the cassandra pages

Mourning, remembering, and hoping

Today is a day of reflection for me. I am mourning every single life that has been lost or shattered because of the senseless, cruel violence of the past year, and I am reflecting on our part in it. I am thinking about the great frustration and helplessness that so many of us feel who have protested government policies, not just now, but going back thirty years and more. These policies have contributed to a war that now seems to be spiraling out of control, harming any chance for a lasting peace, making the entire world less safe, and harming the reputations and integrity of all the countries that are involved. What a complete tragedy. Although I have strong opinions, as well as fear for our own family members in Beirut, today is a day to reflect on man's inhumanity to man, not to point fingers. Why are we the way we are? How do these same tendencies affect life here in Quebec - because they do? What can I, as an individual, do better? How can I amplify my power as an individual to encourage the institutions to which I belong to stand up and speak out for justice and peace, when so many are being silenced? And finally, in such a world, with so much suffering, fear and darkness, how can I be a person who gives hope?

So here are some flowers to lay on this makeshift, virtual altar. They were a gift from close friends on our birthdays, have brightened our home and our days, and last night I finally painted them before their petals start falling. The beauty of the earth stubbornly persists, and if we look, we find it everywhere. Thank God for that. And I'm thankful for every way in which I'm able to experience such things and mirror them back to the world.

A year ago, I was in Edessa, Greece, a small city in a mountainous northern border region that has been torn apart by ethnic warfare for centuries. After reading the news, I went into a large Orthodox church to light a candle, and sit quietly for a while with the icons and the smell of melting wax and incense. Later I walked in the church garden, and looked out over the valley at its orchards, vineyards, and fields. I no longer pray to God to end human wars and suffering; I haven't believed in such an omnipotent deity for a long time. I pray for us to come to our senses. I pray for strength, and to see what I need to do.

View southwest from the old city of Edessa, Greece.


Today, as I look out my studio window here in Montreal, the trees are beginning to turn to their fall colors, and the dark clouds to which we woke are giving way to sunshine and blue sky. A light wind ruffles the leaves of the plants on our balcony. I can hear faint sounds of construction in the distance, because here, homes are being built, not destroyed. For today, for right now, this moment, I am secure and aware of how fortunate I am. I can use this moment to become even more aware, to tune into all of my senses and consciously take in their input. I need to do this several times every day: otherwise I might miss the gifts that are still part of the reality and mystery of being alive. 

 

Rites of Passage

This summer, we're in the process of selling my family home, at the lake in central New York that I've written about and photographed for this blog many times over the years. My feelings about this change are too complex and too personal to summarize here. Some of them were expressed in my book, Snowy Fields, and others continue to emerge -- and I expect that process to continue indefinitely, though lessening in intensity as time passes. 

Over the past six weeks, I've given three book talks - two in central New York to audiences familiar with the landscape that was the inspiration for that project, and one at Christ Church Cathedral here in Montreal, in which I tried to give people some idea of how the rural place and people of my childhood shaped me and my creative life. I also spoke about the spiritual aspects of creativity, and how I believe that claiming  or reclaiming our creative selves is meant for all of us humans, not just those with a particular gift or inclination toward one of the arts. I've loved giving these talks and hearing what members of the audiences have had to say; that's one of the very positive aspects of this process that I'm going through. If you'd like to watch it, here's an audio/visual slideshow of the talk I gave at the public library in Hamilton, New York:

I've felt grief, poignant recollection, and, I admit, some frustration, as I sorted through the possessions of not just my parents, but my grandparents and their siblings. There are trunks full of photographs dating back to the late 1800s, objects, furniture, collections, baby clothes. None of these people did the work of sorting or letting-go: they kept everything, never downsized or moved but passed it all down, and eventually it became my responsibility. Like the previous generations, my cousins and their families remained in the same area, with houses that could absorb some of the objects of these previous lives, but my own urban life is very different. My task has been a triage of finding new homes for certain things, selling others, photographing some before relinquishing them, and keeping a very small selection of things that mean the most to me and are possible to incorporate into our own life and limited space.

