Happy to report that the portrait and I are still dating. We are in fact getting serious--planning our future with only details to iron out. You know — things like getting our chin and lips on straight!

So what am I sure of so far?

I think the rendering looks right but freely admit that Beverley is not someone I know. We met briefly at an art show opening where she shone like a beacon aimed at a portrait painter. Like a crazed stalker, I marched up and blurted out a request to photograph her because her fashion sense is sensational. Bev was kind enough to humour me. I was in the mood to focus the next painting on a face or you might also be seeing her bright jacket and the lime green beaded skirt. I did however take care to include three points of high colour....

You will recall that my wise friend Eunice helped me enormously by suggesting that every painting should be thought of in terms of a wedding. On this occasion the bride was definitely perched on Beverley’s nose. Those fabulous turquoise glasses with their elegant black outlining would have looked ridiculous on me but they highlighted her warm complexion and gorgeous white hair. It was a no-brainer to leave those glasses where they belonged.

The two bridesmaids were equally obvious: Beverley, who is a beading expert, has great taste in that jewelry, although it (the bracelet in particular) has been subjected to an unusual amount of cursing in the last week or so. The roped necklace is coming around but that blankety-blank bracelet needs to be completely re-detailed to retrieve its bright clean colour.

Everything in this painting hinges on capturing her likeness and the jewelry. The background begged to contrast to Beverley’s white hair, so I have been rubbing in thin films of black which echo her dark eyes and lashes. The shirt too was black but it seemed to be making the portrait too heavy so at this point I am simply rubbing transparent colours into it to neutralize that section and then thinly glazing with turquoise. Now the warmth of her skin and brightness of her hair are coming forward to frame her face.

As of today it’s now a waiting game. Only after the oil painting is perfectly dry (you can see that it's wet from the reflection), can the final toggling of values and colours complete the process. And who knows -- that shirt might turn black again.

(just be glad you chose acrylic!!)

It’s mid-summer and already the ecstatic blooming is beginning to slow. Only the hardiest and most drought-tolerant thrive now. Water-hauling is the order of the day in domestic gardens (which obediently reward us with predictable beauty), but it was wild nature that made me re-think colour theory this week. I was confronted with a breath-taking hillside of intermixed orange day-lilies and deep pink pea flowers. Core belief: there is no such thing as a bad colour if it chooses its friends carefully. Thanks to yesterday’s epiphany I now have to drop the “if” clause. I would never have planted pink and orange flowers side by side but that hillside proved me wrong. It sent me back to my digital record of paintings and the only one so far that gives me any credit at all for a colour brain is this one. It was in fact that same colour combination that had initially made me choose it. Thought for today while the portrait's most recent glaze is drying: might the portrait benefit from the same fresh colours! *


In search of even more strong colour, we took to the river a few days ago - Jon to scout for the subtle speckling of a trout and I to seek deep zenith blue reflected on water. Neither of us was disappointed. Several of my shots might even be worth translating onto the canvas. There were cobalts to be found, not only in the dome of sky but also in the patches of vervain which populated the river so, like a drunk at an open bar, I took a hundred digitals over the two-hour paddle. The shot I regret missing was that of a green heron. Even lovelier than great blues herons, if you are lucky you mightcatch sight these small neat fishers making short flights along the shore line before disappearing into the rushes. Only their bright orange legs quibble with the overall elegance of the green heron.

So how to mix a clear hot orange? Let's start with what not to do. Don’t mix a yellow that leans blue (lemon yellow, for example) with a red that leans blue (alizarin or magenta, say) in any medium if you want a clean colour. With all three primaries present, even if your two pigments are transparent, you will still end up with a duckegg tone. Here’s what you do instead: combine a warm (i.e. leaning red) transparent yellow such as stil de grain with a warm (leaning yellow) transparent red such as vermilion. Remember: warm with warm or cool with cool when mixing transparent primaries. Then sit back and remember high summer.


* The portrait is actually coming along fine but I am still in the afterglow of orange and pink.

​I’m just back from a holiday where I accomplished absolutely nothing.   I slept late, binge-watched Netflix, and read a gazillion books -- all without leaving home. I walked in fragrant gardens and towering forests while accompanied by my beloved Theodore.   My holiday required neither airports, nor time changes nor strange beds.  It was quite perfect and the the first time in months I feel rested.

But inevitably I reached the point where I was boring myself, let alone any poor soul stuck in my company (sorry, Darling).  This, I have come to recognize,  is a sign that I need to start a new painting, probably a  portrait.

