the cassandra pages

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? 

 

Of Studios, New and Old

When we finally finished cleaning out our old studio in the Usine Cadbury at the end of October, we sat down for a little while in the open space and remembered the day we moved into it -- the only other time it has been empty. That was fourteen years ago. As soon as our moving truck arrived from Vermont, the space filled up quickly with professional camera and graphics equipment, computers, tools, paper cutters and framing tools, file cabinets and storage cabinets, art supplies, a book press and bookbinding equipment, bookshelves and all the books we couldn't fit into our small apartment, my piano, a refrigerator and kitchen equipment, a couch, chairs, a coffee table, plants. In many ways it was our second home for the past decade and a half; we went there almost every day soon after rising, made our breakfast and lunch, and spent most of our daylight hours working there, only going home  -- usually on foot or by bicycle -- at 5:00 or 6:00 pm. The pandemic interrupted that routine, but by 2019 we were also retiring from our design and communications work, although I was continuing to publish books. The building changed hands, and the rent rose every year: it was clear our time there was coming to an end.

We had worked hard on selling and clearing things out last summer, but realized we simply couldn't finish by the time our lease would be up in the fall, so we signed one more lease, determined to be out this year. By the time we had finished this fall, we were too exhausted and sick of the process to feel very nostalgic. We took some pictures, including this final portrait of me by Jonathan to mark the occasion. Then we locked the door for the last time, and returned our keys.

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My new studio is very small, but efficient, and the north light in it is beautiful. I was really worried about fitting myself into it, and got rid of everything I could in order to make it work; that meant some steely decisions about equipment and studio furniture I've had all my working life, as well as weeding out a great many books, supplies I either didn't need or could easily replace, and even a good deal of artwork and project samples. I photographed things, and let the objects go. It wasn't easy, especially at first: I felt like I was giving up my identity and admitting to being much older than I feel. But as we found homes for our things with younger people who would use them, we both felt better.

The new space holds my writing desk (you can see it reflected in the mirror of the storage cabinet) as well as an L-shaped worktable. The left side of the table has a motor that raises or lowers the tabletop for standing or sitting. All the art, sewing, and textile supplies fit into two IKEA Pax cabinets, and my paper and archive of artwork are stored elsewhere in the apartment; there are boxes of cloth and yarn, archives of professional work, and some canvases and frames in our remote storage unit.

Thingvellir, Iceland. Charcoal on prepared Rising Line Stonehenge paper.

It seemed important to me to put some work up on the walls right away, so I did, and after doing a number of cloud and cityscape studies from the window, I decided to try to make something large just to prove to myself that I could still do that in this space. I want to complete the Iceland series of charcoal drawings that I began at the end of 2011; this large diptych, which was just roughed-out when I stopped working on the series, is 60" x 22". I worked on the two halves separately on the tabletop, and then together on the wall. Later, Jonathan made this portrait, again to mark the occasion of what we hope is a new beginning, and a new chapter in our lives.

 

Present Moments: Our Own, and Others'

Young woman on the metro, watercolor in sketchbook, 6" x 9".

Happy Thanksgiving. We celebrated last weekend with my sister-in-law and her husband, and since we're in Canada, it's an ordinary day today for most people. However I'll probably never feel that way - Thanksgiving was such an important holiday for my family, and a time when I almost always traveled home to be with them. When possible, we've also tried to celebrate it with friends; I love the feasting and gathering aspect of the day but most of all its meaning, as a time to be grateful.

Gratitude isn't so easy these days when it often feels like the whole world is falling apart at the seams. I think we all hoped that as the pandemic became more manageable and understandable, the world would somehow "come round right" but the exact opposite has happened. My coping practice, not just when it all becomes overwhelming, is to try to stay in the present moment, using all my senses to be mindful of what is going on, and all that is good in my life right now. The attention begins with the breath and moves out into the immediate environment, and I often recall the words of a Zen teacher: "When we manage to focus on the present moment, we usually find out that it is all right." Obviously, nobody can stay there for very long, but even a few minutes of mindful attention bring me back to my center and greater peacefulness, and then I'm more able to cope with whatever needs to be done. And, God knows, I have so much to be grateful for.

