Have you ever lived with an oil painting that was brand new when you got it?   Until I actually began painting in oil, I had not.  In fact, it was two or three years after I completed my first glaze oil that I recognized the subtle and wonderful metamorphosis oil canvases undergo.

At first, the surface is all shine and reflection.  That alone was enough reward for me at the beginning.  One of the frustrations I had had with watercolour was the loss of glossy colour as the paper dried.  Acrylic seemed no better, usually going flat, and it even had the nerve to darken as it dried.  But oil — well, hello!! Unfortunately,  an oil painting is a perfect devil to try to photograph right away, as there is always some reflection or glistening, no matter in what plane you choose to photograph it.  My careening off the buffet in July was a direct result of that problem;  out of desperation, I had laid a large painting on the floor in order to photograph it from a minimum of direct (and therefore reflective) light.  Having failed spectacularly to descend successfully from my aerie, I am just grateful that I avoided landing on the canvas — remember those Wile E. Coyote runs in mid-air?  Well, they work.

The great news is that oil paintings age slowly and with infinite grace.  The surface will age into a satin neither matte nor glossy but simply aglow.  I have realized that when I attended many a formal dinner dances in university, I was always in peau de soie, which had that same low and lovely sheen-- proving that not only is our aesthetic sense pretty much consistent but, if we are patient, life  will burnish our oil paintings into a canvas wrapped in peau de soie.  Such happiness.

And that is why I paint in oil.  Just one more reason to learn patience.  Bonus: I am really unlikely to dribble the main course onto it.  

​Once again, I find myself giving a painting a title that makes no apparent sense.  And once that title is lodged in my wee brain, there is no dislodging it.  So let’s try to deconstruct “The Sycamore Dreams.”


I submit for your consideration the backstory of “Kubla Khan,” the famous Coleridge poem.  The poet swore that "Kubla Khan" presented itself fully formed, like Venus being born out of Zeus’ ear;  he claimed that he woke from a post-opium dream and simply went to his desk and wrote “Kubla Khan” out in full, no strike-outs.  He felt it had been supernaturally dictated to him;  unfortunately, someone came to the door mid-transcription (so like life) and Coleridge’s short-term memory failed to retain the entire 300 line poem so we don’t have the entire piece.
Well, the poet's claim was investigated in full, and I do mean FULL (almost a thousand pages)  a hundred and thirty years later (1927) in a scholarly work entitled “The Road to Xanadu”  by John Livingstone Lowes.   Through intensive biographical and bibliographic sleuthing Lowes was able to account for every phrase having been acquired previously by Coleridge;  the creativity was in combination, not invention, which Lowes thought a higher-level activity.  I tried reading the book but happily concluded that the poem would speak for itself.

And that is my hope for fanciful titles;  the painting itself should render them superfluous.    But, seeing as at least one person will query me about them, I search for rational explanations, such as they are.

As always, the title presented itself uninvited.  I can’t claim hallucinagenic inspiration, although I do confess that too rich a dinner can give me a bad night.     The title “The Sycamore Dreams!”  begins by clarifying the focus of the painting — one gorgeous tree.  I have said previously how beautiful I find sycamores’ bark to be, so one such skeletal beauty, fully revealed after all its leaves had dropped,  is the subject of the painting.  I was lucky to see this sycamore at a nexus of magic moments —   when it was completely bare;  when the maples in the background were still in full autumn colour;  when the golf course sprinkling system was being bled; when the bottom two-thirds of the tree were cast in blue shadows;  and when the creamy upper branches still caught the last light.  The total effect was deliriously lovely, leading me to reflect on the period leading into dormancy for a deciduous tree.  I felt that this sycamore had happily begun its sleepy descent into the long-winter-dream.   So voila:  “The Sycamore Dreams.”

It’s a moody overcast day — the perfect time to work on the grisaille.  Yesterday I put on some Rufus Wainwright and contently scrubbed in my light values.   Unfortunately, I am not ambidextrous.  While Jon can cast with either arm, my coordination is limited to my right arm, which is threatening to look like Popeye’s while the left channels Olive Oyle.  Oh well.  So I ache a bit.

The happy news is that building layers of glazes also builds patience;  I spent my life rushing around.  There never seemed to be enough time as I hurtled from one responsibility to the next. So choosing to build a large painting by means of a slow layering is actually luxurious.  It always surprises me to find that I love establishing the bones of the structure by means of a value study.  Full colour is a long time off, but that is okay.  As usual the lights were easy to locate yesterday while today’s dark values are subtle and elusive.  Hurrying would be counter-productive as the background trunks and branches quietly reveal themselves.  I can begin to foresee the layers of transparent primaries but feel no impatience about getting there.  This stage is mainly about looking carefully and feeling my way in by dint of heavy-duty brushwork.  

