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Owners of the Night

24/7/2017

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hidden in the grass:
dreaming voles,


firefly province,

wasps in the palace
they’ve hollowed under the hill.


Mole resting his face against his splayed hands.


Mark Doty’s poem “The Owner of the Night” nails it.  Nature, especially on summer nights,  reveals itself to be populated by legions,  our companions on this living planet.   For one thing, the insect chorus after dusk is deafening even before you add the frog baritones who chimed in until  we reluctantly gave up on having a pond during the West Nile crisis.  Their combined voices created a friendly white noise which has lulled us to sleep for decades.

Individually, not so much.   One September night a persistent cricket  had the almighty nerve to bring his grinding love serenades indoors.  He was hiding inside the staircase, I judged, so  I waited with a shoe ready but he survived to woo again.

On the topic of sleepless nights, here’s a trick for dropping off:  imagine what or who is in your garden.  Only feet away from your bed there are whole quiet families in full swing.   The dayshift - chipmunks and squirrels and hawks - may be sound asleep but nocturnal  lives are lived just as fully.  I realize that it is considered odd to admit this but you know that I am no stranger to “odd.” so finding a mother raccoon and two rambunctious kits asleep on the stone window ledge outside the bedroom was a gift.  They stayed for several days, Mom searching for food at night and coming home exhausted to nurse and even tolerate her fully-rested babies’ hijinks.  Once they mastered climbing the old vine on that wall, she moved them  - presumably to yet another learning centre.  We felt graced by their visit.

Jewell, our first Skye terrier, always went out at night before we all went to bed.   There are coyotes, even coy wolves, in the river ravine behind us and every year we heard reports of small dogs who have been snatched and devoured, so one night I insisted on accompanying Jewell.  She was not amused.  It turned out that she had an elaborate and difficult route, some of which involved climbing under fences and tracing exact perimeters.  Maybe she was just trying to shake me because the baleful glances she periodically delivered made no bones about the violation of her privacy.   After that we reluctantly allowed her to wander alone after dark but not without the instruction “Try not to get eaten.”

Can’t say that I’ve ever painted a mole.  We see their wee drowned bodies on paths after a rain but this opossum -  North America's only marsupial - peeking out of the dark is fully alive, sporting both a face and splayed hands so I hope she will do.  I like to think that in the moist secrecy of her pouch, her embryonic babies are already learning to love the dark.
Picture
"Opossum" oil on canvas 8 x 10
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Sinister Mom, Gauche Husband

12/7/2017

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Picture"First Cast of the Evening" acrylic underpainting, oil final glazes"
Statistics show that the human race selects against left-handedness, which is estimated at occurring in only about one person out of ten. 

That has not been my experience.

Having a left-handed mom who herself was born to a right-hander drove predictable outcomes.  Grandma was unable to pass on her considerable skills in sewing and knitting to my mother;  in turn Mom was unable to pass her own skills to me.  To this day I tie my bows upside down.  Small children smirk.

Even allowing for the well-known fact that lefties are over-represented in the arts, an inordinately large number of good friends - especially other painters -  are left-handed too, .

Leaving aside the issue of friends, what were my statistical odds of going on to marry a left-handed man? One hundred to one, actually [one-tenth multiplied by one-tenth])!     Of course by then  I had accumulated a repetoire of accommodations such as  automatically sitting to the right so as to avoid elbow competitions,  but once again the household leftie demonstrated skills that I could only dream of.   In this painting you will notice with which hand Jon is effortless casting.

Although I have tried to advance the argument that my beloved was dropped on his head as a baby, in my heart I am consumed with envy.    Lefties can boast ambidextrous manoeuvres — whether doing simultaneous two-handed mirror writing on a blackboard or just switching hands "whenever".  Righties are so jealous that we turned words like “sinister” (“left” in Latin) and “gauche” (“Left” in French) into insults!

Having only one working hand really worries me.  When my dismount from a recent caterpillar hunt was less than adroit  (Maple tree - 1;  Z’Anne - 0), my first thought was “Did I break my good hand?” 

