Andre Malraux commented that “The first recipe for happiness is:  avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.”  That’s a tall order, especially in a house which is undergoing “alterations.”  I’m parked on the chesterfield, emptying a huge blanket box which does double duty as a coffee table.  Within it are almost two hundred years worth of family papers and photos.  Shelley - Tag, you’re IT.   (Not only is my cousin an accomplished genealogist in the tradition of my dad, but she claims to look forward to sifting through the five kilograms of family history.)    Besides -  now that we are tackling the closets here, I need a new hidey-hole for my grandmothers’ quilts, which I rarely use, but cherish.


So, as the snow continues to sift down around the house, I am often far away, at least in time.  Mostly, it is Keeles whom I find, simply because I was there when the family home in Saskatchewan was closed.  I see my grandfather’s dance card for the Bachelors’ Ball with my grandmother’s name on every space.  There are houses which he built and in which together they raised a wonderful family.  There is a lacrosse ribbon from 1901 and my grandmother’s teaching certificate in her maiden name.   I still wonder why teacher training institutions took the name “normal schools” but here is her textbook with a letter from a friend tucked into it.  And so very many photos.  As it happens I have both the photo of  the red apron and navy cap which my dear teenaged Aunt Hazel (Mom’s sister) was wearing to advertise war bonds and the 75-year-old items themselves.  I wore them to a Canada 150 event, figuring I was half right

There is such a welter of bittersweet  moments preserved in the blanket box — of births and deaths, of growth and decline, of victory and defeat, of opportunities seized and missed.  As I sort through the memory trove, I frequently pause to ponder the human arc.   Malraux too was half right but he discounted fond reminiscences of family love.

As always, my mother saved my day from too much solemnity by having saved scraps of my childhood, pieces which she and my father must have found particularly hilarious.  There is the letter to Santa;  written in pencil on a scribbler page,  it opens with “The thing I have wanted since I was 6 is a watch. I am 7 now….”  Apart from the lack of subtlety, according to the date I had been eight for almost a month.    They seemed to love me anyway.

My personal favourite is the report on New France;  by then I had graduated to pen and ink.  I suspect Mom kept this one because I had unwittingly revealed a total lack of comprehension that any home could be unhappy, even if it was clear that I was simple:

After a while the men became lonesome because often it was ten o’clock at night when they got home.  Then they would have to eat tasteless food because they never had time to learn to cook. They wanted to get married!  There was a proclamation in Old France that girls of a certain age could go to New France and be married.  There was a huge crowd waiting for the boat that would bring the girls.  As each girl stepped off the boat she went with one of the men.  It was a great day for the girls.  Soon they would be caring for a man they never saw before.  I’ll bet they were all very satisfied.

I stand by that implicit tribute to the wonderful home my parents created, but think we all should feel relief that the burden of inventing feminism didn’t fall on me.

 Jon and I went tromping today without Theodore, who had adamantly refused to snow-plow through snow that was deeper than his chest.  He agreed to chase his tennis ball up and down the long pea gravel driveway which had been snow-blown Christmas morning.  Yesterday was the perfect day for a prairie girl like me — blue skies and a good thick coat of powder snow.  As always, Jon and I deliver neighbourhood gifts then — his in the form of cleared driveways for those who needed them this year and mine in the form of raisin loaves warm from the local patisserie.  Theodore allowed me to dress him in a red coat and gamely struggled through drifts to front doors with me while Jon did the truly useful work.

By today our wee boy had reached his psychological snow limit so Jon and I left Theodore behind near the fireplace when we went down the slope behind us to the park and the river.  Warned by friends that, unlike yesterday, it was wickedly cold today, we overcompensated of course and got so hot that we had to rip off our balaclavas.    There was much to see and hear:  never tiring of snow’s cobalt shadows in the sun, I collected yet more photos of elegant weeds and laden spruce branches for future Group of Seven homages while the toboggan hill in the park reverberated with delighted screams.  We caught sight of a glossy fat beaver slipping into the river and swimming powerfully against the current.  Jon commented that for once the gift of skis for Christmas would have been perfectly timed and indeed there were tracks everywhere.   And not just of skis — even had we not seen their footprints, the deer had left evidence of their visit last night in the form of barenaked euonymus bushes around the house.  Our bird feeders were equally busy during the day.  I know the feeling, having eaten my own weight over the last few days.

It’s winter.   Stay warm and enjoy this beautiful country.  Glad tidings to all.

Even though I was half-expecting it, the presence of a large front-end loader up on our lawn in front of the studio still came as a surprise.  It was the deep growling vibration which gave it away.  For four months there have been machine sounds on all of the streets near us but the metal monsters maintained a polite distance on the far side of the tree line near the mailbox.  Today was different.  I realized why the City had sent out scouts several years ago to document any existing cracks in our house.  No kidding.  A glass paperweight underscored the point by committing suicide from the stone mantel.

Any thought of painting today evaporated.   Then, as the windows rattled, I started to think about it.  It might have been a great day to paint on yupo paper with watercolours. As you know, yupo does not absorb water, so the pigment dries in place and can be easily lifted if needed;  most of us consider this a huge plus.  On the other hand, if you move that new painting before it has dried, your new creation might repaint itself as you are driving home.  Had I only thought of it in time, I could have painted a dog today and ended up with a jungle.    Or vice versa.  Or an egg beater.  The possibilities are endless.  So many missed opportunities in this short life.

