Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 79

Spam

Apologies, but I've recently had a spate of comment spam so I'm turning on comment moderation while I try to deal with the sources, all of which seem to be for various brands and pharmaceuticals. I hope it can be temporary. If anyone has any suggestions for avoiding this sort of spam on TypePad blogs, please do pass them along.

A Drawing a Day: #2

J. at his computer. Pen and watercolor on paper, 4 1/2" x 5".

I showed him this sketch and he laughed and said, "Yep, that's me!"

I said, "Now maybe you can see why your shoulder and neck hurt!"

Plunging into a Drawing a Day

Still life with a Wedgewood pot. Pen on paper, 10" x 8 1/2". May 1, 2013

OK, it must be the folly of May...I've decided to try to do a drawing every day. I'll probably post them here without much comment, and keep on writing regular blog posts. These are not idle collections of objects...I'm trying to figure something about...and eventually people will also appear. The little antique wedgewood pot was part of my mother's collection, and I've been trying to get up the emotional strength to draw it for weeks. However this first appearance doesn't have the energy of the previous drawing; the things in this drawing are significant, but they're a lot more static: the product of too much thinking and not enough letting-go. It's tricky.

One thing I'm doing for sure is abandoning the rigidity of a sketchbook  - I want the freedom to work in different formats with different media.

Meanwhile, is there hope for classical music? Thank you to those who commented on the post from Sunday-- more on that subject coming up soon.

The last of the April drawings, and Happy May Day!

Still Life with a Persian Miniature, pen on paper, 5"x 7"

It was another still life to finish up the month, and the April sketchbook. I like this one as much as anything I've done lately. Many of these objects also appeared in the drawing of the desk and other drawings that appeared on April 3, but here's they've acquired a new life, not so much as objects in their own right, but as the excuse for lines that run over the page and don't stop the eyes at the edges of things, in spite of the close composition.

That freely dancing line is a quality I've always admired enormously in Matisse and Picasso, where you can see it in both drawings and etchings, and in the best of ancient Greek vase paintings. Picasso's "Vollard Suite" is a particular favorite: there's both a stillness and a dynamism in the pages that I just love. These masters make it look so easy, but I know it's very difficult to achieve.

Above, the complete April sketchbook. Some real dogs in there, but some worthwhile experiments too -- and some diary-like drawings that recorded other aspects of life: a broken favorite cup, a weird aerial view of the lake where I grew up, the spiny drawings of that difficult week, the coming of spring.  I learned quite a bit about drawing and about myself.

And now, suddenly, it's summer! This is the day the leaves are popping out everywhere. A mere week ago, it was cold and spitting snow. But sometimes it's like that in Montreal: there's no discernable spring, just a lot of cold wretched weather and then, one day, it's hot.

Happy May Day, everyone! I'm heading to my garden soon, where everything is growing by leaps and bounds. I hope you live somewhere where you can pick some flowers or some flowering branches, and celebrate the day and the season.

 

Sketching in the Sunday sunshine...and musing about secularism.

On Sunday, the newly-formed Urban Sketchers of Montreal were outside on the first comfortably-warm day of the year, sketching along the Lachine Canal.  It was also opening day for our community garden; our work bees are always on Sunday mornings. I would have liked to be in those two places too, but I was singing instead -- and happy to be doing that.

Still, it was such a nice day that I sat outside after lunch, in-between the services, and -- in the spirit of urban sketching -- did this sketch of the monument in Phillips Square, which is located kitty-corner and across Blvd St. Catherine from the cathedral. It was so warm and bright I was actually worried about getting sunburned! I only had 45 minutes so there wasn't time to add color; I just did the basic sketch and then added the watercolor later in my studio. The base of the monument had a lot of tricky angles and slants, and I struggled with the perspective, and against my normal tendency to rush. See how everything is slanting to the left? Another tendency of mine when drawing, which seems odd for a right-hander.

I'm always too critical. What makes me feel good is that I know I couldn't have done this well a year ago. Practice, practice really does pay off, as does being disciplined and gentle on yourself at the same time. Listen to me and get out your pencils, you would-be sketchers! (or piano-players, singers, writers and painters!)

I think we bloggers should have a NaDrawMo. Anyone want to join me? October is the Big Draw month in many countries, but I'd opt for a warmer time of the year. One drawing a day - it's not much, and the subject can be a paperclip or your coffee cup - doesn't need to be anything elaborate. The point is to build up a habit of sketching every day. The best I've ever done has been in April this year: not quite one a day, but a lot. It would be fun to try.

