, 
The Finale of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy is beginning its fifth hour of repeating in my brain so I finally faced down the ear-worm and  found it on Youtube.  Might as well familiarize myself with the rest of the piece, although I seem to be wed to the last ten minutes.   It has been one of those lovely solitary days, with time to think or even stop thinking and let my mind follow its own lead.  Being alone for an extended period is the perfect incubator.    About being Scottish, it turned out.

Blame Bruch.  He might have not have been Scottish, but he captured the sense of that nation by doing something inventive.  While as a young pianist I loved baroque “ornamentation,”  and the “turn” in particular, it never occurred to me that a classical composer could use one to evoke swirling bagpipes played by kilted warriors marching into battle.    although the Scottish Fantasy was composed in 1880, it foreshadows  the Balkan Campaign of 1916, where the 10th Battalion of the Black Watch  won the nickname   “Ladies from hell” ("Die Damen aus der Hölle") as a back-handed tribute to their kilts, their pipes, and their fighting qualities.    Whether or not you are a Scot, you want to be, when Bruch is finished with you.

As it happens, I AM a Scot!  Or at least three-quarters of me, if you can overlook the century and a half we’ve been in Canada.  But looking back, I realize that I have consistently demonstrated my weakness for things Scottish — Sean Connery, shortbread, Skye terriers, good woollens,  warehouse sales, red squirrels, formal dances with dates in dress kilts, cool summers, Jamie Fraser, peaty scotch, my two boon companions and best of all, a Scottish brogue.

So I'm entitled to think about Sean Connery, all right? His looks are okay but it’s his voice that slays me.  I have been trying, without success, to download it onto our GPS, who has earned the name “Dim Bulb” for evident reasons.   Sean would be unable to guarantee any more than Dim Bulb that I  "have arrived at (my) destination,”  but this time I might not care.  The only occasion when I literally had too much of him was when the only seats for Dr. No were in the front row and his chest was thirty feet across.  So I closed my eyes and just listened, mercifully released from the sight of Ursula Andress’s monstrous cleavage.

If you too love Scottish burrs, there’s Scott MacKenzie, the famous flyfisher who does master-class videos about spey casting, the double-handed method of presenting the fly. Or Davie McPhail, who ties magnificent salmon flies on line.  I treat them both as podcasts and can practically hear my blood pressure dropping.  I still regret that I’ve lost the brogue that a year with my Scottish exchange teacher in Grade Two  bestowed.  Thank heavens for Outlander, although I do keep an eye as well as an ear on Jamie.

Finally, there is the "Heavenly Breed," though the fierceness of Skyes has also won them the respectful ​moniker “Land Sharks."  I knew that Jewell and Theodore  are direct descendants of an ancient breed, but recently discovered that cairns and Scotties branched off from Skye terriers only within the last century.  Skyes cover all the bases - comic-looking ("designed by a committee") but elegant;  tough-minded (aka STUBBORN)  but snuggly;  prone to bizarre phobias (Theodore turning to jelly around any one of the bikes in Jon's stable) yet brave ( confronting a large coyote);  dim (see "brave") but exquisitely affectionate and loyal.   Not to gild the lily but I like to think that Theodore’s thinking voice is appropriately burry like Sean's, Scott's and Davie's.  Maintaining this fiction is made a heck of a lot more difficult when he cries like a girl after an hour’s separation.  Still, one tries.

The weather this week is autumnally blue-sky cool so today I am pretending to be in the Highlands  -- feeling the urge to break out the woollens and the shortbread, and to go to the back garden to locate a red squirrel with whom to exchange insults.  All the while, I'm gratefully aware of doing this in Canada, where Boris Johnson is mercifully irrelevant.  So, channelling Kennedy's  "Ich bin ein Berliner" and Alex P. Keaton's hilarious "Today I am a woman,"  today I am a Scot -- albeit one who hasn't been home for a LONG time.  

