Chance, Memory and Awe

Untitled work in progress, 24 x 30 in (4/4)

I consider one of the great benefits of being an artist to be the ability to choose my own subject.  And if I so desire, incorporate life experiences, synchronicity, and downright awe of nature's beauty into my work.  Everyday I feel it a responsibility of my practice to notice what I notice and then make a choice to connect these sensations to some larger issue that's been on my mind or in my conversations or to a piece of poetry, and create from nothing a newness surrounding this source material.  I know it sounds mystic, but to take what I see, hear, think, feel, imagine and sense and mold it into a unique statement of my relationship to my subject is the reason I keep approaching the canvas.  I'm rarely aware of the connections and linkages that are happening in the process of painting, and ever surprised through writing or talking about my work as to how it all comes to be.

I've been painting these misty hills since last October.  I feel comforted by this "softness touching the earth" and have become quite obsessed, as has the rest of my family, with taking note of the drama that unfolds in front of us daily.  I just don't believe that blue skies could ever measure up with sentiments that exhibit themselves in the clouds of the Pacific Northwest.  As I've discussed previously in this blog here, I have a particular affinity to the skyscape/cloudscape as subject.  Impermanence, mystery, associations with the unknowable are all larger issues that get explored through this subject via the poetry of Rilke.

I have been a studio painter for all time--never en plein air.  I--in the words of Joan Mitchell whose paintings  I so greatly admire but have little in common with my works--like to say that I paint the landscape that's inside me.  I have always used photographs to begin paintings and then allowed the painting to unfold. Obviously, my experiences with my environment greatly translate these beginnings into a finished work that is sometimes reflective of where I live but more often just the essence of place.  Recently, however, my paintings have taken on more local and realistic landscape references.  I'm watching this change and will only fight this new desire for a less abstracted reality when the nuances, accidents and my responses to how my paint|medium|surface reacts become overshadowed by a desire to replicate that which I see.  Making my own world versus the safety of depicting reality--something Rilke wrote about here.

Whoever you may be, step into the evening
Step out of the room where everything is known
Whoever you are
your house is the last before the far off
With your eyes, which are almost 
too tired to free themselves from the familiar
You slowly take one black tree
and set it against the sky
slender, alone.
And you have made a world.
It is big
and like a word, still ripening in silence
And though your mind would fabricate its meaning
Your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.



Yesterday a chance errand and an accident on the freeway causing a huge backup left me the audience to some spectacular cloud drama in the Skagit Valley and Chuckanut Ridge areas.  I did not have a camera to capture nor a driver to take over so that I could fully immerse myself in the spectacle.  I did, however,  have an underpainting for another work prepped in the studio.  Today it became the manifestation of some of my memory from yesterday's awe.

unHappy Paintings

Intuition's Border, 12 x 12 in
oil on gessobord  SOLD

A lot of my artist friends are having a very hard time in this current economic climate.   Just this week there were many different versions of the same "keep the faith" sentiment posted on facebook and words of encouragement meant to help us navigate our way through our financial struggle--be it age old or not.  (A question to ponder. Who will be the patrons in this new economic reality if the art market continues to retract?  Many of my buyers are from the former middle class.)  It has been a considerable challenge for us all to stay true to artistic intent and not bow to market pressures-- as it is ever more tempting to paint that which will sell in order to subsist. And what sells,  I've been told many times over,  are happy paintings.

A google search of "happy paintings" found nary a comparison to my work.  Primary colors, illustrative, simplistic subject matter.  Shallow (skimmable) and entertaining and sellable.  My quiet, contemplative, "spiritual", layered works are not found in this arena.  

Rilke frequently wrote about the importance of recognizing and trusting our other emotion.  Here from his Letters to a Young Poet.

Consider whether great changes have not happened deep inside your being in times when you were sad...If only we could see a little farther than our knowledge reaches and a little beyond the borders of our intuition, we might perhaps bear our sorrows more trustingly than we do our joys.  For they are the moments when something new enters us, something unknown.  Our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, they take a step back, a stillness arises, and the new thing, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

An artist whose melancholic works I greatly admire (and yes, would purchase if I could), Jake Berthot, creates just such transformative stillness in his works.  Here by Gregory Orr at VQR.

