Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 57

Live Oaks and Spanish Moss

We were in northern Florida for the past few days for a funeral and a time of family gathering; J.'s uncle (the brother of his father) lives there and is very elderly, so we were happy to be able to stay on an extra day and visit with him. There's a lot that I don't like about Florida, but I'm crazy about the plantlife.

There wasn't a lot of time to sketch but I managed to do a few. We were staying on land near a river, with many huge live oak trees festooned with Spanish moss, whose swaying softness was punctuated by the spiky leaves of palm trees. I found it very difficult indeed to capture the essense of the overgrown tropical wildness. It would take a lot of practice and trial and error with different media to find ways that satisfy me, and I thought back to Winslow Homer's and John Singer Sargeant's tropical watercolors with even greater admiration.

During different times of the day, the moss and the leaves were backlit, or in direct sunlight. Along the great old branches of the live oaks were colonies of ferns and other plants, living high in the canopy where they could catch and retain moisture and the additional sunlight they needed to thrive.

Cassia.

Fantastic, brightly-colored flowers bloomed below, and vines scrambled over walls and fences and other plants with a rampant vigor unknown to northern gardens.

Tiny lizards whose feet made a thin clattering sound scuttled ahead of my hand on wooden railings, mosquitoes and ants feasted on my exposed ankles, and feral cats lurked under trees weighted with ripening grapefruit and lemons.

Time-lost decay and feverish growth coexist there, in the moist heat that slows my feet while quickening my pulse. I sat on the glassed-in porch of the old house watching the moss sway in the breeze, while cracking fresh pecans and picking out the nutmeats, wondering how different I would have been if I had grown up in such a place. I'm fascinated by the tropics but it's an attraction tempered by awareness of violent weather, unfamiliar insects and serpents, disease and fungus, the unpredicable sea, and an aversion to heat-induced torpor;  I'm so much more comfortable with rocks, snow, mountains and forests, and extreme cold. Still, I'd like to spend more time exploring these places with my camera and my paints, preferably with a guide who knows far more than I do and could keep me out of trouble.

Note

It's the last few days for the special launch offer on Jonathan's new book, How Many Roads? so if you had been thinking about ordering a copy for yourself or as a gift for someone, you have until November 1 to receive the special price. Quite a few readers and friends of this blog have ordered copies and we can't thank you enough. I hope I've written a personal note to everyone, because your support and interest are hugely appreciated.

Madeleines

Still life with madeleines and butter dish, pen on paper, 9" x 6". 10/22/2014.

If Proust could immortalize these little cakes with his words, then I figured I'd do the same with a drawing. I like these fast sketches;they often impart more of the essence of a subject or a scene than a very accurate drawing, and give me ideas of how I might rearrange the various elements. Thank you to D. for her recent gift of six delicious madeleines from Fous Desserts, in flavours of lemon, chocolate, and Earl Grey tea. These two were the only ones remaining last night, and they aren't there any longer!

I'm flying somewhere today, and will have different subjects and pictures for you soon. It feels good to be able to put some energy and focus into this blog again.

Anemones

Japanese Anemones, pen on paper, 18" x 6" (left side), 10/22/2014.

Amenone is a Greek word that means "daughter of the wind" -- an at name for these flowers who do the wind's bidding; their common name is "wind flower." Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses that they were created when Venus/Aphrodite sprinkled nectar on the blood of her dead lover, Adonis.

The Anemones are a large group of flowering plants within the buttercup family (Ranunculaceae): there are some 120 species. They're related to Hepaticas, my favorite spring woodland flower: something about this particular petal form, with its ring of stamens around a center, simply touches me.

I first discovered the fall-blooming Japanese anemones when a family friend brought a huge bouquet from her garden to my mother, that October when she was first ill. The white flowers were very delicate, moving with the slightest breeze. Sitting in a glass vase on her bedside table, their beauty and fragility seemed to affirm the best of life itself. Along with lilies of the valley - those spring flowers that bloomed at the time she died - these fall flowers became reminders and personal symbols for me.

Japanese Anemones, pen on paper, 18" x 6" (right side), 10/22/2014.

