Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real.” (1491, by Charles C. Mann ).  Mann’s magnificent treatment of civilization(s) in the Americas prior to European contact repeatedly touches on the inextricable union of “culture” and “civilization,”  raising the issue of what constitutes “the real.”  If, then, “art” is the portal,  the “real” must be grounded in our emotional connect be it collective or individual.

My subject matter always engages both my eyes and my heart and I wonder if art is simply soul made visible.

Or audible, for that matter.  If Theodore were human, he would be a musician.  He’s refining the tenor repertoire and Pavarotti-like, greets any absence of over-an-hour with contrapuntal vocalizations toggling between Mozart’s Requiem and the Hallelujah chorus.  Jon says “Theodore cries like a girl.”  I say “Theodore sings his art with his whole heart."

I’m righter, by the way.

Charles Lamb wrote to William Wordsworth a bare week after his retirement “after thirty-three years’ slavery” in London, working for the East India Company:

The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me.  It was like passing from life into eternity.  Every year to be as long as three, i.e. to have three times as much real time, time that is my own, in it!  I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not.  But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift.  Holidays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys:  their conscious fugitiveness - the craving after making the most of them.  Now, when all is holyday, there are no holidays.  I can sit at home, in rain or shine, without a restless impulse for walkings.  I am daily steadying, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be my own master,  as it has been irksome to have had a master.

I am feeling guilty about griping last week and hasten to set the record straight.  My life is blessed.  I not only loved my job, but now I have the time to enjoy the love of my life in our (usually) quiet home;  we live in a country envied by many.  Best of all, I now make my own decisions how to use my time.   As a good friend said, “When you retire, every night is Friday night and every day is Saturday.”

So did I experience the tumult that Charles Lamb felt?  Not really.  For one, I finally began to feel rested after running on empty for too long.  A massive longitudinal study on sleep and its chronic lack in our society concluded that the majority of people have when the author termed a “sleep deficit” which must be paid back if the body is to remain healthy.  That deficit might amount to thousands of hours, a number which astonished me.  So retirement’s Job #1 was to catch up on my sleep.  No problem:  I LOVE sleeping.

The second unexpected bonanza was the opportunity to revel in the smorgasbord of options spread in front of me.  I sampled  for a year before deciding who I would be for this second half of my adult life.  Choosing art was like coming home.  I had never painted, but drawing and caricature have been a constant since I was a toddler.  We all seek “flow,”  that state of meditative peace, and painting volunteered to fit the bill;  both challenging and rewarding, it absorbs me completely.  Meeting a cadre of like-minded people was the icing on a very satisfactory cake.  Jon finds the same peace and happiness in fly-fishing and paddling.

Lamb's "restless impulse," however, did resonate.    It usually happens when I can't focus.  Today I returned to the fold, forsaking make-work projects concocted to avoid painting.  My ducks are back in their row, where both Lamb and I learned to keep them.  I have chosen and planned the next few paintings and, yes, Aisha and Theodore will be represented, as will as a mourning dove trying unsuccessfully to cover two adolescent chicks, a riverside turquoise canoe and the fat baby robin who appears in this Friday-night grisaille. 

Better get to bed;  tomorrow, eternally Saturday, is fresh new holyday.

I am in a painting slump.  This winter, for reasons you will remember, was anything but inspirational and my output was even scarcer than usual.  There were just as many small paintings — botanical or life studies of birds and small mammals, but I had neither the space, the focus nor the energy to tackle a large painting.  And it made me realize that they are the ones I live for.

I set today aside  to face down the challenge.  Mostly I mean to get back into the mood to put myself out there and take on something which, at the beginning, always overwhelms me. So now, after so long a break in practice, I am petrified.  But all today I have sifted through my multitudinous digitals,  winnowing out the ones which “spark joy” as they  put it, and maybe tomorrow I might prep a canvas and jump right in.  Can't be sure.  There must be other things to do first if I look around a bit.

In the meantime, let's stop peering into the dragon's mouth and change the subject.  Aren’t Jon’s twenty-five-year-old  ten-foot rhodos lovely?  He is our garden planner extraordinaire and the acid beds under these babies are exemplary.  I, on the other hand, am STAFF, all one of me.   I have finally caught on that Jon's job finished a quarter of a century ago;  my annual job is to dead-head them until the end of time.  I calculate that my contribution is up to about seventy-five hours by now. 

​Yeah, I knew he was smart when I married him.

 Let’s talk feet.

My childhood dream was to be a tap dancer, something I never stopped trying, to the vast amusement of those around me.  Probably taking lessons would have been smart.    Even now there is a pair of such shoes in my closet, forlornly tapping out distress signals.   

And now I find myself running short of cooperative toes.

When my quiet Chinese doctor bursts out with, “Let’s face it, Z’Anne — you have terrible feet” — the dance career is even more unlikely.  Even when I was a teenager, my GP held up one of my feet by its big toe and marvelled that all of the wear was in the wrong sections.  So I am to be a spectacle, am I?  And so every decade or so since , my body undergoes some mysterious seismic shift and I spend a couple of months in Monty Python’s Ministry of Funny Walks.   Right now I have two toes which lived together in peace until lately, where one of them is heading off to the Pacific while the one beside it is dead set on a Newfoundland vacation.  I really hope they don’t divorce.

But I still long for dancing and there aren’t enough weddings to satisfy the appetite.  That leaves Taoist Tai Chi, which is not only dance-like but great for balance and flexibility.  The dining room has been arranged to allow for me to do a full set.  Problem solved?  Nope.  In a word, Theodore.  Now that he has bonded with me, he joins the set, which now resembles a cartoon strip:

    
​    1. Thinking:  “Wave hands.’
    2. Saying:  “Excuse me, Mister!!”
    3. Thinking:  “Carry Tiger to the Mountain.”
    4. Doing:  Sliding the dog out of my way
    5. Thinking:  “Move Hands like Clouds.”
    6. Doing: Face-plant

And so it goes.

You are wondering what this has to do with art.   Well, feet are as big an obstacle there as in life.  For one thing, they are murder to draw --  asymmetrical as hell, looking completely different from every angle.   Like hands, they are bigger than we think.   A poorly drawn foot just plain looks ridiculous.  Getting them placed properly is also a challenge.  (Remember Degas’ five-legged race horse?)

This morning in the New York Times (hang in, I’m getting to the point), yet again we are treated to an X-ray analysis of a painting by a famous painter.  Yet again, there is endless academic speculation about what all of the changes mean. ….

Let me help:  Picasso simply didn’t like what he had and he fooled around until his third eye was satisfied.  End of story.  Every painter I know has done and will continue to do this from time to time.  If paint could record a sound track of such a reworked painting, it would report considerable colourful cursing, which would eventually die down to a satisfied grunt at least one whole layer later.  Otherwise the whole painting would have been ripped in two and ritually burned in the annual purge.   ​

Heaven help us all if our worst failures survive us and needlessly puzzle nerds with access to X-rays.  So, if I get hit by a bus because my warring toes defeat me, I am now authorizing my artist friends to celebrate my wake with a bonfire!  Knock yourselves out and don’t forget the marshmallows.  I thank you in advance.