It’s mid-summer and already the ecstatic blooming is beginning to slow. Only the hardiest and most drought-tolerant thrive now. Water-hauling is the order of the day in domestic gardens (which obediently reward us with predictable beauty), but it was wild nature that made me re-think colour theory this week. I was confronted with a breath-taking hillside of intermixed orange day-lilies and deep pink pea flowers. Core belief: there is no such thing as a bad colour if it chooses its friends carefully. Thanks to yesterday’s epiphany I now have to drop the “if” clause. I would never have planted pink and orange flowers side by side but that hillside proved me wrong. It sent me back to my digital record of paintings and the only one so far that gives me any credit at all for a colour brain is this one. It was in fact that same colour combination that had initially made me choose it. Thought for today while the portrait's most recent glaze is drying: might the portrait benefit from the same fresh colours! *


In search of even more strong colour, we took to the river a few days ago - Jon to scout for the subtle speckling of a trout and I to seek deep zenith blue reflected on water. Neither of us was disappointed. Several of my shots might even be worth translating onto the canvas. There were cobalts to be found, not only in the dome of sky but also in the patches of vervain which populated the river so, like a drunk at an open bar, I took a hundred digitals over the two-hour paddle. The shot I regret missing was that of a green heron. Even lovelier than great blues herons, if you are lucky you mightcatch sight these small neat fishers making short flights along the shore line before disappearing into the rushes. Only their bright orange legs quibble with the overall elegance of the green heron.

So how to mix a clear hot orange? Let's start with what not to do. Don’t mix a yellow that leans blue (lemon yellow, for example) with a red that leans blue (alizarin or magenta, say) in any medium if you want a clean colour. With all three primaries present, even if your two pigments are transparent, you will still end up with a duckegg tone. Here’s what you do instead: combine a warm (i.e. leaning red) transparent yellow such as stil de grain with a warm (leaning yellow) transparent red such as vermilion. Remember: warm with warm or cool with cool when mixing transparent primaries. Then sit back and remember high summer.


* The portrait is actually coming along fine but I am still in the afterglow of orange and pink.

​I’m just back from a holiday where I accomplished absolutely nothing.   I slept late, binge-watched Netflix, and read a gazillion books -- all without leaving home. I walked in fragrant gardens and towering forests while accompanied by my beloved Theodore.   My holiday required neither airports, nor time changes nor strange beds.  It was quite perfect and the the first time in months I feel rested.

But inevitably I reached the point where I was boring myself, let alone any poor soul stuck in my company (sorry, Darling).  This, I have come to recognize,  is a sign that I need to start a new painting, probably a  portrait.

It kills me that I am drawn to faces, where so many things can go, oh, so wrong.  The existence of facial recognition software makes the point that exact measurement is sufficient to identify one face out of millions.  Theoretically, all I need to do is to pull out the callipers.  (I often think of the famous story about Colville when his wife answered a reporter’s question about what he was working on by replying “I think he’s about to start a new painting.  He was measuring the dog this morning.”).  Because correct proportions and relationships are vital to portraiture,  I usually take the time to superimpose a grid as a template for free-hand drawing.  If I’’m lucky enough to get mostly everything right,  the human eye, which performs facial recognition unconsciously and perfectly, will not shout “Who the hell is that?” when confronted with the image of someone it actually knows.

A big ”however” follows.  If portrait painting were nothing more than careful measurement , cameras would have replaced paintings completely a century ago and live action animation would have been perfected.   Even when proportion-perfect, portraiture in oil is a brute exercise.  That same exactly-proportioned face is a mobile canvass of minute muscular movements.  In older faces, characteristic expressions have generally etched themselves into laugh lines or practised squints, but no matter the age, unless one has had too much “work” done and ended up with a frozen visage, faces are naturally mobile.   Having to work from multiple digitals is scary but often necessary to attain this marriage of appearance and expressed personality.

I will stop here for now, because the portrait that called me yesterday is in those early stages that are mostly about drawing and  some modelling of shape through burnt umber, red and yellow glazing.   All that I have done other than that is to establish the iconic turquoise glasses, whose colour will be echoed in the jewelry to come much later.  It's still really rough -- lots more fine-tuning and multiple layers to come.   

​More about “Masochism” aka “The Art of Portraiture” next week.  If you see that I have changed the subject, it might mean that the underpainting went south and is now cowering in a corner of the basement or worse.  Pray for us both.

By the way, if you live in Southern Ontario, do go out to your garden tonight after dark.  Fireflies everywhere!!

Among the books I am reading at the moment is one about giraffes. I hadn’t known was that the little knobby bits on their heads were called ossicones but was overcome by the desire to have one, I guess, because…..the half-blind painter striking again, I bent over to retrieve something from the wastebasket and didn’t register the dark corner of our Mission-style chesterfield. Surprise and a bit of screaming erupted when my forehead’s unstoppable force smashed into the corner of the immovable object. (By the way, Superman was wrong. No truce occurred. The immovable object won. ) On the other hand, I did discover that lying on the floor and howling draws dogs; when Rover comes over to check you out, just grab his muzzle and apply his cold wet nose to the boo-boo. Theodore actually suppressed his own scream and just let me do it, proving once again that dogs are the best. Several bags of frozen vegetables and a good sleep later, the big red boulder has shrunk into an aggie; if you didn’t play marbles as a kid, let’s just say it’s smaller if still mighty tender. And my ever-helpful husband just offered the observation that I look like a baby unicorn with a good start on an off-centred horn. Maybe there will be rainbows.

