I’m on a clear-the-decks kick, which usually means that I start with the bookcases, get bogged down dipping again into the candidates for a purge, and…well, you know….  I keep trying, for example, to ditch Mordicai Richler Was Here (a collection of excerpts) but it keeps sneaking back to the coffee table, where I suppose I set it down when laughing hurts my stomach.

Beside Richler sits Dropped Threads — also a collection, edited by Carol Shields and June Callwood,  this time of women’s reflections about the surprises that life dishes out.  “Old Age’’ (Callwood’s contribution) is my favourite.   Physical appearance gets barely more than a nod — “In my mind’s eye I look the way I did for most of my life, with a face and body neither so beautiful nor so ugly as to require upkeep;” which is exactly the way I feel, though she too made me laugh out loud:   “One morning our granddaughter, age seven, was watching me dress.  ‘Oh, I see,’ she said pensively.  ‘When you’re old your nipples point down.”

Made you look.

Other than the obvious, Callwood is struck by how little we actually change:  ”Those of us, notably me, born under the celestial sign of impetuosity are still reacting just a microsecond ahead of thought.”  Sounds familiar.  She claims, moreover,  to have acquired in seven and a half decades only two pieces of wisdom (both of which I also agree with, by the way).  The first is that you “can’t fix anyone.”  No argument there.   More importantly, she also realizes that “if…I interfere when something isn’t fair — even if I screw up the intervention,  even if it doesn’t succeed”, she will feel less guilty “than if I decide injustice isn’t my business and pass by.  This is described, by people who haven’t given it a try, as meddling.  I prefer to think of it as character building.”  What a delight June Callwood was — funny and wise;  aren’t we lucky to have known her, if only at a distance.

I also miss Carol Shields, though her writing remains inspirational:
(I)n the calmer, cooler evenings…the phrase tempus fugit would return to me, beating at the back of my brain and reminding me that time was rushing by.  I was spooked, frightened by what this meant.  And then, quite suddenly, I realized it meant nothing.  Tempus did not fugit.  In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time.  (…) Shallow time and fallow time.  There is time in which we are politically involved and other times when we are wilfully unengaged.  We will have good years and bad years, and there will be time for both.  Every moment will not be filled with accomplishment;  we would explode is we tied ourselves to such a region.  Time was not our enemy if we kept it on a loose string, allowing for rest, emptiness, reassessment, art and love,  This was not a mountain we were climbing;  it was closer to  being a novel with a series of chapters.
I needed that reminder this week, if only because sorting “stuff, while motivated by a desire for a simpler future, always toggles me back into the memories of a crazy-busy past.   This weekend in particular, everything reminds me of a dear friend -- a historian whose well-researched and fair-minded texts influenced a generation of Canadian History students.  Ron, who has been part of my life for half a century, died on Friday.  Rest in peace, old friend.      

Ron habitually involved himself in the democratic process and I have been thinking a lot about that because it’s election season again.  Like it or not,  our votes constitute a choice of futures and the torch is in our hands. So here we all sit together in the eternal now, the only time we ever truly have, suspended between past and future while doing our best to keep the present on a loose string.  Let’s practise thanksgiving every day without forgetting on October 19 that young people also deserve plenty of that commodity.








This watercolour is of my mother on her 80th birthday.   I still miss that laugh.  

​

Maria Popova observes that “most of all, we read to become selves. The wondrous gift of reading is that books can become both the life-raft to keep us from drowning and the very water that sculpts the riverbed of our lives, bending it this direction or that, traversing great distances and tessellated territories of being, chiseling through even the hardest rock.”  Brain pickings, 08/19

While I might not have been in danger of drowning this week, the new novel by Julie Orringer chiseled its way into me.  The Flight Portfolio is nominally based on the true story of the American, Varian Fry, who distinguished himself during WWII by setting up an American rescue mission in Bordeaux to smuggle to safety the great Jewish minds of Europe:  “Chagall, painting in his house at Gordes, was an irreplaceable treasure. (...)They had to matter more than others, those men and women; they had to be brighter manifestations of light."  The plot hurtles forward, as Fry races the clock.

