the cassandra pages

A New York City Diary: Days 1-3

 

1/8/2025 Wednesday

9:00 am. The snow is very light, so the bare areas are ok. Just need to be careful. After the border it's supposed to be clear.

10:15. We’re through. Grateful for our NEXUS cards. Hello America.

Adirondack Mountains, from I-87.

2:45. Just boarded the train in Albany. It leaves in 5 minutes. A porter came around and asked if we'd like some help boarding early...I guess we looked old, or else he needed something to do...so we said sure, and he took our bags and escorted us down to the platform and into the first car, and hoisted our bags up onto the rack. So he got a nice tip and we got good forward-facing seats on the side next to the Hudson.

On our way down, we had eaten lunch at a diner. The menu indicated Greek owners...gyros, souvlaki...finally a man came out of the kitchen, in a blue T-shirt and khaki shorts, looking like he could be the owner. He stood in back of the counter surveying the room, nodded at us. A waitress brought him a coffee and I saw him take a tall glass bottle out from under the counter and pour some into his mug. Retsina, probably. The food was good - clam chowder, generous sandwiches, bottomless cups of hot coffee. "Are you going to talk to him?" J. asked. I shook my head and smiled. "Maybe.” When we were finished and paying our check I turned back, smiled at the owner, and said," Efcharisto!" (Thank you.)

"Parakalo!" he answered automatically, and then said, "Wait a minute, I have to talk to you! Do you speak Greek?"
"Ligo," I said. "A little. I can read better than I can speak."
"My kids are the opposite, they can speak but they can't read it."
"It's because of the way I'm learning, on Duolingo. You don't get practice speaking."
He nodded, grinned and looked at my husband, "When I saw you, I thought you might be Greek…?"
Jonathan shook his head. "He's Armenian-Syrian," I answered.

"Aha!" he said. "Then we can complain in common about the Turks!"

We ended up having a fast, wide-ranging conversation about our connection to his country. When we mentioned how much we liked Thessaloniki, he gestured toward the counter where two older men were seated. "That's where those guys are from! We were just speaking together."

His grandfather had lived in Montreal, near Park X, and he still has family in the city. " Next time," he said as we left, "I expect to hear lots more Greek from you!"
"Antio!" I said, giving him a big grin.
"Antio!" he repeated, correcting my pronunciation and waving back at me.

10:00 p.m. In our hotel room at 26^th and Broadway. We arrived at Penn Station around 5:30, and walked the six blocks to the hotel; it's cold and windy here but not nearly as bitter as at home. The room on the fourth floor is fine, with a small kitchen, a good bed and bath, large windows that look out on Louis Sullivan-era buildings as well as a new slightly-angled skyscraper of blue glass that towers over these earlier structures. This is a tech hotel; there's almost no staff and you navigate everything using your phone. It feels more like an Air BnB inside a hotel structure. We unpacked and headed out to Trader Joe's to buy food, and came back and ate.

I'm tired now, and a bit cold. The neighbors have their tv on and the wall is very thin, so it's going to be an earplug night. My bedside table has a white noise machine on it, with six settings: things like “ocean” “rain” and “summer night,” which is crickets. C. called about an hour ago to thank me for the calendar. She was amazed to hear we were in Manhattan, where she lived for so long, though she grew up in Montreal and California. She said she was glued to the screen, watching her old neighborhood of Pacific Palisades burn in the forest fires. "My old high school is in flames," she exclaimed. "My friend Mary has had to evacuate her house and she may lose it. It's horrific!"

Ah, the neighbors are finally quiet.

1/9/25 Thursday

Early to the camera store, where J. bought the components for my new computer setup. An unexpected thing happened: after helping us and entering the complicated transaction for our invoices, the salesman turned to us: "May I ask a personal question?" Because he'd learned we were Canadian, he wanted to apologize for the recent remarks by the president-elect about annexing the country, and he wanted to know how this had been received in Canada. He ended up speaking for at least half an hour about how upset and worried he is about his teenage daughters and what he fears will happen. He just stood there and said how he felt and how astonished he was at some of his colleagues who had voted for the man; I was worried they would overhear the conversation. I doubt that we made him feel any better, unless it simply did him some good to talk to some Canadians and fantasize about moving there if things get really bad. We didn't tell him how difficult that would be for him; he seemed to think he could just bundle his family into the car and drive across the border into a new life.

