Now I'm sure it’s spring.  After several weeks of hanging out on our window ledge, warbling three-note love calls and, practice-nesting, the mourning doves have finally committed to the course. (Mind you, I wouldn’t have even started cooing until about now and definitely would be waiting for better temperatures before I laid an egg, but that’s just me.)  Still,  they seem to know what they are doing, and this morning when I opened the bedroom blind, s/he was snuggled down, feathers fluffed;  I caught sight of one egg during the changing of the guard yesterday so the second will probably be laid today.  Glad tidings.

It must be either last year’s pair or their offspring because s/he barely acknowledged me.  There might have been a tiny civil nod but it looks like Jon and I are now officially part of the scenery.  Perfect.  Of course, it also means that the window will not get a decent cleaning until June at best (remembering they can have up to nine batches of twins), but a small price to pay for the privilege of front-row seats.  I wonder if the robins who raised their kids a few feet down and over in the old euonymus vine have also returned.  Even the coyote who cuts through daily is starting to look nesty.    It must be worrisome, like opening a cottage, hoping that everything is where you left it the year before.

I don’t remember seeing any nests in the Manitopa maple which was finally removed this week.  Yes, there are times  when having grown a forest in the back yard becomes expensive, but this is countered by the knowledge that our property now supports far more life.  Mind you, there are more beings to worry about.  The ancient butternut that we almost lost two summers ago seems fine so far but we hear that these “white walnut” trees are increasingly rare.  I’ve found a number of saplings and hope that their parent is a resistant specimen but volunteers aren’t particularly cooperative or long-sighted in terms of location choice.  Now that we have an new open space of about 20 x 20 , the big decision is  what to plant. I kept a butternut in the freezer so I might try germinating it.  If that’s a no-go, then it will be another native tree like a tulip tree or a redbud.

In the meantime, we are surrounded by birdsong.  We can hear the red-breasted woodpeckers, though have had no luck spotting them yet.  They may be searching for better real estate as our (their) honey locust is on its last legs.  We did see our first 1919 robin, who was glumly checking to see if the earth was soft enough to tempt the earthworms up (it isn’t);  s/he was wearing a “Shoot, I guess it’s shrivelled crabapples again tonight” look.  The forecast actually looks promising but that particular robin was indifferent to upbeat optimism, knowing better than to believe every forecast you read.  I however am once again a believer that a world without ice underfoot is possible.  Tra la.

P.S.  The painting of violinist and dog is at the final glazes stage though  lots of detailing remains to be done.  I had almost given up hope it might be finished by our show in April at Riverwood.  I have just posted updates in “Works in Progress” on my gallery website.  The right title still hasn’t presented itself, unless I choose "The Recital."  Whatever I call it, the title should evoke a sense of the two of them and their mutual adoration.  

Having narrowly survived this winter and this virus, I am fixing my gaze on spring.  The 14 day forecast is not heartening, but I have it on good authority that it will be unseasonably (isn’t that the word, these days)  warm.  If that means hot, then I will pass, thanks.  But there have been a few encouraging spring notes lately, however.

Last year the first clue that mourning doves were feeling amorous was the two-note wake-up call issued at full blast from the deep stone ledge outside our bedroom window.  So when I heard it this morning, my winter-frozen heart melted a little.  It is probably the female nagging the male to bring her nesting materials (at this stage, there are clear and separate gender responsibilities).  She will build the nest if he will do the runaround back and forth to Home Depot.  Even if a mourning dove’s nests is renowned for its flimsiness, it does the job so I must keep watch.   Last year the prospect of a protected and sturdy nest-site overrode their caution around people.  One can hardly blame them;  it is estimated that 20 million mourning doves are killed annually in North America.

I fail to see the point of this slaughter, especially given the tiny amount of edible flesh.  Not only are they harmless vegetarians whose diet is 99% seeds, but mourning doves are unspeakably beautiful.  When I painted them last year, the soft grace notes of pale turquoise and pink caught my breath.  I am still agonizing over the background, which would have logically been the garden reflecting on the window, but I am drawn to the soft pinks of the toned panel, which reinforce the parents’ own gentle palette. 

​This wee robin, on the other hand, has been given a background which will allow me a bit of wordplay in the title “Robin’s Egg.”  It strikes me now that the colour of a robin egg contains more white. Easily amended.

If I were well it would be a good time to move forward on “The Recital,”  but I am just emerging from my typical viral blur/cough/gasp/snort and the whole concept of the painting continues to be a challenge.  In the meantime at least I can transfer the bones of the background - the huge stained window -  onto the canvas and try to make sure that the lines of leading won’t argue with the rest of the composition.

Everything still feels like work these days and nothing gets accomplished, unless it’s sitting up in a chair and chewing my food.  I’m not quite consumed with bitterness yet.  Wait a week.