The hardest part for me has been contemplating giving up the place itself - the land of which I know every inch, the view from the porch, the huge maple tree, the sounds of the birds that I've heard since I was five years old. Things have worked out in surprising ways, though. I'll be keeping the woods across the road from our family home, which gives me a foothold there as well as a continued vote on the lake association that was founded by my grandfather and father. I still have dear friends with homes on the lake who I can visit, and many of the places I've always loved will remain accessible. We'll be giving up the responsibility and expense of a property that's impossible for us to maintain well at this distance, and hopefully putting it in the hands of new people who will love and appreciate it, and care for it for a long time to come.

And finally, after the years of the pandemic, and especially the last two years in which we cleared out, moved, and downsized our own home, our studios, cared for and moved my father three times, and then dealt with my family's home, we'll finally be able to settle into our own life in Montreal and think about what we want to do. It's kind of astonishing, really: when the pandemic began, in 2020, we had barely retired from our professional work; I was still singing in the cathedral choir and chairing its music committee; we lived in a different part of the city and had a large separate studio; my father was alive and doing well, and we had a very different idea of what the next years would look like. So much change has happened, and we're also four and a half years older, which isn't insignificant at this age.

How do I feel? Somewhat battered, somewhat exhausted, sometimes sad, but mostly hopeful as I look forward to a new chapter. I hope I can be a better friend to my close friends, perhaps be able to do some teaching, resume more of a musical life, continue to do art and writing with greater focus, travel more, and embrace life in this fascinating multicultural city that has also changed a lot during this half-decade. Perhaps I'll also be able to write here more often -- I hope so! 

The Quiet and Wondrous Woods

World-weary, last week I took myself off one afternoon to Montreal's Parc Angrignon, wanting to walk along the water and hear some bird song and, I hoped, clear my head and lift my spirits. This is a park with a lot of water, and it also has large tracts of undeveloped woodland. I'd never walked in those woods before. They beckoned to me, though, and in I plunged -- and to my surprise found many native wildflowers, growing happily and undisturbed. (I was glad I visited when I did, because I also saw a lot of little poison ivy plants starting to unfurl in some of the same areas.) Since we all need some beauty and delicacy these days, here are some pictures of that afternoon -- take a few moments and walk with me.

White trillium.

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Wild ginger

Yellow violets

Bellwort - new to me. Thanks to G. for helping with the identification.

Red trillium.

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I also spent some time sitting on a log, sketching a view across this channel of water. A day or two later, I made the much more satisfactory watercolor at the top of the post.

Spring has been very slow to come to Montreal this year. Finally, this week, I put the house plants out on the balcony and started potting some annuals and herbs to grow there for the summer. It feels like a huge relief to be able to be outdoors, and warm there, again.

Spaces of our Hands and Hearts

Does the space where we work influence what we are able to do there? I think so. Space affects our mindset so dramatically that I suspect it partially determines how much work we do there, as well as its quality. Frankly, in today's world, we should be grateful to be able to do creative work at all, and to have a roof over our heads. So whatever I write here about "spaces" comes from a conscious place of privilege.*

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Ideally, the place where we do our concentrated work needs to be functional and supportive; it needs to suit who we are, and help us to feel good when we're in it. There are plenty of writers who've done their greatest work in rooms or chilly cabins piled with books and papers  -- think Seamus Heaney -- and artists, like Lucien Freud, who've worked in chaos. It's a question of knowing yourself, too.

It's hard for me to concentrate and work well when I don't have, as Virginia Woolf wrote, "a room of my own," even if that room is mine only part of the time. For most of my life, I've worked in somewhat makeshift studio spaces: repurposed or multi-purpose rooms in the same place where I was living. That's been OK when I was able to close the door and have some solitude and privacy, less so when I was working in a larger but shared space, or a space that other people walked through. For much of our time in Vermont, I did my design work and writing in a room that had, literally, six doors -- it was a former kitchen, with front and back outside entrances, a bathroom door, and doors leading to other parts of the house as well as the basement! I couldn't do artwork there at all, but, with my back to most of the doors, I was able to write.

