I think I might have finished the portrait I had promised and so today I concentrated on the owl I am currently besotted with.  I had already laid in both the value and the colour foundations.  It sounds hokey, but this stage of final glazes is honestly the one I live for!

And what exquisite white heart-shaped faces barn owls have.  Their eyes are deep pools of burnt sienna with black edges and murmurs of reflected light.  Tones of pinks, ceruleans, ochres can be glimpsed beneath the snowy feathers which are wrapped in a bonnet of creamy caramel punctuated with white and black polka dots. Most surprising of all, their  fierce beaks are a delicate shell pink!  Unfortunately neither their looks nor their usefulness have been sufficient to ensure their futures;   they are, of course, as endangered as the barns they depend upon.  Jon and I have seen only one in the wild.

I could never have dreamt up such loveliness;  I think most realist painters simply recognize it and then feel compelled to attempt to honour it wherever it is found.  That's where our hearts reside.

Addendum:  I emailed this to The Owl Foundation just to check if it looked my barn owl was correct;  to my enormous delight, the reply simply said "We think it is Barnaby,"  as if they had guessed how important it is for me to paint the specific rather than the general, the individual rather than the group, that dear survivor rather than anyone else in the world.  If you know anyone who might be interested in purchasing it from The Foundation, please contact me for price.  Thanks.

Re-setting our brains to understand that Honky the snowy owl was male, was nothing compared to the surprise we had  some time ago with Bijou, our hand-raised blue-and-gold macaw.  

Bijou was all boy, finding adventure in rapidly learning to release a series of cage closures which culminated in keyed padlocks;  we finally resorted to hanging the key on a shoestring because otherwise he would simply reach through the bars and turn it if it was left in the padlock.  A boistrous 'Hi!" would announce each successful escape.  Bijou loved to play, and we learned to say "Ouch" loudly for him to temper the pressure of his 900 lb-per-sq-inch beak.  There is the true story of a break-in gone very wrong  when someone made the mistake of trying to grab a macaw;  although nothing was missing, the trail of blood was unmistakable.  In fact, the would-be thief left with less than he had arrived with.  I hope it wasn't his favourite finger.

If Bijou liked what I cooked for dinner, he said "Mmmmm, good!"; silence conveyed its own judgment.  He adored Jon and often rode around the house on his shoulder, cleaning Jon's ear with his surprisingly-pleasant dry-black-leather-purse of a tongue.   The night he taught himself to fly, he flew right over a dinner party and made a right turn in the living room to land on the perch at the far end.    He was offered a movie role by someone who saw him perform this manoeuvre when being boarded.  Although we declined, his athleticism made us proud.

And so  we lived happily for eighteen years until I made the mistake of giving Bijou a pingpong ball.  His mood began to darken and he started to play much too roughly. Whatever he was thinking,  he meant business. Then Bijou began hoarding the ball in the back of the closet where he and Gussie the parrot slept at night;  it got to be murder to get him up on his sleeping perch and one evening I found myself towering above him while we screamed at each other.  It was no contest:  "Pound-and-a-half" could out-yell me.  We were both nuts with frustration.

The next morning there was a broken pingpong ball on the floor under his perch......A broken pingpong ball with a yoke???   OMG, Bijou's a GIRL!!!!!  The guilt.  The poor soul had been trying first to hatch a fake egg and then desperately to excavate a cavity in a dark space to lay a better one!  All I had done was to create a problem and prevent her from solving it.  

All we could think of to do was to remove the pingpong ball and thankfully all became calm as her hormones diminished.  But what a paradigm shift!    We couldn't get our pronouns right and Jon and I realized that we might be guilty of major gender stereotyping.

Was female Bijou was being described in a new vocabulary?  Was she suddenly all jewel tones with a powdery white face accented with thin black lines of makeup?  Was she flirty and coy when she would let herself be rolled across the bed in a blanket and emerge to proclaim "Kitty-kitty-poo-poo!" ?   Was her screaming "anguished" rather than "aggressive"?  Somehow our limbic systems had decided that "she" was a different kettle of fish.

