Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 62

Shorelines

I've just come back from a few days visiting my father, during which I stayed alone at the lake house. He came up during the days and we worked together to get the property ready for him to move back there with his girlfriend this summer. For me, it was a wonderful retreat from city life, combining some good hard outdoor work with a chance to enjoy the solitude of the natural world, and seeing a few friends. As it turned out, I had some rather startling encounters with other creatures -- but that story will be told later!

In the mornings I got up early and took my breakfast down by the shoreline. There were birds singing; chipmunks scurrying; sunfish, bass, and carp basking in the shallows. The three mornings were all different; one day the lake was completely still, another breezy, another foggy. At night I went out on the deck to look at the stars, and slept with the bedroom door open, listening to the frogs and insects. It was just what I'd needed, and worth the long drive back and forth through the Adirondacks and the Mohawk Valley.

My dad is doing really well. At 89, he's planning to compete in table tennis in the New York State Senior Games next weekend in Cortland, and though he's got some stiffness in his legs, seems to be functioning well on his replacement knees and hip. I sure hope I inherited those particular genes; he inspires me to stay as active and limber as I can.

My dad and me at the lake about thirty years ago, in the 1980s.

Staying in the house my parents built also has its sadnesses and strangeness; not much has changed and there are so many reminders of my mother, without her actual presence. I wouldn't say it feels "comforting;" it doesn't. I can't help but wonder how much longer my dad will be able to take care of the house, but I'm glad he still can, and wants to. Of course, these realities make me constantly aware that I'm getting older too. But the sadness doesn't have a sharp edge anymore, nor does my fear of the future. Even rock becomes smoothed by time, and nature, the great teacher, accepts each day in turn.

Survey Results

A huge thank-you to everyone who took the Cassandra Pages reader survey over the past week. (It's still open, and if you haven't responded and would like to, I'm very interested in hearing from you!)

So far 69 people have responded, which seems like a large number to me. This blog has about 180 average daily page views, and I really don't know how many people read it per week anymore. Whatever it is, this seems like a high percentage of respondents.

As for the results, here's what you said.

The early responses were, predictably, from the people who use feed readers and came from social networking sites (in my case, that would only be FB and Twitter), but over time the blogroll/bookmarks took over and ended up being half the respondents. In the "other" category were quite a few people who just type in the URL. These results indicate to me that plenty of people still use traditional ways of reading and accessing information online.

 Again, I was surprised: I thought fewer people were using their computers to read blogs. Since this was a "check all that apply" question, nearly everyone still uses a computer to read, even if about a quarter of them also use a tablet, and 18% a phone.

 Another surprise! I was worried that I was posting too much about art, but almost everyone said these were among their favorite posts. Places/travel came in second, with spirit/ideas, people/stories/memoir, and literature/books/music pretty much tied. I guess the original Cassandra Pages description of "arts and culture, place and spirit" has been pretty consistent and is still why people come here.

 Wow! A quarter of the readers who responded have never commented, but cared enough to fill out the survey. I appreciate hearing from you this way very much, and if you never want to comment again, that's just fine.

 Makes perfect sense.

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In the optional "feedback" field, I received 39 personal responses -- also unexpected, and for which I'm very grateful. Many of them were about technical blog matters, and the overwhelming recommended platform was WordPress. But there were also some general comments about the blog, and a number from people who said they hadn't ever commented. Here are a few favorites:

"Blog continues to delight and inform me. It is the only blog I still read from way back when I discovered blogs."

"I continue to read this blog because of the decency, depth, and generosity of the entries. The good humor doesn't hurt either."

"Love the variety and the art and MTL especially. Big fan- sorry for not commenting ever!"

"Cassandra Pages is one of the blogs I've read the longest, so it has sentimental value as well as intellectual and artistic value to me."

"Love the blog and your home town in Canada, despite the extremely long winters you seem to get!" (from the UK)

"You are awesome and should you decide to move, I will follow you to the ends of the interwebs."

"Change the technology as much as you like, but never the still small voice."

I've always felt I had the best readers in the blogosphere -- knowing you're out there makes all of this worthwhile, including the work that will be involved if I ever pack up and move. Thanks again to all of you!

Why Paint the Landscape?

An unarranged snapshot of a piece of my studio, May 26, 2014. Big Iceland drawings on the wall; Montmorency Falls (Quebec) print at bottom left, two New Zealand acrylic paintings on the drawing table, an oil of Lake Willoughby (Vermont) on the top of the cabinet at right.

When I'm working on a piece of artwork I'm not consciously thinking about much except whatever's going on between my eyes, my hands, the particular medium, and my emotions. Subconsciously, though, I'm entering deeply into the subject, looking at it as if I've never seen it before - which, to be honest, it feels like I haven't, such is the intensity of that concentration. Over the past two weeks, as I've worked on the Ruahines paintings -- the most focussed period of attention to art that I've had since doing the Iceland drawings -- I've stepped back after a long session and looked around at the studio. There are some still lives here, and some portraits, but the overarching theme is landscape. And it's made me think about why I do this: why I keep returning to the landscape as a primary subject.