I have been told I have a barky cough.  It has been rudely compared to that of seals.  I blame this on the tubing in my body, which was installed in the wrong size.  It’s embarrassing when my family doctor rolls her eyes at the prospect of drawing blood, sighs greatly, and then says, “Okay, I’ll go find the child-size syringe.”  We both slap away at my arm and then, after poking around for a while, hoot with success together  when she finds a gusher.  Skinny tubing.

When my paediatrician was away and I had one of my tri-annual bouts of bronchitis, the new guy listened to my whooping and bubbling and said “How much do you smoke?”  It was such a stupid question that I tossed back a casual “Oh, a pack or two a day.”  The man had clearly no ability to recognize witty sarcasm and said, “Really?”  Understanding his rhetorical limitations, I said “I don’t smoke” in as emphatic a manner as can be conveyed despite laryngitis.  He sent my mother from the room and asked again.  Same answer.  This time he called Mom in and sent me out.  Same answer.  We left in a huff.  I was mortally wounded and refused to return until my dear Dr. McLandress had returned. So you know I have suffered.

When, despite every effort on Jon’s part to contain his virus last week (which included my being banished from the bedroom),   I caught it anyway, Theodore probably being the vector (because he had been allowed to stay!).  All painting progress stopped together.  I returned to my childhood mode of steam tents, long bed stays and  “horse collars” (only just this week did I realize that there should be an “a”).   Damned homonyms.

As usual, the barking is at its worst at night and one does not of course recover without sleep.  Then, after a prolonged coughing/sneezing bout two nights ago, an epiphany:  if coughing is triggered by a so-called “post-nasal drip,”  then maybe gravity could be defeated by sleeping on my stomach??  Tried it and even if it was magical thinking , I had the first decent sleep in a week (you heard it here first).  Of course, the reason I don’t normally sleep on my face is lack of breathing and the obvious disadvantage of being female…..  Anyway, I struggled last night to make this work and finally aligned myself along the edge and off to sleep I went.  Dreaming has been technicolour and particularly exciting lately (lots of espionage) and I was just trying to grab a rogue spy bus which was escaping through a window when I apparently dove off the bed.  Unfortunately my perfectly-executed rotational peregrine dive landed me on a hard plastic waste-paper basket which literally gouged the back of my head.  I felt around, was puzzled by the presence of a swelling furrow, but determined it wasn’t bleeding too badly so channeled Scarlet O’Hara and decided to worry about it tomorrow.

It’s tomorrow and while I am still furrowed, it is under my hair rather than on my brow, so one can’t expect much sympathy.  Mind you, I won’t need plastic surgery either.  And I was completely relaxed so that was good.  And it might even take a row of green onions in the spring.  Glass half full!!

Missing paint group AGAIN.  The Painter hopes to return next week.  Failing that, I make no promises about maintaining a positive outlook.  Watch out, Glass!

P.S.  By now after, almost five years together, you are probably wondering if I exaggerate.  I honestly wish I had to.

I am relieved to report that the dancer now has four limbs and twenty digits, all of which appear to have a blood supply.  Again, I remind myself that  only I am to blame for complicated projects.  That said, wanna hear about the next one?

There’s an elegant arch I have been wanting to paint for years now.  It belongs to the back of Leslie, my favourite violinist.  Trouble was (Already you are tensing up, aren’t you?) was that the reference shot was, predictably, only  about two-thirds of what I wanted, which was her whole frame.  No kidding.  I found another shot of her legs out by only two cardinal directions (thank heavens, she has a terrific stance and set foot placement);  all I had to do was flip it, size it, stitch it and draw it.  Done.

You are thinking” Phew, that was easy.”  Not so fast.

You know that painting ideas lurk relentlessly, hiding under bridges in my brain.  Well my inner troll also demanded that Melody be included in this “French scene.”  So who is Melody?  Do violins have first names?

She, Sweet Reader,  is Leslie’s adoring yellow lab.  And naturally she didn’t appear in any of the shots I had of Leslie practicing her violin.  There was only one photo reference and in it Melody was looking across rather than up -- out almost 90 degrees from where I wanted her attention fixed.  Double dog damn.

Then began the search for a primer on yellow labs.  Art group to the rescue again.  Thanks, Sue.  Eventually a Melody-ish sketch emerged in correct position, from which I cut out a template to shuffle around the canvas until I had created a diagonal linking Leslie’s bow and Melody’s worshipping gaze.

Surely that should do the prep work.  Remember that no brushes have had to die to get this far.  But the stained window I wanted as background was arched at the top and I wanted the top curve to swing through the upper right of the scene, this time echoing the arch in Leslie’s back, the cursed arch which had started this epic journey.   Some work with a geometry compass on the prep sketch and finally I was ready to begin.