As for the Phillips Square statue itself, here's what the Wikipedia says:

The square features a bronze monument of Britain’s King Edward
VII, who ruled from 1901 to 1910. He visited
Montreal in 1860, when he was still the Prince of Wales, to open the
Victoria Bridge. The statue was designed by Louis-Philippe Hébert and was
erected in 1914. The four allegorical figures at the base of
the monument represent Peace, the Four Founding Nations, Abundance, and
Liberty.

Phillips Square is a meeting place for small-scale demonstrations, strikes, and protests, of which there are many in our fair city, and a convenient and visible downtown end-point for protest marches. Often when we are rehearsing for Evensong in the mid-afternoon, we hear megaphones and chanting coming from the Square over the sounds of our a capella Renaissance and Baroque motets. There was even a very loud student demonstration, against tuition hikes, in Phillips Square on Good Friday afternoon, right during the most solemn part of the religious observance. It felt disrespectful to me, but that's how far the tables have turned here. Fifty years ago all of Montreal's shops would have been closed up tight on Sundays -- by law -- and certainly on holy days like Good Friday, when practically everyone would have been in church. I don't think that it was good at all for the Church to have such a hammer-lock on Quebec society; nor was it good to have Christianity trump every other religion. However, after a lifetime, literally, of spending Sunday mornings singing in church choirs, it's odd to know that in Quebec anyway, we're an anomaly, a relic of a quickly-forgotten past. In a short few decades, the universal assumption has been turned upside down: now it's simply assumed that you're free on Sundays. No wonder it's becoming o difficult to keep the youth choir going, in spite of the great musical education the kids receive -- even the most gifted and enthusiastic of the kids are under tremendous peer pressure to do something more cool. Fortunately I have enough excellent company on Sundays that my own uncoolness feels like it becomes cool all over again!

There were no demonstrations or shouting in the square yesterday: just a lot of happy Montrealers enjoying the sun, like these tulips, ahead of themselves, in the stone-warmed cathedral plaza.

Brilliant Coroners, reprise

Several years ago, a group of friends put together this poetry anthology, Brilliant Coroners, published through my nascent publishing house, Phoenicia. We've never done a really effective job of promoting it, but I was looking through it again recently, and remarking to myself that it contains some truly wonderful work by many bloggers and poets you may have heard of in these pages...several of whom who've since published books of their own and are even gaining an international literary reputation.

Thanks to the excellent work of editors Rachel Rawlins and Rachel Barenblat, I think you'll find that the work inside is of consistently high quality. The cover was a collaboration between Dave Bonta, who took the original photograph, and Marja-Leena Rathje and Natalie d'Arbeloff.

The poets are:

Elizabeth Adams, Ivy Alvarez, Rachel
Barenblat, Maria Benet, Dave Bonta, Teju Cole, Natalie d'Arbeloff, Dale
Favier, Dick Jones, Alison Kent, Leslee Masten, Tom Montag, Jean Morris,
Rachel Rawlins, Peter Stephens, Anne-Mieke Swart, and B.E. Wing

It's on sale through tomorrow, and is inexpensive anyway. To take a look inside, here's a link. It seems like a great way to celebrate National Poetry Month, and the joy of collaborating with others to keep poetry -- and our own enthusiasm for it -- alive.

Back in the Garden!

The Parc Baldwin garden, looking south toward rue Sherbrooke. In the absence of plants, you can see some of our characteristic details: the aqua water barrels, the black compost bins and white sheet-rock buckets we use for toting water and plant scraps, green recycling bins that we used for planting, the tennis balls that mark the edges of our plots.

Two days ago I went to the community garden for the first time this year. The "official" opening day is Sunday, but some of us couldn't wait. It was the first really warm day we've had -- it actually got up to 70! -- and you could smell the earth and practically see the plants becoming green. I took some photos and made this wash drawing, and think I'll keep sketching the garden as it changes over the season. It's funny how the manmade onjects dominate the scene now, with their strong colors and size -- before long we won't even notice them.

When I got to my own plot, I discovered that someone had left me a message!

It was my friend Michel, who's a neighbor and a master gardener. He was there on Wednesday too, so we caught up on all the news as well as checking out our plants. My yellow rose made it through the winter in great shape, and has strong stems with lots of leaf buds - it was an experiment last year; the peonies are sticking their red noses out of the soil, and daylily's green leaves are growign strongly in everyone's plot. Montreal's climate is actually a bit milder than Vermont's, where Zone 4-5 plants like roses and lavender were pretty difficult. I feel encouraged.

 Here's Michel, cleaning up along the fence. As you can see, the garden is right in a residential neighborhood.