Then J. went upstairs to look at lenses and I walked up to Mood Fabrics after stopping to get a yogurt. Later on, I took a nap, and did some drawing, watching the late afternoon light on the beautiful old and ultramodern buildings we see from our window. In the evening, took the subway uptown to the 70s to have dinner at an Italian restaurant with good friends.

 

1/10/25 Friday

Slow start to the day; we slept late because we desperately needed to, and didn't leave the room until 11 or so. We took the subway to Houston St and walked to Greene and the Patagonia store, where I replaced my venerable black jacket, which must be 30 years old.

Trendy shops and fancy car on Greene Street in SoHo

Then we walked up to B.'s on LaGuardia Place. He made lunch for us while we sat around in the kitchen. (His daughter) R. called while we were there and we both talked to her - she had to evacuate her house in L.A. because of the fires; it seems to be OK but she's gone out to stay with a friend in the desert because the air quality in the city is so terrible.

 

I've wanted to do a drawing of some of J.'s ceramics for a long time, so today I managed to do a quick one while Jonathan was sitting in front of the windows where many of them are displayed. It's not good of him but it captures the ambience well enough. The apartment is still so full of her, even so many years later. B. showed us a video of a recent concert he did, and at 6:00 we all went to a nearby cinema to see Almodovar's The Room Next Door. Sushi afterwards at the Japanese place on LaGuardia, then we walked the 20 blocks back uptown on Broadway. Warmer tonight, and the wind has finally died down.

—to be continued

NYC in January

 

 

 

A personal methodology...

Between January 8 and 16th, my husband and I were in New York for a week of visiting friends, going to museums, walking a lot, and hanging out in one of our favorite cities in the world. To save on hotel bills, we’ve often stayed in Brooklyn or even across the river in New Jersey, and sometimes we’ve stayed with friends, but the last several times we’ve rented hotel rooms in Manhattan, and really enjoyed it. The thing is, you have to go when the prices are low — which means the dead of winter, after the holidays, or at other low-peak times of the year.

 

The view from our window.

This time we were in the Flatiron District, on 26th between Broadway and Sixth -- a good location for transport, services, and walking easily to both lower Manhattan and midtown. While the streets were cold and windy, it was nothing like the temperatures or weather we’ve had in Montreal, so it felt like a break for us. A couple of days even got up into the 40s! We had a room in a high-tech hotel with little staff, where you do everything with your phone. It had a kitchenette with a fridge and microwave, so we were able to prepare our own breakfast and make sandwiches or simple dinners when we weren’t planning to eat out. We easily made up the extra price for those amenities by not spending as much in restaurants. Even slices of pizza, that staple food of New York, have gone up a lot in price!

 

Sketching in bed.

I thought I’d share some notes on packing, in case any of these ideas are useful. We had traveled (by car to Albany, then by train, but it would be the same by air) as we always do, with just carry-on bags and a tote bag (for me) and camera bag (for him). Winter travel requires more thought and potential weight than going in warm weather. Over the years I’ve developed a simple formula for my clothes, making sure to wear the heaviest things on the plane or train. For this January trip, that included just two pairs of pants, no skirts: for me that’s one pair of jeans and a pair of slim black washable slacks. Several washable/dryable layers for tops (I like Uniqlo Heattech camisoles and turtlenecks in two weights and neutral colors), a light nightshirt and a small quantity of easily-washable underwear and socks, plus a pair of cotton-blend tights to layer for cold days; a black fleece zip-neck sweater, two cashmere sweaters (dark blue and greyish-purple), and a dressier black turtleneck sweater.