So it’s demanding physical work but pleasantly meditative at the same time.  Now that I’m in the dark values, I’m listening to the score from “Gettysburg.”  It’s sombre and full of loss but faithful to the hope of meaningful sacrifice.  The perfect quiet inspiration to practise patience.

Jon has gone steel-heading and I have no excuse to postpone starting “The Sycamore Dreams.”  The image currently occupying my brain was taken last September during that golden hour when the setting sun burnishes its beloved land.  

Sycamores (platanus occidentalis) are magnificent trees.  In fact, the Canadian flag actually features a sycamore so don’t believe your Grade 1 teacher about that being a maple leaf.  While the leaves are perfectly nice, it is the bark which fills me with joy.  Mottled in irregular plates of taupe, cream, pale  yellow and green-brown, this species is beautiful in the extreme when it is planted as a specimen tree.   Sycamores grace golf courses throughout the GTA so  bravo to the course designers who thought to include them.  

You will note that the branching is haphazard;  unlike solitary elms,whose classic urn shape might feature a pendant oriole nest, a sycamore has more of a Medusa shape, giving it the impression of having changed its mind frequently.  I personally like its gnarly habit.
Background colour of burnt oranges and russets comes from maples behind the sycamore, which is bare.  Only its top branches are still catching the sun, somewhat bleached by its low-angle intensity.  Lower down, the trunk is cast in cerulean blue shadow, and a mysterious plume of steam rises to complete the magic.  All I got done today was to tone the 30 x 40 canvas and block in the sycamore itself.

But the dye is cast.  I’ve gone and made a promise I have to keep.  Sometimes the only way I can face a big painting is to announce its conception.  Now I will feel obliged to tackle it seriously.  I see major backaches here (literally)  but also the promise of something lovely and exotic.  Besides, the “shapers” Lyla so thoughtfully gave me for Christmas are just the tools I will need to detail the fine background.  

Stay tuned.

It was so cold yesterday in the park that, had Jon not insisted I return home with him, I would happily have lain down in a snowbank.  The windchill was double-digits but it quickly became apparent that I had absolutely no right to kvetch.  Someone else had cornered bragging rights for suffering.

We noticed him below the path in what amounted to a puddle surrounded by a snowbank.  At first he would have passed for a hunk of wood, but then we realized we were looking at somebody whose long beak was patiently probing the mud in search of food.  I had my old camera with me so frankly I doubted that there would be enough detail to key him out.  The cryptic plumage was just that but our trusty software gradually produced enough of an image for us to hit the books.  Well, he was either a snipe or a woodcock.  Either was fine with me, although woodcocks in particular have enormous appeal with their big eyes and comical proportions.  I decided on snipe.  I guessed wrong, because Reuven, our go-to birder of note, instantly pronounced our brave survivor a woodcock;  he even had another woodcock he’d been observing, though not in this park.  He mentioned that they really struggle when it is this cold.  My heart broke.

This morning I was fearful to go and look, but there he was, head tucked under a wing and one big brown eye keeping watch.  The weather is softening and I do hope he is able to wait it out.  We have a date at dusk in a week or so, and I’m dying to see him again.   Woodcocks, you see, are crazy for love.  When the mood strikes, they slip into John Travolta’s old disco outfit and affect a sexy slow strut with lots of wiggle.  I’ve just wasted a good hour watching a variety of woodcocks, many of them strutting to perfect background music.  It was hard to choose but I offer you my favourite:   Type  “American Woodcock shows off Dance Moves” in your browser or copy and paste https://www.google.ca/search?q=american+woodcock+shows+off+dance+moves&oq=american&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j69i59j0l4.4170j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 and make sure the volume is turned up.   Prepare to lose your heart.  I don’t know about you, but I would follow that guy anywhere,  just one more contented member of his conga line.

To gild the lily, his Egyptian waggle dance is mere foreplay.  After calling all local females, M. Woodcock performs a death-defying takeoff straight up into the air just to prove he can.  An aerial mating display -- now that's what I call a date!

Eliot was wrong.  It is March, not April, which is the cruelest month.  We are all starved for sunshine and desperate for some fun.  My precarious sanity was preserved this week by a short clip from an unlikely source of merriment:  a BBC interview on Korean politics with an American professor.