It kills me that I am drawn to faces, where so many things can go, oh, so wrong.  The existence of facial recognition software makes the point that exact measurement is sufficient to identify one face out of millions.  Theoretically, all I need to do is to pull out the callipers.  (I often think of the famous story about Colville when his wife answered a reporter’s question about what he was working on by replying “I think he’s about to start a new painting.  He was measuring the dog this morning.”).  Because correct proportions and relationships are vital to portraiture,  I usually take the time to superimpose a grid as a template for free-hand drawing.  If I’’m lucky enough to get mostly everything right,  the human eye, which performs facial recognition unconsciously and perfectly, will not shout “Who the hell is that?” when confronted with the image of someone it actually knows.

A big ”however” follows.  If portrait painting were nothing more than careful measurement , cameras would have replaced paintings completely a century ago and live action animation would have been perfected.   Even when proportion-perfect, portraiture in oil is a brute exercise.  That same exactly-proportioned face is a mobile canvass of minute muscular movements.  In older faces, characteristic expressions have generally etched themselves into laugh lines or practised squints, but no matter the age, unless one has had too much “work” done and ended up with a frozen visage, faces are naturally mobile.   Having to work from multiple digitals is scary but often necessary to attain this marriage of appearance and expressed personality.

I will stop here for now, because the portrait that called me yesterday is in those early stages that are mostly about drawing and  some modelling of shape through burnt umber, red and yellow glazing.   All that I have done other than that is to establish the iconic turquoise glasses, whose colour will be echoed in the jewelry to come much later.  It's still really rough -- lots more fine-tuning and multiple layers to come.   

​More about “Masochism” aka “The Art of Portraiture” next week.  If you see that I have changed the subject, it might mean that the underpainting went south and is now cowering in a corner of the basement or worse.  Pray for us both.

By the way, if you live in Southern Ontario, do go out to your garden tonight after dark.  Fireflies everywhere!!

Among the books I am reading at the moment is one about giraffes. I hadn’t known was that the little knobby bits on their heads were called ossicones but was overcome by the desire to have one, I guess, because…..the half-blind painter striking again, I bent over to retrieve something from the wastebasket and didn’t register the dark corner of our Mission-style chesterfield. Surprise and a bit of screaming erupted when my forehead’s unstoppable force smashed into the corner of the immovable object. (By the way, Superman was wrong. No truce occurred. The immovable object won. ) On the other hand, I did discover that lying on the floor and howling draws dogs; when Rover comes over to check you out, just grab his muzzle and apply his cold wet nose to the boo-boo. Theodore actually suppressed his own scream and just let me do it, proving once again that dogs are the best. Several bags of frozen vegetables and a good sleep later, the big red boulder has shrunk into an aggie; if you didn’t play marbles as a kid, let’s just say it’s smaller if still mighty tender. And my ever-helpful husband just offered the observation that I look like a baby unicorn with a good start on an off-centred horn. Maybe there will be rainbows.

It’s the kind of weather that is more likely to produce thunder and lightning storms in the afternoons. Mammals saner than the chippie who lives under the feeder are probably choosing siestas over food. The only other ones we have seen were a pair today of large opossums in a tangle (siblings? more than that?). Scruffy as always, they sauntered off trying to look casual. We don’t often see possums so it’s good to know they are succeeding. One theory of their territorial spread to Southern Ontario posits that they crossed the Rainbow Bridge travelling on truck manifolds. Warm and convenient. I find marsupials fascinating because the embryos actually find their own way to the exterior pouch and their mother’s milk. Whether you like their appearance or not, you have to admit that’s pretty darn impressive. I don’t know about you but my embryonic self didn’t do much in the way of solo travel.

There are birds around, of course. They all drop by the feeder but there’s better stuff available this time of the year. In fact they are probably experiencing un embarras du choix: (What should we have for dinner? I simply can’t decide!) There are the usual huge mulberry trees covered with sweet fruit but the big news this year in our garden is that the amelanchier (serviceberry) finally produced quantities of fruit. We called them saskatoons when I was a marble-playing kid and they are toothsome. This amelanchier was expensive but it’s proved its worth this year, treating us to fat, if somewhat diarrhetic, robins hanging from it. We are counting on those robins to plant a bunch more.