Sometimes we don't even know what's good for us. After fifteen years, it was traumatic for me to leave our former large, dedicated studio space here in Montreal, downsize dramatically, and move into a 10' x 10' repurposed bedroom in our condominium. I thought it would be a disaster, workwise -- but I couldn't have been more wrong. The large studio had room to spread out, but it was always cluttered, and it was on one of the city's busiest north-south streets, with tons of traffic and a great deal of dust, as well as foot traffic and industrial noise from other tenants in the building. The best feature, for me, was a big wall where I could hang my work, and the ability to have separate areas for oil painting, printmaking, drawing, sewing. But writing there was difficult, as well as any kind of experimental work in general, since it was a big, open space I shared with my husband. I seldom had a sense of complete "head space", not because I was being interrupted -- simply because there was another human being in the room.

After a year and a half of working here in our apartment, I've come to love my new space (the picture at the top of this post is another view). The room is small but efficient, the north light is beautiful, and I have everything I need within reach, with most of it stored in cupboards out of sight. Instead of spreading out and working on several projects at once, I now do one thing at a time and put the materials and equipment away when I'm done -- and that's fine. The tables and storage units are adaptable -- as you can see below, I'm leaning the easel against a wall to take up less floor space, and using a drawer in the storage unit as a taboret. It works fine. 

I thought ventilation would be a problem in the winter, but I recently bought an air filtration unit which should work very well to filter the fumes of any harmful solvents, and if we have wildfire smoke again this coming summer, it should help with that too. The most important difference now is that it's a room of my own, with a door I can shut (but rarely do); all my artwork and writing and sewing take place here, as well as plenty of "thinking time." I've always believed that spaces take on a sort of energy of their own, over time, depending on how they are used, and this one now feels comfortable and personal in a way that our former, cluttered studio never did.

The pandemic years were especially hard, since we didn't use our big studio much at all and tried to do everything in our small, ground floor, former city apartment, where there was no light. We liked the apartment very much -- as a residence. During the pandemic, though, I basically lived at my desk in the living/dining room, with a lot of street noise all day, and poor J. was at a desk in the bedroom, looking out on an alley. I think that showed both of us, once and for all, what was important to us in a workspace -- privacy, light, adaptable table space, good storage, and a sense of peacefulness and quiet.

I wish I had a photograph of the back room in my parents' and grandparents' house where I used my mother's easel, which my father built for her, to do my first oil paintings, back in the 1960s -- that's the same easel I use here in Montreal now. When I moved back into the upper floor of that house, alone, after graduating from college, the pine-paneled back room became my study and studio; it's where I taught myself to paint in watercolor and do calligraphy at a professional level; it was where I listened to music, and worked hard every evening after coming home from my job; it's the room where I began to think of myself as an artist.

After working in various rooms in our Vermont house over the years, none of which were really suitable, we eventually built a garage that included a small woodworking shop for J. and a small studio for me.

My studio in the garage in Vermont, in 2006, just before we moved to Montreal.

I liked that room a great deal, and it helped me to have a space of my own during some difficult years when I was trying to figure myself out -- I was just starting to write seriously when I was about 40, and had begun painting again after deliberately taking some years off. In this room I had an electric kettle for tea, a space heater for the cold winters, a little desk with my meditation items on top of it, a rocking chair, bookshelves, and my easel. Although the windows were small, they looked out on my garden... I have lots of positive memories of being there.

Painting outside at our home in Vermont, probably shortly after I bought this portable French box easel -- which I still use at the lake today. This must have been in the 1980s or early 1990s.