Artists paint what they love. I guess that's the simple answer. Still, it seems like there must be clues to a deeper dialogue going on. (I like cats, but I don't spend my life painting them!) My friend and fellow artist Natalie d'Arbeloff spoke once about my "deep feeling for the landscape," and although no one had ever put it that way before, I knew she had touched on an essential fact. The land speaks to me, and resonates within me, not just when I first encounter it, but for days and even years afterward: the California coast, the pastoral hills and dales of England, the raw elemental quality of Iceland, the flat plains of Quebec and the St. Lawrence estuary in the Charlevoix, the rocky Maine coast, the agricultural hills of central New York where I grew up -- and so many other places. I love the vibrancy of cities, but I'm not drawn to paint them. There's something about the wildness and solitude of open nature that speaks directly to my spirit, and I think I'm always trying to capture that feeling of being a single eye surrounded by something powerful that quiets me, amazes me, moves me, and somehow mirrors me.

I'd like to say "powerful and eternal," because there has always been that element in the landscape - that it was here before us and will continue after us, changing perhaps but continuous in a way that human beings are not. However, the word brings up another reason to paint, which is to try to say, "Look. Look at the beauty and preciousness of this earth." I am not of the school that believes people will ever change their behavior by being bludgeoned, but I do think people need to be made aware of what's in front of their eyes, and that a relationship with it is not only possible, but somethat that is meant to be. Not only is the natural world endangered, but so are we, by our increasingly fragmentary, individualistic, self-centered lifestyle, driven by consumerism, technology and speed. Most people are more afraid of the natural world than drawn to it; fewer and fewer are at home in solitude, or able to be in natural places without being somehow "entertained" or tethered to their cellphone lifelines, or the screens on which they capture their experiences. It's no wonder we are at a point of environmental no-return.

I am horribly upset about the Artic glaciers and Antarctic ice sheets, but nearly powerless against the economic forces and political-corporate alliances that drive climate change; we do what we can politically and individually but obviously even collective efforts by citizens are not enough. Some of that feeling definitely goes into my art: not as rage, but as witness to what has moved me and mattered to me all my life. 

Bean Fields, Paris Hill, NY. 14" x 10", oil on canvas. 1990.

And there is another kind of witness, that of recorder -- in a different way from photography. I did the painting above a long time ago: it's a view across the fields of a very small hilltop town in central New York that I've always loved. I remember standing there that day - the way the heart-shaped bean leaves ruffled in the wind, the call of hawks overhead, the smell of the mown hay. This view no longer exists; the NYS Department of Transportation saw fit to build a highway that bisects this field and cuts to the left of the hill in the distance; the reason I'm sure was that a wide road would be easier and faster for truck traffic and snowplows - this is a place notorious for blowing and drifting lake-effect snow in the winter -- thus avoiding the little town center with its right-angle turn. It's not a change on a big level, and perhaps only a few of us care, but to me it's an example of so much that's wrong with modern society. Painting the vanishing or endangered landscape carries a different kind of weight from photography; it seems less overtly political but perhaps it can speak just as powerfully.

We're shaped by experience, by people, and by memory, as well as by our own particular talents and passions. This past week I've been thinking a lot about my mother, on the anniversary of her death, and how she loved the landscape too. She was a ceramic artist and painter who didn't do much artwork after her twenties, but she continued to see with the same eyes, and to help me see. I owe a great deal of my emotional response to the land to her way of relating to it, as well as her encouragement to me in my own art. I don't paint for her, but she's always there: quietly joyful and fiercely protective of art, landscape, nature, and whoever and whatever she loved.

Reader Survey

Grrr! TypePad has been down again today, for the third time this month. This outage wasn't nearly as long, but it's still both frustrating and disconcerting: if enough people jump ship, the company will be shakier than it already is, and could go under, which would be a lot worse. I've been quite happy with TypePad for a long time, but am considering my options. Moving a blog this big would be daunting and time-consuming, but I may have to do it anyway as a longterm plan to protect the content.

As I consider what to do, I'm curious: it would help me a lot if regular readers could let me know how you usually come here: via a feed reader, via your own blogroll, via social networking sites, via a bookmark, or some other way, and also whether you read the blog on your computer, your phone, or a tablet. If you've got a second, could you fill out the poll below? Thanks a lot! please be sure to click "DONE", at the bottom, when you're finished. Have a great weekend!

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Ruahines 4: Tarn

Tarn in the Ruahines. 15" x 6 1/2", acrylic on paper.

I haven't been able to get a really good photograph - the image above is too contrasty even after being corrected in Photoshop, but it gives the general idea. The details below are a little more accurate for the color but the shadows are still too dark. Agonized over this one; the hills and lake came easily but not the foreground, but I'm ok with it now. It's tricky: how to make a picture that reads well at a distance, but has a lot of interest when you're up close too.

