growth which often form an almost abstract pattern that also teems with life. It's often what draws me to a particular scene, and that certainly was the case with this hillside. Van Gogh is the only artist who went after this problem, in both drawings and paintings, in a way that I identify with. Somehow, I keep going back to it, and maybe I should just give in and pursue that challenge as obsessively as he did. It's particularly difficult to capture in watercolor, but the spontaneity of the medium also mimics life in a way that none of the others can do.

Here are a few details closer to life size:

 

 

 

A regular reader here asked, a while back, if I'd post about my palette and what colors I'm using. Unlike the compact travel box I often use at home or outdoors, I used my large studio watercolor palette for this one. It has a fitted cover that helps to protect the paints, and you can leave a thin sponge or dampened paper towel inside overnight if you wish.

However, as is often the case, I didn't use more than a few colors! But some of them were different from what I'd normally have on hand when traveling. Here they are:

Now for some technical details. I don't usually use cobalt green, but with the addition of a little cerulean blue it gave the perfect color for the agaves. The painting was begun with very transparent washes using highly dilute Winsor red, Winsor yellow, sap green, cobalt green, and other greens/yellows/olives/ochres mixed using Winsor yellow, cobalt blue, yellow ochre. I find that in order to unify the colors across a landscape painting, it helps to use the same blues as the sky (cobalt blue here) and to continue mixing the colors for leaves and rocks and earth with a limited pigment palette, rather than using raw colors "out of the tube," as one-off appearances on the page. Therefore the olive colors are made with blue and yellow, with the addition of a little red -- a much livelier and more transparent way to get greyed greens than by using a opaque green like the chromium oxide, which is an enormously useful color, but it can get muddy when other colors are added to it.

The darks were all mixed with Indigo as a base (Indanthrone blue would have been another choice) which kept these areas quite transparent and luminous. A slightly dirtied (greyed) cerulean blue was used for the shadows on rocks and hills.

As the under layers begin to build up, then you can add some opaque pigments along with the more transparent ones. Here I chose chromium oxide green, Indian red, cadmium yellow, and Naples yellow.  If you look at this detail of the vegetation in the foreground of the painting, you can see the opaque mixtures on top of the darks -- but those have to be added when the dark areas are quite dry if you want the brushstroke edges and shapes to remain!

Finally, I added some pencil lines for texture and form.

Hermit Diary 22: Forsythia

Parc Lafontaine, Montreal, May 1 2020, gouache and pencil in Moleskine pocket sketchbook

 

Forsythia 

 

It caught my eye a while ago, lit up 

against the gloom of the woods

in the corner of a wild field,

the pulsing color of caution. 

 

And now that I have spent a little time

on this stone wall watching its fire

flare out of the earth

I begin to think about the long chronicle of forsythia

 

how these same flowers have blazed

through the centuries,

roused from the ground by the churning of spring.

I would rather not look around the next 

 

corner of the year to see how this will die,

its lights going out,

its bare, arcing branches

waving like whips in the bitter wind. 

 

So I sit facing the past,

letting my feet dangle over the wall, 

beating time against stone with my heels

as the long gray clouds roll over me. 

 

Remember how Arnold by the Channel

thought of Sophocles who must have heard 

the same shore-sounds long ago,

walking by the edge of the Aegean?

 

Well, I am holding in the palm of my thoughts

all the others who once were stopped,

like me, by this brightness, 

this sulfuric cry for help:

 

women in tunics, women gathered by a well,

men in feathers, men swimming by a river, 

all speaking languages I will never know,

saying the different words for its color 

 

as I feel the syllables of yellow form in my mouth 

and hear the sound of yellow fill the morning air.

 

-- Billy Collins

 

 

The Life of Flowers

 

In these days when everything human beings are doing seems so screwed up, here's something truly beautiful, both in the animation artwork and the miracle of what it's showing. Enjoy.

A Beautiful Ending for the Summer

Our friend G. lives on a remote hillside in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where he has a garden of breathtaking beauty. Once every summer we drive out to spend the afternoon and evening with him. This year it was a perfect day - sunny, and still warm enough to eat outside, though by the end of our meal we were all bundled up in jackets and shawls. Here's J. on the deck overlooking the garden and the hills beyond, under the grape arbor. We spent some time trying and failing to find G.'s new glasses which had fallen or gotten snagged somewhere in the garden when he was picking the bouquet for the table-- he found them himself a couple of days later -- and I sat on a rock overlooking the pond for a while, watching frogs floating lazily on the surface, legs splayed. Aren't they wonderful, G. said, and I told him I aspired to the zazen of a frog. Then we had snacks and wine, and later, a cooperative dinner of salmon, corn picked that morning, fresh green beans, salad, strawberries.