All creative people need to train themselves to be able to work in less-than-ideal circumstances. I've always managed to work wherever I was, and it's been good for me to take a sketchbook and notebook (or now, tablet or laptop) wherever I go. However, it's clear to me, looking back, that the differences in my day-to-day workspaces made a big difference in my productivity as well as my contentment and sense of self, and they've also influenced the type of work I was able to do. When there's less distraction and more peace, I'm more able to simply buckle down and do the work. The main question for me has always been "can I center myself and concentrate?"

How do you feel about your own workspaces, and how are you doing, creatively, at this time of so much violence and destruction?

*More than 100 cultural sites have been destroyed in Gaza, along with the lives of scores of poets, writers, and artists. Thousands more have lost their homes or been injured, and yet we continue to hear, at times, their poignant words. Many of us, in the privileged west, have been so disheartened that it's been difficult to continue our own work. And yet we must, because the arts are essential in keeping our own spirits alive, and in giving hope that some of what we value most in human culture has a chance of continuing. When I think about "home" this always includes, for me, the place where I work. To lose it would be to lose a part of myself. Continuing to create, and to mindfully stand alongside those who struggle to do so, or have been silenced forever, is to be in solidarity. I hope to do more in the months ahead to contribute in other ways through my work and my ongoing protest. 

 

 

The Brightness of Flowers, the Darkness of the Sky

I've been sewing for myself this week, for the first time since we moved here a year ago, and it felt like such a pleasure. The fabric is a rayon viscose twill -- a remnant I bought in Lisbon 3 1/2 years ago. And I self-drafted the pattern from a favorite v-neck top, which meant looking up some techniques online for adding and eliminating darts, and for drafting sleeves based on the circumference of the armhole. I had to adjust as I went, a little bit, but it was fine.

The fabric turned out to be quite slippery so it was necessary to stay-stitch all the edges, use twice as many pins as usual, baste some seams first, and then finish all the seams on the inside of the garment. I did a lot of hand-stitching too, on the neck binding and the hems, which I do enjoy, but it's fussy. The result pleased me, though, and I'm sure I'll wear it a lot.

Meanwhile, we're at the height of actual spring blooms. J. and I have been dieting but we treated ourselves to tiny gelato/hot chocolate sundaes at Leonidas the other day, and ate them in the Pierre Elliot Trudeau rose garden in the Town of Mont-Royal, which is an easy bike ride from our apartment. The roses are just starting but the irises and peonies were in full, magnificent bloom, and it did my heart good, after these days of wildfires to the north of us, to see such beauty and color.

Montreal was spared the worst of the smoke and smog, but it was dangerously awful to the south and west of us. We've had a lot of rain the past two days, so I hope that will help the fires to abate.

This was my view on the worst day we had -- bad, but nothing like it was for many of you.

I was horrified by the photographs and air quality readings from Toronto, Ottawa, Syracuse, NYC, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. And before anyone blames Quebec, let's please remember that this can and will happen anywhere there are forests, as our climate comes under greater and greater pressure, with the fires contributing to the vicious cycle. Only the force of collective human determination will change the trend, and it is up to all of us, but particularly industry and government. Please do what you can as an individual, and let's apply as much pressure as we can to our elected officials, and support all of the progressive initiatives aimed at combating the greed, waste, and lack of will that have gotten us to this point.

I Couldn't Keep from Singing

Sketching on the bulletin up in the choir loft, during the sermon last Sunday...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone back to singing in the cathedral choir. As the warmer weather appeared, the risk/benefit ratio between continuing to be super-careful and starting to live more normally seemed to change. My husband had started encouraging me to go back to the choir, but I was unsure. One day not long ago I went for a walk, feeling a bit morose and sorry for myself, but by the time I came back home, I had made a decision to write to the music director and ask if it would be all right for me to return. He said yes, and on the next Sunday, I sang in person with the group for the first time in three years.

It’s been a long history. I started singing in a church choir when I was about six years old, and have continued (which seems incredible, even to me) nearly all of my life.

