I have a lot of things to say about this man…but right now the words are twisted up in my heart.
Last Tuesday, just about the exact time our electricity surged and vanished, so too did his heart.
The ensuing days in the cold and dark were made for the stalwart steadfast Yankee spirited New Englanders, like him. And the distractions of simple survival were just that, distractions.
Only now, as power has been restored and the outside world has followed the newly spliced cables into my studio space,
and the furnace has begun to restore my frozen digits,
and the breath is beginning to return to my soul…
only today am I able to return to the easel,
across from which is this painting,
which I am so glad I didn’t sell when someone pressured me a while back,
because I need him there,
since he is no longer sitting in his Chilmark wingback,
answering my phone call,
and directing the brushes from afar.
It is dark now, outside the studio windows.
Inside it is still early, by this artist’s clock,
but my eyes are weary and my head is thick with days of studying, sorting and pondering. After my two months of rehab hiatus I am back at my day job and it’s time to narrow down the candidates for the coming year’s worth of paintings.
I confess to feeling some pressure about this after raising the bar with last year’s Reclamation Series. Focusing on a theme which threaded throughout a larger body of work was both challenging and creatively stimulating…so I want to play on those swings again. But where to start ?
An interesting consequence of taking the rare “vacation” from our annual fall Vineyard excursion this year, is that I don’t have thousands of “new” photos and sketches from which to leap. Thus the last few days of reviewing the many years’ worth of archived images and ideas.
I have several compositions which have been patiently awaiting their turn at the easel and keep nudging at my elbow so they get first dibs. Some of those were roughly sketched out years ago and the artist who is looking at them anew today is seeing a radically different way to bring them to the canvas. This incubation period is something I have come to trust in completely so, now, it’s all about listening.
As of the end of this day, I have a stack of sketches. The next job is to make decisions about panel sizes. I’ve got about 25 in storage and 37 new ones in mid-production which gives me plenty of options. Then I can pick one or two which are the closest to being ready to paint and get myself in front of that easel. It seems to be best to let the editing of the big list happen in the background…to percolate while I concentrate on lifting the tiny brushes.
It’s a colorful day here in the studio and new work has been sent flying, like autumn leaves, to a gallery near you (That would be the Granary Gallery if you happen to be taking a walk on Martha’s Vineyard )… Here’s a sneak peak with Painter’s Notes to read so pull up a chair and a cup of tea…
The Reverie – 12 x 16
I have been sitting here in the studio office for over four hours now,
basically avoiding the task of writing Painter’s Notes.
Yes, I have been distracted by important things…
like the glorious clear November sky,
screaming its glaze of King’s Blue Deep,
overtop of which the tapestry of fall oaks and maples are positively on fire with peak season color.
Or the twenty minutes I just spent editing the photo I had to take of the praying mantis,
who I discovered sunning herself on the air-conditioning unit outside of my easel window,
when I walked over there to get a piece of gum.
And in between I have listened to two radio interviews by Krista Tippett,
whose conversations with modern day Clerics, Mystics and Buddhist monks
often stop me in my atheist tracks
and shine a light on my own particularly flawed humanity.
So, ok focus…and I am looking, once again, at this painting…and remembering.
It was a hot summer day and the bed of zinnias which I had planted for Pat was full of flowers.
It was late enough in the season for them to have to make way for the Black Eyed Susans,
and for the garden rake to be covered over with cornflowers.
I remember that I had noticed, the day before I started the painting, that the swallowtails were spending the early morning dancing in that bed, and that the first rays of light climbing over the hill made them seem like stained glass windows.
So I had taken some quick photos before I sat with the sketchbook.
As so often happens this was serendipitous because when I came over the next morning,
and sat waiting…and waiting…for the sun to replicate those shafts of cathedral light,
the one butterfly, which I had fancied and chosen as model, returned with a broken wing.
I didn’t see it until just now,
but the colors are the same, in the summer butterfly and the autumn leaves,
and both just as brilliantly alive
with the spirit…
procrastination or reverence ?
Her Smalls – 24 x 23
I believe the origin is British
but that doesn’t matter.
Smalls…it’s just a matter of undergarments.
And the dearness of intimacy.
And the gift of props.
Like the hat box which belonged to John’s grandmother.
The tiny gloves that I wore to the White House.
The delicates which used to live on the shelves in the Muddy Creek General Store.
The leather purse and traveling iron which used to live on the shelf in Jane’s shop.
The coin silver spoon that Ted gave.
The teacup that Sue had to remind me was from her grandmother.
And that whimsical handkerchief of Polly’s which I pulled from the drawer
because of it’s red stripe, and only discovered half way through setting up the still life,
that it’s little girl was, Herself, doing the ironing.