Instead of the viewer’s gaze skimming off the surface like a skipped stone as in so much contemporary painting, Jake Berthot’s paintings hold you—stop you and engage you, stir you and disturb you. When you stand in front of one of Berthot’s recent paintings, you immediately become aware of depths in the painting and you are drawn out into them, feel some part of yourself emptying into them. But then the mysterious mutuality of reverie takes hold: into your newly created emptiness, something flows from the painting. And gradually, steadily, the experience of gazing at the canvas becomes a reciprocal emptying-out and filling, an ebb and flow. Depth speaks to depth. And when at last, after successive, calm, reciprocal emptyings and fillings, you break the spell of the encounter, you emerge changed in some quiet but definite way.

A Softness Touching the Earth

A softness touching the earth, 40 x 30 in, oil on canvas

Japan has been on all our minds and in all our hearts.  There doesn't seem to be enough capacity in the human soul to witness nature unleash its force on man in this way.  Helplessness still sits with us even after the contributing of funds to relief efforts.  The magnitude of the disaster and continuing saga has made us all feel vulnerable to the uncertainty of life.  We can't fathom how recovery can possibly follow such devastation. And then there's me here in my studio painting clouds and wondering how what I do could possibly matter.  Today I happened upon this Rilke poem after finishing the painting shown above.  The words could not be more profound and with them my painting feels right again.

Harshness gone.  All at once caring spread over

the naked gray of the meadows.

Tiny rivulets sing in different voices.

A softness, as if from everywhere,

is touching the earth.

Paths appear across the land and beckon.

Surprised once again you sense

its coming in the empty tree.

Uncollected Poems

Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

RePent, ReDo, ReCycle, ReArt

In the spirit of Earth Day, the month of April will find many galleries showcasing Re-art.  In my own tribute to the idea of reuse--I painted on top of another painting.  Not just some failed effort sitting in a closet that needed to be torn off the stretchers and destined for a landfill, but a painting that had previously been shown in an exhibit and which I had considered "finished".  It sometimes happens that if a painting hangs around the studio long enough I'll find some fault with it and in a moment of utter frustration with whatever is on my easel at the time, I'll rework that which is close at hand and dry.  I do try to exhibit some impulse control when it comes to finished works, however.  In one of those moments last week, the painting "like mist from unhurried clouds" felt flat to me (shows more depth in digital) and lacked a local reference.  I wanted to bring it more energy, more life, more of Bellingham.  Redo.

Unfortunately the curators of the Reart Shows don't find a painting on a painting a proper expression of reuse as I do.  Even more interesting to me than the idea of reuse is the secret image under it all and actually having a digital capture of this previous incarnation.  This process of overpainting is nothing new and has been used by artists for centuries either from the desire to rework an unacceptable composition (like me) or out of desperation for any surface to paint on (like me also). We know about this usually through x-rays and other scans of masterpieces.  There is even a term for this resultant evidence of the reworking or the peekaboo of the initial painting on the  surface of the new painting--pentimento (plural pentimenti--derived from the Italian word pentirsi meaning to repent).  

Here's to upcoming Earth Day (I know it's early, but I'm just aching for Spring) and my own re-art derived through repentance with a bit of pentimento.  An enveloping sky on top of mist from unhurried clouds.

Enveloped Mist (on top of the painting shown below)
30 x 30 in oil on canvas 

Like Mist from Unhurried Clouds--the painting underneath
(no longer viewable except by scan or in digital format)

Serenity (Titling)

Serenity     12 x 12 in, oil on cradled gessobord.

Rarely do I have difficulty titling a work.  The painting at left is the fifth in a series I'm calling the Concealed from View Series...and the first four were simply called Mist, Fog, Sheet and Haze.  These are far simpler and less poetic names than the titles I traditionally attribute to my works.  Quite possibly the idea behind the series is still forming in my mind and it is only through the painting and process of making that  the concept is gaining clarity.  Be forewarned, the titles may change.

Mist, 12x12 in.

My family and I talked a bit about why I like to paint these obscuring elements like fog and mist.  I think I'm personally attracted to the mist not only because it is an ever present element on the hills in Western Washington throughout much of the year, but because I also sense that it slows us down.  That in preventing us from viewing the distance, the fog brings a heightened awareness to that which is closer and clearer.  That instead of paying attention to the far off (future) we pause and pay attention to here (and now).   The mist in its obscuring makes things clearer. All things important to living a mindful life and having a mindful art practice.

There is also something about being cloaked and veiled and enveloped--this masking yet protecting element--that I'd like to ponder some more and write about at another time.

But for today, my son offered up the title of Serenity for this painting.  It reminds him of a lake in the quiet of the early morning fog.  A good sentiment.