The social aspect of the community garden is one of the parts I like the most -- we have lot of fun. But I also like going there early in the morning, with a little thermos of coffee or tea, when I can be alone with the birds and the plants and the day as it arises. After such a long, grey winter I'm really looking forward to this season and can't wait to get my hands in the earth! That will have to wait a few days though -- it's rainy and the temperature in Montreal is back in the low 40s again this morning. Patience!

 

Waiting to Unfold

I haven't written much about my publishing projects lately, but today is a launch day, so it's a perfect time to do that!

Rachel Barenblat, also known as The Velveteen Rabbi, has been a friend of mine for almost as long as I've both been blogging. After becoming friends through our blogs, we worked together on an anthology of poems, Brilliant Coroners, and on the online literary journal qarrtsiluni. We met several times in person, in Boston, Montreal, and New York. During the past decade, she studied to become a rabbi, was ordained, and started serving a congregation. As religious people coming from different places we both engaged with and talked about the difficult issues of the Middle East. We did a presentation together about Jewish and Christian approaches to Scripture, and contemporary life and politics. Recently she entered into the world of parenthood. All the while, she blogged, and wrote poems. Very good poems.

When I started Phoenicia Publishing, it was because I wanted to publish the work of writers like Rachel, who had the courage to look beyond borders and convention and to illuminate the liminal spaces of ethnicity, spirituality, politics, and personal identity. Works that created bridges for readers, rather than walls behind which we could fortify ourselves, or hide within our prejudices. The first book of Rachel's that I published, 70 Faces: Torah Poems, looks at the first five books of the Hebrew Bible through a feminist perspective. Other people shared my own enthusiasm: for an independently-published book of poetry, it's done amazingly well.

 

Today we're launching Rachel's second full-length collection, Waiting to Unfold. These are poems about pregnancy, birth and early parenthood, but again, she doesn't take the expected route. The poems, written as letters to her unborn son and then as a sort of poetic journal of the first year of his life, take an unflinching look at the difficulties as well as the joys of motherhood. I'm not a parent myself, but I've often observed that parents, and mothers especially, are under tremendous pressure to feel and to say that everything is rosy, even perfect, when in fact the experience is often quite mixed. A lot of women who give birth find themselves finally admitted to the secret club of motherhood, where it's almost as if they have to sign a pledge not to reveal the darker side.

Rachel had a miscarriage before she gave birth to her son; that experience and that unborn child are not forgotten, but woven into her poems about this subsequent pregnancy as he writes of her worries as well as her anticipation. And after the birth, she experiences and is treated for post-partum depression, eventually emerging from that cloud. The majority of the poems are celebratory, joyful, funny, and above all, honest. Like all of Rachel's work, I found them very accessible, and -- like the author herself -- imbued with a deep spirituality that's always present but never overbearing.

It was a real pleasure as well to work with the exuberant cover artist, Mary Bullington, a Roanoke, Virginia artist who I met through Marly Youmans. The cover art is a detail of one of Mary's collages, titled "Creation."

The whole process of publishing a book -- like becoming a parent, I imagine -- is exciting, demanding, and challenging; the best part of it is working with the author and artist as a team trying to do our creative best, and trying to do justice to the words themselves.

I hope some of you might decide to buy a book for yourself or to give to a mother you love; while you're over at Phoenicia please take note that all of the other full-length poetry books are on sale through the end of April, in honor of National Poetry Month. The books are all available through Amazon UK and Europe, but if you're on this side of the pond and able to order through the e-store, both the author and publisher will receive considerably more of your support. Thanks!

 

Proud to Still Vote in Vermont

This from VT Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which just opened hearings on a proposed overhaul of the country's immigration system:

“Last week, opponents of comprehensive immigration reform began to
exploit the Boston Marathon bombing,” Mr. Leahy said. “I urge restraint
in that regard. Refugees and asylum seekers have enriched the fabric of
this country from our founding. In Vermont, we welcome as neighbors
Bhutanese, Burmese, Somalis, just as other states have welcomed
immigrants to America for refuge and opportunity, whether it’s the Hmong
in Minnesota, Vietnamese-Americans in California, Virginia and Texas,
Cuban-Americans in Florida and New Jersey, or Iraqis in Utah. Our
history is full of these stories of salvation."

“Let no one be so cruel as to try to use the heinous acts of these two
young men last week to derail the dreams and futures of millions of
hard-working people,” Mr. Leahy said. “The bill before us would serve to
strengthen our national security by allowing us to focus our border
security and enforcement efforts against those who do us harm, but a
nation as strong as ours can welcome the oppressed and persecuted
without making compromise in our security.”

Drawing, Friday

Spiked candlestick, cacti, and shells. Pen and ink on paper, 5 "x 7".

How I dealt with last Friday afternoon.