Some of my most favorite paintings come from a single word.
And the gathering round of favorite things.
And the gift of quiet leisure in which to cherish them both.
It’s looking a lot like this painting outside my studio this week. The skies have clouded up and the copper leaves are swirling into eddies along the edges of the lane. Glimpses of blaze orange peek from beneath neighborhood decorations and the wind is picking up.
Here’s a ghost story for you from the archives…stay frosty out there my goblins…
Ghost Stories
This just isn’t working. Thought it would be clever to write a Vineyard Ghost Story. Been writing and rewriting for days. A tale as told to me by Old Man Morse on Alley’s porch, late on a stormy autumn afternoon, about a seafaring captain who was never seen without a parrot on his shoulder. A story rich in long voyages on rough seas and the hint of warm trade winds and a couple of peg legged smarmy sailor types. And a dark secret. Turns out the captain couldn’t read. The bird who never left his shoulder and was often seen to whisper into his ear….was his enabler. They come one year to winter over on the island. Fierce and wicked weather freezes the harbors and the bird succumbs to the chill and passes on. The captain grieves the loss of his steadfast companion and literary interpreter. In the wake of his sadness, he decides one day to make his way along the snow covered roads to town. In West Tisbury he is welcomed by the lamps glowing on the library doorway. Short story shorter, the spinster librarian takes him under her wing, shameless pun, and teaches him to read for his very own self. How do I ever thank you, he says. Years ago I left my grandmother’s farm on the mainland to move here, she says, and I sure do miss her pumpkin pie. He vows to get her the gourd and when the spring comes and the harbors open he sails away returning months later with the promised orange globe. The captain walks all the way to her door only to find that the librarian had not survived a bout with the influenza. And to this day, there is one night each year, when a pumpkin mysteriously appears on the Library steps. Some even claim to have seen a ghostly reflection in the upper window on stormy nights in October.
But it turns out I am not a writer of stories. I am a realist. I paint what I have come to know. These notes are mostly journal entries and serve as benchmarks along the creative path. So I turn to a higher power.
One of my oldest and dearest friends Steph sent me a book at the beginning of the summer. When she was at the beginning of her chemo treatments. It is “Swimming at Suppertime by Carol Wasserman”. If you do not have this in your house right now you must go to the Bunch of Grapes and get it before dark. I have been portioning it out and yesterday read the chapter entitled Ghosts. Ms. Wasserman has found a most brilliantly simple elegant and graceful expression of the story of ghosts. I bow humbly to her artisanry and her spirit and lay the hallowed pumpkin at her feet. And I am grateful to my friend. Who is also a brilliant writer. Chronicling now her journey through a rough patch with her characteristic strength and humor reaching out to ease the fears of we who love her. And for those of you standing in the dark on this frosty late autumn evening waiting and watching at the end of the cobbled path, with scarves wrapped twice and steaming mugs of cocoa to warm your chilly hands … I offer these two lines from the end of C. W.’s story….. “Doesn’t love abide? Shouldn’t there be ghosts?” …… and maybe the odd pumpkin or two?
It’s been almost three weeks since I had my second knee replacement surgery and I’m feeling great… with short controlled bursts of terrific.
Light years ahead of where I was this time after the first go round, last November, my loyal nurse and trusty PT crew are keeping me hopping and, while the energy level has some catching up to do, the spirits are soaring right along with the beautiful September clouds passing over the studio yard.
For the first three or four weeks I have to share a bed with a CPM. For the uninitiated, this is a Continuous Passive Motion gizmo that you prop your leg on while the machine slowly moves the appendage from straight to bent. Depending on the degree of pain you are willing to inflict on your own self, this can be a gentle ride or a torture device but it does eventually lead to better motion and this, I am told, is the holy grail of ortho docs.
In order to accommodate this machine we had to flip flop the pillows so that, after 23 years of facing north to sleep, I must turn and face…well, I’m facing this…
Chilmark Morning, one of the very first oil paintings I ever did, circa 2000, and one which, though it has watched over our dreams ever since, I have come to overlook as one might a headboard.
You can imagine that the many hours spent resting and reclining over the last three weeks have afforded me, nay compelled me, to re-examine the work. The room itself, a view from the tiny bedroom in that magical Sunrise Camp on the bluff in Chilmark, is the geographical center of my soul. So many nights curled in those sheets drifting to sleep with the ocean waves, listening beyond the dark for the muses. It is especially poignant that circumstances forced me to turn around and see it again, now.
