Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 113
August 12, 2011
Windy afternoon
After I got going on this wash and ink drawing I realized I was being greatly limited by not having the right tools at the house -- only a very fine dip pen and a big brush, and the crummy paper of this Moleskine rip-off sketchbook. But I was determined to try to capture something about the way certain branches were being tossed around wildly while the stiffer ones stayed put.
The mood of this "building" that is the park chanegs all the time, depending particularly on the weather, and the light. Movement is a big part of it too.
Here's a detail of the happening part of the drawing. The next attempt will be with better paper and a variety of pens, brushes, and marking tools.
I couldn't sleep last night, and got up and looked at a book of Chinese ink paintings. That was helpful too.
August 10, 2011
Rainy Night
Last night, around 10:00 pm, we had a storm, and I stood out on the terrace sketching in the dark, trying to keep the raindrops from falling on my sketchpad, and the mosquitoes off my bare arms. It's been a bit cooler today, and is now raining again.
What am I looking for and responding to in these drawings? I'm not sure yet. Perhaps it's merely trying to see a familiar place anew. But there's something about the character of the trees, not so much as individuals but entities that divide the space into rooms, of a sort, or colonaded halls of varying moods, depending on the time of day. I'm coming to see the park as a different type of urban architecture, with people -- and animals and birds -- moving in it and through it as they do a building, but it's a space that changes a great deal from day to day, much more so than a building.
The drawings are a way of thinking.
I need to go up on the roof.
August 9, 2011
The Other Side
I just went back and looked at the posts here from July and June. On the surface, at least, it looks like this blogger, Cassandra, whoever she may be, must live an idyllic, beauty-filled life. Farmhouse breakfasts, pastoral landscapes, perfect vegetables from the local market, flowers and friends. How fortunate she is!
Well, that's true, she is fortunate, and it has been a nice summer, but I seem to have chosen quite selectively what to post, and it doesn't reflect the whole of my life, of anyone's life, because of course all of us face times of darkness and difficulty, uncertainty and change; we're overwhelmed with tasks and responsibilities or may be sunk in loneliness and lassitude that seem to have no ending. I enjoyed listening to Fiona and Kaspa's weekly podcast at Writing Our Way Home this morning, where they spoke about the low points, the mind-traps we fall into, and some strategies for getting past them, and it made me want to write something further about that myself.
Living in a city where I encounter so many people every day, it's impossible not to realize that my life contains much more control than many of theirs - and that is in a modern western city in a socialist society where everyone, supposedly, has access to shelter, healthcare, and food. Millions and millions of people on our planet, including in many industrialized countries, don't even have those basic necessities, and millions more are faced with absolutely dire conditions brought about by war, genocide, ethnic and religious persecution, famine, extreme poverty, disease, exposure to the elements, natural disasters...things we rarely think about except when they appear on our screens. And here I have the audacity to post pictures of blowls of blueberries on pink-and-white china, with honeypots and cheese and flowers. Nor do I often write about my own sadnesses, my anger, my dark days, but please know that I'm a normal human being and I experience all of those emotions too.
Trying to focus on "the good, the true, and the beautiful" in life and to become, as a result, more joyful and hopefully wiser about how to live in a broken world is a conscious decision and path for me, not an avoidance strategy. Then, too, this blog is a public place. It affects you, the reader, as well as me, the writer, almost as much as if you came over for coffee and a chat. What is the mood here? Do we both feel better, or worse, after seeing each other? How does the energy I put forth affect me, the visitor, the world?
Being a Pollyanna in a world like ours is no good -- I hope that's not how it comes across -- and it's a choice, too, for someone as political as I am to decide not to write about the economy, the riots, governments killing and beating up on their citizens, the elections in Wisconsin, the warming of the arctic, or so many other critically important subjects. I used to do that. Instead I've made, I guess, a conscious choice to act on those issues in private, and to focus here on the continual creativity of life, and our call to be co-creators. Over the almost-decade I've spent blogging, my life has changed and opened immeasurably, through contact with you, the people I've met online, all over the world. My own creativity has deepened, and it's been rewarding to realize that what I'm doing sometimes encourages others, both directly and indirectly, to write, draw, do some music, grow a garden, spend some time with nature -- to take some risky steps toward that which is deepest in ourselves. The danger, which I probably fall into at times, is to emphasize the seductive surface beauty of things, and not so much the struggle underneath -- just as the plant has to push and find its way toward the light where it can flower, so do we. Failure and endings cause grief and discouragement, and we all live with pain, fear, uncertainty about the future. The question is what to do with that; how do we hold it all in our hands, both the darknes and the light?
As Fiona and Kaspa mentioned this morning, gratitude is one component. It's become an important practice for me. I do say "thank you" every morning before I eat or drink anything - for life, for the opportunity of each day, for those I love, for the thorns and weedy thickets that end up being my teachers - without being sure anymore to what or whom I am offering this praise and gratitude. That's OK.
I came across this quote on Adebanji's site the other day, and wanted to share it, because it's not just literally about art, but about all of life, where we are all creators:
"Somewhere within all of us there is a wordless centre, a part of us that hopes to be immortal in some way, a part that has remained unchanged since we were children, the source of our strength and compassion. This faint confluence of the tangible and the spiritual is where Art comes from. It has no limits, and once you tap into it you will realize what truly rich choices you have. May each painting you do from that sacred place include an expression of gratitude for the extraordinary privilege of being an artist."-Richard Schmid
August 7, 2011
Weekend drawings: some progress
Well, I promised some more drawing(s) in this series from the park at the end of the weekend, so here you are. I'm still not anywhere close to where I want to go with these -- it's the same problem I was dealing with, same time last year, with the series of Montmorency Falls -- but this Conte crayon sketch helped me move past some of the difficulties caused by drawing with ink and pointed tools. There are some areas in this drawing that I like a lot, though it is rather more of a mark-making sampler than a cohesive drawing. That's OK. Every step on the way is a good step.