However, I had never grown them, and I had to search for a source. The more ubiquitous and tougher mauve/pink varieties were easier to find, and I also found out how invasive they can be: I now have a veritable hedge of them in my garden that has to be hacked back every spring. But it was the white ones I really wanted to grow. Finally I found a Japanese cultivar at Jardins Jasmine, a professional nursery here in Montreal. It's taken two years for the plant to become established, but this year it bloomed beautifully. I not only love the fully-open white flowers, but also the tight round buds and the seedpods that remain on the multi-branched stalks after the petals fall. Yesterday, after putting my garden to bed for the winter, I cut the last branches and brought them home; along with a few dahlias, they were the last plants blooming in my garden and would clearly keep going right up to frost. The flowers won't last long in the warm indoors, though, so I did a drawing, wanting to capture their essence.

A few weeks ago, the husband of that family friend died, in his mid-80s, and I thought again of the bouquet of anemones, and of those two long happy marriages. I hope the wife will find comfort in her garden and be able to make a new life for herself, as my father has: not forgetting, but still living, loving, creating, blooming.

Launch

This party was for the launch of Jonathan's new book How Many Roads?, but it was also, for us, a symbolic moment to celebrate our first ten years in Montreal and the sense that we have truly settled: we've never had an open studio party before, inviting our friends to see where we work and spend so much of our time, and for this party we really cleaned and reorganized the place, so it feels newly special to us too. Above, some of the guests are listening to Jonathan speaking about the project, and how grateful he was to everyone for being there with us to celebrate.

When I said a few words about myself and Phoenicia, I mentioned how I had never been the same as J. or some of the other guests who had always known from an early age exactly what they wanted to do with their lives -- mine has always been a question of trying to balance a bunch of different interests and struggling with the problems that created. It's only been since moving here, in the past decade, I said, that I've finally felt all the threads of my life coming together, with a sense of integration -- and it was quite wonderful to look out and see these friends who represent the different parts of my life -- artists, writers, musicians, gardeners, neighbors, family, friends who share a spiritual path, all of whom have come from many different parts of the world -- and to be bringing out this book from a publishing venture that also brings together many of the things I do that formerly felt separate. In the end, I said, it wasn't "success" that mattered, but giving yourself fully to things that you are passionate about, and sharing that with people you love.

J. gets smooches from our friend who blogs as Duchesse at Passage des perles.

Our niece came up from New Hampshire the day before to help us, and we couldn't have done it without her. We also had a lot of help from friends: here's some of the gorgeous food arranged (and photographed) by Priya Sebastien.

The author/photographer inscribes a book.

 More food beautifully arranged by Priya, with a Middle Eastern flavour.

The guests devoured a carrot cake, iconic of the 1960s (that was in the absence of  the even more iconic brownies of that era.)

And here we are with screenwriter Martine Pagé (Ni Vu Ni Connu) who helped hugely by handling the sales during the party. She and her partner Ed Hawco (Blork Blog), who took these and many other photos as a gift for us that evening, were our first friends in Montreal and we've stayed fast friends ever since -- not surprisingly, we met through blogging!

And in Montreal

(The world) "...will flame out, like shining from shook foil..."

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Interlude

On Thursday we left Montreal rather precipitously, planning to attend a 2:00 pm graveside service for an elderly friend the following day in Washington, D.C. After two hours in solid rush hour traffic, trying to get out of the city, we headed down the Northway, but by the time we reached Albany it was already late and we were exhausted. So we crashed in a motel in Schenectady, and the next morning reassessed our plans; it was clear then (as it had really been the night before) that we just didn't have enough time to make it to Washington by early afternoon.

So we contacted our family and friends, explaining the situation and saying that we'd be with them in spirit (as one of them remarked, Jewish funerals and long-distance travel are a difficult combination), and instead made a right-angle turn onto the New York Thruway to go see my father.

As it turned out, we had a beautiful drive, both going and coming, and a wonderful fall weekend in the countryside that I love so much. After all the busyness of preparing for J.'s book launch, it was a restorative few days, with long nights of deep sleep, natural quiet broken only by the calls of geese and the chatter of squirrels and chipmunks, foggy mornings that gave way to bright clear days, the saturated color of hardwoods in autumn, and time for me to wander in the woods and along the lakeshore, and sit quietly looking out on the meadows. I had been wanting to go there very much; this felt like an unexpected gift.