G. gave me the flowers to take home, and of course I had to sketch them the next day.

What is it about certain landscapes that gives them their particular emotional resonance and feeling? G.'s place always feels the same to me, regardless of the weather or time of year: it's one of the calmest, most quiet and peaceful places I know, and I always feel restored after being there.  Some of that comes from the person who lives there, in an almost monastic lifestyle. It also comes from the way he has laid out the garden, with its stream and ponds, in the middle field, between the house and the distant mountains. Wherever you are, the garden beckons, and it is always present, like a symbolic home to which you can return but which also stays in one's memory, between the near and the far of our lives. It also contains a number of large standing rocks, and because I am tremendously fond of rocks, I revisit them each year almost like people with remembered individual personalities; I like laying my hand on them and feeling the retained warmth of the sun.

--

Last week I also returned to the Sicilian landscapes that have gotten so far under my skin, and did this drawing of hills and a patchwork of orchards and fields, seen from the top of the hill near the Greek theater at Segesta:

Olive trees and fields from Segesta. Charcoal on toned paper, 8.5" x 5".

I've planned to paint this scene but wanted to draw it first. The pastoral landscape of olive trees and planted fields remind me of the subjects of some of Van Gogh's late drawings. As I work toward refining a style of my own for this sort of drawing, I look for the subject's internal rhythms and the ways the shapes interact. This is partly about finding patterns in the ways things grow or are arranged in the landscape, and partly --again -- something about the emotional temperature of the scene itself. I've always been astounded at how Van Gogh was able to convey these qualities of "IS-ness" as well as how he felt about particular places on particular days. Without imitating him, I hope to continue to work on my own language for doing something similar, because landscapes and the individual elements in them -- like trees or the pattern of an orchard -- do speak to me almost as people do. The drawing or painting thus becomes a portrait of the subject, and secondarily a portrait of the artist at a particular time of their life...

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees, Montmajour, 1888.

 

Olives

It's Holy Week, and so perhaps it's appropriate to think about olives and Palestine and the garden of Gethsemani -- but also about spring, and light on silver leaves. Over the weekend I did another gouache sketch in a toned-paper sketchbook, this time of an olive orchard we drove through in Sicily, one of many we saw, in the hills near Selinunte. It was actually harvest time, and we followed a small truck, laden with many boxes of large, just-picked olives, up a long winding road to a town at the top. There we saw a huge olive-processing plant, and many tents, occupied by migrant workers, all of whom were black, and, I suspect, refugees from Africa. I won't forget the sight of another truck we passed on the way back down, driven by a white man, but completely loaded with young black men hanging off the sides. Or the two young men walking their bicycles back up the hill toward the town - an impossible ride, because of the steepness.

But the olive orchards are sheer beauty. I fell in love with olive trees in Sicily, from the young sinuous saplings, covered with tongue-tingling, tiny, bitter fruit in every shade from grey to green to black, to the extremely old, twisted trees: noble and venerable elders that one sees, sometime in the middle of pastures or near an ancient temple, some of which have lived for centuries.

I'm familiar with the olive varieties that we buy in the markets, but have no idea what the different types look like as trees, or how they are chosen for orchards and different micro-climates, but in their great variety, shimmering in the light, they all seemed extraordinary to me and extremely beautiful. I saw for the first time, first-hand, why the precious olive became the symbol of victory and peace, and the symbol of grey-eyed Athena, always my favorite goddess and the particular patron of Athens and the Greeks.

So I've been starting to draw and paint them a bit, wishing I could go back and sit in the grass with my sketchbook. What is the essence of the olive tree? Van Gogh knew; I'm just beginning to learn.

Clematis, and our entangled politics

 

 

The earlier fancy varieties of clematis have gone past, here in Montreal, but the sturdy Jackmanii types are still blooming, and creeping into my studio and home. I have an established vine at my community garden, and brought a few stems home the other day.

Drawing, and concentrating on nature, are one of my refuges from the insanity that American politics has become. I never thought I'd see the depths of behavior that we've witnessed this week, or the utter lack of compassion for transgendered and gay people and for all who need affordable healthcare. I'm thankful for the Republicans who broke rank, and for the military officers who are keeping less discriminatory policies in place as long as possible. I keep hoping we'll see an end to this travesty soon, but I think it will go on for a good while longer -- and we all need to find ways to take care of ourselves.

In any case, I wish you a good weekend. We have guests arriving soon, and I'm looking forward to seeing them and spending some time away from my computer and phone. This was last night in the park, and I plan to repeat the formula: a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, some knitting, and thou. Surrounding us, lots of young Montrealers with their bikes, instruments, babies, dogs, wine, weed; the homeless guys who come along and collect bottles and cans -- and all with universal free healthcare, cheap daycare, and a civil government. It is, actually, possible.

 

 

 

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.