Tag: Musings

Trustfall – A triptych

Posted on by heather

“It’s easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”
Leonardo DaVinci

Trustfall – The Series

It began with a fierce and mournful wailing in the heart.
A visceral flailing of the soul.
In the reaching out
as sanity explodes
the artist grabs instinctively
for what is always within reach
the sketchbook.

Thanksgiving Morning 5:45am – full dark

Waking to Trustfall

Eagle – fierce and powerful and the last true guardian… FURY.

Flag – Dramatically wrenched into fierce tension – tightened, knotted, twisted, threadbare – shredding – coming unwoven – just a few stars 
coming…UNSTITCHED.
With eagle feather and red and white threads swirling all around.
Then what IF anything is there to save it?

Later on the rainy Thanksgiving morning – with the library fire roaring and the tiny tree lit

Having watched as the dark sun rose and the cardinal slept late and the Jamestown sailed into heavy squalls with lightening during the midnight watch. 

Found the eagle studio shots [from] 14 march 2011. 
Perfect for this painting.
32 x 48 panel ready to go.
Ordered a “distressed” flag – which I will torture further in the pursuit of freedom.

3 April 2025

Panels up for oiling out.
Re-energized.
Resistance beginning to grow nationwide.
Marches on the 5th.
I’m ready to dig in and do this.

RISE UP

11 May 2025 – commences and between 4.00am and 5.00am

Panel up on the easel.
Flag drying on clothesline.
Fist ready to fight.

Artist’s Post Scriptum
This is how it began.
As it became clear that there was more to be said
the resistance grew into a triptych.
Two additional smaller works flanking the eagle.
Taken together the creative response
flows from the kernel of that fierce flailing soul
grabbing for the powerful truths
of beauty, decency and justice
standing together with the voices of Resistance
and holding on tight.

The second painting in the Trustfall Triptych.
You can read the Painter’s Notes for Trustfall – Resistance for the backstory.

This began life as a smaller study last year when the idea of Trustfall was first percolating with the Muses.

The powerful emotions of trust and fear incongruently balanced with the lightness and whimsy of bubbles.

A dynamic that continues to challenge
and somehow comfort.

The third painting in the Trustfall Triptych.
You can read the Painter’s Notes for Trustfall – Resistance for the backstory.

The Muses don’t hold on to grudges
and can’t abide living in hate
they see beauty everywhere
and insist on catching it
like feathers riding on an ocean breeze
they love to grab this old artists’ hands
throw caution and brushes to the wind
and dance.

AND…

Because I knew you would ask…
a map rendered
according to distant memory
and assistance from my book of feathers
so you can make sense 
out of these treasures.

Tea for the Tillerman

Posted on by heather

20 x 16 Oil on Panel

“Bring tea for the Tillerman
Steak for the sun
Wine for the women who made the rain come
Seagulls sing your hearts away
‘Cause while the sinners sin, the children play

Oh Lord how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day”
Cat Stevens (Yusif Islam)

The painting came through way before the title.

When months ago, as the sketchbook notes remember for me, I was reaching about in the studio for my touchstones,
my eye settled across the room and over to the corner cupboard, home for many a maritime relic.

This wheel, this tiny helm, came to me by way of Jane Slater’s Menemsha shop many years back now.
It would barely fit on a fish platter and it is deceptively heavy.
The turned wooden handles earned their scars long before coming to rest in my studio.
Rugged stalwart hardworking circles within circles.

I set it next to the easel and waited for the Muses to speak.
But while they argued the tension itself was what I was listening to…

Tethering rope pulling hard to starboard
onward onward ever onward.

Delicate teacup poised with the confident compassion of
Slowdown, holdfast…we’ve got this.

But of course it isn’t about the wheel, or the teacup or the rope.
It’s about where the boat takes us.

And that depends
on the Tillerman.

Basin Breezes

Posted on by heather

48 x 32 Oil on Panel

On tenterhooks and steadfast stillness
Nature hovers ever on the watch

Leviathans of the fishing fleet
Powerful floating machines of endurance

Scarified from weather tossed midnight trawls
Battles with beast and swell

Hatches battened and ropes cinched
Hauling, drifting and hauling again

And when the sea is done with them
And they are tied in to safe harbor

The rigging allowed to rest
The sailors lubbering homeward

In between the rhythmic lapping
dock to boat
saltwater
hull
saltwater
hull

There is a space
for quiet reclamation

And Nature
always
always
finds a way.


Deviled Eggs

Posted on by heather

24 x 18 Oil on Panel

Ahhh
the devil you know.

In this case
once again
the dastardly dr. morse.

It’s not his fault really.
He absolutely cringes at clowns
and dolls.

But what do you expect the Muses to do
when they open a box,
hand delivered from gallery to studio,
(thank you Wendy and John)
penned atop with the bold and provocative signature…
For Heather, love Chris.