Most importantly, it was a good visit with my father, who's doing very well. We had already shopped for a turkey, and bought a giant stalk of Brussels sprouts, a berry pie, lettuces, cranberries, and new potatoes at the local farmers' market on Saturday morning --  all the ingredients for a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner for my father, his girlfriend, and four guests. The next day Dad and I raked and hauled a lot of leaves, and then he went up on the roof to clean the gutters while I steadied the ladder and fetched whatever was needed. It was such a glorious day - crisp and bright - and I felt so happy and so much in the moment. In spite of his age, Dad was very nimble up there on the roof, and quite glad to be getting this task done. At one point he asked for a rope, and I tossed him a coiled clothesline, which he deftly caught. "Nice toss, eh?" I remarked.

He grinned down at me: "And did you see that catch? Left-handed!" and it seemed like twenty, or thirty, or forty years had just been erased.

He sat back on the roof and surveyed the shingles, and the trees beyond them that so faithfully shed their leaves to clog the gutters and the drainpipes. "You're going to need to put a new roof on here one of these years," he said, turning back toward me after a few minutes with a wry look.

"How old is it?" I asked.

"This one's original, and it's still OK," he said, gesturing toward the addition he and my mother put on in the 1990s. "The other one has been replaced once. I did it with Harold Shaw, long time ago." He shook his head: "I didn't like doing that work very much."

"At least it's not as steep as ours was in Vermont."

"Right. I went up there with Jonathan once - that was really steep. No matter what, houses are so much work, there's always stuff to do..."

"Yep."

"But it was fun; your mother and I had a good time building it, figuring stuff out."

He uncoiled the rope: "OK, Bethie, now go get me a bucket half-full of water, and let's see if we can get any of it to go down through the drain..."

How Many Roads?

It's finally here! After three years of effort, I'm thrilled to announce that Jonathan's book of photographs of the turbulent years of the late 1960s and early 70s, How Many Roads? is finally launched. In addition to the book's 91 sepia-toned photographs, it contains an introduction by Teju Cole, essays by Steve Tozer, Hoyt Alverson, and myself, and a preface by Jonathan.

We've published it in both a paperback version and a limited-edition hardcover, with or without a signed photographic print. The books will be available for pre-order at special prices through the end of October. Paperbacks will ship soon, hardcovers at the end of the month. All the details are on the Phoenicia Publishing website.

We hope you'll take a look; this book would be a good gift for anyone who remembers or is curious about the 60s, or who'd like their children to know what it was like. (And, of course, it could be a great passive-aggressive gift for someone you know who voted for Nixon!)

This past Wednesday, we held a lancement (launch party) at our studio, which meant that we had to clean and reorganize it -- for the first time, really, since we moved in. So not only do we feel like we have a book we're proud of, but we've got a studio that feels almost new.

For my own part, I'm extremely happy this project is finally out in the world. The book's title, drawn from the Bob Dylan song, not only echoes one of the book's sub-themes -- what the interstates did to rural New England -- it also describes the circuitous path we've been on to this point! Jonathan and I have done so many publishing projects for clients and other people in the past that it makes me very happy to finally see some of his own work collected permanently in book form. It's part of his own photographic legacy, and it's also social documentation of an important period in American history that has a good deal to say to us today. Although these photos were taken before we met, our experiences of that time were similar. The process of revisiting this part of my own past has been both interesting and fruitful: I understand more about how I was shaped by these events, and also about the fateful turns our world has taken since then. Meanwhile, the accounts of the people and events of those years are already becoming simplified, distilled, and distorted -- or so it seems to me. Even recent history deserves a closer and more first-hand look than the textbooks are likely to give.

Glorious Fall

My dear friend V. brought these flowers yesterday: how absolutely gorgeous they are! We're at the height of fall color here, with some leaves starting to come down, but other trees still green. Last week brought a string of the crisp warm days, crowned by blue skies, that all New Englanders and Quebecers anticipate and love. J. and I walked back and forth to the studio on a couple of those days, enjoying the slowness of foot-travel, and the swish of the dry leaves in our path.

Exciting announcement coming on Monday, so stay tuned! Right now I'm heading off to the market, where the fall harvest is in full swing.

Throwback Thursday: J.

Portrait of my husband, pencil on paper, approx. 14" x 10." 1988.

We've been going through a lot of old boxes and drawers lately, and I found a bunch of drawings that were nice to see, both for the art and the memories. I'm not sure I could even do a drawing like this anymore, or if I'd want to, but that kind of realism and detail were what I was into back then, and it was good training.

 

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