Every Christmas I feel the urge to paint a pear or two. While all pears share their elegant shape, at solstice I become compelled to locate and immortalize the perfect pear--  that is, that rare store-bought edible with a glowing  blush, a striking assymmetrical stem with a leaf or two, and no bruises. And yes, I do know that most painters would simply imagine this pear but I am a realist painter (go ahead, say it:  I lack imagination), so off I must go to the fruit counter in search of The One. 

Now choosing the best pear at Loblaws is no job for an amateur: one has to select the finalists and then eliminate the runners-up one by one.   Last year after I had painstakingly chosen Mlle Poire 2013 (an absolutely gorgeous gal if I do say so myself), a man who must have been watching asked if I would let him have the second best.   I had to explain that Pear #1 needed an understudy (see "The Elusive Dollarama Blue"  7/7/14) and that I would probably end up by painting them both. He said he thought they already had nice colours. It went downhill from there. 

Being a painter isn't for sissies, although still life does allow you eventually to consume the sitter .

We're off now, Jon to the river for a few hours of teasing salmon and I for a walk with my camera in this gorgeous Scottish mist.  May you have a Christmas that warms your heart.

On the second page of The Burgess Boys,  the narrator observes  that her mother "didn't like Unitarians; she thought that they were atheists who didn't want to be left out of the fun of Christmas."  Okay.  But even if that were so, who could blame them?  Christmas-time conjures so many happy memories.  And it is always a joy to create new memories for the children in our lives.

When I was very young, we would  often travel to my grandparents' home a province away.  This would involve a train trip on a Pulman car.  The porters were kindly gentlemen who made the whole event feel special.  I have always loved cozy spaces so the best part was watching the transformation of the seats to a cunning double berth made up with crisp white sheets.  The world felt less dangerous then, The War safely in the past, and the rough wool privacy curtains more than enough of a divider.  The parent who drew the short straw would share the lower bunk with me;  apparently it was a dreaded ordeal, as I was an eggbeater with sharp elbows and knees.  But for me, at least, falling asleep to the clickety-clack of the wheels pre-disposed me to a life-long affection for rail travel. 

Wherever we were, Christmas was always a busy time.  There were special projects at school:  for years, my sainted mother kept the Yuletide log I had fashioned in grade two out of flour and water with a sprinkle of sparkle and one sprig of spruce which went bald almost immediately.  She must have clung to the hope that it had a certain lumpen charm.  And every year there would be yet another creation for me to haul home triumphantly and for her to make a fuss about.  She was an exemplary mother.

It seems to me that we sang a great deal -- in the classroom, in the music class, and at church, whether in the pew or in a choir.  Once we had a piano we sang at home too.  To this day I belt out the alto line of the carols and feel the absence of Mom's soprano and Dad's tenor beside me.  The Christmas season ended on New Year's Eve with the singing of Auld Lang Syne;  after that, the prospect of  going back to school was unavoidable.  (I like to think that I've always been someone who always made excellent use of free time....  It wasn't school I disliked so much as having to get up on a cold dark winter morning!)

For a child, it was all about the gifts.  Trying to fall asleep on Christmas Eve was sheer agony.  Sometimes I just crawled over to an air register to eavesdrop on the adult conversation;  that was a guaranteed sleeping pill.  Come morning, there would be my stocking at the end of the bed and I could usually count on a doll or doll clothes to fill in the hours until everybody else woke up.

And we ate.  Christmas was a turkey dinner, a ham graced the table on New Year's Day, and I ate my own weight in Christmas cake and mincemeat tarts.  To this day I cannot understand how anyone might reject a good fruitcake and so I offer the magnificent gesture of allowing those of you who suffer fruitcake surfeit to send me your cake.  Let me eat cake, as Marie said.  You can even send it COD and I'll pay the postage.  While I have my mother's recipe, the year I tried to bake it (at great cost, I might add), the recipe foundered on the reef of assumed knowledge  -- it seems that I needed more guidance than a recipe with no timing for the traditional three nesting cakepans.  The Mama Bear cake was fine, but Papa was too dry and Baby needed changing.