One of the joys of summer birdwatching is sorting out parents and kids. Baby birds look like adults but still behave like kids (think teenagers). There’s a male cardinal right now who hasn’t mastered the art of landing on the squirrel-proof peanut feeder. He is trying to hover like a hawk or a humming bird. Like every young adult, he wants to do it by himself, while reserving the right to ask Mom and Dad for handouts. He’s flown off now, probably to do just that.

And so the perennial story plays out in our garden, as it does in yours. I have to keep reminding myself that four months ago ice and snow and mud ruled. This season sees me taking multiple shots of summer’s bounty, which I store until the winter when my soul craves colour. In particular, I need to remember that my digitals won’t do full justice to reds because I can see that every time I take a picture. I will write myself a note to read in January, even though I already know I won’t believe it.

Probably "glaze oil" is such a slow and deliberate process,  I always feel a little pang when someone acquires a piece of mine.  The Renaissance method of building from an underpainting and employing transparent glazes always feels more like a long marriage than a one-night stand with the canvas.   We are, of course, wildly overstocked with these exes of mine at home, but they don’t languish in storage — I believe in moving paintings around before they become part of the wallpaper.  And they certainly do.

But though I don't balk at wandering through the house and moving every single painting, for the most part I draw the line at moving furniture.  Because our living room is longer than wide, the current furniture arrangement was a necessity.  That was a no-brainer after having seen what the renters had done to it:  the sofa and chairs all sat with their backs to the wall, leaving a huge empty space in the middle; there wasn’t a conversational grouping to be found.  You imagined having to yell back and forth.  That was the first thing to be addressed once we had redone the floors and the walls.  It was an extremely hot summer and we still wouldn't have a/c for another thirty years.  By the time we had placed the sofa to address the fireplace from the middle of the room,  we had been reduced to a pair of wet rags, so we must have made some sort of tacit agreement that it would stay here and so it has.   So has everything, actually.  There is only one occasional chair which moves around and Jon inevitably complains.

He would have had more to complain about in the house I grew up in.  My mom had no such compunctions about predictable domestic geography.  Dad and I would arrive home in the evening to find everything but the piano in a different spot.  (For some reason Mom never moved paintings either.  I suppose that was in line with our being mirror-twins of one another — both with scoliosis but on different sides, and one left-handed, the other right).  And to be fair she exorcised her furniture habit only during the day so it was relatively safe to walk through the dark house at night.

One of my English professors, Bob Stewart, was blind, so his whole life was something of a dark house.  He was handsome, had a touch of a southern accent which did no harm when teaching American lit, and went everywhere with Yutte, his German Shepherd guide dog.   When he asked me out, I accepted readily.  We met at his apartment and walked together to see The Barber of Seville at the Playhouse.  It didn’t immediately strike me that I was standing in for Yutte that night but after walking Bob into a guy wire, I smartened up and we got there and back without a fatality.  At the apartment was a supper of pre-cooked frozen food  to reheat.  I insisted on helping with the dishes.

A month later, Bob let it casually drop that it had taken him weeks to locate his kitchen utensils.  Yutte had no serious competition.

Our shaded house is not nearly as well organized as Bob’s apartment was so we misplace things all the time.  The worst offender is Jon’s beloved Hardy fishing cap, which demands semi-weekly searches because it could and does turn up anywhere and Jon can’t imagine life without it.  My most highly-motivated searches usually involve paintings.  Because they go up and down according to the season and my mood, I often don’t miss something for months.  Suddenly, as Sherlock would say, “The Game is On!”  More than once after an anguished two-day hunt, I realize that it has been hiding in full sight and I think “Time to  move that one!  Wallpaper!”

Even if I remember that the painting is in fact gone and now living with someone else, it is a lovely feeling to walk into that home and see one of your exes on the wall.  Kismet all over again.

If I have anything longer than a short sentence to word-process, I avoid the iPad with its stubborn insistense on replacing words I actually meant to type or its inventive volunteerism about what I should type next.  (My mom would have dubbed it a “bossy little toot.”)   That and its absence of a decentkeyboard.  Yes, Dad, you were right that learning QWERTY was a skill everyone should have (he didn’t) and I am almost ready to forgive you for signing me up for typing summer school in Grade 10 even though I was totally exempt and should have had the whole damned summer off.   Oh well.  So here I am, touch-typing happily at the iMac, which is getting long in the tooth like its owner.  That means I am in the “studio.”

The previous owners (we are only the second owners in 90-odd years) would have called it something else, although we are not sure what.  It had all the characteristics of a screened porch when we bought it but was missing one crucial component:  an exterior door and steps.  We are pretty sure that the room wasn’t a second thought because its walls blend seamlessly with the rest of the stone on the house.  Maybe a sleeping porch?  It had a latch on the porch side, so maybe a sleeping porch for grown-ups?

