the cassandra pages

Inspiration and Perspiration

I can feel that I'm starting to be ready to wrap up this series of winter drawings, at least for this year. There are two or three others I'd like to do if I can. But this one beckoned persistently, and because I knew it would be a real challenge, I decided I'd better go for it while I still felt inspired.

On the day I saw this scene, we had been fortunate enough to drive through the Adirondacks just after a heavy snowstorm that had thickly coated every single branch of every tree -- the atmospheric conditions must have been very particular. Since the snowfall, there had been no wind, and we were nearly alone on the roads, so it felt like a sort of suspended animation. We left the main road at some point and drove up through deep woods on a narrow dirt road to its top, and then back down into a hollow where there was a stream. The road was icy, and we figured we'd better turn around while we could. Jonathan got out to take a picture of the water, but on the other side of the road, long ago, someone had made a semi-circular clearing, now ringed by this group of trees, completely covered with thick fresh snow: mostly spruces and larches with lacy branches, standing heroically like characters in a play, or guardians of the woods behind them, flanked by a chorus of bare deciduous trees raising their white arms and fingers. No wind blew, no birds sang or hopped from branch to branch to cause cascades of snow -- just the utter stillness of deep midwinter woods on an extraordinary day.

At the time I hadn't planned to do any drawings, but as this series progressed, I kept coming back to that semi-circle of trees, and felt I needed to try.

The complex nature of this forest scene required a preliminary sketch (above). The overall approach was too simplistic and too contrast-y, but I was just trying out different approaches. I wasn't too happy with the spruce tree, but liked the larch on the right, and felt that the handling of the trees in the background would probably work. So then it was a question of beginning again for real, and summoning the patience for what I knew would be a long, challenging effort.

In most of the drawings in the series, I've been able to work back and forth across the whole scene, or from top to bottom in a logical way. But here, I couldn't do that, because there was so much going on that I kept losing track of where I was. So I developed the picture in vertical slices, worrying all the time that I wouldn't be able to integrate the entire drawing across the picture plane. It was complicated, eye-fatiguing, and seemed like it took forever -- I worked on it off and on for three days.

Then, once I was almost done, I had to work quite a bit on the picture as a whole to make the different areas relate to each other, and bring the overall greyscale into harmony. There are some things I'd do differently if I were to do it over (that's not going to happen!) but in general I'm pretty happy with the final result.

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This process made me think a lot about what happens when inspiration is hard to hold onto -- how do we keep going toward our original goal when things get tough? It's so easy, and tempting, to give up at that point. Part of being a professional artist, designer, writer -- or pretty much any other artform -- is learning how to stick with a project, no matter how difficult it is or how many obstacles come up, and bring about a satisfactory conclusion. If the client has hired you, then that is your part of the contract. Likewise, if the public has bought a ticket to the concert, there is an expectation of excellence.

But for the professional, this also creates a difficulty. When is the result "good enough," and when is it extraordinary? Because most of us know, deep down, that there is a difference. In music, as in all the arts -- and in sports, for that matter -- peak performances do not happen every day. The public may not know, because technical virtuosity may be there, just as facility in drawing or painting may be there, and the public tends to recognize and reward virtuosity. But technical brilliance alone doesn't create an inspired performance or a truly special work of art; it is not the same as artistry that somehow, intangibly, conveys what is going on in the heart and mind of the artist and conveys that to the audience in a truly moving and memorable way. For that matter, the artist often doesn't know why a particular performance felt different, or why a particular painting or drawing or poem happened as it did: you can't "will" it to happen. The hours and hours of practice and preparation that add up to technical facility are the means to the end, but they are not the end in themselves.

There are an awful lot of professionals who do coast along on a combination of technique, repetition of what has been praised or popular, and doing work that is "good enough." Pushing yourself to do better, to continually grow, requires taking risks -- and that means some of the time you're going to fall short or fail. It also means once in a while, maybe not often at all, you're going to do something that confirms why you began this journey in the first place.

I'm not saying that this drawing is extraordinary in any way, just that it was more challenging than the others I've done so far, and required digging deeper into myself to keep going and pull out a result that felt satisfying -- it asked more of me. Looking back on the last two months of work, I can see that I've learned a lot.