Jon and I have been busy wrapping gifts for all of the little people and finishing the hand-made ones;  he has a pair of hickory walking sticks in progress for the boys next door, for example.  I try to combine book gifts  and art supplies with special things from my own childhood like tiny dolls.  My Aunt Bess always had something of the sort for me and I still treasure them.  

May your Christmas be enriched by those of the past and serve as a joyful future memory for others.

Most of our canoes (5 plus a kayak) have flotation devices.  These are simply big tough air-bags which are designed to discourage the vessels from sinking like stones.  This is particularly important when we are tripping on less-traveled rivers.  While Jon becomes more and more completely relaxed, I am feverishly visualizing the stages that a body (mine) will go through after I drown.  So the bags are a great comfort to me and are, besides, brightly coloured (so the search and rescue helicopter can locate my body).  On a sunny day they are cozy to curl up to.  Jewell even snoozed on them, although she had a tendency to toboggan off them in the rapids.  Flotation:  all good.

It is a week before Christmas and I caught myself thinking about this as we walked along in the pouring rain tonight.  The flotation devices I was passing were somewhat more frivolous in intent:  most of them were Santas, complete with interior lights and bouncing with seasonal excitement.  For several years I have been planning an entrepreneurial coup inspired by these hot-air gentlemen.  Now if I tell you, you must promise not to steal my thunder or hot air.......

To appreciate the brilliance of this concept you have to think like a pre-Christmas woman.  I know you can do this.  Now review the lists you are working from:  Christmas gift thinking/finding/hauling/wrapping/carding/delivering;  Christmas cards writing/sending/reading;  special people meeting/phoning/emailing/entertaining;  Christmas decorations unboxing/untangling/arranging/dangling;  Christmas food deciding/shopping/hauling/storing/baking/cooking/table-setting/ serving/cleaning up.  And, of yes, there is the Christmas house cleaning/paring/ dusting/polishing.  Anyway, that's the short-list.


So here's my idea:

an inflatable wife/mother/sister/daughter/professional!  But unlike Santa, she will fully inflate only in the mornings, and will gradually lose air throughout each day.  After Christmas morning, she simply remains collapsed on the grass.  Isn't that a money-maker?

What do you think?  

My life has been littered with animal encounters.  My parents lived in fear of my losing an arm to a strange dog  (apparently I leaned out from my baby carriage to pat every one we passed).  When we went to the duck pond in the big park, I quacked for a week.  Without success, I tried to coax every chipmunk to "Spread your tail, squirrel" and to have not only peacocks but peahens do the same.

My being disobeyed by an animal has remained pretty much the rule.  Even the beloved Fudgie would quite regularly pee through the open windows of my doll house, although I cling to the notion that he meant it affectionately.  After all, he let me dress him up in doll clothes and would lie on his back in my doll crib as long as my mother was not around;  if she walked in, he would arise with as much dignity as he could muster and exit the tableau.   And I was always the one he would run to when yet again he would have his hip broken by chasing a car so ineptly that it would hit him.  This was in the days when dogs enjoyed complete urban freedom.  Fudgie often took the role of "The White Stallion" in our cowboy scenario (one of many).  It was the perfect part for him because the only requirement was that he run around out of control, albeit sometimes with a limp. 

 I adored him.

Things went much the same with Jewell.  Jon taught her rules and I tacitly allowed her to break them.  The only thing which saved us was her placid personality.  While she eventually realized that she could do pretty much as she pleased,  Jewell just enjoyed being part of a home-loving quiet household.  It is with my dog-training deficits in mind that we have indefinitely postponed finding another dog.  Waiting until there is one consistent adult home during the day seems smarter and I think I can wait until Jon retires.  In the meantime, I make a fool of myself in the neighbourhood every evening, while Jon hopes against hope that I don't lose an arm....

