As a teenager, I arrived at a  Van Gogh show to find the famous paintings already crated for shipping.   Ever since, the prospect of missing something important by a hair has haunted me, so it was a relief to see Mary Pratt's magnificent retrospective at The McMichael mere days before it ends.

I LOVE MARY PRATT.

Where to begin?  Well, there's the juiciness of her colour.  A Mary Pratt red is too hot to touch, too luscious not to sample.  Her famous painting of jelly jars cooling on the shelf evokes everything I know of promise and pleasure.

Then too, I love the subtlety of her whites.   Often the white clothing of Donna (her model) becomes the canvas for small masterpieces of suggestion, annointed with refracted rainbows.

And scale!  Apparently Donna was petite, and Mary's full portraits of her are life-size.  I rounded a corner to find one and froze in delight.  Some of the still lifes were big enough to wade in.  Pratt nails the female version of "Go big or go home."  

Finally, none of the other virtues might have counted or even developed without her exceptional industry.  For a high realist, Pratt has an astonishing body of work.  On video, she speaks of all of the sacrifices she had to make in order to paint from nine until after six daily.  Foremost was the society of an extended support group of good friends.  Five guilty women looked at each other, knowing that friendship is a precious thing to us and that going to visit Mary was a sort of rite celebrating that sacred bond.  Kathy, Cindy, Adriana, and Christine and I all wished that Mary could come for tea and that we could welcome her, offering the best and most comfortable chair for her painful back;  I dare say everyone at that superb show had the instinct to cossett Mary Pratt with laughter and love.  

Mary, if you're one of the ten people who read this blog, consider yourself invited.  Let us thank you for choosing deathless art over personal comfort.  Your sacrifice was not in vain.

And you other nine:  if you live in the GTA and if you have not yet seen this show, GO NOW, in your bathrobe if necessary.  When Jon and I were in NL several years ago, there were only two Mary Pratts in The Rooms.  I had a little cry.  This week they were happy tears.

As a librarian often asked to help young adults choose a book, I always counselled following your heart. That is, always consider the choice to be a date, not a marriage;  unless you are committed to the story by the end of a chapter or two, you politely say good night and move on to more promising prospects.  Life's too short.

Paintings are a bit like that. An artist's basement is probably littered with bad dates;  the good marriages hang on walls  or sometimes reside under the bed, waiting for a change of season.  The horrible ones might have seemed promising to start  but revealed their unsuitability in a hurry.  One particular horror  began well but I saw its true nature when I started to work the winter tree shapes.  Panicking, I decided to give them autumn leaves.  The leaves were worse, and made the trees look like they were hung with wet socks.  

Now I am not a palette-knife painter.  I am slow-and-steady-wins-the-race to the core.  But the trees had to be fixed!  So I grabbed the palette knife and started troweling.  Well, you can see where this is going.

But can I simply throw the abomination out?  Of course not.  That canvas was expensive!  And there's a lot of pricey paint on it too.  So it sulks,  face to the wall, whining that I didn't give it a fair try, and couldn't we go out again?  I so admire both Mary and Christopher Pratt, who made a daily occasion of committing bad dates to the flames of permanent oblivion.

Don't expect to see a picture of that one of mine here.  Ever.  Instead, I want to talk about my current steady;  I believe you've met.  We've spent about fifty hours together and I think he's a keeper.

Once, when I trumped my bridge partner's winning trick, Judy exclaimed, "What were you thinking?"  I blurted out, "Blue," and the table exploded with laughter;  we were all painters, you see.

When I first started painting, it took forever to find something I could paint, a situation that gradually eased as my experience increased. Nonetheless, my great leap forward happened when I met the delightful Kathy Bailey, who introduced me to  glaze oil, a Renaissance method more forgiving than watercolour and more leisurely than acrylic.  Tackling the technique was overwhelming at first but worth every hour invested.  Sincere thanks, Kathy.

Now that I am not so intimidated by level of difficulty, the "what to paint" issue has taken a turn. There is a wonderful story about Alex Colville's wife, who was chatting with an interviewer about the great painter.  When asked, "Is your husband currently working on a painting?" she replied, "I think so.  This morning I caught him outside with callipers, measuring the dog."

For me, as for most representational artists, I'm sure, the creative process begins with a kidnapping.    Margaret Laurence always said that she could silence the insistent voice of any one of her main characters  only by giving her an independent life on the page;  I too am captive until my mind's eye won't accept anything less than transferring that image onto a surface .  