What ever it was, it is now the place I paint and write.  When possible.   This last few months have been so busy that my beloved studio has morphed into a storage unit — my brushes a jumble, piles of papers, and paints in no particular order.  I hate disorganization, so today is being devoted to sorting and cleaning and re-ordering all and sundry.  My palette is clean, brushes standing in straight lines like the little soldiers they can be, and the pigments all wearing their caps on straight.  The army is standing by.

​Yes, I get it.   It is somewhat grandiose to call a 7 by 10 space a “studio,’   let alone compare it to a battlefield.    I have tell my canvases to take a deep breath before I carry them in, and before anything new can be added, something equivalent in cubic area has had to vacate.  It’s full.

So here we are again, talking about “stuff.”   I do try not to bring home anything which is neither beautiful nor useful, but many old objects, having achieved both, have won a permanent home with us because they possess both form and function.   The studio, for example, houses dozens of art supplies, but my eye is calmed when paintbrushes sit in old scotch containers or paints reside in wooden art boxes, many of which were my mother’s.  Once in a while an old tube of her oil paint surfaces;  miraculously it  still spreads properly  if you can wrestle the screw top off.  There are not many of them because Mom moved immediately to acrylic when it hit the market, and shortly after abandoned that too for a new love —university courses in English and art --  never looking back, even when Dad grumbled that she was always writing essays.    A bust of her sits on the stone ledge beside me here  (when Theodore doesn't claim the space for bird-watching);   there she functions as the principal guardian angel, flanked by photos of her cherubs—my beloved scalliwag, the collie/cocker mix who ruled my life from grades 1 to 6, and the sainted Jewell.*

As the surfaces cleared today, so did my head. Like last year’s mourning dove on our window-ledge, who evicted her first brood before they had any desire to leave and immediately laid an egg, I too might be gestating a new painting or two now that the nest has been thoroughly refluffed!!


* (Jewell’s calm and friendly demeanour failed us only once.  I've written about the time dear Maureen had brought her gentle Aussie — Molson —over  for tea.  He seemed inexplicably stressed until we realized that Jewell was surreptitiously mau-mauing him with flashes of a white snarl.  After that, he wouldn’t even get out of the car in our driveway.  Well, Maureen’s current Aussie, Blu, who is much smaller than Molson, evened the score this week.   Mouths agape, Maureen and I watched Blu and Theodore go at one another in the kitchen.  It was the classic cartoonist’s dust-up until Theodore cried uncle.  For the rest of the visit, he cowered on my lap and refused to take his eyes off the little champ, whose lovely eyes gleamed with victory.    Sorry, but I have to say it:  Girls Rule!   

An old friend once remarked to me, after gazing around our living room, “You love your stuff, don’t you.”
A statement rather than a question.  There was no question.

Periodically, especially after I visit someone with a beautifully spare aesthetic, I ask myself what it is about “stuff” that matters to me.  The answer always seems to be connected with life lived, but not particularly my own.    When I gaze around Jon’s and my living room, I see it peopled with those who went ahead.  His maternal grandmother was an army matron who accompanied the troops into Europe to liberate France;  her uniform belt and dog tags rest on the old turning bookcase, close to the pocket watch of Jon’s paternal grandfather.  On another shelf sits the tin-type of my mother’s mother at age 8 and the embroidery Mom made for her half a century later.  My father’s crystal set sits close by, with an Inuit carving which was given to him by the dear friend who had built the basic radio with Dad when they were teens.  There, too, are a few of my paternal grandfather’s hand tools, and a beautiful little pot my grandmother threw.  On another bookcase is my great-great-grandfather’s leather-bound “Magistrate’s Guide to Upper Canada,” which the wrote in 1851, and a collection of Tennyson signed by the next Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and given to the family’s  governess, who happened to be my aunt's aunt.   Although he didn’t live long enough for me to hear him play it, Grandpa Keele’s violin hangs on the wall.

While there is quite a collection of stuff, it is not a “collection”.  I don’t actually collect anything, unless perhaps small wooden or lacquer boxes which are as useful as they are decorative, and Wardian cases to shelter greenery and provide sniffs of warm earth year-round.  Most of what is here would be worthless to anyone else, but for us it is most precious because it is specifically speaks to our roots..   

​My younger self must have whispered, "Stuff it!"