He does succeed in saving thousands of Jews from certain death.  In fact, Fry was, like Oskar  Schindler, posthumously named  “Righteous among Gentiles.”  Thanks to him,  not only artists like Chagall but philosophers like Hannah Arendt and writers like Max Ernst, survived to further enrich Western culture.

It should be said that part of this novel invented --  in particular, a memorable character who is the vehicle for a moving love story.  (The author’s Afterword advances an argument to justify such a character.)  This character's presence only deepens the theme of consciously choosing the precipice of action over comfortable complacency:
If we could pin down the moments when our lives bifurcate into before and after—if we could pause the progression of milliseconds, catch ourselves at the point before we slip over the precipice—if we could choose to remain suspended in time-amber, our lives intact, our hearts unbroken, our foreheads unlined, our nights full of undisturbed sleep—would we slip, or would we choose the amber?  

​This novel is about the precipice.

The American Rescue Mission that Fry founded is profoundly inspiring, but what really elevates this novel is the richness of its prose.     Objects take on deeper meanings:  A wind at sea describes a tense moment in a sailboat:  “The air had become taut between them, snapped into a sharp transmitter of movement and respiration.”   Later, warily  in public, Fry notices someone holding “a wicker cage on her lap, inside of which lay the shadowy form of a doomed rabbit.”  He descends a staircase “that spilled from the station like a cubist waterfall.”  I particularly loved the description of Chagall’s atelier as containing work “in its pupal state, damp and mutable, smelling of turpentine, raw wood, wet clay.”  Yup.  
 
Throughout, the sparks of human intelligence drive the novel.  When a great writer commits suicide out of despair, Fry mourns his death in both mechanistic and spiritual terms:
the drug had gone to work, shutting down the intricate machinery of the body, breaking its fine linkages, silencing its humming wires, dimming the electric light of the brain until it went dark. That beautiful brain ceasing to send its beacon out into the night.

Fry and Orringer both believe that "Artists save lives. So do outspoken champions of democracy. And journalists."  I heartily recommend The Flight Portfolio and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.  I read a library version but plan to buy the novel.  Let me know if you would like to borrow it.  z

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water,
and I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Our world in spring is full of bustle, mine included, and my most peaceful hours are spent gardening, where I catch myself blurting out greetings to the shy friends who have returned.  “Welcome back!” goes to the busy girls who hive in the old cedar tree.  “Hello, Gorgeous,” I tell the chippie who has parked himself under the feeder.  And “Hope you ate all our grubs” is my mumbled message to the gentle skunks who visit at night, leaving a toppled path of divots across the lawn.  I say nothing to the mourning doves who have established a new nest high in the climbing euonymus;  they prefer not to draw attention to themselves but we do nod civilly and they know I wish them well.

The wonderful collection of essays titled Hope beneath our Feet:  Restoring our Place in the Natural World reminds me that it is not only the natural world which gives me hope but also the “ordinary people willing to confront despair, power and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”  Paul Hawken goes on to quote Adrienne Rich, who wrote “So much has been destroyed/ I have cast my lot with those / who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, /  reconstitute the world.”  Good to be reminded where we too should cast our lot -- with like-minded citizens.  But tending our gardens and welcoming our wild neighbours is a great way to get into the mood.

This week’s inspiration was born on a ferry dock in late October.  As I waited to leave Salt Spring Island and head to the air terminal in Sydney, dawn broke and night melted into a soft sky-blue pink, which itself dissolved before my hungry eyes.   Though not quite foggy, the softness of the scene brought Carl Sandburg's famous poem to mind:

The fog comes 
on little cat feet. 

It sits looking 
over harbor and city 
on silent haunches 

and then moves on. 

Firing off a hundred shots like a crazed paparazzo, I sailed on, as rich as Croesus.  It’s the same feeling I get when staggering out of a public library, arms laden with books.  Always the cheap date....