I admit to finding it difficult to say goodbye to autumn.  Of all the seasons, it is certainly the most flamboyant.  The whole world flames and glows.  The pastels of spring are a distant memory, replaced by a palette of deeps in cadmiums and purples.  Autumn is a saucy old tart, dressed to the nines and living it up.  

Marilynne Robinson has a great line in her novel Housekeeping:  "She was an old woman but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease." I think that qualifies as damning with faint praise. Autumn, on the other hand, pulls it off with aplomb, making the lapse into dormancy, even death, look like a celebration.

The problem artists have is that when it's over, it's OVER.  The world becomes muted and quiet very suddenly;  it actually takes me a week or so to adjust my eyes when the spectacle ends.  And then throwing that remembered brilliance of colour onto a canvas invariably looks phony and overdone.  Most will tell you that autumn is by far the most difficult season to paint.

But we do it anyway.

Balancing precarious on the back of an armchair while I hung mercury-silver Christmas balls against the dark wood frame, I lost my nerve today.  Like a drowning sailor, my life passed before me, edited down to the falls and near falls and general fears of heights.  I have fallen off a ladder while painting the trim on our stone garage;  I somehow had the presence of mind to sacrifice one heel rather than the facade ( in my defence, it was in the days of oil paint -- there would have been no hope of removing it in a single lifetime).  I have, as you know, stepped through an open trap door in the dark;  fortunately or unfortunately, only one leg went through and the knee which didn't was mighty tender for a while.  I have walked into many a low overhanging branch while wearing a ball cap on a hike;  Jon then has to endure the angry stares of other hikers while I stagger on, holding my forehead, temple, nose....(you choose).  I have danced on our roof, not because I had any such desire but because my beloved was in the attic trying toconvince a young raccoon to vacate.  Jon was garbed and masked so all I could hear through the shingles were muffled "DANCE HARDER!" instructions.  The furry lad eventually left and then I had to make the terrifying dismount onto an extension ladder.  And oh yes, the time I exited from the wrong side of a natural "flowerpot" formation and dropped a good 15 feet to rock below;  rightly or wrongly, I managed to do a set of tai chi before everything went into trismus.  Again, it hurt like the blazes but I lived.

Bottom line:   I am height-challenged in the literal sense.  Yes, I know that when I accused my parents of always setting me up somewhere high for a picture, my mother corrected the record by providing a photo with comments on the back:    unbelievably twas I  who had  demanded this. The rock was enormous but there was tiny me;  it was a saw-off, as they had made me face the sun as usual,  blue eyes tearing as usual.  Anyone browsing my childhood pictures might conclude that I was an abused child.  

Now maybe I'm just a slow thinker who didn't register the terror of falling for far too long, but now I am properly scared.  And yet during the space of a year I find myself perching on chairs, ladders of all sorts, the kitchen counter, or hanging from a window frame while washing the outside of a casement window.  Any woman can tell you that keeping house doesn't stop at the six foot mark.

So what does this have to do with art?  Not much.  I just needed a good reason to get off the back of that chair and breathe.  But writing this did pique my curiosity about the general angle I choose to paint from.  Turns out that it's pretty well always horizontal, although not always in the same plane.  My brother took me to the AGO and one of the most interesting exhibits was the Colville.  He had been a war artist and drew superbly.  One working sketch was that of a stretcher carried by four men;  it was pictured from above, as from a low bridge perhaps.  Working in red conte he had corrected the perspective of the nearest man, enlarging the size of his head and adjusting its angle so it would describe him from directly above.  It was exactly the right correction and knocked me dead.  

Even working horizontally it's extremely hard to size body parts accurately when they are at differing distances.  One of my watercolours is of a friend who danced for the National Ballet;  I portrayed her with her hand extended forward.  Jon insists that her hand is too big.  I know it's correct.  For one thing, it is stretched towards us.  But still...  If I paint it in oil, I might just split the difference.