the cassandra pages

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.

 

Spring is Slow, but the Project Continues

Here in Montreal everyone has pretty much had it with the cold rainy weather. In spite of that, the trees are leafing out and daffodils and tulips are blooming. I'd rather have an attenuated spring than the kind that simply arrives one day with a blast of summer heat - but this one has been especially long and cold. It's good, though, for my project of painting budding trees and tree flowers!

Above is a picture of my set-up -- a pretty rudimentary but adaptable and functional binder-clip system for holding the branches suspended naturally against a white background.

Below is a process photo of this particular painting, of the long catkins that are the flowers of paper birch trees. I need to do a pretty detailed drawing first, so I take time with that. The structure of the branches and flowers are important in conveying the weight and "style" of the blossoms. As I draw, I study the color too, and think about how to show the shapes in the final painting.

Here, it wasn't necessary to draw every single little circular bloom once I understood how they worked. What was crucial was to draw the central stem from which the blooms emanate - like the string on which  pearls are strung. It's not perfectly straight, which helps to give the correct impression that the catkins are very light. I also look for patterns: are the little circular blooms offset, or opposite each other, or do they coil around the stem in a spiral? When the observation is accurate, the painting proceeds much faster too, because I've got the structure and growth-pattern clearly in my head.

 

Below, a pencil drawing of a branch of a budding horse chestnut that I found during a bike ride in Maisonneuve Park. What a great shape it has!

I also did the pen drawing below, one evening before the leaves started to fade and droop. I felt it would make a good painting in acrylic or oil, with the little jug turned around and moved to the left to form more of a triangular shape with the stem, echoing the triangles of the leaves. Unfortunately I think I've missed my chance to do the painting from life this season, but maybe I can work from these drawings.

Finally, this was yesterday's effort. I was staring up at a magnolia tree where all the blossoms were above my reach, and then saw this fallen bloom on the ground at my feet. That was an "a-ha" moment; I brought it home and painted it immediately.

I'm not sure where I'm going with these paintings; I'm just trusting the process to show me. So far, it was been quite rewarding and satisfying, and it's given me an excuse to get outside and look at spring differently.

If you have favorites, I'd be delighted to hear which they are, and why!

In the Parks

A yellow swallowtail on a pot of verbena at the Chapultepec castle.

Mexico City has such a reputation as an urban megalopolis with terrible air quality that one wouldn't think it had a lot of green space, but actually, the city's parks are many and beautiful.

The terrace of the castle overlooks the Chapultepec forest in every direction.

The Bosque de Chapultepec is one of the largest urban green spaces in the Western Hemisphere -- it's a forest park of 1,695 acres, twice the size of Central Park. Within the park are a number of museums - the famous Anthropology Museum, the Tamayo art museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art; a large lake (see above, top right); a zoo; many trails and paths and recreational areas where families love to stroll or picnic; and the Castle of Chapultepec itself with its extensive grounds.

A formal garden in the castle's top level courtyard.

Gardens require gardeners: these men had been trimming branches down below, and were struggling with their wheelbarrow, which overturned right after I took this picture.

A grove of palms underplanted with agapanthus, at the foot of the Chapultepec hill.

On certain Sundays, Paseo de la Reforma is closed to traffic and becomes a bike and pedestrian thoroughfare; we were lucky enough to hit one of those days. This is the street when it comes into the Chapultepec Park, giving access to the major museums and zoo.

---

Nearer to where we were staying are the semi-circular Parque Espana, and the oval Parque Mexico, which forms the center of what used to be the Hippodrome, or racetrack. The former course of the racetrack is Avenida Amsterdam, which runs in a gentle oval around the entire park, and the two lanes of traffic are separated by a wide, planted garden of trees and plants with a pedestrian walkway in the center. It's a wonderful place to walk, and we often found ourselves taking this (somewhat longer, but scenic) path whenever we were heading to someplace in the neighborhood.

In both of these parks, we often saw dog trainers with a whole hoard of perfectly-behaved canines. We talked to this young man at right, below, whose charges included four Afghan rescue dogs, and a large pet pig.

For someone like me who is crazy about plants, the parks are an endless source of amazement and pleasure. Many of the plants that thrive in Mexico City are species I know as houseplants, except here they are huge, sometimes attaining the size of trees. There's enough rain here for them to grow, but along with the water-loving rubber trees and azaleas and banana trees, are the native desert plants - cacti and  various succulents -- and various monocots like the agaves, orchids, and bamboo. (I think I could happily go there and study and draw plants for the rest of my life.)

Every time we visit I notice more, and become more curious about this very different climate and ecology. And of course the birds and insects are different too; I spent an hour trying to get a good look at some tiny lizards in the Chapultepec gardens; they'd come out into the sun and then scurry around the trunk of the tree, just out of sight, like squirrels.

