Once in a while, it’s fun to change up your game.  Several weeks ago we had a terrific workshop with Laurel McBrine on impasto or palette-knife painting.  She had me at “no medium needed” and “no brushes to clean.”   I had brought along a digital of one of my favourite cliff faces.  Yes, I am aware that other, more normal, folks have favourite shoes or vacation spots or desserts.  I have favourite cliffs, some of which I have already painted (see “Bay Bulls” 1 through 4 on my gallery website) and a great many more which I am just dying to paint.  I visit this particular cliff on a regular basis, in all seasons, but had never gotten around to painting it until now.

Even though it is probably limestone and subject to constant change, I think of my cliff as “Rock of Ages” and get all fluttery whenever we paddle past it.  So during that workshop I hauled out my reference shot and a cradled wood panel and went for it. 

Working impasto is a bit like mud wrestling  — sloppy but fun as hell (I imagine…).  You load up the knife with a pile of pigment and toggle back and forth between control and chaos.  Woo Hoo!

A hunk of my ancient wisdom rests on the knowledge that everything has its price.   To start, this love child cost me a good pair of leather gloves because there was half a pound of quicksilver pigment on her by end of the day and I had to get her home.  And while I may have noticed that I had used ten times the usual amount of pigment, I failed to translate that into drying time, especially when there is no alkyd to speed up the process.  Good luck trying to find a dust-free dog-hair-free storage around here these days!  Three weeks later, the surface is dry to the touch but I imagine that centuries will pass before the painting dries thoroughly.

​Don’t care.  This was too much fun to miss.  And if we ever decide to clone Theodore, there is a mother lode of hair to work with.

This week’s inspiration was born on a ferry dock in late October.  As I waited to leave Salt Spring Island and head to the air terminal in Sydney, dawn broke and night melted into a soft sky-blue pink, which itself dissolved before my hungry eyes.   Though not quite foggy, the softness of the scene brought Carl Sandburg's famous poem to mind:

The fog comes 
on little cat feet. 

It sits looking 
over harbor and city 
on silent haunches 

and then moves on. 

Firing off a hundred shots like a crazed paparazzo, I sailed on, as rich as Croesus.  It’s the same feeling I get when staggering out of a public library, arms laden with books.  Always the cheap date....

I’ve been thinking  longingly about these digitals since then.  Finally, there was enough clear floor space this week to gesso some canvases because my soul is begging for colour.  This time of the year is the only season that stubbornly refuses to provide much in the way of beauty. In fact, yesterday in the park may as well have been a white-flagged surrender to drabness, so painting was a must. That Salt Spring glow of dawn beckoned, demanding a long horizontal  (36 x 24) format.

My intent is to develop the painting through colour blocking.  Pam Carter, the Scottish landscape artist who regularly paints this way, earns my admiration for her juicy blocks of colour.   It is misleading to assume that there is no sophistication in this style — Carter’s expanses are full of subtlety and masterful blending — so I too am looking to set up masses of what is apparently a single colour, but which are full of mixed colours and quiet transitions.  While Carter uses a high-key palette as I often do, this painting will be closer to the pastel register.  Time for stronger colour once my eyes adjust to spring.

In her exquisite novel, The Winter Vault,  Anne Michaels describes an ancient Nubian village about to be lost forever to the Aswan Dam construction, a human tragedy compounded by an aesthetic one.  Here is Michaels' gorgeous word-painting, which I visualize as colour blocking:

The houses were like gardens sprung up in the sand after a rainfall.  As if cut by Matisse’s scissors, shapes of pure colour - intense and separate - were painted onto the glowing white walls.  Designs of cinnamon, rust, phthalocyanine free, rose antwerp blue, tan, cream, madder, lamp black,sienna,and ancient yellow ochre,perhaps the oldest pigment used by man.  Each a shout of joy.  Embedded in the whitewashed walls were decoration - designs of brightly coloured lime wash, bright as the eye could bear - geometric patterns, plants, birds and animals - with mosaics set into the plaster like jewels, and snail shells, and polished pebbles.  Over the gates were elaborately painted china plates, as many as thirty or forty decorating a single house.  They were like stones of a necklace set against the white skin - porous, breathing, cool - of the plaster.  Here was human love of place so freely expressed, alive with meaning;  houses so perfectly adapted  to their context in materials and design that they could never be moved.  It was an integrity of art, domestic life, landscape…. (131-2)

If my new painting has a theme so full of love, it has something to do with the hope that each dawn brings, a hope  bolstered by the survival of such a paradise --  a theme that must, however, be delivered wordlessly. 

All I've done so far is to establish the blocks of colour— once this dries I will do some glazing but thinly so as suggest rather than emphasize the mood.  No hard edges.  I also have a crow and a buoy or two to place in focal points.  Playing around with titles, I think today’s best candidate is “Little Cat Feet.”   Lots to do. 

(Another small hope - that it will be dry in time for the show!)

Full disclosure:  Jon is better than I at most things.  One area, however, needs serious work.

The Scene:  Bedtime.  I am already in bed, teeth brushed and all.  Jon, who can go for hours without eating, decides that he needs a snack.

Him: (from downstairs)  Where did you put the leftover rice pudding?

Her:  It’s in the fridge, on the second shelf, on the right, at the back.

(seconds pass)

Him:  No, it’s not.

Her:  Yes, it is, Darling.  On the second shelf, on the right, at the back.

Him:  No it’s not.

(I’ll spare you the repetitions, which alter only in volume)

Him:  Could you come down and find it for me?

Her:  Okay.  (discouraged tone)

Her:  See — on the second shelf on the right at the back?  (tone which mixes superiority and annoyance in equal measures.

