bay

Bay is all about lake, sky, and land.  We are high here, looking down at the bay and, seemingly, across with the sky!  This is a quick color sketch, with some amount of detail and layering in the field.  The sky is quite close to the paper.  The field is partly dried, partly in flower.  The colors are slightly more violet, and the field flowers are different; still, there is some resemblance of our northern bay with the Mediterranean near Cap d' Ail or Nice.

near Suttons Bay, August 1

near Petoskey, July 31

The same field flowers are in these views, seen a day apart.  One field has color in the field flowers; the other field's grasses and flowers are already quite dried out, seeds and seed heads much more predominant than flowers.  Suttons Bay is in a protected bay of Lake Michigan.  Petoskey is farther north and the bay there is more open to weather from the west over Lake Michigan.  Diane told me that Suttons Bay just didn't get much rain this summer; the rain has passed over and passed to the north often.

The top painting here is the same field as the field in the previous post, three weeks later.  I was leaving the hill and the small house and shed caught my eye, almost engulfed by the fields.  Of course the house is important here, centered; still, the fields provide its stage, its display.

between developments

hill overlooking Suttons Bay

This small painting I did in the studio, from a watercolor sketch on site.  The site is a hill in northern Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula looking down toward a bay of Lake Michigan.

I sat in my car to do the watercolor.  There is a dirt two-track in view at the lower left.  This path comes up to a paved lane, where I'm parked.  This lane is part of the infrastructure for a whole new subdivision: paved lanes, cul-de-sacs, fire hydrants, power cables.  The big hill has been set up for houses; a big cherry farm was bull-dozed to make way for the development.  Behind me here, just up the hill further, there are 5 houses, almost finished but boarded up, windows broken.  One house is partially painted.  This development stopped, went bankrupt.

As long as I did not look behind me, the view was dazzling.

On the Lake III

On the lake.  With Nature, with and without people, in a boat.  This third variation of the theme is from the writer Edith Pearlman's story Self Reliance:

   She changed into her bathing suit and took a quick swim, waving to the Sisters Scrabble and the geezer.  Back in her house she put on jeans and a T-shirt, tossed the wet suit onto the crotch of a chokecherry tree.  What should a person take for a predinner paddle?  Binoculars, sun hat against insidious sidelong rays, towel, and the thermos she'd already filled with its careful cocktail.  Pharmacology had been a continuing interest.  "I'll swallow three pills a day and not a gobbet more," Aunt Shelley had declared.  "You choose them, rascal."
   Cornelia pushed off vigorously, then used a sweep stroke to turn the canoe and look at the slate roof and stone walls of her house.  Just a little granite place, she realized; not fantastical after all.  She had merely exchanged one austerity for another.  She thought of the tomatoes, and turned again and stroked, right side, left, right. . . Then, as if she were her own passenger, she opened a backrest and settled herself against it and slid the paddle under the seat.  She drank her concoction slowly, forestalling nausea.
   Sipping, not thinking, she drifted on a cobalt disk under an aquamarine dome.  Birches bent to honor her, tall pines guarded the birches.  She looked down the length of her body.  She had not worn rubber boat shoes, only sandals, and her ten toenails winked flamingo.

The story is in a marvelous collection, published in 2011,  Binocular Vision.

On the Lake II

Wang Wei is one of the major poets of the Tang dynasty (618-907), the period of greatest poetic flowering in China.  I thought of this poem when I read Stanley Kunitz's The Long Boat (see below), and I wondered if Stanley Kunitz was "seeing" Wang Wei's poem alongside his own while he worked.

Lake Yi

Blowing flutes cross to the distant shore.

At day's dusk I bid farewell to you.

On the lake with one turn of the head:

Mountain green rolls into white clouds.

This poem is translated by Pauline Yu, from a terrific book she wrote (1980), The Poetry of Wang Wei. 

On the Lake

"In the Slop of His Cradle"

Elise Archer made this beautiful painting, which I reproduced from the cover of The Collected Poems, by Stanley Kunitz, her husband.  The painting's title is also the 17th line of a poem by Stanley Kunitz.  Here is the poem:

THE LONG BOAT

When his boat snapped loose

from its mooring, under

the screaking of the gulls,

he tried at first to wave

to his dear ones on shore,

but in the rolling fog

they had already lost their faces.

Too tired even to choose

between jumping and calling,

somehow he felt absolved and free

of his burdens, those mottoes

stamped on his name-tag:

conscience, ambition, and all

that caring.

He was content to lie down

with the family ghosts

in the slop of his cradle,

buffeted by the storm,

endlessly drifting.

Peace!  Peace!

To be rocked by the Infinite!

As if it didn't matter

which way was home;

as if he didn't know

he loved the earth so much

he wanted to stay forever.

Lake of the earth

The lake is a window into the earth.  
Ohmygosh: these words-become-image take my breath away.
Here is the entire poem from where these words come, The Half-Finished Heaven, by Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton:

THE HALF-FINISHED HEAVEN


Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.


The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a drink.


And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.


Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.


Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.


The endless ground under us.


The water is shining among the trees.


The lake is a window into the earth.

Lake Michigan, oil/gessoed board

lake

Lake Michigan

oil/gessoed board

A bit can re-call, can call up the large lake.

I think once again of Yeats's The Lake Isle of Innisfree .

Today in Michigan, Betty Ford is being buried beside her husband, Gerald Ford, who was one of our Presidents.  This bit of news re-calls Betty Ford's large, lovely and brave contribution to our world.

lake views

Lake Michigan near Holland

July 8, c 3:00 pm

The lake looks different from one quarter hour to another and from any slight change of view.  My sister Helen said it looks like the ocean.  

These color sketches I did today and yesterday in the studio, from pencil sketches.  How different these colors are from the colors of the watercolor sketch in the preceding blog entry.

lemon-yellow of primroses

oil sketch on board

You can see the quick layering of this small sketch:  wet and dry strokes of oil paint on a linen-covered cardboard.  Primroses, poppies, and peonies were blooming at the edge of the woods.

Travel and family visits have precluded my regular work weeks, happily.  Still, I can sketch.  Below is a small watercolor sketch of Lake Michigan.