It took a few months for this particular iteration of a composition to formulate,
and for the moth infestation to be captured… and not released,
before the Muses
with a clever assist from Herself,
who put the “devil” in the mix,
were able to tie teacozy
to eggshells
which led to the ceramic eggplate from Ebay
and then to the supporting cast of mustard and scorpion sauce
both of which followed along like a gamboling spring lamb.

Once assembled
it was the work of a moment to see
that the books
which I had randomly grabbed
off of the topmost library shelf

were more than just another whim of the Muses…
“The Way of All Flesh” indeed…
and rather,
paraphrasing as Emily Dickinson wrote,
“All I need of hell”.

Bible Black

Posted on by heather

18 x 24 Oil on Panel

The crisping of early winter mornings
forms wispy tendrils
of delicate steam
which float above the teacup
sitting on a wooden box
to the left of my reading chair
in the snug of the studio library.

It is often a place
and a time of year
where and when
I go a little deeper
and darker
under the sway
of Under Milk Wood.

Last November
while walking those Welsh worn cobblestones
I had two companions.

On my shoulder to the left
were the well thumbed pages
of Dame Hillary Mantel’s Cromwell saga
and leaning just there on the bones of the right
Franny Moyles’ weighty tome of a biography
of Hans Holbein, the younger…
of course.

Magnificent chroniclers of juicy details
all three authors taken as one
provided a playground for this pondering artiste
while the Muses plucked their gossiping lute strings
stirred up lessons from the lives of the great poisoners
and ground pestles of earthy cadmium fire and indigo mystery.

Over my leftmost shoulder
just beyond the peat bog stained shelving
its Trinity alphabet leafed in gold
hiding a scintillating glint
winking from atop the leaning pole of mace
tucked there into the darkly columned corner…

just there
gesturing away from all that history
toward the promise of
of a canvas garden coat
draped over the rim
of the sour cherry scarred bucket
reflecting the raking
of the earliest morning light
then flinging us out and beyond
to the white stone guards
of the churning ocean horizon…

stood that stalwart maid of the chamber
Her-story
ivory aproned
and bible black.

Granary Gallery 2025 Show

Posted on by heather

Sprinting like Jorge Mateo after a sac fly from Rutch, flying around third and losing my helmet on the way towards home base…
I am chugging my way into the home stretch…
and running out of time.
So this year I will offer the New Painting “Rollout” into 4 groups of threes.

The first of these present three “studio” paintings.
Qualified as thus because they capture, in still life, glimpses behind the scenes of the new, now very much a hard scrabble working, studio.

I’ll give them each a blog post all their own so you can absorb the Painter’s Notes, take a walk in the garden and brew a fresh cup of tea in between.

Enjoy, Heather


She’s Got My Back

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Seeing it through…the crack of dawn

She’s behind my chair as I write
and finish this last Painter’s Note
though it is the other end of the day from this painting
and the light is different on her fur

and she’s really tired of me sitting up here in the loft
all
day.

Maggie’s favorite treat is still sweet peas
and this spring I planted them close enough for her to help herself.

She still loves her sticks
and keeps a stockpile by the studio front door to share with special guests.

She’s fearless in the face of woodchucks
and tolerant of chipmunks.

She has a deep abiding affection for
everyone.

And she always
always
has my back.

Homeward Bound

Posted on by heather

Seeing it through…the eyes of a voyageur

If you read the notes from the painting, Seeing It Through, you will understand
where much of this still life came from.

Set in my library, sadly not on the USS Jamestown, you may recognize that inkwell,
and though I use the pen not the quill I have tried to write with it.

The little oil lamp lives on a library shelf…patiently waiting
and the signal flags are never in the same place when I search for them in the new studio.

The eyeglasses and this journal itself were handed to me by C. Morse himself.

As was typical for the time period
when paper didn’t grow on trees
someone in the last two hundred years used the first half of this old whaling journal for a scrapbook
carefully gluing religious tracts and society news clippings all the heck over entire pages.

But the last few pages were free of this detritus and in the most exquisite script,
which I didn’t even try to render, the captain or probably boatswain recorded the comings and goings
of the last days of a several years’ long whaling adventure of the ship Java out of New Bedford.

Even today the log entries of a commercial fishing vessel differ from that of a naval vessel.
The 1861 log I am editing mostly lists weather, reckoning data, who got thrown into irons
and the occasional details of the odd court martial.

The Java’s log book reads more like a journal
and we learn of the cases of scurvy and birds that follow the ship.

And on at least one page, revealed under the corner of the pasted clippings,
were those drawings of whales. It was common to illustrate the ones they captured,
perhaps by way of some kind of inventory and documentation.

This was the final entry
written as they had Cuttyhunk in sight
which means they were sailing past the Aquinnah lighthouse as he put down the pen
…homeward bound.