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.  

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.

I was reminded of the old golf joke — “Hit the ball, drag Harry” today on  our walk.  You wouldn’t think that a 22 pound terrier could successfully resist walking on a lead but he did, all four legs stiffly leaving tracks on the driveway.

Not that I really blame him.  It is France 1915 on our tiny street.  The house vibrates from 7 to 7 from the huge front-end loaders, the gravel trucks and the trenching machine which occupy our territory.   I suppose the watermains might be as old as that war and they frankly do need replacement but poor Theodore, a dog who is afraid of cardboard boxes, is rigid with terror.

So I wasn’t surprised when, in the studio later, he tried to scale my legs to get to the safety of my lap.  I’m into the final glazes of the two paintings which I have been posting and,  tempting as is the thought of sitting,  I’m a stand up painter.  Like most painters, I use my whole arm  frequently - sometimes to scrub, sometimes to lay down a line, sometimes to glaze.   We need to step back frequently too and I regularly fall off my stepstool  when I forget that.   


Scared or not, Theodore will have to settle for the floor at my feet where, no doubt, I will do another header or two.  Plus ca change….

True confession.  I wore orthopaedic shoes —brown Doc Martin’s, I guess —for what felt like forever.  Age seven to twelve, actually, at which point I refused to embarrass myself further.  My flat feet seemed to have been reshaped from duck prints to what my love calls "your Egyptian feet” — always ending with “I don’t know how they hold you up”).

But my feet are making duck prints again and my back stopped speaking to me at noon.  Yet again I am in deep water with no land in sight (although the duck feet might come in handy).  Turns out that “It seemed like a good idea at the time” is a dangerous way to choose subject matter.

Little girl in white dress.  What could possibly go wrong?

The fact that her skirt was tulle apparently registered enough for me to identify it in the last post.  I ADORE tulle.  If anybody ever gave me a ballet tutu I would probably never take it off.  Thousands of hints have failed to produce a tulle anything and thus I am reduced to painting it on others.

Loving it and painting it are different continents.  Today the charm of the tousled layers has come head to head with the sorting out of said layers. Cross-eyed trying to establish just how many tulle overskirts she is wearing and where they do and don’t overlap, I am driven by the grim truth  that, if I get it wrong, the painting won’t read right.    

So this means returning to first principles.  Yes, the glaze oil process as I practise it necessitates least five separate layers of paint.  And yes, that allows for corrected rendering at least four times.  But it has been my experience that getting the drawing right at the beginning makes the difference and that means paying close attention to detail and line at every stage.  Portraits are, of course, the most dependent on exact rendering.  (You will remember that my lapse of judgment chose to paint a portrait surrounded with tulle.)  I stood at the easel today for three hours and staggered through the drawing.

That propelled me into the grisaille, or value study, which establishes the tonal structure like a sepia-tone photograph.  Nothing slapdash here either.  I have learned the hard way that careless brushstrokes will return to haunt me.  So whether I am painting a leaf or a nose, I try to imagine the “grain” of the area and echo that with my brush.  Again, the damn tulle.  Four more hours for my arches to sink.

Our marriage has precious few secrets.  But I don’t remember anything in our vows which said I couldn’t keep a small dark chocolate stash for those late afternoon duck-print moments.

Jon and I attended a wonderful wedding reception this weekend;  everything about it was perfect, to the point that expecting anything more from the evening would have amounted to gilding the lily.

Yet one of those rare moments of grace occurred.  The band was taking a break and we had just sat down to drink some water and catch our breath, when children took possession of the dance floor.  I don’t think any of them, all dressed in their party finest, could have been over five.  One little girl promptly lay down and allowed herself to be dragged ceremoniously by one foot while affecting a tragic expression.  A  retro “Twist” started up a few feet away.

And then it happened.

A small vision in a long white tulle dress sauntered out and sank to the floor, gracefully laying her torso across the outspread skirt.  She seemed to be channelling a Tchaikovsky ballet and I am a fool for little girls in tulle so  I grabbed Jon’s phone and ran.  The dying swan agreed to reprise the pose and her mother graciously encouraged me to go ahead.

Later that evening, someone in a suit and tie  (who turned out to be her slightly older brother) accosted me outside the women’s washroom.  He opened by declaring his excitement over the new painting of his sister.  He wanted details about size, composition and completion date.  It was oddly flattering.  I tried to explain that one of my digitals has less than a one-in -a-thousand shot of becoming a full oil painting but he was all in and yet again resistance was futile.  Had he been fifty years older, he would have handed me a commission contract.  I did manage to convince him that I couldn’t think about starting it before November.  That apparently satisfied him and he strode away, probably returning to his pint-sized corporate responsibilities.

So the swan and her agent are in charge of this creative studio.  Looks like  I’m going to paint “Another Big Day.”   

The unreliability of memory has been this week's theme.  I reconnected with a dear old friend by email and we began to reminisce.  Trouble is, we had widely differing memories of important events and I have been starting to wonder about parallel universes.  Certainly, the literature about brain research makes it clear that, while perfect memories may be stored, their accessibility is a different matter.  What did remain true was the remembered emotion:  we liked each other enormously and somehow affected one another's futures.

So what part does art play in this fragmented game?   Picasso saw painting as autobiography: "I'm like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the trees that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it." 


"Dead calves"??   A powerful image but it doesn't reflect my relationship with memory.  For me painting is the attempt to record those splendid moments when the love of life overwhelmed all else.  Doomed to failure, I am nonetheless drawn like a moth to those joyous experiences which light up my brain.  The invention of digital photography was essential in this because those of us who embrace reality may need a little help in catching that moment of perfect light.  


This small (12 x 12) painting is of my beloved niece and her dear little Marie.  They were in our living room  shortly before Christmas and a shaft of low December light broke through.  Anne, who is a wonderful mother, glows with love, and the painting which ensued began my "First Valentine" series of mothers and their babies.


Every painting of mine is filled with emotion, the truest part of memory.  Otherwise, why bother?