winter mind

where we venture forth

oil/linen 30x40"

January 2014

I have taken this phrase--where we venture forth-- from a wonderful book, Hunger Mountain, by David Hinton, a long-time translator of Chinese poets and philosophers.  In this book, subtitled "A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape," Hinton merges his walks and thoughts with the thought and culture of classical Chinese. And he makes poems of his own:  assemblages with phrases from his translations, with pregnant spaces around the fluttering-like words.  It's a remarkable book.

winter all around

pastel/paper

Winter is all around us today.  Everywhere we look, and immediately upon us when we step outside.  We are winter today!

The Outermost House by Henry Beston is a wonderful book.  From Autumn 1927 to Autumn 1928 Beston lived in his two-room cottage on Cape Cod and wrote about Nature around him.  The dunes, beach, the sun and moon and stars, the birds, the movements of the sea:  all are characters, the formers of the drama in his book.  There is very little about humans or about himself.  Here is some of his writing.  Look how carefully he pauses at the end of this passage, in memory and gratitude, and then resumes.  Isn't it Nature here that he has become even as much as he is a man writing about Nature?

Nb."the Hunter" is Orion, in the sky

    My year upon the beach had come full circle; it was time to close my door.  Seeing the great suns, I thought of the last time I marked them in the spring, in the April west above the moors, dying into the light and sinking.  I saw them of old above the iron waves of black December, sparkling afar.  Now, once again, the Hunter rose to drive summer south before him, once again autumn followed on his steps.  I had seen the ritual of the sun; I had shared the elemental world.  Wraiths of memories began to take shape.  I saw the sleet of the great storm slanting down again into the grass under the thin seepage of moon, the blue-white spill of an immense billow on the outer bar, the swans in the high October sky, the sunset madness and splendour of the year's terns over the dunes, the clouds of beach birds arriving, the eagle solitary in the blue.  And because I had known this outer and secret world, and been able to live as I had lived, reverence and gratitude greater and deeper than ever possessed me, sweeping every emotion else aside, and space and silence an instant closed together over life.  Then time gathered again like a cloud, and presently the stars began to pale over an ocean still dark with remembered night.

winter, thick

blizzard

We are in the thick of winter.  A lot of winter is past, but winter will only slowly crawl toward spring, through many weeks.  We almost forget the shapes of trees or where the long yard meets the fields.  Some days we cannot see much of any detail, winter so thick around us.

My small pastel painting here only seemed OK (OK, it's done) when it became almost detail-less.  It did not breathe or shake or otherwise move for quite awhile, for many layers until then.  I did not set out to paint such an abstract view.  Still, this is the place where the painting has stopped, where the evergreen on the right emerges or dissolves in the midst of winter all around.

I wonder where the word "blizzard" comes from.

winter deep

winter deep in January

Tree trunks and branches mostly provide colors now.  Much else is covered with snow.  Trees in the far distance lose their color and become sky or snow; it is hard to tell which sometimes.  This kind of deep-January scene can be interesting drama:  the ins and outs of distance and middle distances, the snow white lines that are either field or branch, the movable horizon (where is the horizon?).  Is that a telephone pole, or is it a fence post?    Why does the color shift there?  Any conclusions that I settle upon:  these conclusions seem to shift the next moment.  And the shifts cause more movement out there, then more responses from me.  Such activity!

When I painted this small landscape, the image became abstract early and kept veering quite abstract quite often.  Still, I tried to show some distance and some details, and I consulted my sketch several times to do so.  I like the sense of activity in the finished work, a sense of actor--liness maybe, from a scene that at first seemed quite quiet.

How is your winter going?

winter, quiet

January 2011

We look and look and look around in the winter as we do in any season.  Snow quiets everything.  Slows things down too.  My looking is mostly padded these days, so that variations in a scene seem not so often abrupt as they seem nuanced, attached to the tonal dance.  Still, the scenes are quite lively.

Have you read Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening recently?  Is there impatience with stillness at the end of his poem?

Whose woods these are I think I know,

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.