BEGIN?????
Now all that remains is to paint.    If I can still remember how.


​BTW:  I fully intend to update my gallery website, you poor souls who keep hoping I will.  Thank you for your patience.  It's on today's to-do list.  So think Wednesday.
  

It's now Wednesday, I have come down with the plague, aka Jon's cold, am missing art group AGAIN (God is surely not a painter, because we have been iced, snowed, or struck down by viruses for the last three weeks) but at least the "Works in Progress" category on zannekeele.com/More About is up to date.  I am waving a tiny flag.

Sitting here and waiting for inspiration, I found myself musing over the question, “if someone were to promote mud-wrestling as a competitive sport, what kind of mud would work best?”  As I perused the topic, I immediately ruled out sandy soil for obvious reasons and then, remembering that I had dried my hands out painfully when gardening without gloves, decided that lanolin would have to be a must in any mixture.

By the time I got to thinking about best proportions, it occurred to me that my distraction gear was in overdrive again.  Let’s just agree that recently there have been far too many crosswords,online games, long books and Netflix binges.  This kicks in whenever I feel daunted by what I’m painting, even if it was my very own benighted decision.  Well, let me convince you how richly entitled I am to any and all distractions these days.

Still soldiering along on “The Turn.” You know about the dancer’s recent surgeries but I didn’t get around to telling you the story of THE ARM.   Just embarking on this image with its woefully inadequate pre-digital visual references, let alone painting it three feet high, probably seems crazy.  But I couldn’t overcome the urge to paint it in oil and northing serves to exorcise an image once it is lodged in my brain like a fragment of a song but to give up and get to work.  I even knew there would be serious problems right off the bat.  Lo those many years ago, she had chosen a pose in which her right arm reached out on a diagonal towards the camera.  Every figurative artist knows that hands are about the same size as the face measured from chin to mid-forehead, even if our universal tendency is to draw them smaller.  But this hand, so close to the lens, was now unsettlingly enormous, though accurate.  A male bowerbird would have had no problem, of course.  (see January 7, 2019)

​As if this weren’t enough, I wanted to set the figure on a vertical canvas and realized that  a 3:1 ratio:  36 x 12 would nicely reinforce her tall elegance.  My first thought was to let the giant hand disappear off the canvas to the right but when I blocked it in, no dice;  it unbalanced the composition and drew the viewer’s eyes right off the canvas.

That’s not even the worst of it.  Lacking photo reference for the dancer’s entire mid-section, I no longer even had a semi-workable hand to move around.   Remember the adage about needing a village to raise a child?  My paintings apparently require both a husband and a large art group. This time it was Judy, another friend/artist, who kindly pointed her fingers together and held the pose.    

You would think this would do it, but the new block-in was still awkward until I realized that the dancer’s shoulder and semi-turned arm position would also have to undergo adjustment.  All I had was Judy’s hand.  You’ll love this part:  I tried to take a selfie in the dancer’s position.  Thank heavens Jon arrived home the next hour and rescued me from the virtual impossibility of getting far enough away from my iMac to even take such a shot within the allotted 3 seconds.

Great!  Now all I had to do was set my feet as if in toe shoes, face away, but rotate back towards the camera and drop my shoulders, the pose culminating in my right arm and fingers artistically poised over my right hip.  I will spare you the result, but I’m sure you can imagine it.  I was more than a bit off the mark in every plane, but the look of panicked agony on my face at least proves that I was trying.  Degas would have fainted in horror.

It has taken a solid couple of weeks just to get the value study onto the canvas.  The dancer  is now more or less on the go if you don’t count the  slightly blue arm and the new hand that looks as if it has been parboiled.  Only the Frankenstein stitches have been removed.  Mary Shelley must have been a painter.

And didn’t I then enter it in an upcoming show when it is still not much more than a twinkle in my eye.  I feel a thirty-stint round of Solitaire beckoning.

​Snow has finally arrived to stay!  Lest you doubt that I am serious, let me enumerate a few of of its virtues.

Quite apart from the utter necessity of snow to replenish aquafers and  guarantee moist and fertile spring fields, the utter beauty of a coat of white argues for its healing balm on our wintry Canadian souls.  Walking in November and December this year was starting to feel quite desolate.  The palette was that of a female sparrow — all greys, taupes,  cloudy creams.  There was little for the eye.

But today….  As I look out the studio window, now that’s is a value study worthy of interest!  Even down in the park earlier today when the storm was swirling we were treated to lovely progressions of high values close to us, which melted into the distance in a series of fading silhouettes.  It may take us forever to get all of our and Theodore’s layers on (and off) but well worth it for comfortable viewing.