No doubt you saw it too:  Groucho Marx couldn’t have staged it all any better.  Ten seconds into the professor’s analysis, the office door swings open and a little girl marches in like a toy soldier;  clearly she is joining a party which has somehow mistakenly begun without her.  The audience realizes that this is a home office and the expert professor is instantly recast as the hapless father who tries and fails to execute a back-handed re-direct.   Already too little too late:   his authority has vaporized, the victim to his daughter’s certainty of her own welcome.  Our hearts go out to him but the battle has already been lost.

What else could possibly go wrong?

Well, I didn’t expect a baby in a wheeled contraption to come careening through the door. Now there are three participants in the segment and the kids outnumber the professor.  Viewers are holding their breath.

But wait — the mother has just realized that the kids are missing!  She’s no slouch and, like every good wife in the world, she springs into action.  Sliding through the door like Kramer, she executes a right turn, grabs the kids and over their loud vocal protests drags them backwards in a tangle out of the room.  All three disappear from view.  Husband carries on as if nothing has happened although of course everyone is focused on that open door.  The last few seconds catch the heroic wife bellying back like a commando to pull it shut.

It was pure theatre of the absurd.  Have you ever heard of a “French scene?  ”  Simply, every arrival or departure of an actor is recognized as triggering a new chemistry and therefore a new scene.  This comic genius of a YouTube capture actually contains five French scenes in less than thirty seconds.  Moreover, it is hilariously funny mainly because this farce was playing out on live television.   If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.  And the mini-play had a hero, of course.  Because there was nobody else to solve the problem , the mom pulled herself together and got her ducklings back in a row.  I think she was wonderful.  Personally, I would have made immediate plans to enter a convent.

Its universal appeal is obvious.  All of us can remember a  time we found ourselves totally exposed in front of an audience.  Clearly it’s not the guy in the suit but that poor heroic woman we bleed for, while traitorously laughing to reduce our horror.  It took me back to the time Sally MacArthur, who had a gorgeous soprano voice but no loyalty,  decided as the curtain opened to freeze and simply close her mouth, leaving me to sing the entire alto part of our concert duet by myself.  I still have nightmares about that one but at least they are largely private memories.  There’s a lot to be said for having pre-dated the Internet.

It transpired yesterday that I actually have yet another cold not unlike the one that devoured January.   And while the Quasimodo limp brought on by the mysterious back spasm several weeks ago is better (I can put my socks on again, thank heavens), it has left lingering joint pains like so many pesky toothaches.  I almost never take painkillers but feeling a Tylenol One erase the throbbing in my hips yesterday was quite a little thrill.

I reassure myself that I am holding my own.  

I have a favourite pair of prescription readers --  they are tortoiseshell, round, and feel pretty darn cute, I must say.  I donned them yesterday to give myself a little lift.  I didn't immediately fear the worst when Jon commented that I reminded him of someone famous, a writer...... I hopefully offered up Virginia Wolfe, Jean Rhys, and Margaret Atwood.  Nope, nope and nope.  It slowly dawned on me that my husband was searching for a male author.  Gulp.  It gets worse.  He thought I looked like ……..wait for it………..Truman Capote.  

Truman Capote??? 

Truman Capote!!!

I didn't have the heart to ask whether it was the real one - Harper Lee’s  childhood friend and the model for "Dill" - or Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Not that it makes any difference,  come to think of it.

I guess it's no worse than Jon’s memorable reaction to a self portrait I painted many years  ago.  Self-portraits are famously stinkers.  They pretty well always (with the possible exception of Durer’s self-portrait which is more of a showcase for that handsome devil’s great hair) contain the glassy stare necessary to trying to paint your own face from a mirror.   Finishing it, I was thrilled that the painting even looked like a person.  When I showed it to Jon, all he said was "Who is that?  She scares me."

He should be scared.  I'm giving him a five minute start and some free advice.  We all knew that Archie, not Edith, needed to know how to stifle.​

A particularly smart place to start would be refrain from comparing your wife to Truman Capote. 

I’ve been meaning to write about this sensitive issue for a very long time, each time hesitating for fear of causing regret.  But I keep finding myself painting memorials to a beloved - a person, a pet - while having to work with a posed or poor quality image because there was no other choice.  Often the image even fails to capture the telling expression, but it is all there is to work from.

Painting a portrait is by necessity slow and careful.  The tolerances for error are exceedingly small if you are aiming for immediate recognition and I do.  That said, simply getting the contours, proportions and skin tones right is not enough in my opinion.  Our dear ones have mobile features and a vast array of expressions, some of them highly characteristic.  