I’ve been thinking  longingly about these digitals since then.  Finally, there was enough clear floor space this week to gesso some canvases because my soul is begging for colour.  This time of the year is the only season that stubbornly refuses to provide much in the way of beauty. In fact, yesterday in the park may as well have been a white-flagged surrender to drabness, so painting was a must. That Salt Spring glow of dawn beckoned, demanding a long horizontal  (36 x 24) format.

My intent is to develop the painting through colour blocking.  Pam Carter, the Scottish landscape artist who regularly paints this way, earns my admiration for her juicy blocks of colour.   It is misleading to assume that there is no sophistication in this style — Carter’s expanses are full of subtlety and masterful blending — so I too am looking to set up masses of what is apparently a single colour, but which are full of mixed colours and quiet transitions.  While Carter uses a high-key palette as I often do, this painting will be closer to the pastel register.  Time for stronger colour once my eyes adjust to spring.

In her exquisite novel, The Winter Vault,  Anne Michaels describes an ancient Nubian village about to be lost forever to the Aswan Dam construction, a human tragedy compounded by an aesthetic one.  Here is Michaels' gorgeous word-painting, which I visualize as colour blocking:

The houses were like gardens sprung up in the sand after a rainfall.  As if cut by Matisse’s scissors, shapes of pure colour - intense and separate - were painted onto the glowing white walls.  Designs of cinnamon, rust, phthalocyanine free, rose antwerp blue, tan, cream, madder, lamp black,sienna,and ancient yellow ochre,perhaps the oldest pigment used by man.  Each a shout of joy.  Embedded in the whitewashed walls were decoration - designs of brightly coloured lime wash, bright as the eye could bear - geometric patterns, plants, birds and animals - with mosaics set into the plaster like jewels, and snail shells, and polished pebbles.  Over the gates were elaborately painted china plates, as many as thirty or forty decorating a single house.  They were like stones of a necklace set against the white skin - porous, breathing, cool - of the plaster.  Here was human love of place so freely expressed, alive with meaning;  houses so perfectly adapted  to their context in materials and design that they could never be moved.  It was an integrity of art, domestic life, landscape…. (131-2)

If my new painting has a theme so full of love, it has something to do with the hope that each dawn brings, a hope  bolstered by the survival of such a paradise --  a theme that must, however, be delivered wordlessly. 

All I've done so far is to establish the blocks of colour— once this dries I will do some glazing but thinly so as suggest rather than emphasize the mood.  No hard edges.  I also have a crow and a buoy or two to place in focal points.  Playing around with titles, I think today’s best candidate is “Little Cat Feet.”   Lots to do. 

(Another small hope - that it will be dry in time for the show!)

I first saw this image of my cousin's daughter years ago, and it haunted to me until this week when the time was finally right to put brush to panel.

I have said before that the most important line in Hamlet is “Readiness is all….”  Many images inhabit my brain for a decade or more.  Sometimes even a painting which is 90% completed suffers that same postponement.  For whatever reason, I know enough to leave well enough alone when my instincts tell me to step back and wait;  the corollary trick is to act when that mood to finish strikes!  Once or twice I have even gotten out of bed to correct a misstep or to solve a colour problem.  I do not recommend this. 

The good news is that this week was finally the time to begin “Nimbus.”  One of the reasons I loved the photo is that Erin is not posing.  Her ash-blonde hair glowing, even reflecting the warmth of her cheek, the wee girl is rapt in contemplation.     Although it is partly shadowed by that glorious hair,  her sweet face is relaxed, so completely focused is she on what will forever remain a mystery.

Of course, the other reason I wanted to paint her was that gorgeous mane of hair.  Anyone who paints the back of someone’s head is utterly sincere about an enthusiasm for painting hair (see “Rapunzel” in the Portraiture section either by following the link above to my gallery or bookmarking zannekeele.com”).  The title comes, of course, from the 17th century word which has the double meaning of “a luminous cloud” or “halo.”  Both would suit, on this occasion.