For this trip I took two scarves: one a bright wool-blend jacquard, the other an abstract silk print. All the clothes go into my rolling suitcase in zippered packing cubes, which then keep everything organized in the hotel’s dresser drawers or shelves. Outerwear is an ultra-lightweight down jacket layer, and a high-quality rain shell with hood, a knitted hat and gloves. A couple of pairs of my vintage silver Mexican earrings and one necklace, plus a pair of gold hoops, are the only jewelry I take. This time I wore my low hiking shoes (Merrell) most of the time, and packed a pair of medium-weight black leather ankle boots for dressier occasions. I take my phone and a small tablet that has a keyboard, and scrupulously avoid taking or buying books. The rest of the weight is taken up with toiletries and medication, in the tiniest packages I can manage. I empty, flatten, and pack my cross-body Baggallini purse in the suitcase, and during travel keep all my essentials (wallet, passport, small sketchbook and watercolor palette, etc) in my carry-on tote, which fits over the handle of the rolling suitcase. Not having to lug or pull heavy bags makes a big difference in how much I enjoy travelling, so I’m completely sold on this method.

We generally walk or take the subway (we love the NY subway) and don’t use cabs, but obviously that requires pretty good mobility and some knowledge of the system. This time we called an Uber only to take us from the hotel to Penn Station/Amtrak when we were leaving the city to go home, but it arrived almost immediately.

 

On the subway.

I’ll write more about what we did in a subsequent post. It was a great trip!

Simplicity, in life and in death

 

 

Landscape on I-88 near Nineveh, NY. Pencil drawing in sketchbook.

 

On Monday, we drove down to Binghamton, New York, to attend a family funeral the following morning. My Aunt Doris was the wife of my father’s eldest brother, the Rev. F. Porter Adams. Porter died suddenly in his early 60s, forty years ago, and yet Doris continued in good health, living independently until she was 94, and dying last week at 98. Like his father, my paternal grandfather, Porter was a Methodist minister, and so is his daughter Nancy. He and Doris were married in 1952. I remember her as a devoted mother to her children and the embodiment of the perfect minister’s wife, always at her husband’s side and involved with their church communities. After he died she was an equally caring mother and helper for her adult children and grand daughters. She was a homemaker, a good baker, cook, and seamstress, with a strong Christian faith; she was always kind to me, and I never remember her being annoyed, complaining, or saying a cross word to anyone. I realized, sitting at the service, that -- outside of these roles, which were also the subject of the sermon and the family reminiscences — I had barely known her at all.

Or then again, perhaps I had. Perhaps the way she was remembered and described at the funeral was exactly who she was, and that her choice had been just that: to live a simple, modest, selfless life, expressing her faith through devotedly caring for her family and community. It must have been terrible to lose her husband so suddenly and unexpectedly, just when he was looking forward to retirement, but somehow she managed not only to go on, but to find meaning and purpose in the many decades that remained. Not only had she been loving and faithful, she must have also been quite strong, and have had the support of good friends in addition to her children and her siblings.

The funeral was simple, straightforward, and heartfelt. Old favorite Methodist hymns played on a piano, stories shared by her family and the chaplain at the nursing home where she had lived for the past four years, a brief eulogy by the pastor of the church, a duet sung by those two women - the chaplain and pastor - followed by prayers of commendation. I was glad there was a lot of music, because it’s a tradition on my father’s side of the family. When they were young, my dad, his sister, and his two brothers had often sung as a quartet at church services led by their own father, and later on my grandmother always insisted that we all stand around the piano and sing together at family gatherings. I grew up playing those Methodist hymns at the piano while my father sang, in his clear tenor voice, and I could hear him next to me, in my mind, on Tuesday morning.

In addition to being there for my cousins, who have always supported me at such events, I’d wanted to acknowledge the passing of my aunt as the last of my parents’ generation. The eldest on both sides of my family is now...me. It’s a sobering thought, and it has come late, mainly because many of them lived very long lives.

 

Landscape on I-88 near Nineveh, NY. Pencil drawing in sketchbook.

