Monica and I had the brains on Tuesday to cancel our walk:  it was raining and  close to zero, as I later discovered when planting a few errant bulbs and scattering some echinacea seeds where they would do the most good.  After ten minutes in the garden, my fingers were numb but  not so useless that I could refuse to begin the second in my “Up, Up and Away” series.  I should have remembered that life is so rarely smooth.   While the first 3’ by 4’ painting had been oriented as landscape, the second was definitely asking to be tall and slim,  like a portrait. I have never tried to fit anything taller than 40” into the tiny stone studio.  Sure,  I expected to have to work from a stepstool to reach the top, but it quickly became clear that I had sadly underestimated the capacity of my work lights and studio easel to rise to a 48” occasion.  Hmmm.  


Plan B:  Drag out the second large easel and figure out where to set it up so I wouldn’t need extra lighting.  Remember, small house.  The TV room and living room were impossible and that left the dining room.  Our table will seat ten if it absolutely must, but its redeeming feature is that it is a ’gate-leg” and will collapse back into a small desk size.  That has meant that the dining room has also functioned as a tai chi studio for one.  (And as if that weren’t great enough, I can put a small new painting on the piano and get a fresh look at it  every time a turn is in order.   All painters know how easy it is to overwork a piece so, again, thank-you dining room!)  Surely it would be greedy to ask more of this space.  


As I studied the room while maneuvering the twelve square foot canvas, I suddenly realized that the double windows face north.  Bonanza!  If I set up right next to them and adjusted this easel for a large canvas in portrait orientation, Bob would surely be my uncle.  Dear Old Bob.  And thus it came about that today our dining room was christened in its new identity:  art studio/tai chi space/ eatery!!  As long as MPAC doesn’t feel the need to triple the taxable floor space, it’s all good.  Now all I have to do each day is to remember why I have come to the dining room….

​So the question I began this post with is not rhetorical in the least.  Few of my questions are.

And suddenly - KA-BOOM - it finally IS spring!! The poem by e.e.cummings says it best:

in Just
spring     then the world is mud-
luscious  (…)
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
(…)
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s spring….

Those of you familiar with the poem will note that I have edited out the satanic balloon man and cummings' intimations of an imminent fall from innocence.  For now, let’s let spring be itself, free of literary symbolism. 
It might even be safe to stop talking about cleaning my muddy boots and actually do it.   Like Margaret Laurence, I am warned by my Scots-Presbyterian heritage never to let my guard done, but even so….  Our back garden is rocking with birdsongs, not all of which we can identify.  For the last month, I do know that a cadre of wild canaries has been camping in the ravine cleft.  They sing beautiful complex melodies which must have taken their whole first year to learn.  Jon and I once camped on a tiny island in Algonquin and were treated each dusk to a long serenade by a warbler we never identified.  I will never forget its song, though: the twenty-seven note melody was repeated perfectly, over and over ; the last note, the twenty-eighth, however, was always BLAT, a sound which bore no relation to its predecessors.  We concluded that he was an avian dropout who had lost interest near the end of the school year;  if you have ever watched tai chi sets performed on special occasions, you might notice that the last ten of the hundred plus moves often share the same fate.  (My tai chi sets have dodgy conclusions too . Occasionally I miss the slap entirely and knock myself over.)


Still, I get it.   Love is in the air.  Spring is so exciting that it’s hard to focus.  Warblers have joined the canary chorus and, as I write this, I can hear both hairy and downy woodpeckers hammering away at lunch.  Thanks to Pam’s binocs this morning, the hoarse croak Jon and I have been puzzled by has revealed itself to be a red-bellied woodpecker high in the dying black cherry tree.  Last night at the base of the hill Jon and I flushed a rabbit so big that his cotton-ball tail was more the size of a Kleenex box.  And everywhere there are deer.  We recently ran into some who actually approached us;  we learned later that neighbours had been feeding them raw carrots and broccoli (carrots, I understand, but come on…); anyway, we know that they get lots of green roughage from our sacrificial euonymus so we feel no obligation to provide even more luxurious items.  Any day now the infant raccoons will show up, sometimes up on the roofs that they had insisted on climbing in spite of their mothers’ strong objections;  by morning they are hysterical, bawling like the babies they are.  The moms are close by --  partly amused, partly annoyed, but  probably smugly confident that a lesson has been learned.

So a sincere welcome back, warm chaotic Earth!  And now that I can get a shovel into the ground, I’m going out right now to dig a worm for my moss garden, reminding myself that, because I think of it as a tiny glassed Eden, I should probably dig two.   Even a worm deserves a significant other.