It certainly gives you sympathy for people who have had a family member undergo gender re-assignment.

I'm grabbing a few stolen minutes here on the website because my iMac been playing hide-and-go-seek-the Internet with me;  I go seek, but he's hiding!  Despite our history of great and meaningful searches together, he won't even play  "load the Internet" any more or, when he does, it's often just a tease because we set out for a destination but never seem to get there.   Even when we occasionally arrive together like this (assuming I will be able to post it), I'm frantic, trying to think of all of the things I need to do or say before the next time he totally denies ever having met me.

Maybe Mac's and my hard-wiring are just working at cross-purposes.  They say that neurons that "fire together, wire together".   Well, if "practise makes perfect" as my grandma would more clearly have put it, I'm the only one getting lots of practise.  

Yes, I know I am sounding petulant.  Kvesh, kvesh, kvesh.  But Mac and I have been best friends for five happy years;  at least I thought so.  He's big and handsome.  We meet every day.  I still think of him as young, just ready to start school,  but maybe OS X Version 10.6.8 is starting to believe his press and feeling like an old guy.  If that's the case, we're both toast for I too have A Major Birthday approaching.   Apparently we're both Old Age rather than New Age.  What to do?

You know you're in trouble when outrageous solutions begin to sound reasonable -   I have started pondering if an extra shot of electricity would help.  The Atlantic Monthly has just reported new experimentation with brain enhancement which involves electrical stimulation to particular parts of the cortex.  If I had any idea where Mac's brain was I would give him one good zap - CPR for the CPU?  

Failing that, I shall haul him out of the studio and its stone walls to see if that helps.  

HELLO!!  Okay, we did that and voila!!  Whoever wrote "Stone walls doth not a prison make" hadn't met Mac. We're BAAACK!  

Benjamin Franklin observed that "Fightings and Paintings are best viewed from a distance."  True.  But at what distance?  Being a man, Franklin might also have added, "Size matters."  

As you know, each time I begin a new project, I struggle with this issue.  Partly it is a question of where the painting is to be hung.  While paintings for small rooms usually have smaller dimensions, optimal viewing distance is not automatically a function of image size, although the two are certainly related.  Occasionally one comes across a huge canvas with infinite detail or a tiny canvas with bold strokes.  

The image size in relation to the subject's size is another issue.  Georgia O'Keefe famously enlarged botanical painting to great effect.  An enormous face would be another matter, although I have gone as far as doubling dimensions, as in this portrait of Jon.

Right now I am painting owls.  Half way into a portrait of a barn owl, I am wondering if it should have been smaller;  we have a close friend, Tom,  who has always lived on a farm and who used to see them frequently.  He made me realize that these lovely birds are petite and almost dainty.  I think I shall continue this particular  painting but may try harder to paint  those to come life-size because a series is in order.

Visiting the Owl Foundation this fall thanks to my friend Sandy reinforced my long love of owls, a leaning which I have inherited from my mother.  It is a spectacularly successful owl rehabilitation centre, world-class in my opinion.  While its buildings are neither new nor expensively constructed, they embody the insights of decades of observation.  Everything on the property reflects the intelligent intent and hard work of the McKeevers and those who have joined their mission to save injured owls.  There was, I admit,  only one small shock -- finding out that Honky was a male (!) (see May 15),  if an unusually enormous one.  

So I offered to donate some owl paintings - both the originals and the rights to the image.  Most people don't realize that, unless it is stated otherwise, copyright (and therefore reproduction right) is retained by the artist. Sometimes the image is more useful to a charity than the original, which can only be sold once.  Cards can be produced indefinitely if the public finds an image appealing.  I hope each painting will help provide the real owner of the image with a better life.