The drive back to Montreal was long -- more than six hours, not counting stops — but the weather was good and we took turns driving. The first stretch, on I-88 from Binghamton to Oneonta and then to Albany, passes through what feels like home terrain to me, and near towns where my grandparents and father, and later, friends of my own once lived: Nimmonsburg, Afton, Bainbridge, Sydney Center, Nineveh, Otego.

Jonathan drove the first stretch, and I looked out the window, taking photos of the landscape I love and making these two fast pencil sketches, while I thought about my aunt’s life, so different from my own. I also replayed the service we’d attended, fixing it in my memory. Such simplicity! It couldn’t have been a greater contrast to the grand liturgical events at the Anglican Cathedral we attend and where, as a choir member, I was part of the presentation for so many years. I had loved this very Protestant service, though, and felt comfortable in it — partly because it reminded me of where I came from, and mainly because it was utterly sincere. Anglican liturgy gives structure, dignity, solemnity, and a progression of mood and intention throughout a service; the language is poetic, and music provides meditation, participatory moments, and enhances the mood of the readings, the time of year, the occasion. The words and service used at a royal funeral are almost the same as those for the funeral of any Anglican, anywhere in the world. But there is a lot to be said for the directness, familiarity, sincerity, and simplicity of what we had just witnessed. It suited my aunt perfectly, and perhaps some of that feeling came across in the simple drawings I did later that day.

 

Near Unadilla, NY. Watercolor, 5.5” x 8” in sketchbook.

Today, though, I’m back in my own home. That peaceful landscape of fields and gently rolling hills continues to call to me, so I did a quick watercolor in my sketchbook, hopefully bringing the muted colors of November to life for you. There will be more to come.

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! 

Returning to Oil Painting

When we were in central New York for a short time a few weeks ago, I started an oil painting. It was the first one I'd worked on since 2018 - a pretty big gap in time. The interruption of the pandemic and the fact that we took apart our studio and moved were, of course, a major factors, but except for the three oils I did back in 2018, I had actually done very few since we moved to Montreal almost twenty years ago. Instead, I concentrated on drawing and watercolor, on keeping a sketchbook, and on printmaking. I also did fair amount of bookmaking and binding, and sewing projects. The larger works I did were almost all pastels - dry media, rather than oil or acrylic easel painting. And all of that had to fit into our professional life, because we were working until about six years ago -- perhaps that's why I did those oil paintings in 2018.

When I reflect on the reasons behind these choices, I realize that the spaces in which I've worked have always influenced what media I used, along with what was going on in my life at the time -- and I'm going to write more about this in a subsequent post. 

But today, I want to talk about beginning again in what has always been the most important medium to me - oil. Why? I guess I just like it - the materials have a seductive and enticing quality that appeals to all of my senses. There is craft involved long before you pick up a brush - the preparation of your support, whether canvas, board, or wood, has to be done properly or the painting will not last. The materials are pretty expensive so you need to understand them. Then, the process of building a painting takes days, weeks, or longer, and it can be utterly absorbing as well as agonizingly frustrating during the period when you are living with it -- because that's exactly how it feels. Fortunately, oil is a forgiving medium, unlike watercolor -- it stays workable for a long time, you can scrape it away with a palette knife, dissolve layers with a solvent-soaked rag and begin again, and continually revise by painting over dried previous layers without the colors becoming muddy. You can work into wet paint for soft edges and other effects, without having to time your efforts down to the minute, as in watercolor. The colors themselves have a unique beauty, luminosity and depth. And all the while, there is a sense of being part of a lineage of painters who have wrestled with this medium over the centuries, trying to create works that are beautiful and that will last. Yes, modern conservation techniques allow us to preserve works on paper, but they are never as highly prized as oil paintings.

View up the Chenango Valley from North Norwich. Oil on prepared board, 12" x 16", February 2024.