I graduated to the adult choir in that Episcopal parish once I entered junior high school. After I graduated from university and was working in my home town, I conducted that small choir for two years. In 1976, I moved to New England, and joined a very good choir at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover, New Hampshire. I stopped for a few years when J. and I got together, because his father was the Unitarian Universalist minister in Woodstock, Vermont, and we started going to hear him preach on Sundays, and then often had lunch with his parents at their home afterwards. After my father-in-law left that position, I realized how much I had missed singing, and began again with the choir in Hanover. I sang there during all the years we lived in Vermont, until we moved to Montreal in 2006, and took private voice lessons for some of that time as well. When we moved, we joined the congregation of Christ Church Anglican Cathedral in Montreal but I was unsure if I could manage the commitment or the stress of being in the cathedral choir, which was on another whole level of rigor than anything I had experienced. Thank God I had the courage to try, and to sing with Patrick Wedd — the cathedral’s music director, extraordinary organist, and soon a fast friend — for twelve years, and then with Nick Capozzoli and Rob Hamilton, Jonathan White, and then Nick after he became the Director of Music following Jonathan’s resignation in the second year of the pandemic. But with my own age and my husband's immune issues, I didn't feel comfortable going back to singing when the choir regrouped in person, and especially not when the masks came off. It was only this spring, as the pandemic waned somewhat and we began to feel more comfortable after some medical advice, when I began to think about possibly re-joining.

I had almost resigned myself to the idea that my singing career was over; after all, I was not young anymore, and I absolutely did not want to be one of those people who is talked about behind their back: “Why doesn’t she quit?” I wasn’t sure how it would feel this time around, but so far, my voice has felt good, and not too fatigued even after a full day of rehearsals and two services. However, I’ve pledged to myself that I will stop when I can no longer contribute positively — and hope it will be clear to me when that time has come.

Making music hasn’t been the problem: I’ve been playing the piano a lot since moving it to our new apartment. This winter, working on some Schubert Impromptus, new to me, was a great consolation during the darkest months of weather as I dealt with change and grief. But if you have had a history of making music with other people, that experience is pretty irreplaceable. Singing in a choir is a particular kind of musical experience, too, and in one like ours, where we churn through a huge amount of repertoire in a short time, you have to like sight-reading and be good at it, have experience in a wide range of periods and styles, and be able to absorb and learn the music very quickly so that you can perform it confidently after only a couple of times through -- if that. It’s not the same at all as a choir that practices a few pieces of music intensively for, say, a whole semester, and then gives a concert. A choir like ours cannot work on each piece with the same level of attention to detail, but if the singers and director are very good, and they have a strong affinity and sense of singing together as a group, they can actually perform very well, week in and week out. Although we don’t repeat pieces very often — it may be a matter of many years — when we come back to something that we know, then of course we can work on the details with even greater finesse. It’s a particular kind of challenge, and it’s exactly what I like most as a musician.

The camaraderie of a choir is also a particular sort of bond, and I think some of that comes from the fact that our only instruments are our bodies. There's a physicality about singing with others that creates a greater awareness of all the other group members than I ever found when I was playing in a band or orchestra. The personnel of this choir has changed a lot in the years I was away. Most of the professionals who sang with us have left and been replaced by new and younger singers (all of whom are excellent); most of the volunteer singers are also younger — many are McGill students or recent graduates — and in addition to the eight paid professionals we now have three choral scholars. These are gifted college-age singers who are given a stipend in exchange for the experience of singing in this kind of a group, and doing some solo and ensemble work on their own. But there are several people who, like me, were in the choir for years and are still there, and some new, but older volunteers I’ve been happy to meet. One of them is a man in his late 80s who I talked to for the first time last Sunday. He had sung in the cathedral choir thirty years ago, and then stopped because of some vocal problems — and now he is back. After we had told each other brief versions of our choir histories, he smiled at me and said, “Yes, it just gets into your blood.”

Like him, I don’t know how long I will be singing, but I know how much I missed it, and that it means a great deal to me to be able to do it again. Of all the things I've done, singing is one that keeps me firmly attentive to the present moment, and is perhaps one of the best ways of finding the joy that being fully in that moment can provide. And it still seems miraculous to me that, with only our bodies, we can take a collective breath in silence, and, the next moment, bring forth the extraordinary music that only a choir of human voices can create.