I always pay attention when I feel my inspiration running thin. Perspiration - pushing through to a good result - can only take you so far. The poet Osip Mandelstam once made the enigmatic comment that he always knew when he was getting close to the end of a cycle of poems when he started writing about the stars. He had discovered a clue in his own work. I don't have that; I just have a feeling that I'm not quite there on the razor's edge, the way it was when inspiration first hit and the first works were coming. But concentration and persistence can bring you back to a place where inspiration once again takes over: that's the intangible lesson of this drawing, and maybe of those moments standing in the circle of snow-covered trees.

Winter Mysteries

If there is an ultra-typical view of central New York that feels like it embodies the sense of "home" to me, it's this sort of scene: pastures bordered by hedgerows, wooded hilltops, tall deciduous trees and scrubby brush, all arranged in a zigzagging patchwork that carries the eye up and down and across the rolling hills. It's beautiful in every season, but you can see the shape of the land better in the winter, when the contrast is greatest between the fields and the trees; in the summer, pretty much everything is green, or shades of green, brown, and yellow. After this winter's deep dive into the landscape, I'm sure I will be making paintings or doing pastels in the more colorful seasons too, but I'm learning a lot about looking and about what has always attracted my own eye, attention, and heart to this particular type of terrain and its ecology. 

The picture at the top of this post was done after the one below. These are two views of the same range of hills, north of Hamilton, NY, as you're heading toward Rt 20. 

The top picture took a quite a bit of time - an hour or two -- but the bottom one was a deliberately fast 13-minute sketch. In the video below, you can see the whole sketching process condensed to a minute and a half, which I find both amusing and also mystifying; I've watched it a number of times and still can't figure out how the brain and eye, intellect and intuition actually do this. There's a lot about the arts, as well as many other human endeavors, that will always remain mysterious to me, and beyond the realm of what we "learn" to do or can explain. 

For instance, this weekend we watched Mikaela Shiffrin break Ingmar Stenmark's record for world cup skiing victories -- a record many thought would never fall. The qualities that set her apart are vastly more than flawless technique and great physical conditioning; there's her uncanny feeling for the snow in a wide range of conditions, her ability to "see" the course in her mind, and then ski it tighter, faster, and more perfectly than anyone else, and the whole constellation of mental and emotional mastery that's necessary to win so consistently over a period of years. My husband was a ski racer in his youth, and we both skied a lot in our 30s and 40s; he was incredibly good and taught me a lot about the sport, while I became a rather foolhardy advanced intermediate. We stopped, eventually, after some injuries that threatened to become chronic problems as we aged -- and also because skiing with people with cell phones began to take away the solitude and quiet we loved in that other world of the mountains. But those long, cold, sunny, foggy, snowy days remain etched in my mind, and in my dreams I am sometimes still skiing -- and it still feels fantastic.

I never understood exactly how the mind and body managed to coordinate themselves in order to allow this. You learn "how", but then there is a kind of letting go, where you aren't thinking about it in the same analytical way all the time. For me, that was always a tenuous balance, because I didn't grow up on skis, and I was never that good at it, but under optimum conditions, sometimes I could experience the freedom. The gulf between me and a top racer like Schiffrin is, well, about as big as the distance from here to Switzerland, and yet I can appreciate what the human body is capable of doing, both for someone like me who grew up among little un-skied hills like these, to learn to ski on much bigger ones, and for the people at the top of the sport -- or music, or art, or dance, or many other disciplines. It's nothing short of amazing. The thing is, we all do many things every single day that are an astounding combination of learned and intuitive actions. We seldom stop to think about them, but we should marvel at ourselves now and then, for simply being able to read, brush our teeth, cook an egg. It is not insignificant at all.

Old Apple Trees

 

The latest in my series of winter charcoal drawings of upstate and central New York is this one, of a pair of old trees in a field - probably apple trees, I'm thinking. They touch something in me; perhaps it's the way they are still growing in spite of losing limbs and, in the case of one, practically its entire original trunk. Maybe it's because they look like a pair. But it's also because finding old trees like this feels typical of such a place, where people have been farming for a long time. Perhaps there was once a homestead nearby. I like the way these trees, with their individual personalities, stand in the foreground, set off by the indistinct woods in the little gully behind the hills; it makes me want to walk there, climb up the hill behind, see if there's a stream. I'm sure deer like these trees too, and can be found beneath them in the fall, eating apples.

It's difficult to get good photos or scans of these drawings; even when I work on them in Photoshop, I find that favoring the bright white of the snow means losing a lot of detail and grey tones in the trees, but retaining those tones means the snow is too dark. I've got a project in mind for this series, so I need to solve that technical problem, no doubt with some help from my partner who knows all about black-and-white reproduction.