Him:  Oh.  I didn’t recognize it.  (light tone)

We all know that such a scene takes place in thousands of homes throughout the country, regardless of timezones, family income, or gender preference.  One person in every pair-bond arbitrarily designates the other as the official Finder.  And that’s that.  It’s a permanent position, as far as I can tell.

Now, if you think it’s no big deal to find something you carefully put away yourself, even if that does entail climbing out of flannelette sheets, remind yourself that existence of every gruntled Finder presupposes a Loser in active practice.  At the moment we have every tool from our basement workshop distributed throughout the rest of the house, which rings with “Have you seen my__________?” 

My darling is a card-carrying Loser.

Let me be clear.  These searches for objects I have not actually stored carefully take a hell of a lot longer.  What’s worse, they are often time-sensitive or all progress grinds to a stop.   Sometimes I enlist a flashlight to catch a tell-tale metallic glint but nothing really works except picking up every single thing but the piano and checking under it.   I’m a hearty eater and I now wonder if the only thing which keeps my weight under control is the constancy of high-pressure search-and-rescue operations around here.  Theodore has shown no interest in being handed the baton so Finder I shall be until one of us dies.  On the plus side, I do find items I myself have misplaced.  Last week produced a vase I had been looking for, 6 unmatched socks to add to my collection, 3 gloves of different colours and four dark chocolate bars.  Chocolate is a great consolation when seeking does not lead to finding.  

But take heart, fellow Finders.  As long as we have this job for life, let us choose to train our veteran Finder Brains on searching for things that spark joy  -- the gorgeous signed Inuit carving that winked at me in Value Village or the Haida copper and suede-lined humidor that showed up in a neighbourhood garage sale.  (Painters, take particular note:  it takes a veteran  Finder to come up with the odds and sods which populate a still life.  I am particularly fond of Rusty, my tin frog in the bottom right corner.  [I  Oh, gotta go.  It's okay, Dear -- let me help you find the....]).

Happy Anniversary to us!  It is exactly four years since we met on this page and I wanted to thank you for coming along.


I went back (see Archive in turquoise print to the right) to March 2014 to refresh my mind as to the exact day to buy our cake.  To my horror, I see that I posted ten entries within 19 days that month.  I can only imagine that there must have been a hell of a neural backlog which needed clearing because that pace proved unsustainable.

Although I have done a lot of editing, this has been my first foray into sharing my own thoughts.  I recommend it as a tonic for the brewing stewpot that is the mind.  Sometimes the post is thought through before I sit down at the computer;  just as often an opening leads me to a conclusion that was only dimly sensed before.   On a lighter note, it’s always fun to share the myriad silly things.  Light or heavy, having to write it down helps me to think more clearly and I suspect that is true of most people.

All things considered, I decided about a year ago that posting once a week (on Monday) would be a manageable goal.  I honestly believed that.

But in the meantime, life has had its way with me and a goal of predictable get-togethers has devolved into what even a charitable psychologist would term “random reinforcement” — never a strategy recommended for sustaining a connection.   I am very sorry and will try to do better.   

In my defence, it’s been busy, but it is now possible to walk from A to B in our home without having to go through C,D and E.  The washer is once again available and my iMac back in business.  As Joni wryly observed, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”   I have always thought that the notion of chickens coming home to roost should be celebratory and it is.  Welcome back, y’all.

So…..I hope you can accept this apology.  Around here, the preferred wording is “I am a stunned pickle” so append that as a chaser.  That you are reading this suggests that you know how to hang in.   A number of people have asked if the post can simply be sent automatically.  I have absolutely no idea how to do that.  The best my Luddite self can do at this point is to try again to stick to a schedule, though occasionally I may have to post a day early or late.

My university French prof used to exhort us to “Tattoo it to your chest.”  My chest now reads “Post on Monday.”  Please note that today is Monday.

This self-portrait is titled “Back at You” because Jon is reflected in the crazy-house sunglass reflection.  Put yourself there today with my sincere thanks.  I owe you a piece of cake.

Z’Anne

Fair warning:  rant ahead.

Last year I was gob-smacked to read in a major newspaper that a young woman was profiled for “curating” the bracelets on her arm.  Oh, come on.  “Curating,” a word which was reserved for aesthetic considerations of the highest level, has devolved to mean “choosing?"    

For one thing, that usage broadens the category exponentially, robbing it of all usefulness.   Don’t we choose pretty much everything these days?  Our furniture did not arrive via stork, what I wear involved rudimentary personal shopping, as did what we find on our plates.   There are precious few of us who don’t make a series of daily choices, big or small.  If anything, there is too much choice, a situation implied by the French phrase -   un embarras de choix -   but there is not much riding on most of these choices and we would never think to dignify them with the term "curation."

Just for the fun of it, let’s play reductio ad absurdum for a moment:

• Unfortunately my curated collection of single mitts cost me two fingers and a thumb last winter.  Dang.
• Last night Jon critiqued my carefully curated supper.  It seems that the lima bean/cooked cabbage/kiwi casserole which explored subtle vegetative greens failed to speak to his aesthetic thirst for primaries.   
• We plan to go canoeing next month so I had better start curating the gear.

Actually, around here there has been a stark reduction in curation lately.   I long to return to the days when changing the bed actually involved choice.  In a reverse-Cinderella, our linen closet has become the pumpkin of attic access,  so for the last four months, it’s been strip the bed -wash and dry the bedding-put it back on the bed.  Curating the sheets -- a lost dream.

My tiny heartbreak aside, if we are going to fool around with a perfectly functional and specific word, I have a suggestion.  Let’s take it away from the art world, which has allowed  it to celebrate such things as a meat dress. Apply it instead to what matters.  Encourage schools to help children explore and evaluate the qualities of social relationshps - true friendship, for example.  In effect, teach kids to curate their souls.

Now we have a ballgame.