In a few short weeks that cabin will be no more. You have read here about what the corrosive storms have done to the bluff, and the plans are being finalized to relocate the three more stable buildings of the camp, but this old lady can not be saved. All of us who have been sheltered by her over the years will certainly keep the memories alive, until they too, like the sands, fade and blow further out to sea. And there is a solid and still growing body of work that visiting artists over the years have created to chronicle the stalwart presence of this shelter during her time on the edge of the planet.
Am I waxing a tad too nostalgic ? Perhaps but you can’t blame it on narcotics, I ditched those day one. More likely it is the forced hiatus, the medically imposed abrupt halting of the maniacal momentum that had become my life of late. The full stop, look and listen which I am respecting and honoring with no expectations…except that I will return to the second half of my life able to walk my dog again and hopefully keep showing up at the easel to record the next chapter for me…and for Camp Sunrise.
Before I head back for my afternoon nap, here’s a look at the original Painter’s Notes for Chilmark Morning…Now go out and take a walk in this sunshine for me…
Spring 2000
A sacred place. On a great measure of bluff overlooking Squibnocket Point there is a century old chicken coop become camp cabin. Outside, the seagulls rise on the warming October air and cry out over the persistent sound of the ocean swells. The rusts and siennas and golds of the late season meadow are accented with tiny red specks of newly opened bittersweet. There are long shadows and down along the stone wall the deer have settled into their beds of bracken and cattails hidden behind the grapevines. I have spent a hundred evenings on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Familiar with the darkening shapes of rabbits coming out to find their supper of greens, beacons from the West Chop light house signaling on the horizon, the milky way preparing for its spectacle, and the magic of sparks arcing into the night wind as the logs are emptied from the too smoky fireplace. Inside on this evening with lobster pots and wine glasses stacked in the porcelain kitchen sink, the dog walked one last time and the candles gently blown out, we retire to our cubby hole of a bed. When the last light of the reading lamp goes out there is an indigo blackness, a ghostly breeze lifting the curtain from the sliding window, and a stillness broken only by the rhythm of the waves.
Camp Sunrise. So named almost a century ago by Grandma Sophie for the spectacular sunrises which grace this edge of the planet. It is humbling to stand on that bluff, with the Atlantic ocean before you, and all of the continent behind and watch the sun break over the horizon. I confess to having witnessed more sunsets than sunrises and I covet the cool crisp sheets of the morning.
It was on one of those island mornings that I awoke in the tiny cabin bedroom to a mysterious light. The center of my waking world was awash in firelight. The door alongside the bed was opened to the bathroom. Herself had placed a small candle in the sink while I slept.
(Now, the interior of this cabin is painted white at the beginning of the season every other year or so. There have been great Nor’easters weathered there when, huddled under the thick wool blankets against the storm, I believed that those thick layers of paint were all that was holding the walls and roof together.)
The orange light of that morning’s candle was alive and dancing across that whitewashed wood. The brilliant blue square of the bathroom window had long been a subject in waiting and I had done sketches and taken photographs for a decade in anticipation of capturing that scene. But it wasn’t until that moment, when the echo of her spirit was reflected in the worn surfaces of the porcelain and wood, that I found the way in to the heart of this painting.
The advice to writers is to write of what you know. I believe that is true for artists. I paint the Vineyard to testify and to claim and to hold tight to that sacred piece of the planet. Because I have been there, and I know what it feels like to drown.
The weather is saying…autumn is here…get out your flannel shirts, brew a pot of organic coffee, take a mug and that little woven basket, and head out to the sky chair
for a morning of spoon carving !
Galleries are calling…wanting…NEEDING new work ! And I have spent the last month doing just that. New paintings will be arriving on the Vineyard, in Denver, and the one on it’s way to Santa Fe sold even before I put the frame on it !
So why, you might ask, is this artist sitting around sipping coffee with a knife in her hand instead of a brush ???
Well, I’m in the final countdown before I go in to the hospital on Monday to get me another of those bionic knees. The last hiatus of healing kept me out of the studio for a couple months and I’m aiming to beat that record. I have a renewed sense of purpose, and focus, and a pocket full of positive feedback and kind thoughts, that have filled my creative coffers to the brim and I’m eager to be on the other side of the hospital gown.
The order of the next few days is…. R-E-L-A-X…and the best way I know of to do that is to carve a spoon.
And in keeping with the theme of the week, Fixing Old Things, I picked out this old mess of a spoon to start with…
It must be twenty years old and I can see why I never finished it. Been hanging around in the spoon bag for so long it has a rich dark patina and is hard as…well a hardwood.
Here’s what difference a couple hours made…
It’s more difficult to measure what those hours did for my peace of mind, but my blood pressure cuff might tell the story.
So you all enjoy this fine weather, and the coming of the colors as the leaves and the air and the apples get good and crisp. I’ll let you know when I get back to the easel.