But in real life, I can see that progress has been made. I pinned all the drawings up on my studio wall - four of them are still at the lake -- and was pleased to see how they talk to each other, and how together they start to add up to something more interesting than the individual drawings. That's encouraging.

We're having more snow here in Montreal today, with another storm coming this weekend. I figure I have just this current month to continue in a winter frame of mind, so I need to keep at these. There are nine so far, including two that are sketches, and I'd like to have at least twelve to choose from, better yet fifteen, by the time spring can be felt in the air, and the snow begins to recede at last. One of the drawings I plan to do is of the same field you can see in the summer painting, standing on the floor.

 

A Winter Stream in the Adirondacks

My weekend project was this charcoal drawing of a stream near Lake Piseco, in the southern Adirondacks. We had stopped by a culvert in the road where the stream passed underneath it, and I got out and took some photographs in both directions; that was late January and the stream was flowing strongly -- which seemed unusual for that time of year, no doubt a consequence of the warming climate. Lake Piseco is a big body of water, and normally is a haven for ice fishing, but we saw very few ice fishing shanties out on the ice this year.

There were lots of challenging aspects to this drawing, from depicting the conifer forest in the background, ringed by shorter bare shrubs, to the mounded snow and trees reflecting in the flowing water. I simplified the scene from what it actually looked like, where there was snow on every branch, and the brush and twigs coming out of the snow seemed much more complicated and detailed. This little 38-second time-lapse shows how the drawing evolved:

Over the past couple of days I made a short demo video just about drawing the conifers in the background, in response to a request made on the previous video post -- I'll post that tomorrow or the next day.

Still lives in black and white

Hyacinth in a foil pot. Charcoal drawing in Fabriano sketchbook, 14" x 11".

The monochromatic exploration continues here, along with the snowy days and grey skies. Unlike our neighbors to the south, we've had snow on the ground pretty much all of the time since December. Friends who have a house in the country said there was three feet of snow on the ground, with snowbanks towering well over four feet. So it probably makes sense that I'm still thinking in black-and-white, although I'm missing color and thinking about getting back to it -- this week I've prepared four birch panels for eventual paintings in oil or acrylic.

There are a couple of still lives that I haven't posted yet. The potted hyacinth was a most welcome gift from a visiting friend.

And here is a plate of fruit, drawn very quickly. I like the freedom and spontaneity of this drawing.

I'm continuing on with the series of charcoal landscape drawings, and did a new one last night, not from central New York, but of a stream in the Adirondacks. This one began as a start of a response to a comment on the last post - a reader asked for some guidance about drawing conifers, because she's right that the approach needs to be different from what I said about drawing deciduous trees. I'll respond in more detail to her question with a post about that drawing later this week.

How's the weather where you are? If you're in the northern hemisphere, is spring evident -- or do you live somewhere that stays warm? If so, please send some sunshine and flowers our way!

On the question of teaching art...

 

 

For best results, watch full-screen.

For a long time, both here (quietly, in some comments) and in my head and heart, the question has come up as to whether, during the next part of my life, I might do some teaching. What I'm most interested in are the people who, for whatever reason, loved to draw and paint when they were younger, and then gave it up. Far too often that was because of a teacher making disparaging remarks, or it may be because life -- and other paths and responsibilities -- simply intervened. But now, later in life, the call to do that once-loved creative activity is resurfacing. How to begin? How to get over those nagging insecurities -- that voice in the head that says "you aren't any good" or "it's too late?" -- and enjoy the process, have fun, and stay with it? 

I'm also interested in drawing and other forms of art as a meditative practice, which involves setting aside one's internal judging voice, and learning to become immersed in the act of creating for its own sake, and for the good it does to our spirits. In both of these areas, then, there's a psychological aspect which is often missing in traditional instruction but which actually forms a stumbling block for all creative pursuits and must be overcome, not just once, but repeatedly. However, once we understand it, it gets easier.

The possibilities for art instruction have changed so much in my lifetime -- when I was young there were correspondence courses for would-be cartoonists or illustrators, but anyone serious about fine art went to "art school". Personally, I'm glad I didn't, because I never got slotted into a particular style or type of work, and so I've remained quite open to all types of art and ways of approaching it. Now there are so many ways for people to learn, and to teach: from online courses to in-person workshops to one-on-one live zoom classes. 