Robbie, a regular commenter on this blog, suggested that a little less seriousness and a bit more entertainment here might be something to consider. I don't know that this blog will ever fall into the category of "entertainment" but I agree with him that a lighter tone or perhaps more anecdotes might be good for me too. Like my father, Robbie makes a point of engaging the people he encounters and seeing if he can make them smile. What a lot of readers probably don't know about me is that I do this too, and always have; I found the taciturn and private nature of New Englanders a big challenge! Here, speaking a minority language can also create difficulties in making connections, as I found when I lived in a French-speaking area, but there are so many other ways to do it -- as children, pets, music, knitting, and urban sketching make clear! And frankly, it hasn't been a big problem for me. Montreal is a place where bilingualism and tri-lingualism are not only common but part of the city's fabric that we appreciate, and learning to communicate and make friends across those potential divides has been one of the things I've enjoyed most about living here. You have to plunge in, make mistakes, be human and friendly, and not get discouraged if some people don't return your friendliness; others will.

The neighborhood where I used to live, Plateau Mont-Royal, was predominantly French, rather entitled, and somewhat closed-in on itself. Our new neighborhood, Cote-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grace, is the most ethnically- and linguistically-mixed in the city, with some 48 languages spoken regularly in homes. In the elevators of our 12-story modern condo building, we hear neighbors speaking French, English, Chinese, Spanish, Yiddish, Russian, Italian, Arabic, Filipino, various Indo-Iranian languages, and many others. English, rather than French, is the most common language people use to say good morning and wish each other a good day. There is a huge Asian grocery market across the street, a Romanian charcuterie and bakery, and an eastern European/Russian/Ukrainian market around the corner; nearby on Victoria Avenue is a big kosher bakery, and that street is lined with Indian, Vietnamese, and Jewish restaurants and shops -- to name just a few - while in other directions the concentration shifts to African and Caribbean, Iranian and Turkish, Portuguese, Greek and Middle Eastern, Mexican and Latin American. Not only is this mixture invigorating for all the senses, it encourages me to learn some words in more languages and try to connect with the Chinese butcher, the Ukrainian woman behind the prepared-food-counter, the Romanian couple who run the charcuterie, the Israeli pharmacist, the Lebanese dry-cleaner, the Muslim car mechanic, the Filipino cleaning woman whose schedule is the same as mine for the pool locker room, the Greek fishmonger. But even more than that, living this way is a daily reminder that the people of the world actually can co-exist, and help each other to thrive.

We Montrealers do pretty well with that, but the situation is far from perfect. Outside the city itself, Quebec is much less diverse. The conservative provincial government has passed new laws ostensibly to strengthen and protect the French language -- which I agree should be protected -- but they are written in a way that discriminates against minorities. And hate crimes, while rare, do occur. Last night, in fact, there was a hit-and-run incident in a nearby neighborhood, captured on a closed-circuit camera, where a car accelerated toward a Hasidic woman pushing a baby carriage across the street, struck the carriage and dragged it for some distance before speeding away. The baby inside was miraculously unhurt. People are shocked and upset that this happened and a search is on to identify the car and its driver.

Of course, I'm coming to all of this from a position of privilege, both through my whiteness and my economic security. But because of being in a long-term, ethnically-mixed marriage, I'm sensitive to the lack of awareness, micro-aggressions and constant pressure to hold one's tongue that come from living in primarily white, privileged, homogeneous North American communities, and the self-protectiveness, frustration, depression, and anger that can result. It's very hard to change anything when people stay only in their own comfort zone -- which is, itself, a privilege -- and do whatever they can to protect that. I've been in the minority a lot, and it changes everything about your view: my empathy has come to lie with those who are considered "other".

In the end, breaking barriers comes down to familiarity, being human with each other, and finding our common ground. Yesterday I had to go into the center of Cote-des-Neiges for a blood test at the local CLSC. The Centre de prélèvement (testing/sampling) is on the third floor of a nondescript building; in the elevator with me were a staff woman with a cart of plastic containers filled with disposed syringes; an elderly Eastern European woman in a headscarf and heavy coat who could barely walk, supported by her daughter; and two young friends, one of whom stopped and leaned her head, eyes shut, against the wall after she got out, before entering the testing area. Oh dear, I thought, she's so afraid of something, maybe needles. If she hadn't had a companion, I would have spoken to her and tried to help.