I have a bone to pick with Mr. Rogers. Not the lovely, quiet man who spoke gently to children. The Mr. Rogers who sorts my mail.

Christmas was the first signal that our relationship was faltering. Friends contacted me from various Canadian cities to complain that there were no letters from us and they had it on good authority that mutual friends had received theirs. Odd. I re-sent a number and put it down to Christmas mail. Then I began to realize that emails sent to me (Jon being apparently on good terms with Mr. R) would suddenly surface days late but in their correct date order. Pretty easy to miss those among the fifty or so which arrive daily. (Note to self: in your next life, join fewer than five active art groups). The coup de grace was an important email which I sent to six friends this month and which only three received. Not one of the missing missives ever bounced back or showed up in junk mail.

Mr. R and I had previously enjoyed a meaningful and balanced give-and-take. I gave him money and he took care of correspondence. Now, not so much. As a female, I do of course blame myself but cannot pinpoint what I did to offend him. While I admit that correspondence roulette is pretty exciting, I am more of a checkers-personality-type so I worry.

Why do you care? Only if you expect an invitation to the opening of the big show which opens on July 4 in Toronto at the Etobicoke Assembly Hall Gallery. I don’t yet have the flyer but expect to send e-vites in about a week. So…in case yours is misdirected to some digital purgatory in which to languish or is simply killing time to be delivered on the 5th, I am inviting you here. All I can hope is that Weebly, my kind webhost, doesn't know you-know-who.

When Jon and I were walking Theodore yesterday I happened to mention that my last blog was titled “The Lady and the Tramp.” Jon does not read my blog — probably a healthy decision - and he was visibly startled, blurting “I’m not the tramp, am I?” "No, of course not," I replied. "It’s about Jewell and Theodore.”

But it did get me thinking.

Jon may not be homeless but he does have an inordinate love of adventure. He cycles daily, whenever possible finding a new route to explore. When he doesn’t arrive home on time, I find that a text which begins with “Where are you?” and concludes with “Shall I start selling off your gear?” does the trick. That’s going to be some garage sale when the time comes. In the meantime he scares the living daylights out of me, especially when he’s cycling in rush hour. Ironically, it was on a Sunday when he wiped out, having been cut off by a driver who made an unsignaled turn right in front of him and who later admitted to not having noticed him. I’m pretty sure Jon had left his invisibility cloak at home that day. So I breathe easier when Theodore hears the bike on our pea gravel driveway and leaps off the couch to greet our vagabond with high-pitched yelps of unalloyed joy.

Then there are the canoe trips. Jon used to do solo wilderness trips. He let me come on one (I figured we might as well die together). Unfortunately that was the year that the Attawapiscat washed out after an enormous storm and all the campsites were under water. I wasn’t doing much better than they were. By Day 3 it became clear that I was the albatross around Jon’s neck. Miraculously, we were able to radio for help; apparently I embraced the bush pilot in relief and Jon drove me to my mom’s in Winnipeg. I tried to chain him to a telepole in the basement but he outwitted me and went back to do the Albany alone. It didn’t help my nervous system that while at Mom’s I happened across a tiny article in the paper about a paddler who has just been found circulating in an Attawapiscat souse-hole that same week.


Another year (and another solo trip): Ian, our dentist, made the mistake of making conversation and enquiring about Jon. Very little dental work ensued. Yet another summer found me sniffling in a stairwell at Canadore College, where I was supposed to be distracted by a painting course now. And so it went. Mercifully, my canoe bum now trips with five other guys and I sleep like a baby.

Please don’t get me started on fishing in high water. Jon has the brains to wear a belt on his waders so they can’t fill up and drown him if he trips but still…. When it did happen, the belt worked and my heroic camera sacrificed itself. (Look on the bright side if humanly possible.)

Do you remember “Dress for success”? Yes, there is such a thing as Tramp Style. Post-retirement Jon’s uniform is pure Mark’s — cargo pants for all seasons and canvas shirts in (thank heavens) a variety of colours, long sleeves for cool weather and short sleeves for hot; note what he's wearing in this painting which is at least ten years old. He might be wearing that shirt as I write this. He is wed to them, even those which bear the battle scars of trips and projects long forgotten. I have to smuggle the most egregious oldies out under coffee grounds. I had tried turning them into painting rags but they turned out to be too identifiable. I suspect him of doing the same with his dress clothes.

But thanks, Darling, for asking the question. You are, as always, an inspiration!
​