Tired! Going home.

 

 

Sprung! (with a few reservations)

At last, the leaves are out, and spring has really arrived in our fair city.

Lilacs! <>

The "ruelles vertes" (green alleyways) are finally "vertes."

Apple blossoms and tulips are finally softening the lines of even the most urban facades.

And last weekend the plants moved out to the terrace. What a relief to feel outdoors and indoors breathing together again.

I'm not as happy about my community garden this year. Several of my friends have left, and a number of the gardens are being converted to high raised beds for vegetables - the soil is contaminated with heavy metals from industrial use long ago, so when I joined, everyone was growing flowers, and there was a consensus among most of us to create a place of beauty together. But the big demand in the city is for vegetable garden plots, and I guess people got wind of the fact that they could grow here in containers or raised beds. The communual feeling seems to be disappearing quickly. Flower people, as J. said, are not always the same as vegetable people...Two gardeners have constructed a huge vegetable planting bed with high walls in back of mine, squeezing every inch out of the space so that I have almost no space to stand even on the shared path. It changes the feeling of being there a lot. So I'm not sure what will happen, but I'm not feeling happy about it except that I do like to grow flowers to cut and bring to the apartment, and having the garden allows me to do that. I can go early in the morning when few people are there, and enjoy the solitude.

Living with a great many other people in close quarters is one of the big adjustments I've had to make in the move from country to city, and sometimes it isn't easy. The use of public parks, walking and bike paths, public gardens, public transportation, and so many other shared services, is something I strongly believe in, support, and enjoy, but for those things to work, people need to be considerate of each other. For the most part, people in Montreal are extremely polite and aware of each other. But every spring, I do find myself missing the privacy and solace of my own garden. I thought I had adjusted, but this development shows me I've got some more work to do. In spite of loving the beauty of spring, in a lot of ways it's always the hardest time of year for me: too many losses that came in these months, too much sense that - like Christmas for many people - everyone is overjoyed and I should be too.

Grief is always hard, isn't it? And it creeps up on us when we don't expect it, when we thought we had gotten over things that were painful. It's important to be gentle with ourselves, but also to think about what we do have, and be grateful. As urban existences go, we have a pretty wonderful one, and even though many people I love are no longer with me, they gave me so much that lives on.

Ruahines 3: A Rocky Pool

A Rocky Pool. 11" x 4 1/2", acrylic on paper.

This was a bigger painting with a stream running out of a forest above this section. I didn't like the top of it and cut it off; all the energy was in this pool. I like how even though the scene is in New Zealand, it felt to me as if it could be in the Adirondacks, or anywhere in northern New England or eastern Canada.

 

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Forest Primeval -- black-and-white prints!
Ruahines
Ruahines 2

TBT

It's been fun riffling through old albums for amusing pictures to share on FB on TBT (Throwback Thursdays,) and I thought, why not re-post them over here? Making homemade pizza has been J.'s specialty for longer than I've known him, which is well more than three decades now -- we've got LOTS of pizza pictures. Here's one from our Vermont kitchen in 1986. We're stillusing that rolling pin and old banged up aluminum flour measure, as well as the cookie sheet I'm holding. I think both those pizza peels are history by now, though.

At Last!

 

The leaves are still trying to come out on most of the trees here -- it's that magical time of year when all the branches have that greenish haze - but the flowers have decided it's actually spring. These two pictures are from my own garden, the one below, taken with my phone, was across from Eglise St-Stanislaus on Blvd. St-Joseph.

 

Ruahines 2

Ruahines 2. 13 1/2" x 7 1/4". Acrylic on paper.

This is a painting I started on Saturday and finished today. It feels like kind of a breakthrough for me in using this medium, so I'm feeling happy. I like how I can use a combination of watercolor and oil techniques, and work rapidly on paper, though I'm using Golden's Open Medium to keep the mixed colors from drying out immediately. Again, thanks to Robb Kloss for his inspiring photos of New Zealand's Ruahines. These mountains, once they're above treeline, remind me of Iceland even though the vegetation is different, so there's a familiarity and emotional reaction that are probably helping as I paint.

The color is a bit more accurate in the details below.

 

 

 

Tech notes: this is a very limited palette of five colors plus white (see below.) It's more work to mix the colors but I always think the result is more unified and harmonious that way. As in watercolors, if I were using a different blue or yellow as the base primary, the resulting overall tonality would be different. Just scratching the surface in terms of knowledge of comparative transparencies and so forth. It turns out that I just don't own very many acrylics to begin with -- and some of the tubes I did have were dried up and had to be thrown out. Time for a trip to the art supply store! And I'm extremely pleased to be using paints that were made only a few miles from where I grew up, by Golden Artist Colors, a very progressive employee-owned company that's providing a lot of jobs in a depressed area as well as making one of the best products worldwide. 

 

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Ruahines
Experiments in Acrylic