Of course, life is not so pleasant for the majority of the 22 million people who live in Mexico City; for many of them, just getting water takes up a big part of the day and is never certain. The Guardian ran an excellent photo essay yesterday by a photographer who walked around the entire periphery of Mexico City, documenting the often-dangerous, poor neighborhoods that spread up the sides of the old volcanoes on the edges of the valley. It's an eye-opening look at how much of the world, unfortunately, lives.

Cosmos and Anemones

And for those who found the previous post too cranky, here's something less so. We're getting to the end of flowers in the community gardens now, when all that's in bloom are various late-season yellow daisies, asters, and the last of the annuals. These cosmos and anemones are still looking good, but we've been close to a frost this week, although it's still a bit early for that. This morning was downright nippy as I rode my bike to the studio, but it warmed up mid-day. Montrealers will keep the summer going as long as they possibly can, though I've already seen some recent immigrants bundled in parkas, and I feel for them!

 

Summertime Means Gardens

George's garden, East Bolton, Quebec.

My love of flowers and gardens is at its most passionate during these months when the pots on the terrace are overflowing, the community garden is a mixed-up riot of color, and we get to visit some friends and family in the countryside, where there are both gardens and roadsides full of wildflowers.

We're eating our fill of strawberries from Isle d'Orleans, the first blueberries are in season, and in another week or so there will be luscious Ontario peaches.

 

I hope you're enjoying summer where you are, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, that is, and hello to my friends down under - today it's 87 degrees F here, and I'm almost (but not quite) feeling nostalgic for the opposite season! Yesterday I spent way too many hours working in my community garden plot, cleaning up the overgrown borders, digging out unwanted plants and weeds, moving things around. This morning I could barely get out of bed, but once I got moving and took a couple of Tylenol, I was functional and feeling glad I had done all that work.

Leaf by leaf.

 

It was a hard week, wasn't it? I've written something in response to Dallas, but have submitted it to a publication first. If they don't take it tomorrow, I'll put it up here.

In the meantime, sewing and drawing have helped, and I also got out my flute and did some practicing for the first time in a long while, mostly Bach sonatas. Today there was a work bee at my community garden, but being a drizzly day, few people showed up. One person spread mulch on the paths, another weeded the perennials along the chain-link fence that divides the garden from the community swimming pool, where a lone swimmer swam laps in the rain.

I spent an hour working mostly by myself at the compost bins, a different scale of salad, cutting up discarded weeds and stems into short lengths, and turning the pile with a pitchfork to aerate it and incorporate some soil and partially-decomposed organic material. It was exactly the right task for today: meditative but practical - the sort of work, it occurred to me, that a monk might do in a monastery garden, wordlessly praying all the while for the world outside the walls. And then I stowed my muddy gloves in my backpack, unlocked the gate, and rode my bike through the deserted Sunday morning streets of this peaceful city where very few people have guns, pondering my only weapon, a pen.

 

Inspired by the Springtime Table

Finally, spring has arrived in Montreal. Not all our trees have leaves yet, but many do. The magnolias are on bloom, and flowering pears, and there are daffodils and tulips. I picked the first from my garden a few days ago, and they've found their way onto our table along with a basil plant left by friends who've gone on vacation. I'd been drawing the tulips alone, before (see below) but the addition of the basil set up a more complex still life that begged to be put on paper. I like the tilted perspective of the tabletop here, and the flatness of the picture plane. I'm glad I added the background of books and sideboard. In the end, it isn't a drawing of tulips but an arrangement of shapes and positive/negative space that creates tension and release, with the many types of curves leading the eye through the picture, balanced by the verticality of the books and vase handle. It doesn't matter a bit to me whether the objects are identifiable or "realistic."

Here's a fast sketch that was an earlier version from a few days before - not nearly as interesting as a finished drawing, with the two blooms so symmetrically arranged on either side of the vase, but making it served to instill the shapes in my brain, so that when I looked at the objects again, in conjunction with other things, it was easier to see what I wanted to emphasize and how to work with the shapes.

I put some color on this drawing afterwards, but liked a cropped version of the right-hand side better than the whole image. It helps to photograph the image and play around with it in a photo editor, but I used to do the same thing with a couple of cropping covers cut from mat board. I always ask myself, where is the liveliness in this picture? What cropping makes it the most dynamic? What do I like the most in it? What sings? Sometimes there's not much! But it really helps to zoom in, move around, crop different areas, copy it and cut it up: artists are fortunate now to have tools that allow us to do this non-destructively.

I've almost finished this sketchbook! Looking through it last night, I was contented and grateful to see it as a journey and journal through the year, rather than being critical of the drawings.