Meanwhile…grab someone you love and take a walk for me !
Debbie reports that early Macintosh Apples are for sale today at the orchard…State Road, Martha’s Vineyard.
This is exciting news since last year there was almost no apple crop due to early spring weather. I sure wish we could stop over and pick a few, they’re some of the best flavors on the island. The orchard is just a stone’s throw down the lane from where the Obama family will be staying this week and they are due to arrive this afternoon. Might want to leave a basket by the road for the secret service Debbie !
I just got off the phone with Ted, who modeled for this series of paintings a few years back, and he reports that the Chilmark Road Race runners had perfect weather for the annual run up Middle Road. This month is the busiest on the island and, though I often wish we could be there to share in the fun…I’m quite happy to be home enjoying some “quiet” summertime days.
Here in the Pennsylvania studio I am catching up on chores and getting ready for another Follansbee drive by as he heads south to lead a workshop at Drew and Louise Langsner’s Country Workshops. You will know him by the spoon shavings that appear in his wake…and the ones that gather shortly thereafter under my sky chair.
Some new work is…in the works… and I’ll give you a sneak peak next time. Til then, take a big bite out of what’s left of the summer and say hi to the Magnuson’s for me if you stop by for some of their Macs !
It was a wonderful opening at the Granary Gallery last week and, though we are home, and I’m already back at work starting on the next year’s worth of paintings, the show will hang for the rest of the summer and the gallery staff reports that visitors are spending a lot of time studying those details…
If I did this right, this should post all by itself on the morning of the Granary Gallery Show opening. And if all else goes well, Pat and I will be waking up to a beautiful day on the Vineyard as you read this.
As I am writing this tonight it is almost midnight and we are still a week away from leaving home, the studio is full of carefully wrapped paintings, the trailer has yet to be cleaned out, and there is much packing yet to do…so you can imagine that this new technology is playing little tricks on my weary psyche.
It has been a long and rewarding journey to make my creative way through this series, Reclamation. And without further ado, I give you it’s finale…
Severe Clear – 40″ x 70″
My guide at the beginning of this journey was Denys Wortman, a MV Museum Board member whose Vineyard roots are deeply woven into the fabric of the island, Denny was a fountain of information.
I returned to the building many times during that visit last autumn and tried to experience how the light and shadows changed over the course of a day. One morning Denny met me and brought along the museum flag. When I stepped outside to walk across the wide expanse of front lawn to help him raise it I commented on how there wasn’t a cloud in the crisp October sky. “Pilots call that Severe Clear”, he replied.
Back in my Pennsylvania studio when I was looking through the sketches and notes I had taken I found that I had written down that phrase and, for almost every morning of the dozens of days it took me to paint this view from the balcony, the spring sky here was brilliantly cloudless…so the title fits.
I became intimately familiar with every one of these buildings, and boats and trees over the many weeks of working on this painting. But it was the tiniest of details that the muses insisted on which kept a sparkle in my bleary eyes. The pinpoint of green in the traffic lights at the drawbridge, the rigging on the tall ships, the picnic table where Pat and I eat Chef Hesi’s sushi, the ducks in the rippling current, the flecks of red paint on the oar…and the best of all…the little dog on the back of the boat.
You will need a magnifying glass to see him…I sure did.
So now my tale is told. The Martha’s Vineyard Museum has already begun the renovation work to revitalize this old Marine Hospital, and bring about it’s next incarnation as the future home of the MV Museum. I hope this series of paintings will offer another layer of historical perspective on the long life of this building to those new generations to come who visit the museum.
Now you all go out and have some good old summer fun… and we will raise a toast to you tonight…thanks for listening,
A sketch of this painting appears in the catalogue that we made for this series. Here’s a peak…
It’s always fun to look back and see how closely I come to the initial ideas for a composition. In this case what I seemed to have been most focused on was the quality of those raking shadows across the clapboard. The colors and intensity within varied wildly from one side of the wall to the other and the colors of the fire escape bounced back up to influence them further. And the title, which came to me in part because I started the sketching on Memorial Day, and mostly because the colors and the lines somehow kept reminding me of those patriotic swags that drape over holiday porch railings.
This was actually the last one I painted in the series. I was winding down after spending over 300 hours working on the big one, which you will see tomorrow, and was positively bleary eyed from all the tiny details. Once again, I realized that this last one had to embody all the lessons learned about peeling paint and rusting iron, how much wavy glass to leave in and leave out, how to stay true to the architecture and its weathering and mostly, how long it takes to build up a realistic portrait of over a hundred years of the life of a giant old building, that sits on top of a hill, on an island, off the coast of New England.
