Once in a while, I am reminded of how much work we have poured into this old house.  It goes without saying that every surface, inside and out, bears the stamp of a one project or another.  We are only the second owners, even though it had well over fifty years under its belt when we took it on, but the house was amazingly unspoiled thanks to decades of benign neglect.  The exterior trim was both original and intact, although a regretful colour, and thankfully no one had painted the woodwork.  We upgraded the heating and electrical systems and proceeded to make the old girl ours.  People say that the test of a marriage is hanging grass cloth together.  Yes it is.  So was sanding and staining an entire oak floor, while living in the cellar. Over the years this place has become as comfortable as an old shoe.  We do stairs in the dark, automatically counting them off.  Either of us can find the bathroom at 3 A.M. in any phase of the moon.  I thought the house and I were compadres.  You think you know somebody.

So it came as something of a surprise on Saturday morning when I stood up after cleaning the bathtub and rotated right into the end of the bathroom door.  We’ve been living here for over a third of a century and cleaning the tub is something I have done before.  But that cursed door has been playing the long game, patiently waiting decades for me to drop my guard.  I slammed into it so hard that my first thought was about teeth — my original and very expensive teeth.  Use them every day, as a matter of fact.  They were fine but my forehead was another matter.

Naturally I had screamed bloody murder.  Windows cracked and the dishes rattled.   I sat down on the bathroom floor to wait for Jon, who would certainly thunder up the stairs and comfort me.  Nothing.  Holding a rapidly swelling goose egg, I staggered down, whimpering.  Nothing.  Finally the hum in the TV room led me to find my beloved, who was wearing his new noise-cancelling headphones and cheerfully peddling away on his Tacx bike trainer.  Boy, those suckers really work.   He eventually noticed me. 

So a word of advice if you are in the market:  if you are buying noise-cancelling earphones for yourself, do so by all means.  I understand they reduce stress.  

But you might want to rethink their suitability as a gift item.

If at our house we tend to eat mainly whole food, it is partly due to its beauty, I suspect.  As you know, I am likely to paint at least one pear (see “Mlle Poire 2016”) annually, and it’s no secret that I have a thing about vegetables too.  Embarrassing to admit, but I once spent a week painting a Savoy cabbage.  And the GUILT when we finally ate it…..  So when a friend served me an hors d’oeuvre of glistening ratatouille yesterday, the sight of it was almost as pleasurable as the taste.  The magpie artist in me was delighted.

The corollary is that past-its-best-date-produce unnerves me.  You know - those zucchinis at the bottom of the produce drawer which transform themselves into ooze while you are making tea.   Or those elderly wrinkled parsnips which don't go gentle into that good night.  I don’t know about you but sometimes (usually when being artsy-fartsy rather than domestic) I get the unsettled feeling that a new life-form is brewing in my crisper.  


Sometimes it sort of is.  There was the year when I opened the fridge during the birthday luncheon for his dear grandmother and discovered that Jon’s dew worms had staged the great escape, stretching themselves out in the channels of corrugated plastic that manufacturers once used to cover the fridge bottom.   I tried to stifle the scream as that always unnerves guests.   Or the November that our resident green frogs found the fridge styraorm container(our pond was too shallow) a bit warm and got up to have a look around;  like clay Chinese warriors, there they stood, in perfect formation.  Luckily, we were eating alone that evening.  But I digress.


I write this to remind myself not only to give thanks for the bounty of food we enjoy, but to remember to make “fridge soup,”  as a dear friend calls it.   Never the same from week to week, home-made soup fashioned from odds and ends is nonetheless always good.  I like to think that somewhere in the crisper’s vegetative communal mind there is a dim hope to be stewed rather than abandoned to rot.

​Maybe that’s just the artist in me talking.

There’s been a lot in the news about da Vinci lately;  in fact a new biography characterizes him as possibly the most “diversely talented” human being ever.  Quite apart from his brilliance of invention, often centuries ahead of his time, da Vinci’s paintings continue to fascinate us.  The Mona Lisa is not a particularly beautiful woman but the way he rendered her image completely elevates the painting.


Lighting was part of the magic:  “You should make your portrait at the fall of the evening when it is cloudy or misty, for the light then is perfect.”   As a result, there are no strong tones anywhere.  Everything is muted, softened and a mood of calm dominates.


That is not to say there is a no detailed underpainting.   This is particularly noticeable in his “cartoon” (or drawing) of “Virgin and Child with Ste. Anne.”   Graceful but distinct lines of the drawing anchor the portraits.  I love the fact that the faces are exquisitely accurate;  people do not look alike and art with generic faces falls short for me.  He mustn’t have thought  feet were important — here they are crudely depicted, as is Ste. Anne’s hand (which he was probably having trouble placing) and the women’s headscarves.


Yet this solid linear structure is brought to glowing three-dimensional  life by means of softened darks and lights.  This kind of application is called sfumato --  “smokiness, ” which looks as if it might have been rubbed on by hand (we can see his palm print in one painting).  Again, in the fully painted major works, this sfumato dominates the work, and is achieved by multiple glazes using earth tones — ochres, siennas, umbers - on top of a restricted palette .   Martha Stewart’s “duck egg” palettes would be right at home.

I’ve been in the mood to return to portraiture.  Da Vinci reminds me that there’s nothing harder or potentially more beautiful.  Wish me luck.