​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.

  In the final year of Honours English, the History of Criticism was an obligatory course.  Otherwise, naturally no-one would have taken it, but we all succumbed and completed the readings.  Man, was it ever dry.  Only a few ideas really captured me.  One was the premise that once someone had completed a work, that writer’s intentions, stated or implicit, became irrelevant because the book or short story or essay had to stand on its own and a valid critique had to arise solely from close reading rather than biographical background  Though I have always felt that personal and historical context is a huge help in understanding an author, this critical purism has a point.  And that principle would hold for visual art too.  I hope.   No one really has to know that that man who shows up in so many of my portraits is my husband or that the wee mutt with the Dumbo ears is our Skye Terrier.   As long the viewer assumes that I am neither a stalker nor someone who lacks the knowledge of what dog ears should resemble, I’m cool.

(By now you are asking yourself, “What in hell does literary criticism have to do with bowerbirds?”  Hang in.)

The other concept that gave me trouble was “l’art pour l’art”  — “Art for Art’s sake.”    Basically, the claim was made that art has no usefulness other than its intrinsic value.  That is, art serves no purpose other than to be created and viewed.

(Now we have a ballgame.)

Cue the male bowerbirds of Australia!  I have read about them for years and always wanted to meet one — you will understand why in a moment.   Sometime in their dim evolutionary past, female bowerbirds began to demand an architectural extravaganza before - well, you know.  Dinner out and a movie didn’t cut it.    A male bowerbird was expected not only to clear a largish forest area and to construct a small hut of woven twigs, but also to decorate it into a dazzling Hollywood extravaganza with a psychedelic  entranceway guaranteed to lure a female into checking the joint out.  Once lured into the hut, the gal is treated to a performance of the owner’s dance steps just outside.  The clever application of false perspective in the design (think Michelangelo’s David or Greek columns) serves to flatter the male’s size and make him that much more of a catch.  Remember, every guy is competing with all of the others, so it takes an incredibly high degree of skill and imagination to seal the deal;  simply put, the better the bower, the better the love life.  The best decorators mate with up to twelve females.  Biologists call this his  “reward,” an  understatement if I ever heard one.

Now while male bowerbird effort is demonstrable, this is not Father Knows Best.  Having awarded the “Best Design” category of 20__, the ladies depart alone to raise the kids.  Even more conveniently, when the mating season is over, the guys all return to full-time art to up their game;  by "full-time" I mean TEN MONTHS OF EVERY YEAR.  That bower doesn’t build itself and demands constant tweaking and improvements!  So while it’s tough to grow delphiniums in Sydney because blue flowers — blue anything, actually —are like catnip for some of the girls, your poker chips might be stolen by another species of bowerbird which goes mad for red.  What can I say?  I too know that supplies are expensive and, though I may not invest ten full months of every year,  glaze oil painting is definitely SLOW.

(Finally getting to the point)

No matter how you define art, bowerbirds qualify as artists.

One standard is that of skill, though tastes are changing.  The "intention" behind modern visual art seems to be in ascendance over technical ability, a trend which I deplore.  Noah Strycker notes that “The definitions of art and skill have separated so that we now value reputation as much as talent, concept as much as execution.”  Even granting that, the bowerbird has both — he knows what he wants, and steadily develops considerable expertise to attain that goal, while aesthetically reinventing himself year after year.   Not a bad life.  I’m pretty sure that by Month Ten, the little architect/designer is way down the art-for-art's-sake rabbit hole, muttering: “I'm not sure about that piece.  And if I could just add another…or a touch of …..  ahhh, yes." and on it goes.  I know that feeling.  Artists are my tribe.  See why I want to meet another one?  Of course, the bowerbird might reject me, the huge ugly female something, as intrinsically unqualified for the title "artist."

Which leads me to one observation.  In the human race, both males and females form artistic intentions, develop their technical skills, and create aesthetically-pleasing works.  But, you know, I remain unconvinced that the larger art world, like that of the bowerbird, equates female and male talent.  

​Just saying.