  My brain is so steeped in the strong brew of literature that fragments of lines and shreds of plots settle at the bottom of the teapot that is my head.  Today, when the usual late-August swarm of fruitflies arose from the peach set down briefly on the counter, Keats jumped out, becoming “Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruit-fly-ness.”  I think it’s an improvement, actually.

Far from its being a time of calm satisfaction with a harvested crop, fall is actually a source of trepidation for most people.  I think it is the sense of returning to work and all of the surprises that come with new people and new challenges.  It normally proves to be happily manageable, but the pace certainly pick up and you barely come up for air until the next summer.

So my heart goes out to all those who have come to know the triggers of impending autumn:

- of course, fruit flies
- the odd red leaf on a tree
- wild grapes ripening
- the thrum of cicadas
- school buses on trial runs
and the two worst  - ads for school supplies and conversations that begin with “Are you looking forward to getting back to it?”

Frankly, I think it should be illegal to stock, let alone advertise, Hilroy products until September.   And it goes without saying that the question rarely sparks joy, as they say.  Unless it is an honest question, coming from another in the same boat, a "morituri te salutamus," it is an impertinence and should be ignored with as much dignity as one can muster.

So, for those of you who, in early August, started counting down the days left, I send you both sympathy and empathy.  You are allowed to kvetch.  Everybody does a certain amount of worrying about change.  You will be fine.  And this too shall pass.  Time really does fly.  Think of those tiny black flies whose lifespan is as minute as they are.  Now they have a GOOD reason to mutter "carpe diem" as they hover over my ripening fruit.  Because I am now about to murder them.

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

This morning I was in the bathroom minding my own business when I heard the dreaded tap-tap-tap at the window.  Anyone with real wood soffits and window frames knows that sound.  Somebody - probably a woodpecker who is tired of eating the food I gave him - is mining our house for breakfast.  Dang.

I sprang into action and pulled out the best weapon in my arsenal:  the feline hiss.   I climbed onto the antique cast-iron tub (honestly - it’s almost a century old), put my face as close to the sound as possible, and let fly.  If I do say so, my cat hiss is spectacular. The tapping stopped dead.  When it started up again about a minute later, I threat-nailed it again, and silence finally reigned.  Victory!

So it’s got me thinking about second languages.

Like Jane Goodall I was a huge Dr. Doolittle fan and while I can read French, my preferred second languages are non-human. I do a passable grouse, for example, but I’m most fluent in macaw.  Having lived with one for twenty years, I can summon up a happy drowsy going-to-sleep macaw when necessary.  Handy in a pet shop when you are in the mood to scratch an unfamiliar turquoise head and kiss a delicate powdery-white cheek.  I can also mimic a macaw's version of English.  If you are interested, it’s much further back in the throat and is a low half-growl, although it sweetened up noticeably whenever Bijou  saw a yellow vehicle - school bus or Kapoda - and tried to get its attention for the purpose of matrimony.  It was at its worst on a cartrip to the West Coast.  Her hanging perch was above my newspapered lap and she said “Hi!” to every car we passed, no matter the colour.  Thank heavens it was off-season.

And, of course, I call the chickadees down when the feeders have been refilled, and it’s kind of fun in the spring to tease the male cardinals proclaiming their ownership of a breeding site.  I can fool them for a few moments until they realize that their whistles are far lustier and that the interloper is a weenie and no threat.  Ditto for my great-horned owl hoots. I can get along in morning dove but would hate to try to order lunch with it.

I’ve been working in the back garden (AKA New Forest) trying to pull the last enchanters nightshades before Theodore gets to them and comes back is studded with burs and looking like a punk rocker.  I’ve lots of company.  The robins are busy stripping the pagoda trees of their juicy black berries so they can go and perch over the Adirondack chairs with predictable results.  The cicadas are getting noisy again so the temperature must be rising.  In fact, the insect string sections perform round the clock, the cicadas relieved by crickets and katydids once the sun sets.  I don’t speak insect but the best guess is that they play nothing but love songs like an AM station at the beach.  Good luck, fellas.  Thanks for the soundtrack.

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.