I have a lot of work to do, myself, to figure out what I might want to do and how to do it. This past week I made a narrated video of myself making a charcoal drawing, in order to observe my own process and make myself talk about it. Of course, this isn't a "beginner" video, and as such it doesn't fit into either of the categories I've mentioned above. But I learned a lot of technical things doing it, and it suggests other subjects that might be addressed in a series of videos -- like a deeper look at materials, for instance. I thought you might be interested in seeing it.

Any comments you may have are welcome! Next time, I'll try to set the camera up so that it's more over my shoulder, and the work is parallel to the camera frame -- no need for the viewers to get a stiff neck! It feels to me like introductory videos should be short, from 5-8 minutes perhaps, while a demo like this -- which shows an hour-long process condensed to 16 minutes -- can't really be much shorter. If you get bored at any point, you can skip forward!

Thanks for watching, and for any thoughts you may have.

 

 

Snowy Fields of Central New York

 

I made a video about some charcoal drawings done during a recent visit to central New York, when the landscape that I love was covered with new snow, in all of its graphic beauty. For the best experience, please view the video at full screen size (after pressing the "play" arrow, click the little square at the bottom right of the video screen.)

Please let me know if you like this sort of thing and would like to see more! I'm planning to do another that explains the materials in more detail, and some that show drawings in the actual process of being made.

Below are the finished drawings shown in the video. Enjoy! It was such a pleasure to make them, and I'm looking forward to doing more.

 

 

 

 

What Lasts, What Sustains

A rainy evening in the clouds, the first sustained weather like this we’ve had since moving here. I like the different feeling in the apartment: quiet and closed-in, with the nearby all we can see and therefore much more prominent.

We stopped at the Jean-Talon market on our way home from my annual check-up in the eastern part of the city -- the first time I’ve seen my GP in person in more than two years -- and bought tomatoes, strawberries, a big bunch of basil, and pots of thyme and small hot peppers. Jonathan made pizza for dinner with the tomatoes and basil, and the pots are out on the balcony, getting slowly soaked with warm rain.

Coming back from central New York this time, I’ve finally realized that I always have a day or two of adjustment in each direction when I feel emotionally ragged, tearful, even angry. Arriving there, I feel overwhelmed by the house and tasks that have, suddenly, become my responsibility; I feel burdened with obligations and other people’s expectations and demands, and worried that I will fall short or be criticized -- and at first all I want to do is escape. Then the natural surroundings start to work on me; I get used to going to sleep after walking around the lake, looking at the stars, hearing the croaks of frogs, intermittent conversations of geese, and the distant lowing of cows. I get used to waking in the fresh air of early morning, fog blowing across the water, before making coffee and drinking it out on the porch or on the bench down by the shore as fish begin to rise -- and the negative feelings start to calm down. The longer I spend there, the more people I’ve come into contact with, and the more I realize we share a web of interconnections that have somehow persisted despite my long absence. Because my family’s roots there run so deep, it’s not hard for me to find ways of connecting, and when the mechanic or the truck rental guy or the clerk at the supermarket hear my name or my parents’ names, the suspicion caused by my Quebec license plate seems to be replaced by their own natural sociability, because people there tend to be very warm, friendly, and chatty. And this feels not only familiar, but refreshingly natural to me, after spending fifty years in New England and a French-speaking major city where there has been, frankly, not much of that, and seldom a ready response to my own overtures of warmth or friendliness to strangers.

Coming back here, to Montreal, the reaction tends to be a kind of wrenching sadness and grief, mainly about my father but also my attachment to that place juxtaposed with my fulfilling and happy life here, and an awareness that both marriage and family ties mean compromise -- I cannot do whatever I might want on a given day or in a given year, but have to -- if I’m to remain true to myself the values that I hold dear -- act responsibly on behalf of the people I love. And this, unfortunately, divides me. I don’t want to live in central New York full-time, nor do I want to live primarily in America again, but I do want to see and care for my father, I do feel a responsibility and love for the land that we own, I respect and care about the hardworking and straightforward people I’m meeting back where I grew up, and (perhaps this is the most significant revelation) I see much more clearly how embedded that culture and place has always been in me. Here, in my adopted country, province, and city, I am able to live more fully and freely as the person I’ve become over the years, and this is where my husband and I have built our life together and want to remain. As for community and friendship, these exist here, there, and everywhere we have lived -- and sometimes just as strongly in the strange place of online interconnection that has arisen over the past two decades, and is independent of addresses, borders, or time zones.