Jon and I were granted several minutes of pure grace last week.  The last sky light was fading on a country road when he spotted a "murmuration" of starli​ngs.   There were hundreds of them, perhaps over a thousand, and the dancing flight must have just begun, for as it wheeled and shape-changed we saw small groups still winging their way into it like teens late to a great party .  Jon pulled  into a sideroad and I  turned on my camera;  re-playing it, we realized that the starlings' "murmurs" are inaudible.  All we can hear are our own gasps of pleasure as we watched it through the windshield for several minutes.  Brilliantly set to Pachelbel's Canon (which is Jon's and my song, by the way), this lovely YouTube lasts for almost four minutes and sets me to swaying on my chair.   

These joyous congragations occur certainly after the nesting season is over and probably only when food is plentiful in the autumn.  In fact, I suspect that they are practise flights for the young, who will soon migrate.  I have read that physicists find the shape-morphing of mathematical interest, as they are much too complex to be attributed to  a single leader.  But surely, beyond their biological and mathematical marvels as the murmurations swing from teardrop to boomerang to comma, every individual starling must be drunk on the sheer glory of group dance.

What became even more touching was the way our private performance ended.  Bit by bit, the party-goers went home to bed, simply dropping unceremoniously into treetops in what I assumed were loosely-related kinship groups.  I would love to know who had held out the longest, unwilling to say goodnight and  forsake the wild abandon of the sky.  Maybe it was just the teenagers.  Within two minutes, all had tucked themselves in and the sun was free to set.  We sat in silence for several moments of gratitude.

I admit to having no photos of flocks.  The best I can offer you - you who have been steeped in regular colour -  is this watercolour of our dear orange-wing parrot.  Having decided to paint him in a variety of poses along a branch, I realized that such a scene was impossible for pair-bonders unless the kids had not yet left for university.  So instead I just called it "Gussie, Gussie, Gussie, Gussie, Gussie."

I'm in the process of painting a commissioned portrait for the friend of a friend.  Our first conversations dealt indirectly with the issue of the unity of medium and subject matter.  She had looked at my website and realized immediately that there were some portraits which would not accurately reflect the gentle nature of her mother;  in particular, she did not want the style of "The Private Joke,"  which I had painted of Jon.  

You will note that this painting is done on a wood panel.  While I gessoed the surface slightly, I deliberately left the grain because Jon's deepest soul is that of a nature-loving outdoors kind of guy.  Whenever we have done remote wilderness canoe trips on big unpredictable rivers, I am a trembling mess while Jon becomes almost meditative.  One of our family jokes is that, when I complain of hypothermia, Jon's inevitable and honestly-puzzled reply is "I'm toasty."  The bigger the physical challenge, the more relaxed he gets.  When his all-male canoeing group trip whitewater, he's usually the one to run  the loaded canoes through the white water while the others portage.  I treasure the several pictures I have of this;  his face glows with exertion and happiness.  There's something of that look in this portrait.  Picture a paddle down to the left.

So, using a rough substrate and dark colours was the right choice for my beloved, who is enjoying a completely satisfactory (because active) moment.  While both Jon and the subject are quiet and private, her version is the feminine one.    I am working on that portrait now and muttering  "soft" and "gentle"  to myself.  To begin with, the canvas is much smoother than the wood.The colours will be feminine rather than high-key, the edges soft and even lost at times.  I'm still deciding how much or how little to detail her sweater, which has strong contrasts in it;  my inclination is to render it by suggestion.  I think it will be titled "Quiet."


And just so you know that I didn't forget that promise in April (just misplaced my notes), here are four French artists who rendered skin tones brilliantly:  Caillebotte,  Ingres, and early Renoir (at least in "Young Boy with Cat).

Additional thoughts on asymmetry have been plaguing me today.  They were in part inspired by one of those unsettling discoveries one makes in front of a mirror.  It had not escaped my notice that my right temple is greying nicely;  on the left, nada.  To add insult to injury, I peered close enough today to realize that the same thing was happening to my eyebrows!  I was idly plucking grey hairs out and suddenly realised that one eyebrow had left the stage while the other was babbling on as usual.