She is largely finished.  I am looking forward to the final touches, which include the fine blonde hairs which are so light as to float above her halo.  

Seeing as the renovation is in full swing (Don’t ask) and it is snowing out, I have been spending time updating my website and fooling around with the blog.  I am slow on the uptake but finally figured out how to add categories to the four years of writing — they are listed on the right hand side in turquoise, just below the list of dates.  Eureka!

But I am caught out.  The title of  this blog site is misleading in the extreme.  It purports to think lofty thoughts about nature and art.  Not even close. If you start searching by subject category, it turns out that four years of writing essential details the absurdity of my life and my total inability to dominate animals.  Yes, there are nods to art - size/subject matter(portraits, still life) shape and size considerations; a bit of technical advice in alla prime/glaze oil/underpainting/palette — but by far the most blogs show up under “The Human Comedy” or just plain “Animals.” 

I should have titled it “More Bathos than Pathos!”

On the plus side, I have updated the gallery website, which badly needed it.  Far more exciting is having figured out today how to embed YouTubes in the blog.  I had only two but it bugged me that I had to post the url instead of including the video;  now there is a YouTube category.  So if you are feeling rapturous, click on “Murmuring and Gasping” (October, 2014) to find a gazillion starlings flying to Pachelbel.  If, on the other hand, you just want a giggle, choose “Pit-a-Pat” (March 2017).

Do not expect to find any video of me painting.  Nobody has that much patience.

Decades ago, I learned the hard way not to be an “early adaptor.”   Now I can be content to let others do the de-bugging;  the corollary to that is always to be somewhat behind the curve (“9:30 in Newfoundland”).  So only recently did I stumble on Pinterest.  Beyond its obvious art source appeal, the app immediately satisfied my fondness for organizing;  embarrassing to admit now, I maintained my own vertical files in university until the mass of paper overwhelmed my bedroom.  Digital storage saved the day, but that is another story.  I can sit at home and sate my eyes  with scads of images on my iPad, while setting up categories to my heart’s content..  

​Pinterest not only satisfies my psychological storage needs, but even gives me a laugh or two.  Recent favourite:  someone came across a Tom Thomson and commented that he really deserves to be famous.  Note to self:  tell Steve Martin to get onto that. 

In the spirit of Thomson, my all-time favourite Canadian painter, here is a little (10 x 30) appreciation of sunset on a remote lake.

Years ago I received a Valentine from a dear friend, who simply wrote why she treasured our friendship; that hand-written letter meant more to me than I can say. Lynne has maintained her beautiful handwriting by using it daily. Sadly, I am reduced to word processing for what should be personalized and on paper. Soul-sisters, you know who you are. This is for you.

My life has been blessed by you, my sisters, no thanks to Mom and Dad. Because she so nearly died giving birth to me, a first-born, My sensible father efused to let my mother have more children; as he put it, “You may survive another birth, but I wouldn’t.” So I have had to go looking for sisters, for you. Let me tell you why I claim each one of you as kin. You gave me many reasons.


One thing which drew me was your ability to love. You inhabit an Eden of empathy. I see your kindnesses daily— to the elderly , to the sick, to children, to neighbours, to the poor, to beasties wild or tame. You live by doing unto others as you would have others do unto you. You make the world better by being your fine unselfish self.

But wow do you know how to laugh! Getting together is fraught with rib-splitting humour, most of it self-deprecating. You are funny-ha-ha, even turning your own funny-peculiars into fodder for laughter. Perhaps laughter comes easily to you because you have cultivated contentment, which is very different from complacency. You celebrate the life you are living rather than the life which might have been.

You are smart in other ways too. You read, you ask questions, and you think. You believe in self-improvement without being full of yourselves or preachy. You never discourage; you simply inspire and leading by example.

So this comes with my love and my thanks, even if it is two days late. Happy Valentine’s, dearhearts! Love you.