For a quiet moment that illustrates this, listen to the introit (opening choral work) by going to 6:20 in the video below, of last Sunday's Evensong for the Feast of the Ascension. It's "My Peace I Leave with You" by the 20th century American composer Amy Beach. (All the works except one that we sang that afternoon were by female composers.)

 

 

 

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.

Not Springing Along, but Inching...

Spring is coming very fitfully to Montreal this year. One day, warm weather; the next, cold clammy rain. It's pretty awful today. But forsythia is blooming, and the first daffodils, and the magnolias have huge buds. It will arrive.

And normalcy in our personal life also seems closer this year than for the past three. This weekend we had dinner at a friend's house and met some new people - what a pleasure! Saturday night we drove out to Pierrefonds, a western suburb that is still on the island of Montreal, to see Albertine en cinq temps, an opera adapted from Michel Trembley's 1984 play of the same name, with music by Catherine Major, and is a production conceived, created, and carried out entirely by women. It tells the story of a Montreal woman, Albertine, who has had a difficult life, and at age 70 is spending her first night in a nursing home. She talks with her earlier selves -- Albertine at 30, 40, 50, and 60 - as well as her sister, Madeline - and the story of her life is revealed through their conversations. Albertine's history mirrors the history of many Quebec women who were unable to find much freedom in their lives, and were deeply affected by patriarchal and religious attitudes. Interestingly, too, the story of her life takes place on rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine, the exact part of the city  where we used to live ourselves.

Albertine en cinq temps is also the first opera ever produced in Quebec to be written and performed in Joual. This is a Quebec dialect of French that was spoken mainly by the working class and is now a source of Quebec identity; many of its words have entered the main language as Quebec slang, but for those of us who didn't grow up hearing or speaking it, it can be really hard to understand. One of my close friends, Catherine St-Arnaud, who I sang with in the cathedral choir, sings the role of Albertine at 30 and has been part of the production team bringing this opera to life. She sent us a bilingual libretto to read beforehand, in French and English, and there were projected sur-titles, but because the French was all in dialect, it was a little tricky, as well as being fascinating to a word nerd like me. All in all, Albertine is a brilliant and very moving opera, beautifully conceived and sung, and if you ever have a chance to see it, by all means do so - there are several more performances of this current Quebec tour. This was also the first big public performance we've attended in three years, so it felt like a liberation for us.

I haven't been painting or drawing much this week, except for the watercolor here -- the bowl of fruit on the blue-and-yellow platter just begged to be painted, especially the brilliance of the pomegranates. This was somewhat bigger than usual - I did it in my 14" x 11" sketchbook and used large brushes.

Instead I'm working on a text to go with the charcoal landscape drawing series, which I hope to publish later in 2023. Because it's personal, as well as being about the art, it's been rather slow going, but it's coming along -- like the slow progress of spring.

Working in Monochrome

When the view from your studio window is this monochromatic, sometimes it's best to take advantage of nature's prompt to interpret things in black-and-white. That's what I was thinking when I bought a new Fabriano sketchbook last week with the intention of using it for charcoal drawings. Maybe some dry pastel and oil pastel, too, but mostly black-and-white work, in a large format. I've been drawing in it almost every day since then. 

In this fast sketch of the little park below us and the parking lots beyond, I was just trying to see the various geometric shapes and make a lively drawing. I'll be doing more like this as I figure out how to use the essentially boring view in a more graphic composition. What really interests me are the tire tracks in the snow. Along with the little trees and bushes, these are the only organic, irregular shapes in the scene and they bring something otherwise static to life.

This one, of the neighborhood beyond the parking lots, also appeared in the previous post, and is the view I was drawn to initially and have depicted a number of times, mostly in watercolor.

View of the Jewish cemetery in snow. Charcoal on paper, 11"x14".