My modest proposal is rather easier and a heck of a lot more benign that Jonathan Swift's was: USE YOUR CAMERA REGULARLY.  Given the high quality of smartphone cameras, virtually everybody has near-constant access to good photography.  Use these amazing tools to take lots of close-ups of your beloveds.  Group shots are fun but do not take the place of portraiture.  It doesn’t matter in the slightest if you plan to have the photo turned into a portrait.  What matters is that someone who really matters is documented  generously.  These crystallized moments will have great meaning in the future.  Just remember to regularly download them  onto a HD or a DVD which you store somewhere safe off-site.  

And what to do if someone you care about seizes up at the sight of a camera?  When I wanted to paint a friend whose deer-in-the-headlight expression around cameras bore no relationship to her exuberant personality, I enlisted Jon the Relentless Tease to distract her.  Despite herself,  she eventually exploded in laughter and SNAP! 

To continue the saga of the domestic re-org, I now have a second easel set up in the corner of the TV room.  Unlike my picturesque stone-lined study, this room has north light.  While such a consideration may seem trivial, even wrong, it’s been my experience that southern exposures and artists don’t always play well together.  In the months when trees lack leaves, it is almost blinding to try to work with the low sun blasting into the studio.  As I have confessed, I keep a man’s snap-brim hat handy to keep the sun out of my eyes when I am working but there’s no easy solution to the problem of strong warm-coloured light.  Add to that the issue of fresh oil paints’ reflectivity and I often have to abandon ship until later in the day when I can see what I’m doing.

The second issue in my beloved studio has been temperature.  Because my studio was once a screen porch, it exists - despite the Amazing Jon’s addition of casement windows - outside the footprint of our house.  In the winter it is cold;  in summer it can be sweltering despite the ceiling fan he also installed.  The prospect of temperature control dazzles my tiny mind;  Jon has always called me a cheap date and this kind of event proves it.  I am over the moon.

Lest you fear that volatile organic compounds will now pollute our home, let me put you at ease.  All of my oil paints are safe.  They have no heavy metals (cadmium red, cobalt blue, lead white, etc.) and the mixing medium is alkyd walnut oil.  Brushes are temporarily stored in baby oil and later washed with Murphy’s oil soap.  Yes, it is more work than using turps and mineral spirits but far safer.  Yes, my studio sometimes smells like a salad.


Now all I have to do is to haul one of my super-gessoed canvas out of the basement.  That may take a while.  That level has yet to be tackled.  The year we bought the house, Jon and I set up camp down there so that we could sand and stain all of the old quarter-cut oak floors and repair the thousand other things old houses are heir to.  Laura the bright and exceedingly honest 5-year-old daughter of a friend summed up our basement in one word:  “YUCK!”   I heartily concur, Laura.  No doubt your forty-year-old self would repeat the exact same thing.  Oh, well.  Glacial progress seems to be our style.

We are in the process of decluttering the house.  While  I try to be relentless  it is not in my nature.  I am more of a "Well, you never know when you might need a _________" kind of gal.  (Be honest.  How many times have YOU donated something only to need it the next week?  I rest my case.) So, that we have not one but two potato ricers hogging major space in my utensil drawer is typical, I am afraid. Perhaps I could spare one of them.  If I have to.  I guess.

On the other hand, many AWOL items have been reporting for duty.  So what has surfaced from the Land of the Missing?  

To begin with, quite a number of prodigal paintings have come home to Mommy.  They had been buried in the basement under enormous rolls of aluminum foil and plastic wrap (thank you Costco, for super-sizing and bulk wrapping everything that doesn't move;  I wager my stores of baking soda and chicken broth will outlive me).  But where is the right half of that prairie sky?  Guess I can't call this a diptych any more.  If the little rascal shows up in your neighbourhood, please send her home with a scolding. Her sibling misses her.


On the plus side, it turns out that I actually have painted enough for the annual show in April.  That's a surprise;  here I was just warming up for my usual March melt-down of sheer panic.

All of this is thanks to Jon, bless him, for he is clearing the decks.  Fifty seven linear feet of binders have been dislodged from closets and large furniture.  This purge has given rise to some serious horse trading.    While my optimistic bid for his study - prime real estate thanks to its seven windows - didn't even warrant a counter offer,  I did score the top half of an armoire,  the entire buffet and a closet.    For the first time I actually know where to find my gear.  And most of my paintings .  And all of them on the same floor!  

The re-org might not make me a better painter, but it sure as heck makes me a happier one.