The testing center is staffed by people who are just as diverse as what I've been describing, and they switch seamlessly between French and English; the receptionist and I spoke both languages during our exchange and I don't think either of us really thought about which one we were using. I had the same nurse as the last time I was there, and she gestured to me to sit in the comfortable chair near her work area. We spoke about the weather and how soon it was getting dark in the afternoons, as she noted the instructions and got out the proper vials. "Are you OK with blood tests?" she asked, as she prepared to tie the rubber band above my elbow. "I love them," I said, smiling. She said, "You're my first!!" and we both started laughing. "I won't faint, if that's what you mean," I added. "OK," she said, "One-two-three..." It didn't hurt much, and was over very soon. "You're good," I said, "that was pretty easy." "Thanks," she replied, fastening the gauze with some adhesive tape and smiling at me as she held it for a few moments. I got up, put on my coat, and wished her a good day, hoping that the woman from the elevator had survived her own ordeal and that someone had been kind to her, too.

On the way home, on the metro, I couldn't help noticing the young woman across from me, lost in her music. We are all living our own present moments, I thought, but in this urban environment, there are so many times when those moments intersect: opportunities to be interested in each other, and grow in sensitivity to the multiplicity of ways in which we are human.

The End of Autumn

I wrote a whole post earlier this week, and then Typepad went down due to a DDoS attack, and lost it. Now the platform is up again, but it's impossible to post any images because Typepad is having difficulty migrating to a new server.

The best news is that we finished the studio move on October 30 - the space is swept and empty, and we returned the keys. It's hard to believe that we're actually done. It was a good space for us for many, many years and I'm grateful for that.

Meanwhile, the leaves are coming off the trees and winter definitely approaches, even though we haven't had a major frost yet. We've usually had freezing weather by Halloween, but not this year -- in fact, it's supposed to be 68 degrees this weekend.

I began a new sketchbook in October, and so far it seems to be much more experimental than the previous one, perhaps as a result of the utter upheaval in my artistic life due to the studio move, that has made continuity next to impossible and perhaps not even desirable. I've been working in gouache and acrylic on paper, in addition to watercolor, and that feels good. But I hope to get back to some larger charcoal drawings and some paintings this winter. The new studio is quite small but efficient, and I think I'll be able to manage by working on one thing at a time rather than spreading out a bunch of stuff and leaving it there, just because of a surfeit of space.

Also, Instagram is troubling me these days. I spend too much time scrolling through my feed. I'm not sure if stepping away for a while is the right move, or sharply decreasing my time there, or simply cutting down the number of people I follow, but I do need to make some changes.

Let's hope the blog issues get resolved soon, but in the meantime, I'll try to write here a bit more often. I hope you are gracefully navigating the change of seasons where you live, if in fact you have a change -- it's never entirely easy. Always happy to hear from you in the comments, and with a bit more time now, I will try to reply!

 

 

 

 

 

Artists, Moving On

The deadline is October 31 at midnight; that's when our studio lease is up.

We're almost done. After a month of steady work, the furniture and equipment are gone, the files emptied, the tools sorted, the negatives and prints and artwork moved. Two days ago I sprayed my large charcoal drawings with fixative and took them off the walls - those were the last piece of our work remaining. The recycling/junk guys came yesterday and took away all the leftover books and a large wooden shelving unit. We have a small load remaining to bring home, another to take to storage (it is a small storage locker!), and another group of things, mostly tools, are going to the lake, but we can begin to imagine ourselves sweeping and mopping the floor, and turning the key in the lock for the last time.

What a saga. This move has been so much harder than downsizing and moving our household. There was simply a greater accumulation of things that we hadn't dealt with, and had to go through in detail, separating them into "keep", "sell", "give away", "recycle" and "throw away" - and then those categories ended up with finer subsections --for instance, things that we could take ourselves to the EcoCentre, like metal recycling, or hazardous waste, or the thrift store, or other things that were too bulky or impossible to dispose of -- like the many books that our bookseller friend didn't want, and friends and family didn't want, and even the thrift places and used bookstores didn't want.