With luck the snow will continue its slow accrual;  We’ve received about eight centimetres so far and hope for another ten by morning.    Because it is so light even Theodore with his low undercarriage can navigate;  in fact every so often he lowers his considerable snout and breaks into high speed plowing runs.  He alternates these frontal snow attacks with luxurious squirmy backscratches in the cold fluff, emerging with a stiff white coat.  It’s all fun and games until he gets an iceball between his toes and then he quits, striking pathetic poses with one paw held high.  Jon and I would have walked longer but we no longer run this corporation.  Theodore and I went home to stay, while Jon just changed his gear and headed out with his skis.

I had ample time to wish I had joined him.  If you are a creator of any stripe, you know there are “Just Shoot Me” days.  This painting, which is a decent size, has been nothing but trouble so far and I suspect I’m failing to acknowledge some cosmic hint.  Soldiered on, though, and ended up with a grisaille which may or may not play nice in the days to come.    I’m working from an incomplete set of original photos (the dancer's middle section completely missing)  complicated by my decision to further alter my reference shot of the original watercolour which still has all of its parts.  Remember the copy of a copy of a copy issue?  Oh well, nothing ventured.

What kept me going was the prospect of The Day after the  Storm.  On the prairies at least you could count on a day of dazzling sunshine in a perfectly blue sky and a blank canvas with interesting messages. Sometimes that happens here too.  Common for us are the raccoons’ articulated hands and the coyote’s elegant stroll, but the best discovery of the year were the distinctive footprints and tail drag of a pheasant -- in our very own driveway.   Just proves you can live in a large city but if you pretend to live in the country sometimes nature plays along.

I have a day to kill while the grisaille takes its own sweet time drying;  you can see how fresh the paint is in the digital.  Watch for snow angels;  I may drop by.

The world gives us special people who are able to state or picture what we know intuitively to be true.  Confronted with their work, we can only nod in affirmation.  Mary Oliver may have been lost to us last week, but her wisdom remains: 

No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude.


Wild Geese
​
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body 
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
​over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

And most importantly:

“The most regretful people… are those… who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

As you may have noticed, I owe you a post as from last Monday.  Problem was, I wasn’t painting and therefore couldn’t write.  Honestly.   Well, back on the horse so hello again.

Virginia Woolf was on the money when she declared that a woman needs a room of her own -  a thought echoed by the poet, Mary Oliver, who died only a few days ago:

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.  

But even solitude demands working space.  Well, let's have a peek at my studio.  It is 7 by 10.  I’m sure we can agree this is a really really small studio, especially for someone who often paints big.  That issue can be solved, if only by hauling the work outside every so often to get a good look at it from a  distance.  (Most of my large paintings are therefore done from April to October.)  As they say, no biggee.  And it is all mine.

But there is another greater challenge.  In a word, storage.  As in, there isn’t any.  So I have an elaborate system of stacked wooden paint boxes which are more picturesque than convenient but which house every pigment known to woman.  And while two full walls of casement windows above exposed stone may sound like a romantic’s dream, only those windows’ stone ledges are available there to hold the myriad objects that artsy flesh is heir to.  At the moment that 17 feet of ledges house two lamps, an electric pencil sharpener, gazillions of pencils and pens, Jewell’s  photo as well as her collar and a lock of hair,  8 scissors (ever notice how they congregate?),  a large Tang horse, last year’s dried hydrangea heads, a phone,  last year’s geraniums clinging grimly to life, a dead rosemary (when will I learn?), the ever-necessary aloe for emergencies,  classical cd’s,  a hole-punch, and…..well, you get the picture.   The wee room also contains my desk and the gigantic Mac I am composing this on.  Should also mention the rocking Mission love seat with footstool, two easels - one enormous, the other not , plus an office chair and my old piano stool which I can spin on when bored.  Packed, but purposeful, the room works.  Biggee-er but manageable.

So why could I neither paint nor write this month?  It took me a few days to figure out and the answer was ridiculously obvious:  A LACK OF FILING???

Okay, so I hate and avoid filing.  But I have an equal and opposite need to find whatever I’m looking for.  Failing that, it’s too easy to get side-tracked and then I get overwhelmed.    It’s official:  I have the soul of a librarian.   So there went the week but by Friday every piece of post-Christmas detritus — bills, financial reports, cards, canvases (pristine or not), photos - was stored logically, the brushes were clean and sorted, replacement supplies bought and canvases toned. Thus was order re-established in my tiny domain and ka-zaam I could focus again.  When I climbed on my horse, I no longer rode off in all directions, like Leacock's colonel.  Phew.

This handsome setter was  a sociable guy who hung around a country road we frequented on Salt Spring in 1995.   Other than feeling wistful to realize that he must have died years ago, it was a joy to renew our friendship.  I’ll let today's value underpainting dry thoroughly before deciding whether to do a full glaze oil painting or leave him in sepia-tone heaven.  You will be the first to know.