I don't think my oils are better than other things I've done; often the liveliness of a drawing or quick watercolor pleases me more. But there is something about the process of creating an oil painting  -- maybe it's because you're with it for so much longer? -- that I find satisfying. It's always a journey, both artistically and emotionally, and there are always points where you're stuck or things aren't working, and you want to give up in frustration, but don't, and somehow find your way out of the thicket. The final painting may not be your best, but you've learned something that you can take with you into the next one. And the medium itself - the unctuousness of the paint, the spring or stiffness of the brushes, the smell, the joy of mixing exactly the right color and value, the way the paint becomes part of the surface -- all this is deeply satisfying. 

When there's been a big gap in time between when you stopped doing something, and beginning again, you can never pick up where you left off. That's because you aren't the same person anymore. A lot has happened in my life, and in the world, since 2018, as well as the fact that I have aged. All of that is carried in my body and mind whether it's formed into expressed words or not. And even though I've done a lot of artwork in other media during that time , and learned a lot from it, painting in oils is different from anything else. I'm very curious to see how these factors will affect my creative work in the long run.

Making new progress in this medium has been a goal of mine for a while, but I haven't been in the right space or frame of mind to start until recently. I'm not sure where I want to go with it, but I trust the process to show me that -- the way to find out is to paint. I don't know what a realistic goal is for the coming year, nor do I want to stop drawing or making watercolors. I don't think I can do a painting every week, but maybe I can do one every month. I do recognize an underlying sense of, if not urgency, then certainly a ticking clock -- if not now, then when? Because I too want to create a larger body of work that has a chance of lasting, being passed down to the next generations, having meaning to people because the work shows a place or a person or a feeling that resonates or captures some aspect of life that perhaps doesn't, in reality, exist forever. And I also want to challenge myself to do the best work I can and take myself, through it, into new territory. So this is a beginning, and I hope that I can keep at it and not let huge gaps in time occur again.

Starting with a winter landscape made sense, since I was completely absorbed in drawing such scenes all last winter. I feel like I've internalized some truths about them.

In this particular painting, I struggled just to get some technique back, as well as to make decisions about how much detail to include, how to handle the tangles of branches and shrubs and grasses, and the snow upon them. In the end, I simplified a lot, as you can see in the video about 2/3 of the way through. At one point I rubbed out the whole lower left section and repainted it; I also brightened the sky and added more blue, and changed the color of the hills, adding some scumbled color to indicate the trees going back. The conifers were lightened, and I added beige and pinkish violet to the bare-branched trees near them in the background.

When I reached the point shown below, I was pretty happy with the brushwork in the foreground and in the bare trees, and also with the small touches of color that I added. The deep blues gave a lot more depth and interest to the snow, while the touches of pink and lavender enlivened the dry grasses and shrubs and helped to unify the painting, since shades of both are in the background trees and sky.

I'm not sure I'm done with it, in fact probably not, but the work from here on will be fairly minor. It's a start.

 

Summer's End, New Beginnings

We're back in Montreal after two weeks in central New York working on the lake house. It needs a new roof -- this time I went up there with J. to take a look, after we peered into the attic crawlspace and saw some water damage, which we had suspected -- so we arranged for that to happen next month. The main task was to finish sorting many of my parents' collections and other possessions. At the end of last week an antique dealer's crew and truck arrived, and we all packed and carried what had been designated to leave. At the end of that long day, I was proud of myself for not getting emotional; I was exhausted; and, as much as I had liked many of those things, I was stunned to see how good the house looked and felt in a much simpler and less crowded state.

If any of you have done this, for yourselves or for your family or friends, you will probably recognize these feelings. For us, it was the third major move/downsizing in 14 months, and we're certainly not done with the work on that house. But as we sat on the front porch that evening, we had a real sense of accomplishment, both for the sheer physical work we'd done, and because, a year ago, I couldn't imagined being able to handle the emotional demands of the task.

I don't know if it's a curse or a blessing, but I am able to remember a lot of my past in detail. Nearly every object in that house and every inch of space is weighted with specific memories of the people who once handled those things, or moved through those rooms, or used the same objects in different houses that I also remember vividly. Because I loved all of those people, and miss them now that they are gone, and because they were all collectors and storytellers who liked history, as well as being makers who restored or created many of the things in the house, there are a lot of complex layers.