To be fair, I have always been out of whack;  a lifetime of physio has been punctuated by each physiotherapist's enthusiastic announcement,  "Your spine has a double S-curve!" as if this were an outcome devoutly to be wished.  Years of Taoist Tai Chi have largely disguised my crooked nature but I must admit that the eyebrow thing has me flummoxed.  What to do?  Bleach one or dye the other?   Shave and pencil in a Marlene Dietrich?  Hardly a philosophical problem but something to think about.  (I lead a very quiet life.)

Flowers can be of two basic shapes:  actinimorphic, which means that they are essentially rounded and look the same no matter where you put the diameter (think carnation), and zygomorphic, which means that you can only cut them in half along one line (think pea flower).   In both cases, the demand of symmetry is met.  Most animals are the same, or at least that is their biological intent, but not all of us succeed.

On a side note, Brits refer to "crooked cops" as "bent coppers."  Different phrases, same image, same meaning.

I think I shall have to embrace my asymmetry because it is certainly an essential element in my paintings and, indeed, in those of most visual artists.  Most of us go to considerable trouble to avoid plunking the focal point in the middle.  There are four sweet spots on any rectangle and even realistic images are placed to take advantage of one or even two of these.  For example, I find drooping tulips far more interesting than fresh ones because they are lopsided and therefore graceful (note logic).  In the waterlily series, the waterlily stems often  issue from a single focal spot, leading the eye back over and over to the water-dropleted leaves.  I see from my work-in-progress notes that I sometimes change my mind about how to weight a painting and may rethink the composition part way through, even turning the canvas upside-down at completion.  

A friend owns two Tom Forestall paintings which cleverly solve the problem of which side is up.  As always, Forestall fools around with canvas shapes.  This time he chose rounds and mounted them on ball bearings so that the paintings could be rotated to new angles.  Brilliant.  And incredibly expensive to do. 

In the interest of both time and money, I just put two wires on it and flip it at solstice.  My Beloved has always thought it a compliment to call me a cheap date;  I modestly agree.

One of the best things about paddling is direct access to a turtle's-eye view of riverbanks.  One of the worst thing about paddling is being the bow paddler and therefore responsible for rock-spotting;  there are far better things to look at.  For example, when we paddled in August with our friends, Brian and Marilyn, the sunny banks were dappled with knapweed, Joe Pyeweed, turtleheads and at least two species of lobelia - Kalm's and cardinalis.  Through all of them angelica poked their tall fat heads.  Flocks of cedar waxwings wheeled overhead, handily nabbing flying insects and looking far nattier than they do in late winter when they get drunk on fermented crabapples and hang by one leg while squabbling.  On the water, mergansers, great blue herons and flocks of Canada geese concentrated on eating;  only the kingfishers on overhanging branches expressed their outrage at our intrusion.  And everywhere, cedars.

It is only in the last few decades that I've come to appreciate white cedars.  Granted, Western Red Cedars become enormous and stately but what our cedars lack in biomass they make up in longevity and beauty.  Tiny bonsaied cedars cling to the Niagara Escarpment, core sampling having revealed that many were alive when Columbus "discovered" America.  A TED talk on ancient plants enumerates much older ones but none more elegantly assymetrical.  Their complex curvature created by the roots' patient search for purchase on the low rocky shore is particularly visible from the canoe and I frequently photograph them.  The blue-grey tones of the aged wood  contrast magnificently with the complementary Indian reds of the cedar duff.  This scene which so strongly draws me is more portrait than landscape, I realize.  To paint it is my gesture of respect for venerable survivors.

I am reminded of a poem that my mother embroidered for her own mother many years ago.  It begins with the wish "Let me grow lovely growing old" as do "so many old things"  like silks and pearls and treed streets.  The  poem ends with "So why not I, as well as they/ Grow lovely, growing old."    Our ancient cedars provide the same inspiration. 