As I look out over the city from this high place, the clouds have risen and thinned, and lights begin to flicker on and shine in the deepening blue distance. I feel my solitude keenly and comfortably tonight, and I know that this is a quality I carry with me wherever I am, along with a natural desire for making connections, and an ease in doing so. There’s relief in recognizing that it doesn’t matter so much where I am, physically, because I’ll always be myself -- a child who grew up loving and being consoled by the solitude of nature, books, art, and music, and also learned sociability and a love of people from her father and others in a rural society that valued family, and caring about each other, above everything else.

Those qualities saved me when I left my small town and went off to find my own way in a large university, and I see them now in my father as he navigates the incredibly difficult transition from independence to a nursing home, impaired by deafness and mobility issues that would doom many people to isolation and despair. But several staff people told me how much they liked him, and I could see his efforts to connect with people, to find ways of communicating his identity and his sense of humor in spite of his frustration at his body’s failings, at finding himself stuck in that place, his grief at the loss of his partner, and all the other challenges of extreme old age.

At first I thought, “This is terrible, how difficult this is for him,” but now that I’ve thought through this last visit more deeply, it actually gives me hope that even in extreme circumstances, one’s humanity and love of others can still be expressed, and consolation found in recognized places of solace. “I can’t sing anymore,” my father said to me as he listened to a woman play the guitar and sing familiar songs -- but I saw his toe tapping, and watched his hand beat time to the rhythm -- and he had found his way to the circle of residents at the appointed time for the musical event that week. Whatever is deepest in us remains, I think, and we must not give up on it -- not now, not ever.

 

Snowscapes of home

The landscape of central New York State, where I grew up, is unmistakable to anyone who has lived there, and when there's snow on the ground it accentuates the forms of the land. I took some pictures from the car when we were visiting my father back in January, and recently made some drawings in pen-and-ink with a light wash added at the end.

The bare, mostly-deciduous trees, the gently rolling hills, the snowy fields, the fences and weeds sticking up through the snow, the fallen branches and isolated farm buildings and roads all contribute to the particular feeling of these rural landscapes that begin somewhere near Canajoharie and stretch past Utica to the east and west, and continue down to the south toward Binghamton.

Better seen from Rt 20 than from the Thruway, it's a pastoral patchwork of small farms, creeks, swamps, and woods that changes with every dip or turn in the road, and has a particular beauty I've never encountered anywhere else. It got imprinted on me at an early age, and will always say "home."

In Memoriam

Photographer Robert Frank died yesterday at the age of 94.

Jennifer Lewis, artist, photographer, ceramicist, and one of our closest lifelong friends, died a year ago this week, at the age of 68; the day the photograph above was taken, we were together at the 2008 Robert Frank show at MoMA, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Franks' masterpiece, The Americans.

Aaron Moore, historian, professor, and husband of my dear friend Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, died on Sunday at the age of 47 -- just half that of Robert Frank.

I have no way to make sense of the unfairness of life, the time we're each allotted, or the way each of us meets our fate. What I do know is that each of these people used the time they had to be creative, to be productive and engaged, to connect with others, to try to make a difference, and to be courageous. Each of them touched me, in quite different ways, and I will always be aware of them and remember them.

Jonathan and Jenny looking at Robert Frank's contact sheets, New York City, 2008.

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It's September 11th, a day of remembrance that goes beyond any one person. That morning, Jennifer called us in Vermont, from her roof in lower Manhattan: we were on the phone with her when the second plane hit the tower.

And on this day, I think, too, of what Robert Frank photographed in his iconic book, The Americans. Like Dave Heath, whose photographs we saw earlier this summer at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, like Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, all of whom knew each other, Frank was trying to express something tragic and destructive that he sensed at the heart of American life in the 1950s and early 60s -- something that would explode into violence later in the 1960s, and has never been resolved. Frank showed us America's racism, economic inequality and insensitivity, its feel-good culture, and above all, its denial. Now, much of the divisive toxicity that became an undercurrent after the 60s has been allowed, and encouraged, to boil over and come to the surface. So I think a post entitled In Memoriam today is also a requiem for an idea of America that is dying, and must die eventually -- but how long that will take, and at what cost, none of us can predict.