Today is the first anniversary of my father's death. Although I dealt with the clothes and personal items shortly after he died, it took a full year for me to get to the point where I could say, all right, it's time for many of these things carefully collected by my parents, grandparents, great aunt and even great-grandparents to move on to new people who will also appreciate them. It finally feels ok for us to change the house and make it more our own, for the time in which we have it, and to do so without guilt. Part of getting there is the process of mourning and letting go, but I think it's also difficult and complicated to accept, and then acknowledge, the fact that we are now the elders: we have taken our parents' place.

My father had a clear conception of what he wanted the house to be when he designed and built it, with my mother's help. It's a real mid-century aesthetic, but for all these years, I don't think that could really be sensed during the several decades it took to finish the house. Later, there were so many interesting things in the house competing for visual attention that you didn't really see the space itself. When the shelves and surfaces were cleared, and some of the furniture removed, we could suddenly see and appreciate the integrity of what my parents had planned. I wondered if maybe they would have liked it too, in some sort of alternate universe. All in all, I'm grateful for the memories I have, and during these recent days I was glad to be able to talk about all them with my cousin next door, and to friends whose relationship with our family goes back three generations. 

As I wrote last winter, in a long essay that will be published this year along with my series of winter landscape drawings, the land and nature of central New York are also a consolation for me. The fields that had been covered with snow were now filled with towering rows of bright green, tasseled corn, or with freshly mown hay; the skies were't grey but bright blue with lazy summer clouds; deer grazed all over the countryside, along with turkeys and rabbits and other small mammals; hawks swept over the meadows; rising fish made circles on the water and swallows skimmed over the surface chasing insects; and a noisy flock of Canada geese arrived each evening to sleep on the lake, leaving again after the sun had chased away the wispy morning fog. The rhythm of rural life continued, both on the farms, and independently in nature, and there was comfort in that in spite of the changes in the climate.

During the past four weeks, I haven't touched my sketchbook, haven't read or written much at all, and certainly haven't written here - this may be the longest period I've gone without writing on the blog.  Today felt like a time to try to put some of this into words, and I also spent the afternoon doing an oil pastel of Chenango County hills -- the first work in color that has come out of this time.

I'd rather not see this moment as an ending, because so much of what has been remains inside of me. Let's call it a continuation that's also morphing into something new.

Willow and Stream

Willow and Stream near Otselic, New York. Watercolor, gouache, with touches of charcoal pencil. 6" x 6". May 30, 2023.

Last week we were in central New York for a visit to the lake, and, because Memorial Day was near, we also visited the graves of my parents, maternal grandparents, and great aunt -- I'll write another post about that soon. One afternoon we drove over the hills to the cemetery in South Otselic, NY where many of my ancestors are buried. Unlike the winter landscapes that had preoccupied me since January, the whole world had become green, lush, and leafy. It wasn't a particularly pretty day, there were no interesting clouds, the sun was right overhead, and the green felt relentless. But I stopped and took a few pictures anyway, and a few days ago, back in Montreal, started working with one of them.

Here it is, and it's pretty boring! I stared at the photograph for a long time, wondering what I could possibly do with it, and trying to remember what had felt compelling enough about the scene to ask J. to stop the car. The answer is in the title of this post -- the willows and the stream - but I didn't know how to make a picture from this: how to make it interesting, when there was so little color or even obvious, strong compositional shapes. So I decided to begin with drawing, and a few hours later, this was the result:

As you can see, the drawing is cropped in from both sides to focus more on the willows and downplay the field. It was fun to draw a verdant landscape instead of the snow-covered ones and I was surprised that it worked this well in charcoal, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with the composition. When preparing a set of details to post on Instagram, I had cropped into the image and saw that a much closer view was better. In the original, the stream forms a strong diagonal but it also divides the picture into two more-or-less equal triangles, giving the grassy foreground too much prominence compared to what had first attracted me: the shapes and growth pattern of the willows overhanging the stream, with the brightness leafiness above, and the dark, mysterious area where the willow overhangs the bank of the stream.