Note to Self:  Always try to land on your useless hand, Lady Klutz.  Better still, aim for your head and hope for the best.   Right?  (Should that be "Left?")

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War Zone Meditations

10/7/2017

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Picture
I’ve been thinking about insects these days. Even granting the importance of saving old trees, our daily practice of murdering gypsy moth caterpillars and smashing their pupae inevitably gives rise to meditations on what the ethicists call “interest.” Both tree and insect have an interest in survival and some years only one wish can come true. I know which side I chose this year.

Don’t misunderstand me to assume that I am unadmiring of insects. They will surely survive us, if only because of their evolutionary decision to produce multiple offspring. One of my favourite Larsen cartoons shows a praying mantid addressing a host of babies - hers of course; standing at a podium reminiscent of a graduation ceremony, she is dryly reminding them that virtually all of them will shortly be toast. (Another cartoon gem shows two mandids facing each other. One has just said “You slept with her, didn’t you?” and at that point you notice that the other one is missing his head. Don’t get me started on mantids. Did you know that they, unlike other insects, can turn their heads? But I digress…..).

Although Kafka mined the horror of waking up as a cockroach, the miracle of metamorphosis just blows my socks off. I once and only once witnessed a dragonfly emerging from its armoured nymphal stage; on a rocky riverbank, the soaking wet juvenile crawled out of the water to shed its skin and proceeded to steadily pump up two pairs of gossamer wings. What a sea change — from aquatic grazing to aerial hunting within an hour. I wondered at the time if that new helicoptering adult might have been experienced a sense of surprise and thrill at the speed of flight (over 30 mph) and the huge field of vision afforded by composite eyes. I certainly felt it and would be surprised that this new grownup had not.

This magic hour was surpassed only by the great luck of catching a Monarch emergence. That miracle happened during an Eid celebration which we were attending so I herded up the kids to come and watch with me. There are so few Monarchs left that I had almost forgotten the exquisite turquoise transparency of the chrysalis which was surpassed only by the jewel tones of the new adult. Again, it took less than an hour for this miraculous metamorphosis to complete. Appropriately, the kids watched with something akin to reverence.

This ancient watercolour of Gussie is a reminder of how he loved to stay outside, luring anyone from chipmunk to butterfly into his cage for a visit. Though Gussie's eyes are soft with happiness I doubt that his feelings were shared by the butterfly, who, judging from its immediate exit, was probably more persuaded of the likelihood of being devoured. Any insect in our back yard must be sharing the same mortal worry these days. We live in hope of returning soon to our preferred model -- The Peaceable Kingdom - though we do notice the lambs are getting less and less cooperative about lying down with the lions.  After all, they belong to different voting blocs, don't they.

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Ignorance without Bliss

3/7/2017

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“You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.”
― Walt Whitman


Sure, Walt.  Now try getting away with this this while painting a familiar face.  Better still, a canoe.  

No dice, huh?  I was reminded of this, as usual, the hard way.  Back in the underpainting stage, I decided to tilt our lovely old cedar-strip canoe so that the viewer could spy its deep red body;  well, didn’t this turn out to be an act of wilful self-injury.   By the time  the painting and I were into final glazes, that canoe and I were in a fight to the death.  No matter what gunnel lines I adjusted,  our beloved canoe just looked more and more drunk.  My “vagueness - ignorance, credulity” didn’t do one good thing for a watercraft which was increasingly resembling Farley Mowat’s famous  “boat who wouldn’t float.”

Well, I’m the painter so occasionally I remember to exert some control.  Now the canoe sits as straight as a prim Victorian miss, only its decking visible.  And because you no longer ”know” that it is a splendid red, I shall have to settle for telling you.  (My favourite 18th century novel was Tristram Shandy;  Sterne was the first novelist to allow the reader to imagine something for himself.)  So please imagine a deep rich singing red.

Come to think of it, you probably would have assumed that anyway..…  Okay, then.  The game is on.  What if I tell you that this canoe is deep forest green? 

​
Stay tuned.  There’s lots of layers still to come.
Picture
30 x 40 glaze oil unfinished
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    Picture

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