It’s the kind of weather that is more likely to produce thunder and lightning storms in the afternoons. Mammals saner than the chippie who lives under the feeder are probably choosing siestas over food. The only other ones we have seen were a pair today of large opossums in a tangle (siblings? more than that?). Scruffy as always, they sauntered off trying to look casual. We don’t often see possums so it’s good to know they are succeeding. One theory of their territorial spread to Southern Ontario posits that they crossed the Rainbow Bridge travelling on truck manifolds. Warm and convenient. I find marsupials fascinating because the embryos actually find their own way to the exterior pouch and their mother’s milk. Whether you like their appearance or not, you have to admit that’s pretty darn impressive. I don’t know about you but my embryonic self didn’t do much in the way of solo travel.

There are birds around, of course. They all drop by the feeder but there’s better stuff available this time of the year. In fact they are probably experiencing un embarras du choix: (What should we have for dinner? I simply can’t decide!) There are the usual huge mulberry trees covered with sweet fruit but the big news this year in our garden is that the amelanchier (serviceberry) finally produced quantities of fruit. We called them saskatoons when I was a marble-playing kid and they are toothsome. This amelanchier was expensive but it’s proved its worth this year, treating us to fat, if somewhat diarrhetic, robins hanging from it. We are counting on those robins to plant a bunch more.

One of the joys of summer birdwatching is sorting out parents and kids. Baby birds look like adults but still behave like kids (think teenagers). There’s a male cardinal right now who hasn’t mastered the art of landing on the squirrel-proof peanut feeder. He is trying to hover like a hawk or a humming bird. Like every young adult, he wants to do it by himself, while reserving the right to ask Mom and Dad for handouts. He’s flown off now, probably to do just that.

And so the perennial story plays out in our garden, as it does in yours. I have to keep reminding myself that four months ago ice and snow and mud ruled. This season sees me taking multiple shots of summer’s bounty, which I store until the winter when my soul craves colour. In particular, I need to remember that my digitals won’t do full justice to reds because I can see that every time I take a picture. I will write myself a note to read in January, even though I already know I won’t believe it.

Probably "glaze oil" is such a slow and deliberate process,  I always feel a little pang when someone acquires a piece of mine.  The Renaissance method of building from an underpainting and employing transparent glazes always feels more like a long marriage than a one-night stand with the canvas.   We are, of course, wildly overstocked with these exes of mine at home, but they don’t languish in storage — I believe in moving paintings around before they become part of the wallpaper.  And they certainly do.

But though I don't balk at wandering through the house and moving every single painting, for the most part I draw the line at moving furniture.  Because our living room is longer than wide, the current furniture arrangement was a necessity.  That was a no-brainer after having seen what the renters had done to it:  the sofa and chairs all sat with their backs to the wall, leaving a huge empty space in the middle; there wasn’t a conversational grouping to be found.  You imagined having to yell back and forth.  That was the first thing to be addressed once we had redone the floors and the walls.  It was an extremely hot summer and we still wouldn't have a/c for another thirty years.  By the time we had placed the sofa to address the fireplace from the middle of the room,  we had been reduced to a pair of wet rags, so we must have made some sort of tacit agreement that it would stay here and so it has.   So has everything, actually.  There is only one occasional chair which moves around and Jon inevitably complains.

He would have had more to complain about in the house I grew up in.  My mom had no such compunctions about predictable domestic geography.  Dad and I would arrive home in the evening to find everything but the piano in a different spot.  (For some reason Mom never moved paintings either.  I suppose that was in line with our being mirror-twins of one another — both with scoliosis but on different sides, and one left-handed, the other right).  And to be fair she exorcised her furniture habit only during the day so it was relatively safe to walk through the dark house at night.

One of my English professors, Bob Stewart, was blind, so his whole life was something of a dark house.  He was handsome, had a touch of a southern accent which did no harm when teaching American lit, and went everywhere with Yutte, his German Shepherd guide dog.   When he asked me out, I accepted readily.  We met at his apartment and walked together to see The Barber of Seville at the Playhouse.  It didn’t immediately strike me that I was standing in for Yutte that night but after walking Bob into a guy wire, I smartened up and we got there and back without a fatality.  At the apartment was a supper of pre-cooked frozen food  to reheat.  I insisted on helping with the dishes.

A month later, Bob let it casually drop that it had taken him weeks to locate his kitchen utensils.  Yutte had no serious competition.

Our shaded house is not nearly as well organized as Bob’s apartment was so we misplace things all the time.  The worst offender is Jon’s beloved Hardy fishing cap, which demands semi-weekly searches because it could and does turn up anywhere and Jon can’t imagine life without it.  My most highly-motivated searches usually involve paintings.  Because they go up and down according to the season and my mood, I often don’t miss something for months.  Suddenly, as Sherlock would say, “The Game is On!”  More than once after an anguished two-day hunt, I realize that it has been hiding in full sight and I think “Time to  move that one!  Wallpaper!”

Even if I remember that the painting is in fact gone and now living with someone else, it is a lovely feeling to walk into that home and see one of your exes on the wall.  Kismet all over again.