The real issue, of course, wasn't just the arduous, lengthy, physically-demanding process, which simply had to be gone through, but the emotional aspects of sifting through forty years of our working lives and personal history, and preparing ourselves for the next chapter, which will not include a large space for whatever projects we decide to embark upon. For years I'd occasionally suggest that we sort through the boxes and accumulated stuff that we didn't seem to be using, but when you have plenty of space, there is such a dis-incentive to actually do that -- and we didn't. But as the rent rose higher and higher, the day of reckoning approached. We did a lot of weeding last summer, but signed one more lease, knowing that it would probably be the last one, but with no concrete plan for what was next except that we wanted to bring living and work under one roof again. In March, when we found a new place to live, that set the inevitable process in motion -- and the studio closing was forced upon us. When my father became dependent on our care, and then died, the available time for the moving process was contracted and the pressure became much greater.

It's been enlightening to see what we actually did keep over the years, and why, and what has changed now to allow us to let much of that go. I think we've learned a lot about ourselves and each other in this process, and I'm more inclined to be gentle as I look back at the people we were, rather than judging ourselves too harshly. When we started out together, as partners in marriage and a fledgling business, we had nothing, and were determined to be self-sufficient -- so of course we gradually acquired tools and supplies for every conceivable task. We bought a house that needed a great deal of work, and we did almost all of it all ourselves, from the heating in the cellar to raking the roof in the winter to prevent ice dams; my husband sanded and painted every clapboard; I grew a lot of our food, made curtains and clothing, papered and painted and sanded; he took care of the car and built furniture for us in his small woodshop; he learned how to do plumbing and electricity and tiling. We bought and mastered each new generation of computer equipment to keep our design and publishing business going without needing employees or technical assistance. This was at first a necessity, but became our way of life, and during those energetic years, we enjoyed it and took pride in it.

When we moved from a small, relatively rural Vermont village to Montreal, we really had no idea of what we were getting into, and what we might need or not - so we brought most of those tools and equipment with us. And we kept far too much in the way of outmoded tools and supplies. Our big error was not dealing with all of that during the intervening years and having to do it all at once -- but now we've done it, and we've gone through the paralyzing uncertainties about what to do, the decisions, the leave-takings, the questions about identity and age, and the sorting and packing and letting-go -- and we've survived. When October 31 comes, we will feel lighter, happier, and more free.

What I find most sobering is the plight of artists and craftspeople who still desperately need those large studio spaces, yet are being pushed out of one once-affordable but now-gentrified neighborhood after another. During the moving process, we've shared the freight elevator, loading dock and dumpster with many other tenants of this large former factory building, who can no longer afford the rent charged by the new landlords who are upgrading and changing the building into a place for small businesses, high-tech firms, and offices -- all of which can afford considerably higher rents. It is a business decision for the owners, and they have a right to do that; the building is much more attractive than when we moved in more than fifteen years ago. But as I've talked to others who are leaving, their anxiety and stress are palpable, and there are few good options for them in this city. And while a society without art is unbearable, and the governments everywhere tout their artists as intrinsic to the society's identity, very few actually give the necessary support. Relentless capitalism always wins.

Somehow, the arts and artists survive, but I ache for the people whose work and psychological health will suffer as a result of being forced into smaller, insufficient spaces. What do we care about and value, as human societies? Choosing art (and here I mean all the arts) as a way of life almost always means years of low income and precarity, but artists are not considered in the same breath as "the poor" - in fact, many people see them as somehow privileged, and governments tout them as shining examples of each culture. Except in rare circumstances, artists are not protected, and very few rise to acclaim or monetary success -- but just look at the people who use the work of artists, and their associations with them, to make themselves feel important and elite. Look at the system of grants and exhibitions and art sales, and who really profits from it -- a largely-closed system that has only been somewhat eroded by the freedom of the internet and artists taking control of their own distribution, marketing, and sales. When you look closely at the system, you see its unfairness and hypocrisy -- but the purity at the heart of art always remains, and can't be taken away. This is why, in spite of everything, it survives.