When cropped, that's much more what we see.

Then the question was how to translate this into color. The next day, I took out my watercolors to make a sketch, and ended up struggling with it for quite a long while, trying to keep it loose and interpret the scene with vigorous brushstrokes and beautiful color that wasn't necessarily in either the original landscape or photograph. 

The tree branches here are dark blue and brighter blue, not black or brown, and the blue is echoed in the grassy areas and the stream, contrasting with the bright yellow-greens of the sunstruck leaves. But it wasn't until I made the stream itself brown, and added the few strokes of orange, that the picture began to sing at all.

By then I had overworked the dark area of low branches at the left front, so I went in with just a little bit of opaque watercolor to add some leaves, and a few strokes of white charcoal pencil to highlight the tops of some branches and bring them forward. Then, fortunately, I forced myself to quit before messing around with it any further!

I'll probably do another version of this scene in a different medium, maybe pastel, maybe oil or acrylic, before letting it go. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts!

 

Color and Light

We recently returned to Montreal after a week in central New York. In Montreal, there was a terrible ice storm last Wednesday, with power outages that lasted days for many people, and devastating damage to the city's trees, especially in the parks. Friends sent us pictures and their own accounts, and while our building was without power for a long time, and then again last night, we clearly missed the worst of it. I also missed the observations of Holy Week at the cathedral for the first time in years, but we got back in time for Easter. Renewal, warmth, color, and sunlight are exactly what everyone needs -- myself included.

300 miles to the south, spring was already in the process of arriving, and on our last evening there, I got out my watercolors and painted this field that we had seen a few hours earlier in the late afternoon light. The luminous gold only lasted for a few minutes on this cut cornfield and the hill beyond, but it was breathtaking enough that I had cried "Stop the car!" and rushed out into the muddy road with my camera.

It did me a huge amount of good to be out in the countryside for a while after this long urban winter. We saw a nesting bald eagle, a flock of mergansers on the recently-unfrozen lake; rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, and wild turkeys; Canada geese, herons, robins, cardinals, and dark-eyed juncos...and someone -- maybe our weasel -- had generously left its scat on our front porch, full of hair and tiny bones. The stiff, bright green and purple noses of skunk cabbage had already poked through the water in the swamp, and spring peepers sang in full chorus even during daylight hours. No leaves showed on any trees or shrubs yet, just on one honeysuckle that faced the southern light, but there were pussy willows in the swamp, one of my mother's yellow crocuses was in bloom, and the woods felt tremulous, as if you could actually feel the pent-up power of all those tightly-furled leaves inside the millions of buds, ready to burst forth.

At the same time, I've been finishing my series of winter snowscapes in charcoal. There was still a lot of snow in the Adirondacks, and I was able to take reference pictures for a few more drawings, and stay within that much colder frame of mind while I was working on them. I'm also beginning an essay to accompany this series of drawings, about the central New York landscape and why it is under my skin. But I can feel my heart gravitating toward color and light, and coming back home to Easter only reinforced that sense of new beginnings, and new life.

We attended the Great Vigil of Easter at the cathedral on Saturday night. It begins with a fire in the courtyard, which is then carried into the dark church via the lighted Pascal candle, from which everyone's small tapers are lit, and we sit together in that near-darkness while the foundational stories of the Hebrew scriptures are read and music is sung; finally the dry bones of Ezekiel are brought to life, and we move to the resurrection story, the organ peals forth, bells ring, the lights go on and the candles are extinguished, and we find ourselves in a church bedecked with flowers and spring color. Pagan in some ways; ironic in a city ravaged by an ice storm, with so many families still in darkness and cold -- and utterly welcome to my own tired spirit. 

My other cathedral this year was this circle of hemlock trees on a small ridge near the lake. I had gone there on Good Friday morning, climbing up onto the ridge to stand under the trees, listening to the wind, the invisible amphibious chorus, the calls of nesting geese on the pond beyond, and let the peace of that place, along with many memories, permeate my body and heart.

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.

--

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.