Bittersweet

Summer has been slow to come this year. The laundry basket, full of last weeks clothes,
has freshly folded sweat pants and long sleeved shirts topped with several pairs of woolen socks.
We were unprepared for today’s heat and humidity. Not yet acclimatized, Gully and I
were drenched and panting heavily after the early morning romp at puppy class.
It is late afternoon now and we are spoiled by the coolness of air conditioning in both cabin and studio. The leaves are lifting in the steamy currents beyond our window closed to such trade winds.
The sky is darkening at the edges signaling an advancing storm.

Late last night, when the sky gave way to another such tempest, I brushed the last shadows into the white towel on the sunroom porch door. This painting has been a struggle for me.
As with the other vineyard images, I have had the composition firmly imbedded in my mind for years,
eagerly awaiting the studio space and time to bring it to life.
During the first week of painting my foot went through a board on the landing of my studio steps. All
three levels of the decking were rotted and in need of emergency replacement. Limits of time and money
drove me to take on this project single-handedly (with three tremendously helpful hours offered by a
strong and brave angel John). For a week I quite literally could not walk into the building,
perched among the arbors some 16 feet in the air, as the decking was slowly rebuilt.
The entire experience will provide rich material for future works. The rusty nail that went through my
right hand made it possible for me to have a brand new tetanus shot and the bruises from head to foot
have inspired a whole new arrangement of colors on the palette.
When I finally returned to my easel, the original layout for a light breezy reminiscence of the sleeping
porch had taken on a profound urgency. Every remembered hammer swing and the three days of
painstaking rain delay had me rolling those storm clouds higher and darker up along the horizon.
This painting was supposed to be about the shadows. I wanted to capture the darkness that lingers after a
fast moving ocean gale, just before the raking afternoon light slams into the whitewashed room.

Up until the final hours I had been debating whether or not to add the ring of bittersweet vines. The
house on it’s ocean bluff is surrounded with fields of them and it is a ritual during our annual autumn
pilgrimage to gather some on our last day there to take back to add color to our long cold winters.
As I gathered my supplies to head up to the studio on that last day of painting the morning news stopped
me short. The nation was poised in the final seconds of countdown to the execution of the Oklahoma
terrorist. The emotions articulated by each of the survivors, echoing the deep divide in our national
conscience, and at the same time the miraculous common ground in our shared humanity,
was a challenge to my soul.
This painting is not now and was never about the death penalty or that rending of our national fabric.
But the voices raised and moment of collective silence spoke to me of the calm which precedes an
upcoming storm and the leaves which join to raise the alarm.
The light is there to make sense of the shadows and the wind that lifts the curtain carries a bit of each of
our songs. So much struggle, moments of peace, storms on the horizon ….
and oh so bittersweet.