Sheet, 12 x 12 in.

Fog, 12 x 12 in.

The Peace of Wild Things (Inspiration)

I am beginning a new painting this week that will be dedicated and donated to Geneva Elementary School.  It is a gratitude painting to the school community for nurturing both of my displaced middle school children--and their classmates--following the closure of their school after a fire in November of 2009.  My son Ian was an original refugee from the fire and  the Geneva community was remarkable in its ability to respond quickly to the needs of this group of students and teachers.  My daughter Chloe followed this year and has equally thrived at Geneva amidst the uncertainty of not having a middle school and the expectation of attending a different school every year for her entire middle school experience.  This turning lemons into lemonade is in no small part due to the dedication and commitment of the Whatcom teachers and the entire Geneva School Community who had to stretch and realign themselves to accommodate the changes thrust upon them--all with a positive and fun attitude.

Although Rilke (my favorite poet to turn to for inspiration) addresses the traits that were required of all those affected in this situation-- the embracing of uncertainty, the living of the questions, the allowing of the course of events to unfold--I'm choosing another poet's words to reflect upon as I create this painting.  Wendell Berry is a poet, farmer, naturalist and author who is often considered our nation's contemporary Thoreau or Emerson.  President Obama just this past month awarded Wendell Berry the National Humanities Medal.  I have only recently been introduced to his poetry and the Peace of Wild Things is considered one of his more well-known poems.  The poem feels right for this painting because it calls upon us to release our worries of the past and future and give ourselves over to nature and live in the present "like the wild things who do not tax themselves with forethought of grief".  It also feels symbolic of those things that Geneva Elementary School and its staff offered and what the location of the school in the trees represented to these students in helping them through the drama of losing their school.

I'm hoping that the painting will find its way into a quiet space from which to be reflected and contemplated upon--along with the accompanying poetry.   I'm hoping that it serves as a reminder of the respite that the school offered to these students.  I'm hoping to reflect back the natural setting that is so special about the school--and express how nature does serve to calm and remind us to pay attention to the here and now.  And that even though we, as parents, initially in the shock of the event worried about how this experience would negatively affect our children,  now talk about their resilience and ability to thrive despite the obstacles set in front of them.  We are proud of how our children developed both strength and flexibility through this experience.    And finally,  with this painting,  I have the artist's desire to show how poetry and art facilitate and open up avenues of expression that help us understand these complicated and abstract ideas and remind us of our compassionate selves.

The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Telling a Painting's Story (Provenance)

Sometimes a painting collects an interesting provenance early in its life.   Little Squalicum Beach Clouds is just such a painting.

Last spring I began painting sky studies.  For a number of reasons I had started paying more and more attention to the upper realm as a subject. Rilke liked using clouds and sky as metaphor for the unsayable, the uncertain and the unknowable.  I liked that.  Also, reading about Diebenkorn set me off on trying to understand what he was referring to when he talked about the amorphous: that underlayer which he so wanted to conceal and reveal in his paintings.  And, my natural affinity to soft edge and layers of transparent color was calling out for this subject.  So, I began to paint skies.

I looked at Constable.  I looked at April Gornik.  I looked at Gerhard Richter.  And of course, I looked at Turner.  My friend A. purchased my first sky study before it was dry.  There was something here for me, a way to push the paint around that was interesting.  I continued to paint these studies mostly using photographic references until the day my children and I sought out the beach on our bikes and this billowing form of nimbus clouds was sitting over the skyline of Bellingham Bay.  I took a picture with my iphone and tried to inscribe my memory with the particular clouds from this day.

I never feel compelled to mimic—in exactness-- nature.  I choose what I want from the offerings and let my imagination and desire drive the rest.  The colors I use are most certainly never local.  And that happened here. 

A couple of collectors admired the painting for months.  During a studio tour in October they were both in the gallery at the same time.  And, even though she had nowhere in her home to put the painting, J. couldn’t stand the thought that it could go to someone else and she grabbed the painting up—with a little trade on my part.

A few weeks later, J's best friend’s husband, a young man in his thirties and a world famous climber, died in a climbing accident in Tibet when a cornice collapsed.  J was suddenly called upon to be a support for this terrible grief.  And, in searching for a way to offer comfort to her friend, she thought of this painting: of the nest of clouds in the sky, of the place where the sky meets the mountain, of the colors that I chose to depict this scene.  And she gifted this painting to her friend.   A piece of art offered in solace to an unimaginable sorrow.