 Well, the male canary has switched his shabby winter coat for a snazzy yellow one, the male cardinal is broadcasting territorial arias, and the canine bachelor next door is straining on his tether.     This universal male springtime behaviour suggests that spring may be in sight (although the recent ice storm nearly put paid to that hope).  We dodged the bullet, though, and Jon is busy in the basement, fibre-glassing and epoxying everything in sight.  He comes up to eat, but that far-away look in his eyes tells me that fishing season is opening soon and that canoeing will follow close on its heels.

There are so many things that Jon and I love about winter that it always comes as a bit of a surprise to feel totally pumped about spring.  We have a cold garden, always the last in the neighbourhood to bloom, so it’s not that.  It must be the light levels.  What is not to love about finishing dinner before the sun sets?  My I.Q. mirrors sunrise and  sunset, so I get a whole lot more accomplished in the sunny half of the year, and don’t ever ask me something complicated after dark.  I have started to locate and rummage through the gardening tools and might even clean and store the winter boots this week.  As with snow tires and male mania, timing is king in spring and fall.  

When it comes to beating everybody else in the garden to the draw, scylla is the uncontested champ.    We began decades ago with a single plant and now these dear sweet bulbs bloom everywhere:  they are my favourite spring flowers.  I try to corral them in the rock garden, only because it kills me to mow their little blue heads off several weeks from now, but this is an impossible task and so we end up with fanciful mowing patterns.  Luckily, they bring me inordinate pleasure and it’s a small price to pay for that brilliance of colour.  Within a few days the crocuses will open, happily surprising me yet again because I will be  reminded that they in fact are my favourites;   masters of survival like the scylla, croci even manufacture a miniature eco-system with their hairy leaves and petals. Before you know it, the blue violets will appear.  I usually decide that I like them the best.  You might sense a pattern developing.   It’s not that I can’t make up my mind;  it’s more about being a cheap date, as my husband observes. 

By then I will be past redemption,  hopelessly tantalized by the need to paint something, anything, which is deep blue;  keeping that in mind, if you walk past our garden in late April,  you might  find me doing The Photography Crawl;  simply put, I lie prone on the ground, use the close-up lens and try to think like an ant.    But digital photography saps the reds so the blues are never right, and I’m tired of guessing.   So if you catch me paint-splattered while recumbent or crouched in a flower bed, palette in hand, just do the decent thing, for heaven’s sake.  Don’t let on that you saw me.  I will do my best to ignore you too.  Thank you.

For those of you who correctly pointed out that my directions to the show were pathetic, I am here to make amends.  Riverwood is on the east side of the Credit, off Burnhamthorpe.  Turn left, if you are travelling west, at the first set of lights after the bridge.  The Credit Woodlands runs south at the lights and deadends while Riverwood begins on the north.  Park in the large parking lot to your left, a few hundred metres in.  Visual Arts Mississauga is just past the old reconstructed barn.

If you are coming in daylight, think about packing some walking shoes.  There are great walking trails and, make a plan to return in May  to see the beautiful gardens.  I try to remember to fill a pocket with sunflower seeds too, because the chickadees are friendly to a fault.  Just don't let them bully you.  Remember, they only weigh a few ounces and you don't.

If I’m lucky, somebody is feeding the waterfowl when I take my camera to the lakeshore.  I have my favourites, of course.  Ducks are to seagulls as skunks are to raccoons:  the politer cousins.  However this time there were no well-behaved ducks in sight, not even mallards, so I had to settle for the gulls, who, predictably shrieking and arguing, wheeled through the sky.  I set my camera for “sports” and hoped for the best.

This shot was a happy surprise for someone like me;  I am ham-handed with a camera.  We have a family joke that goes like this:  Did you see the shooting star?  No, where?    Did you see the fish jump?  No, where?  And so it goes.  Thus catching a seagull poised in the air came as somewhat of a surprise — a thrilling one, because the still point, her gimlet eye, is sharp, fixed on the edible target, while her wings are blurred with strength and purpose.  When I painted it this week, I realized that the image simply needed transfer, not adjustment:  it had a sharply detailed focal point within softened surroundings.  After all, it is the way our own eyes function, isn’t it?  Directing the viewer’s eye to the centre of interest is more easily said than done, but half of the fun of painting is problem-solving.  And once in a wonderful while, problems solve themselves (unlike the white-water canoeing photo which will need a complete reversal of soft and hard edges when I start it!).

The psychologist William James (Henry James' brother) said something interesting about the whole issue of focus:

"Millions of items of the outward order are present to my sense which never properly enter into my experience.  Why?  Because they have no interest for me.  My experience is what I agree to attend to.  Only those items which I notice shape my mind.  Without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.   Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word.  It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive."

There.  In a rather large nut-shell, that is pretty much what artists do:  manipulate selective interest.  We hope that the viewer agrees to attend to our choice.   Now let's step away from our screens and selectively focus on something we find beautiful.  That's it!  Ain't consciousness grand!

(As a side-note, Finding Nemo provided the only possible title!)