I was, however, relieved not to have been painting in oil today.  Especially during the final glazes when the proportion of oil to pigment is higher, a freshly painted section can sag and harden that way if left in a vertical position.  This time of the year when the angle of light is almost flat and a painting on the easel is completely reflective and blinding in the late afternoon, I have a hard time judging how much oil is too much.  Sags are a permanent disaster unless you are prepared to wait a couple of years to sand them out.

Mary Pratt has a practical solution to this problem.  After a day of painting, she places the painting flat on the floor to dry.   Mind you, I doubt she has a dog.   With Theodore in mind, I manoeuvre the wet canvas past the cream wing chairs by the fireplace and try to drop it in front of the pilot light.  And there it lies today, safely protected from sagging yet free to recreate itself with abandon.  After all, it is not quite finished and may have some opinions of its own.

Come to think of it, maybe I should have stretched out in front of the fireplace myself.

Yada, yada, yada.  I keep nattering about portraits and have yet to begin one.  In my defence, I am in the mood to do something big, if only to take my mind off the machine noise which promise to last four or five more months.  If it helps, think of this as a character study.

I took the shot in Cathedral Grove this fall thanks to my cousins, Shelley and Jack, both brilliant photographers.  When my battery failed, Shelley handed me a wonderful camera to use.  It felt like winning the lottery.  The gigantic Douglas firs and Sitka spruce towered over us but ironically it was at ground level where I found the most arresting beauty.  This ancient,  bark gleaming in deep jewel tones, has robed herself in hanging mosses.  Whether or not the tangle of roots belongs to her, their sinuous blue grace enhances and counterpoints the gorgeous centenarian, who might easily pre-date Columbus.  

It took an entire day but the grisaille, which was a real stinker to sort out, was finished yesterday.  Now I am anxiously waiting for it to dry so I can start glazing on the transparent primaries.

Scale remains the main problem.   While the maple leaves and the trunk might pass for sugar maple, in fact, those leaves have been dropped by another true Pacific rainforest giant - acer macrophyllum — big-leaf maple, whose leaves can reach 12” across. Turning bright yellow in fall, they punctuate the multitude of greens in the landscape.  I suppose I could insert five Skye terriers end to end to convey the enormity of this tree, but, as always, I'm open to a better suggestion!

Jon and I were watching a movie the other day and both of us noticed that nose of the leading actor had a somewhat whimsical bridge.  The movie was not so absorbing that we couldn’t speculate on that nasal history, finally deciding that it had met with some immoveable object.  Hmmm.  Sound familiar?  You read it here a couple of posts ago.

As inconspicuously as possible, I sneaked up the stairs to check my own schnoz.  The goose egg has shrunken into a poached egg, though I still can’t wear a beret and my teeth ache, but miraculously my beak appears undamaged.  This matters because I inherited Grandma Keele’s  proboscis and this well-worn face of mine cannot bear too many more insults.  My mother, on the other hand, sported an elegant aquiline nose which she hated but which in later life earned her the honour of being chosen as the subject for a bust.  I admired her family characteristic just yesterday as I dusted it.

All this nosing around got me started thinking about art.  Doesn’t everything.  Most portrait subjects have the brains to choose their best angle, but even so, a nose can be a devil to render.  My beloved’s is a case in point.  This is a nose I know intimately — particularly because Jon is a relentless tease who delights in feeding me fanciful “factoids’ (Are you listening, Donald Trump?) which he will then wait to hear me disgorge in public.  I was defenceless until his sister shared the observation that, when Jon’s trying to pull something off, his nostrils flare.  So quick spousal honker scans are pretty much automatic now in our house.

You would think that I could draw that snoot with my eyes closed but no such luck.  And again, faces have to be exact when it comes to proportion and angles.  Even if your sniffer’s bridge, like your eyes, resides about half way up the head, general guidelines are only that;  variations are endless (think Jimmie Durante).  Jon’s nose is, if anything, too straight and getting its length right still challenges me.

You are thinking that this is a first-world problem and you are right.  Besides,  there’s a simple solution and a guaranteed winner at modern art shows.    From now on my portraits will bear vegetables instead of schnozzles.  I’m looking at an acorn squash for me and an elephant garlic clove for Jon.  You might want to choose a vegetable now before the best ones are all gone and you are stuck with cauliflower. 

This is entitled "The Private Joke."  You could park a tractor in that nostril.

A few posts back I wrote about da Vinci’s sfumato or smoky softness of line.  Because I so love the results, my most recent landscapes are all about figuring out how to create this effect.  I’m still not sure whether Leo always painted wet-in-wet oils but even if he didn’t, I still find it working this method promising.  As you know, that’s why I prefer oil to acrylic, which not only dries while you stop to adjust your ponytail clip, but even has the impudence to alter its colour, for heaven’s sake.  Of course the car, my clothing, the living room fireplace where I lean canvases to dry more quickly all bear witness to oil’s willingness to move but at least they are emblazoned with colours I chose.

The original image of the Rocky in winter had such a quietness to it that, while I built it the painting as usual, I strove to keep each layer somewhat loose.  Only the open water  and some cliff crevices approach defined contours and even there I softened edges.  The surface is still pretty wet and reflective but you get the idea.  I feel as though I'm on the right track.  Next up:  actually get back on the horse and explore this technique with portraiture.  Gulp.