The little men next door summoned me to the fence on Sunday to demand An Adventure  so we three ventured down into the ravine.  While they, dressed as Spidermen/Ninja Turtles, were a bit disappointed not to find a komodo dragon to slay,  I was modestly thrilled to find a bloodroot in bloom.  Because it was late afternoon, it had already closed its white flower and wrapped itself with its frilly leaves.

Tentatively, ever so tentatively, I am starting to believe that spring has finally vanquished winter.  The back garden, which we have naturalized to meet the wild on its own terms, is a bit like a spent battleground this year and we wander through it, picking up broken branches, removing ice-damaged small trees and searching for survivors.  Jon's beloved  fifteen-year-old rhododendrons took the brunt of it - many of them will not survive, but a few soldier on and are starting to lift their leaves to the sun.  There will be no glorious show around the patio this year.

As you know, my favourites are the ephemerals, many of them bulbs, and in early spring I look for them on my hands and knees, peeking under the leaf mulch to salute their return but confining them to barracks until they themselves hear reveille.  Every spring is a miracle in Canada, but it seems even more so this year.  Our neighbour Gary's gorgeous lawn,  layered with successions of perennials, is now in full crocus bloom.  This recent painting was inspired by a single shot I took of his garden several years ago, and today I made a point of capturing multiple closeups of this year's blooms to save for inspiration on a future wintry day.

Having jimmied my back this week from standing at the easel rather than exercising every day, I have been working on a wee portrait of a gorgeous miniature schnauzer pup named Khaleesi.  She's a bundle of energy and a constant source of delight for Janet and David.   They are good friends and I value them, so....this is the right week for a portrait I can sit down to do.

Now palette is one of the first things I think about when starting a new painting.  You might have noticed that I adore blue -  my mother's favourite colour, too  - and that it finds its way into every painting.  If you recall from "The Process" on my website, a burnt umber (red/blue/yellow) and white layer is always followed by a separate layer of each primary in every glaze oil painting.  That means that, before I even start the final glazes, blue has already reported for duty twice.  Moreover, to mix the blacks for my "darkest dark", I normally use burnt umber and ultramarine on top of all that.  Blue and blue again.   So Khaleesi, being black/grey/white, is largely blue, with the exception of her red collar and her transparent burnt sienna eyes.  I simply laid out burnt umber, white, and ultramarine and played happily away until she returned my stare from the wood panel.  

I might be ready soon to begin a painting in this same palette of our dear Skye terrier, Jewel, who passed away in January.  I long for a limit to the blues.  Rest in peace, dear girl.

I just came in from sorting walnuts -- Eaten, and Not.  We found them when cleaning the garage (snowblower to the back, gardening tools to the front, tires available).  They comprised an impressive cache, and we knew the owner.  She's a feisty red squirrel who has, no doubt, reproduced in the far back rafters. 
Our ancient building (too small for modern cars) has proven to be an ideal denning spot for numerous neighbours -- raccoons and squirrels, both black and red, in particular -- largely because my husband is reluctant to discard electronics boxes.  So these cardboard and styrofoam marvels take up residence in there, forgotten by us, but discovered with delight by our temporary renters:  "Look, honey, modern, no drafts, and lots of insulation!!"  This particular little homemaker-of-the-year even remodeled one of the boxes as a pantry.  

Now imagine the work involved.  First you have to find a walnut tree (check -- we have both white and black on our property);  then you have to work fast in order to beat out the competition (check -- she had a couple of hundred at least -- the girl was fast);  next, you have to chew off the thick green coating that makes them look like limes in September (check:  these were completely stripped and looked like the kind we buy); 
Esoterica:  walnuts were traditionally sourced to produced a beautiful dye of warm yellow, and so all of the squirrels around here unwittingly acquire saffron moustaches in Movenber.  Finally, after storing them in the perfect larder (thank you, Sears), you have to chew two access holes in every nut as you wish to consume it.  

My food prep is a whole lot easier.    

So this industrious gal had fully stocked her Martha Stewart larder with hundred of walnuts and, as Jon caught sight of her slipping in through the garage window last week, we're pretty sure that she had a better winter than the average squirrel.  Here's the rub -- only about half of the walnuts had been consumed.  The others were still in storage and Jon was anxious to dispose of the box.  What to do?  Over objections, I went out and sorted them, refilling a small replacement box with the intact ones, because I'm the cook in this family too.  Good luck to you and your family, Missus.  

But don't even think about trying to move into the main house.

