Hammering a nail both safely and effectively still eludes me, but,  like every other painter, I yearn to nail something, be it only a cast shadow.  I am presently working through the underpainting layers of a portrait, hoping to capture realistic tones.  The translucency of skin needs to hint at  living flesh below it while its surface bears witness to a life lived.  (Jon has a duelling scar - bet you didn’t know that).  On top of that, so to speak, any shadows on the skin must also reflect any adjacent colours, so if you are wearing a red broad-brimmed hat, the shadow it casts on your face will have red tones.  Fun to try, hard to pull off.

So I asked myself, “What are the easy parts of a portrait?”  Certainly not the initial rendering, or you end up with somebody else, even (God forbid) a late Picasso.  And even if you get the features in the right relationship to one another, the eyes can trip you up.  Whatever colour the irises, they need to be painted transparently even if almost black.  And the reflective spot of light in the pupils!  Put those in the wrong place and - zap - you might find an unsettling stare looking back at you for eternity.  Worse still, they might point the eyes in different directions and eternity will be spent trying to sort out the gaze.

Let’s take a positive tack and assume that all of the above has gone reasonably well, myriad pitfalls have been avoided, and it is clear sailing ahead.  I was cheered to read that I am not the only person relieved and relaxed  when challenge is nearly over:  in the words of a theatre critic describing his perfect day, his Sunday Times article would only require him to take “great pains about  semicolons and such-like (because) the only thing I really enjoy about writing is the punctuation.”   James Agate then goes on to say that the painter Millais “once confessed that the only thing he enjoyed about portrait-painting was putting the highlights on the boots of his subject.”  Notice that Millais did not mention eyes.

Truth is, I can never predict what part of a portrait will challenge me the most.  For Whistler it was a coat.  Thomas Carlyle complained that Whistler, having asked to paint him and having promised only two or three sittings, spent an inordinate time getting the drapery of his big black coat right, while paying little attention to Carlyle’s face. The head is lovely, in my opinion, and probably painted itself, while trying to tease out the folds of the coat drove Whistler crazy.  He didn’t even develop the paintings behind Carlyle, whose right hand and cane are no more than suggested.  It was that damned coat which finished Whistler off.  I can sympathize, having once agreed to paint a black Sharpei from an inadequate reference — all folds, all black.  You can only imagine.

Why do we do it?  Perhaps in this modern world of shortcuts and time savers, something you do by yourself, whether writing or painting, is the ultimate adventure which will demand that best of you.  (I know -- and spinach is good for you too.)    From a smaller lens,  getting to the nose is the reward I currently seek.  My last act will be to crown it with a magnificent highlight which I cannot possibly screw up.  Phew.

Just last week I wrote about the golden groves of autumn.  But "All is changed;  changed utterly, "  as Yeats might have said (and did).

This line from Yeats’  "Easter, 1916"  came to mind yesterday, though not because a nationalist rebellion had been quashed.  The "terrible beauty” which was born was the arrival of snow and its abrupt attendant  turn from the warm tones of fall into a neutral cool palette.  With the arrival of snow and overcast skies, all colour literally disappears.  Only bare trees exist to punctuate the landscape.     In many ways, the forest has been visually simplified, rendered serene.   (I wish I could claim that driving through the Rockies in winter had the same effect.  All I could think of was tons of cold rock biding its time while planning to crash down on the car.)   But a December river valley seems calm and quiet to me, stripped of all visual intricacies.   It does have its own beauty.

On the whole, we actually enjoy winter walking more than sweltering summer hikes.  Usually we head for the conservation area, so while we start out facing the north-west winds, we get to turn around and enjoy the wind at our backs for the return trip.  The only  birds in sight were a flock of sparrows who filled a thick hedge with their chatter.  They warm my heart, reminding me of my  mother, who celebrated  their winter presence .  Sometimes Jon and Theodore and I pass groups of school children whose nature interpreter has given them sunflower seeds with which to attract chickadees; they stand like little statues, arm outstretched,  hoping beyond hope that someone will land.  I still feel thrilled and graced when the tiny claws touch down weightlessly and lift off just as quickly.  Their plumage is as spare as the season -- this little gaffer was painted in white, blue and black.

Addendum:  It may reassure those of you who hate winter that today’s walk was more ordeal than walking meditation.    I was sufficiently inspired enough to dig some more woollen layers out of storage.

Good neighbours are to be prized above rubies.  We had such a neighbour once.   She was a great  mother,  industrious, quiet and neat.  What was not to love?

Well, she moved out, even possibly died;  either that or she’s had a personality-changing stroke because whoever’s living next to us now is a slob.  We had Felicia;  now it’s Oscar on steroids.

As is our wont, we didn’t catch on for months.  During the late summer when the walnuts were ripe and we walked in the wild back garden wearing hard-hats to stave off concussion, we saw her often.   The stone garage has gradually turned into an animal-proof fortress, but she was an original tenant so we had left one small entrance for her and witnessed multiple walnut drop-offs.  All good.

Only in late September did the small of rotting vegetation puzzle us.  We checked for grass clippings inadvertently stored, sniffed the compost container, and looked at each other and shrugged.
Then Jon had occasion to climb up to the storage area and … good grief!!!!!

It is understood that all guest/tenants are to chew and dispose every single walnut rind before storing that nut.  Everyone knows this, for heaven’s sake.   Had my mother been a squirrel, I feel sure that it would have been one of the first rules of civility she taught me.  What sort of idiot red squirrel doesn’t know that??  

Well, Oscar, apparently. It is a hard lesson but if you simply dump your walnut rinds where you live, eat, and sleep, you either have to breathe through your mouth all winter or run the risk that your ticked-off landlord hauls away  that huge garbage heap of what devolves into rotting black permanent dye while evicting you too. And the week before it snows!

The possibility exists that Oscar is a female (although I sincerely doubt it).  Unless we get comfortable about issuing a death-by-starvation notice, we may even have to wait until late spring to dispossess “x” (what’s the gender-neutral  objective-case pronoun?).  But no more Mr. and Mrs. Nice-Guy.   Your moving day is coming, Red-Tail.  That lease will not be renewed, Honey!

P.S.  Just now, a fat grey cousin is swaying back and forth on the old rhodo outside the window,  slowly concluding, yet again, that the squirrel-proof feeder is in fact just that.    Some of them may be ill-mannered ( I always blame parenting, don't you?), but nobody ever called red squirrels, the real Canadian squirrels, stupid.

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