I've been wanting to draw the Jewish cemetery, over on the left, but hadn't felt ready until I saw it covered with snow, on a foggy day, with the ethereal trees behind it. Charcoal lends itself perfectly to a scene like this.

We went out into the countryside to make a quick trip across the border two days ago. This is a snow-covered field near St-Jacques-le-Mineur, Quebec, and was completed very quickly. The effect of trees in the distance is just vine charcoal smudged with my finger, with some harder, dark Conte crayon applied over it. The birches are picked out with a fine-pointed white eraser.

 

The very first drawing in the sketchbook was of this vertebra and two rocks. It also combines soft vine charcoal for the midtones with some harder compressed charcoal and Conté crayon, and a few details in charcoal pencil. White erasers in different sizes and shapes are indispensable tools for charcoal work - they allow you to erase large areas, for sure, but also to go backwards and forwards, working with both the charcoal and the eraser. The main use is to lighten areas or pick out highlights and create texture. And you must work on good paper that has some "tooth" to catch all the little particles of charcoal, but will stand up to scrubbing and both the buildup of dark areas and the erasure of others. I usually work on Canson or Fabriano sheets of pastel/charcoal paper, but I really wanted a sketchbook right now because storing a lot of small drawings is a problem for me in the new space, and I knew this format would encourage me to do daily drawings. The sketchbook I'm using is a 100-sheet wire-bound book in the Fabriano 1264 line, in the series labeled "Sketch," and except for wishing the paper were just a little heavier, I'm quite happy with it.

And don't worry, color hasn't disappeared!

New Year in a New Neighborhood

New snow. Watercolor with pencil, in Stillman&Birn sketchbook, 9" x 6", 12/29/22

The Christmas storm blanketed Montreal with a thick, wet coat of snow, and then freezing rain fell on top of it. On the 27th, we went out into the countryside to a friend's house, where there had been no rain, and even more snow -- several feet of it -- lay pristinely on the ground and the rooftops. Not so here in the city, where by New Year's nearly all the snow was gone.

Until last night that is, when it snowed again. The weather has been unremittingly grey, but I've enjoyed the changing moods outside my studio window. There's really nothing very exciting to draw, on the surface of things -- a little park, a car dealer close by, an empty parking lot, a street heading off into the suburban rooftops of TMR (Town of Mont-Royal) with lots of trees, and beyond them, the distant buildings of northern Montreal past rue Sauve. On clear days we can see the foothills of the Laurentians. None of this is worth a painting on its own strength, but what interests me is how the weather affects the scene, how every day is actually as different as the moods of the sea, how the changing light and atmospheric conditions alter the emotional temperature of what I see -- and feel. Trying to capture some of that is a worthy sketchbook challenge.

The painting at the top was a difficult one and I struggled to pull something out of it after getting very discouraged with the page about halfway through, and not wanting to overwork the watercolor. Adding some sketchy, loose details in dark brown helped a lot, as did increasing the contrast overall by deepening the shadows.

Melting snow. Charcoal in Fabriano sketchbook, 14" x 11". 

I bought a new, large sketchbook this week specifically for charcoal drawings and pastel sketches, such as the image above.

While I often drew or painted the park across the street from our old place, and documented the seasons, it never seemed to change so much day-to-day and therefore wasn't as interesting to me, even though it was vastly more "beautiful." Probably if I'd had a higher vantage point it would have been different, because here the sky takes up more than half of my view, and the condition of that sky says everything about how the land and city look below it.

Snowy day. Direct watercolor in sketchbook, 9" x 6".

Right now it's starting to snow again, so the scene is even whiter and more ethereal than in this watercolor sketch, completed only an hour ago. Color fades to the barest hint of itself; the indistinct horizon blurs even more and comes closer; trees and rooftops lose their sharp edges. 

Today's view feels chalky, and I'm looking forward to trying to capture it in pastels, but in a little while the sun will have gone down, so that may have to wait until tomorrow -- when who knows what the sun and sky will be doing?