This afternoon I caught sight of just exactly how much dust had populating our living room (notice how I personified it -- as if it LIVES AND BREEDS).  I didn't even bother to factor in the number of spider webs which colonize the space between the screens and the pane in the casement windows.  At that moment, I knew that something had to go.

It's April now, but actually December is the worst month for dust.  Bet you already knew that.  And why, you ask, as though you hadn't already figured it out.  I think it's because of the almost horizontal sunlight at the winter solstice.  Now that can be a wonderful thing:  when it lit up a bowl of pears in the living room one year, I grabbed my camera and later painted the image. December Light:  a good thing.  

But December Light is a two-faced scoundrel.  For example, it faithfully shows up at one of my rare pre-Christmas get-togethers with a few artist friends of long-standing, all of them good housekeepers.  And for those inevitably grey  days ahead of the event, I try to think like a dust mote and where I would hide.  Even that morning, all looks well. The sun waits until everyone has arrived and then bursts in, like a rotten boyfriend you thought you had successfully banished.  The air is revealed to be a kaleidoscope of dancing particles, the furniture reveals its hidden angles to be swathed with a century's worth of the stuff.  Such shame.  Everyone pretends not to be have noticed.  But they know.  They KNOW.

So I have decided to take a page from my friend Lyla's book:  she considers dust to be a "protective coating."  And I have to admit that it has come in handy when Jon and l have left notes for one another on the piano ("Put your reels away.  NOW .") or on the dining room table ("When's dinner going to be ready?")   Mr Dust and moi-meme:  bffs.

So soon old, so late schmart. 

This time of the year before the canopy opens, it is blindingly bright in my studio. As a result, I have taken to wearing a snazzy hat with a snap brim to keep the sun out of my eyes;  sometimes I forget to take it off, leading Jon to remark that he feels like he married Jimmy Olsen.  Well, okay, but it does the job.

I treasure my useful reporter's hat for another reason too, as it was a gift from my men next door:  Asher and Aydin, who are six and five respectively.  They had been to a theme park and I guess that "hats all around" was the theme.  They often come by, herded by their lovely aunt, Aysha, who is a sensitive and motherly ten.  Sometimes we just sit in the driveway and examine the pea gravel.  Or go for walks in the ravine or by the river.  Or draw.  Or cut pumpkins into faces.  We quite like one another's company.

None of this was any help when I tried, in secret, to photograph the two of them together in order to paint a surprise birthday gift for their grandmother, my dear friend.  Boys that age have the attention span of a gnat.  I finally gave up trying to get them to work in synch and simply painted them separately on the same canvas.  The giveaway is the fact that their shoulders meld.  Shhhh.

 

As I confessed yesterday, I absolutely adore the myriad looks of water.  As a great way to view it, canoeing is delightful while occasionally heart-stopping.  Nonetheless over many years of white-water paddling together, Jon has never once dumped me (in either sense of the word, I should add).   My husband is truly a water-baby and he has taken me to waterscapes I would never have seen on my own.   

Of course, once having viewed glorious water, I wanted to learn to paint it.  Working in watercolour some time ago, I started a portrait of Jon sterning the canoe on Saltspring, as seen my vantage place up front in the bow seat.**   The portrait and the canoe went fine and then I froze.  It took two years before I had a moment of sufficient nerve to finish the water.  What did I finally realize?
 


ROUNDED DIAMONDS ON THEIR SIDES.  Now go paint some water.

**Never have learned to stern a canoe -- Jon tried to teach me once in the Humber River in three feet of water but I looked up to see an enormous harbour police boat which had approached because we were going in circles.  He must have thought we were drunk.  No, just uncoordinated.   After receiving a warning AND A TICKET, I cried for an hour and Jon knew that his position in the stern was his for life.

I spend a lot of time gestating a image before it takes form on a canvas.  If the image in my mind or on the camera isn’t powerful in some way, I generally discard it and keep searching until something lights up the pleasure sensors in my brain.  Last year, it was waterlilies -- not so much the pristine flowers, but the tough, glossy and colourful leaves, which lend themselves to the process of building a painting through glazes.  Then, too, there are the transparent darknesses of the pond through which the light penetrates;  it varies from deep blue to amber to black, and is often speckled with tiny white insects which scatter themselves across the surface tension.  Long parallel shadows cast by the reeds drape themselves across it all, changing colours with every surface they meet.  Water in general fascinates me and I’ve been painting water again today - trying to capture the slow swell of the bay’s deep darkness as the glow of sunset reflects off its surface.