Here's a compositional sketch, deconstructing one of the drawings I posted last week. I did another charcoal study from this one too. It's too stylized, but it's clear that working the relationships out in charcoal is going to be helpful. Anyway, I feel less discouraged than I did on Friday! It was a beautiful weekend here, though humid, and we enjoyed it. Hope you did too.
August 5, 2011
Sights and Sounds of the Park
Nothing too exciting here, but I hope my Monday to have acted on some further ideas and have something a bit more evolved to show you. I have to say, regardless of the outcome, it's awfully nice to sit in the park, my back against one of these old trees, and sketch, and look, and sketch, and look.
You see -- and hear -- quite a lot in an urban park.
All the while I was drawing, a group was practicing for an evening gig in the open-air Theatre de Verdur. Kind of folky, kind of pop. Not very excellent, but all right. Loud. The female singer sang lines in French, and then the male guitarist would stop and say, "Checking...checking."Again. And again. Odd because it's usually pretty quiet there.
Except for the ducks. Gulls. Dogs.
The older man I drew reading in this picture seemed all alone with his book. Now and then he's lean back, smoke a cigarette, gaze out at the water. He had longish grey-white hair that curled around the back of his head; a creamy white shirt that glowed in the sunlight; he seemed like an aging intellectual. But alone. Then, all of a sudden, along came a beautiful raven-haired woman, easily twenty or thirty years younger. His daughter, I thought. But no...when I left they were wrapped in each other's arms in the long grass, laughing.
Beyond them, a child wailed. Everyone turned to look; children in the park don't usually cry that much. I walked past, amused; she was a little girl of maybe four or five, with lots of dark curly hair, a deep rose-coloured dress with orange shoes, angrily stalking away from her mother while pushing her own carriage, her mouth open as wide as she could manage to release the wail that echoed satisfyingly across the water to compete with the sound checks from the band. And on her head was a white first-communion veil, or perhaps it was from a child's bridal costume; whatever it was, the normally polite Canadian bystanders were all smiling to themselves.
On the way home I saw roller-bladers doing synchronized skate-dancing, and heard someone playing bagpipes.
Late at night, J. and I took a walk in the park too. We walked around the lakes and came back through the trees, where a man was juggling fire.
August 2, 2011
August
The handle reads "Bleuetière" - a blueberry farm, often pick-your-own.
Yesterday, driving up into the Laurentians toward Mount Tremblant, we passed many roadside stands with signs that said "Fraises du Jour" -- "Berries of the Day." The offering of the day was often, however, sweet corn, along with little baskets of raspberries, blueberries, or currants. And yesterday was the first day I've ever seen gooseberries for sale in a grocery store.
July 31, 2011
Tango
Yesterday we went to a wedding. The bride and groom are both talented, accomplished professional musicians -- both organists -- who will be making their first home in England. Our choir sang for them. From the loft, on an extremely hot and humid day, I watched the bride walk down the aisle toward her waiting husband-to-be; she in an elegant strapless white gown, carrying a sheaf of delphinium and calla lilies; he in a morning coat. Over the past four years I've watched her grow from a gifted, determined, but less confident young woman into this poised, mature, accomplished and beautiful woman who was walking now, with grace, toward her new life. And I cried a little, as I always do at weddings, because even with all their hope and joy, no young couple can possibly know what they're getting into.
Tomorrow, J. and I will have been married for thirty years. We laughed with H. and D., the couple who married yesterday, that their marriage followed right after a royal wedding, just like ours did: we were married the week after Charles and Diana. Our wedding, and theirs, were both a whole lot simpler, and, fortunately, we've been a lot happier. "Be happy forever!" I told H. as I hugged her after the ceremony. Her face lit up, as it does when she smiles, and she said, "I really think we will be!"
What does it take, this elusive thing called happiness? One thing I think I see now, that I didn't then, is that happiness doesn't mean the same thing. No one, and certainly no two people together, can maintain the bliss that they feel when they fall in love and embark on that crazy promise to spend their lives together. Staying together becomes work at times. Hard work. It also takes some luck, a lot of patience, and a sense of humor; it requires a growing sense of one's own self as an individual as well as a partner, and an increasing flexibility to allow the other person to be who they are meant to be, and to see the beauty not in some idealized notion of what the other person and this union ought to be, but in what they are at any given moment. And frankly, sometimes it's better to let it go and move on.
We've been fortunate. It's been, and continues to be, an adventure. We're still growing and changing, and have become not only "the protectors of one another's solitude," as a dear friend remarked about his own marriage, but the protectors and defenders of each other's quirkiness. One day, we may be protectors of each other's dignity.
What a beautiful and insane endeavor; how much we expect from it and from one another, and how far we fall short! But as the tango shows us, there are infinite ways for human beings to dance together.
July 28, 2011
Some Views of the Park
Sunny afternoon, Park Lafontaine 7/25/11
The past few days, I've been experimenting with different drawing techniques for foliage, searching out a shorthand that captures the rhythm, busyness, and emotional tone of trees and shrubs at different times of the day. I've been thinking about this problem for years, and keep coming back to it, but now I have a bit more time to explore possibilities. These are just some initial sketches done with my Lamy fountain pen, quickly. I'll move on to washes and broader areas of ink and contrast, but I'm curious how far one can go with just a pen.
Early evening, 7/26/11
Night, 7/27/11
Death of the Book Box?
On my Phoenicia Publishing blog, some further thoughts on the future of books, bookshelves, and that great symbol of passage from home to home: the book box.
