returning geese

si bi luo yan

Four leaves of bamboo painted in such a way that they are said to be luo  yan, "like a wild goose alighting."  This is an instruction to painting students, on a page in The Mustard Seed Manual of Painting, in the chapter on Bamboo.  Each time I practice this arrangement, the wild goose/bamboo leaves look different:  sometimes pensive, sometimes free, sometimes a bit gangly!  We have returning geese in our skies every day now, and we can hear their honking above us often before we even see them.  Oh wonderful reunions.

Emerging from

the regions of the moon--

the first wild geese

(Hatsukari ya

tsuki no soba yori

arawaruru)

I came across this haiku, by Miura Chora (1729 - 1780), in a 1995 exhibition book entitled HAIGA by Stephen Addiss.  A haiga, a haiku-painting, by Chora was on the same page with the haiku.  It is lovely, three black geese.  I hope that you and I see this haiga (again) and more of Chora's work someday.

tulip, tulip

As I was painting the tulips, I noticed they were starting to straighten and rise in the vase, and open. Here is the painting, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches, done quickly and stylized, yes.  Also, it is somewhat fleshy, the paint in the leaves, do you think so?  And emblematic, the image seems to me, in a simple way, so I have called it  Easter 2010 .

I had been drawing tulips before and after the Easter painting.  Good thing.  Yesterday I set up to do some small gouache paintings of tulips.  But when I came back after a lunchbreak to actually start, the tulips had burst open in their vases so far that petals were flattened like an open hand.  Some petals were already fallen onto the table.  I did these two sketches anyhow, from my memory of the white tulips and from my drawings.

Whenever I pause to look at paintings of tulips, I think of a wonderful book, Still Life with a Bridle by Zbigniew Herbert (translated from the Polish).  The book is small, 8 x 4.5 inches, 165 pages of writing; it is exquisite and sturdy.  Its subtitle is Essays and Apocryphas.  Herbert wrote the book after he travelled to Holland to explore the Dutch seventeenth century through paintings.  One of the chapters is titled The Bitter Smell of Tulips  and it starts with this line:  Here is a story of human folly.  The one image of our edition is on the cover:  a tulip.

By the way, it is said that tulips do not have a smell and I think this may be so.  Yes?

winter and spring

sumac & spring light, sketch

At least ten inches of snow have fallen in the last week, and none melts during the day.  Winter is still here. Yet, when I stopped to quickly sketch a particular sumac, pine, tree, and treeline in the snowy landscape, I noticed an unmistakeably bright glow of spring light above the band of clouds, above the snowy land.  The pastel painting that I did later has some of the "springiness" that I felt in the air.

sumac & spring light, pastel

returned mourning dove

This mourning dove, which first appeared here in January in the "lighted river birches" blog entry, has recently become a Toughdove.  He turns toward us, from his perch on the charcoal branch, here and there, http://www.toughdoves.com/.  You might have to search a bit to find him at the site.  Or just view him, watching us, here!

one more, once more

one more winter view

once more, winter

This week has been very cold.  Yet, the light is noticeably longer in the sky when I leave the studio to go home.  These two may be the last snow landscape paintings of winter:  still winter, the fields and trees not opening much yet.

at the point of the thaw

There was a thin strip of thawed, green ground showing, which I quickly sketched.  Back at the studio, a small pastel painting, from the sketch, took on paths of its own:  its own small world.

the stillness of two deer

small world

misty,  january

Here is another 8x10-inch landscape painting, pastel and charcoal and some graphite on paper.  I call these little paintings small world landscapes.

late afternoon lighted river birches in the winter treeline

I suppose you have your own idea/image of a treeline with river birches lighted by the late afternoon sun.  You can conjure your own image now;  my image follows the mourning dove painting below.

a mourning dove returned last week

Mourning doves come and go in our yard during the winter.  We hadn't seen any for awhile.  This dove came around last week to feed on the seed I'd scattered on the ground, but also appeared later on the deck rail, turned into the west-blowing wind, turned toward the window where I watched.  Here I've sketched the mourning dove on a branch, turned.  Pastel, charcoal, graphite, and gouache are in the sketch.  The size, 5x5 inches, is the same as dove-images at Toughdoves.com.  Maybe this mourning dove will become a Toughdove.

river birches, winter (spring)

If your eyes move fore-to-aft, side-to-side, color-to-color here, good, I'm glad.  The sun was setting and highlighting the river birches, but also there was somehow a bit of spring-coming in the site, in the sight.  I tried to get some sense of that spring-titillation.   Does this image at all merge with your own of river birches in a treeline?

january, park

I was the only one there.  Not even a squirrel appeared.

A highway is just beyond the trees; there is an orange plastic snowfence sprawling just left of view.  My thumbnail sketch from this site is quite active--lots of pencil marks and instructions.

Some of the quiet of the place has come through in this pastel-on-paper version that I did later in the day.

january, path

We have had a lot of powder-light snow this winter.  Yesterday, some more came down.  This pastel sketch, though done quickly, recalls a still, quiet place, west of town.

wonderful Ivo's poem

Look at this wonderful poem that Ivo sent us for the new year. It is so light-stepping amid thought thickets:


To think is: to show, to let appear

But not in figures, forms of sound and light—
It’s to go back into the very letting

Which is when anything appears—
For this appearing. What is

Toward appearing is: a Weirdness
Suffering whose truth is—thinking, is

Smartness that soothes the steep
Weirding of the Weird—(open: “majestic”)—

Whose instress is sheer (nothing but)
Parting: Stillness returning

Falling to itself, mildly: the one and only
Irrevocable Gift. Thanking which

Is thinking: foundering answer, There to the
Silently greeting

Towardness in all “shows itself.”
                                                                        -Ivo De Gennaro   ©


Ivo lives in a mostly German-speaking part of Italy. Still, his English is good, really good. How to account for Ivo’s jokes in English/ about English, like firecrackers in our conversations when he visited? Lighting up words in such a way, he must just delight much in them!

By the way: the “weirdness,” Ivo tells M, gets to a thought thought in German. And “instress,” yes, he tells M, is from Gerard Manley Hopkins. I think “majestic” is a generous nod to my New Year’s blog entry. And I think Ivo’s poem resonates with JT’s poem (in the December 13 blog entry). Do you “see” this too, and, also, more?

Happy Birthday Jack Levine

January 9th is Jack Levine's 95th birthday.  Jack is a great painter.  I've followed his work and visited him infrequently ever since, years ago, I apprenticed with Ruth, a terrific painter, Jack's wife, Susanna's mother.

An exhibition of Jack's paintings will open at DC Moore Gallery in New York City:  this Saturday, January 9, is the opening reception and celebration of his birthday.  Let us honor him and (re)view his awesome works, in museums of many of the cities of the world or, for now:  dcmooregallery.com/levine.htm.  Cheers, Jack!