While I've never been very good at saying no, I actually do have my limits.  For example, Jon rarely sees one of my large landscapes (some without any water at all) without suggesting that the presence of a fish jumping would enhance the entire effort; so far I have actually held the line (oh dear, a fishing metaphor), adamantly refusing to add a brook trout to a stretch of wet pavement or to paint him kissing a huge salmon before releasing it back into the Restigouche.  (He's not the only man, by the way, who has tried to convince me to paint him clutching a huge fish;  sometimes the only reference material available is a tattered photograph.  I live in fear of such commissions.)  

Even Jewell watched for fish, leaning out over the canoe's gunnel whenever she spotted one.  I always suspected that Jon had put her up to it.  It had taken us three days to get her into a canoe at first.  Day One: pull the canoe up on shore, fill with cushions and cold drinks and books.  Spend day in canoe.  Day Two:  Repeat, but with the addition of the dog, who had begun to feel left-out on Day One.  Day Three:  Launch.  She never missed a paddle after that and would leap in before either of us could board.  She never did master white-water paddling and remained content to let us do all of the work.  She was just there to watch fish.  As far as I know, she was not Jon's natural offspring but still....

Her sense of adventure presented a new problem.  Skyes neither like swimming  nor are they particularly good at it.  So we agreed that she should have a PFD.  I bought one at Petsmart and tried repeatedly to get it onto her.  No dice.   Obviously,  all she needed was a demonstration.  It actually fit me reasonably well and I congratulated myself on applying lateral thinking during the two days I wore it.  When that failed to persuade Jewell, I gave up and returned it.  The clerk asked me if it had been worn and I replied, "Well, yes and no...."   I'm sure that customer training seminars still persist in regarding this as an apocryphal story.

Jon has had to content himself with fishy portraits sans people and I know he imagines himself to be just inches away, in the act of presenting the perfect original fly.

To continue my line of thought about Simon's Cat, "Fetch" is my favourite, although "Hot Water" comes close.  The star of "Fetch" is, of course, the cat, who nonchalantly sends a keen but gullible dog  chasing a series of increasingly malevolent tosses.  Naturally I identified with the dog.

The first time I actually noticed my being duped by another animal was near Victoria.  Jon and I had come into town to watch the Branagh Hamlet;  we had also heard that California sea lions were hanging around  one of the local parks so that too was a must-see.  There was quite a gaggle of onlookers and I was absorbed by these giant creatures who dwarfed the fool in a wetsuit swimming far too close to them.  I felt a rubbery thud against my heel, lowered my binoculars and turned around.  There was a dog, who was panting and telegraphing his desire to have me throw the toy he'd heaved at my foot.  Naturally I obliged and went back to the sea lions.  A minute later, a second thud.  I threw again, this time a bit farther away.  Then a third round.  My arm was tiring.  When he interrupted my field biology reverie the fourth time, I heaved the kong as far as I could, saying "Now that's the LAST time!" and muttering under my breath, "I wonder who that silly dog belongs to."  A woman stepped forward from the throng and confessed, "He's mine but he often pretends he doesn't know me when we're out.   (deep breath and a sigh)  He likes to pick up women."

Even my beloved Jewell played me.  Although they are positively loaded with virtues, Skyes are not noted for their obedience.  Jon's crazy dream was to have a dog who would play fetch with him.  After much coaching and even demonstration (far too embarrassing to explain), she deigned to fetch the ball one sunny Saturday.  Having demonstrated that she understood the concept, Jewell never fetched another one.  And until the finality of her decision sunk in, someone - not Jon, The Throwing Arm - had to go repeatedly and retrieve the rotten ball.  

Robertson Davie's novel, Fifth Business, takes its title from theatre.  The term distinguishes the stars of the cast  from the supporting character ("fifth business"), whose functions are to observe and advance the action indirectly.  

It's important to understand one's relative position whether on stage or in the cosmology.  Mine is not at the centre.