Saryu's haiku

"willow tree"  calligraphy

Without a brush

The willow paints the wind.

               -Saryu

We brushed this haiku in class Tuesday.  My calligraphy here is somewhat willow-like, breeze-lifted.  While we were in class, outdoors there was great wind.  We were under a tornado warning!

Saryu's surname and his lifespan's dates are not known, evidently (unless you know them).   This haiku is from a book from The Art Institute of Chicago,  Zen Haiku, selections and translations by Jonathan Clements.

blue flags

blue flags in the field

Blue flags are a wild iris that grow around here.  They are small and fine, delicate.  Yet, they are tough, they will not give up their patch of  field easily, and they can spread if they have enough water.  The ones I saw were almost hidden, surrounded by field.  Here, the painting has lifted them high in the field, undaunted by the grasses or the woods beyond.

woods and flowers

rhododendron and woods

Back and forth between the cultivated and the wild:  most of us like to go there:  you too?

This little painting started as a site sketch at the large garden of a nearby school called Aquinas.  The painting, mostly pastel, also looks emblematic of the site where our friends S and Fr live on Cape Cod.  Their house's yard is surrounded by very large rhododendrons, and the yard verges in the back up to 800-plus acres of protected woods.  We have been much thinking of our friends this month, so this scene, rhododendron and woods, getting through onto my paper as two places, not one, shouldn't surprise me.

in the deep heart's core

William Butler Yeats wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree in 1895.  He was in London, pavements all around, when he heard the sound of water lapping in a fountain and thought of his boyhood/ island/ the sea.  Here is his poem.  Here also is a link to Yeats himself reciting the poem:  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15529  .

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.


And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
  Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
  And evening full of the linnet's wings.


I will arise and go now, for always night and day
  I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
  I hear it in the deep heart's core.


Often I call upon this poem and say some lines and, hearing the words, I am calmed.  This past two weeks I have been in two great cities, Chicago and Boston.  There, amid great strength and beauty; still, Yeats's poem has wafted to me at times, clearly, with music, with magic.

Gillian's wonderful poem

On the drifting roof
survives a Tsunami dog
hell crossing to sing--


     -Gillian Huang-Tiller
Gillian is brushing up to Issa, which makes her own poem even more layered, wonderful.  Here is Issa (who lived in Japan from 1763 - 1828):


in this world
we walk on the roof of hell
gazing at flowers


     -Issa

Homage to Bonnard

May day trees

A bit of Bonnard's  "Almond Tree" painting transfers, bequeaths, to this small painting.  The May day trees here are real enough:  they are flowering now between an old brick building and some woods not far from where we live.  Someone keeps the grass mowed.  The crabapple at right was growing from an old broken trunk.  The other trees kept co-merging in view, exchanging color and light.  Something about the way the color stays in and comes out of the paper reminded me of Bonnard's way of working in oil paint on canvas, reminded me when I was almost finished. My center tree here is not an almond tree; nevertheless, it beholds a bit like one. 

My painting is somewhat clumsy.  But it has, I think, something of the living, exchanging nature of art and homage about it.  I am glad for that.

Bonnard's almond tree

L' amandier en fleurs

(The Almond Tree in Blossom)

Pierre Bonnard

This small painting is the last one Pierre Bonnard painted.  The almond tree was outside his bedroom window.  The painting, he finishes in 1947.  Here are the words of Bonnard's grand-nephew, Michel Terrasse, from a lovely book, Bonnard at Le Gannet, about the painting:

    Though bedridden in his austere cell, and drained of strength, he was still thinking of his Amandier en Fleurs (Almond Tree in Blossom).

    He asked Charles Terrassee to bring him the canvas: 'This green--on the ground--there--it's not right.  It needs some yellow.'

    The nephew who loved him best took his uncle's hand and helped Pierre Bonnard to add a little touch of gold for the very last time on this earth.

This time of year, when the trees are starting to bloom, I think of this painting.  I love Pierre Bonnard's work.

our pear trees in spring

pear trees, early May

We have pear trees all around town, along major roads and framing the lawns of municipal buildings.  They are beautiful trees, and they are just starting to bloom.

This small painting is pastel and charcoal and some graphite on a soft printmaking paper.  I did a quick pencil sketch out in the car.  These trees are growing beside a road near my studio, a road wide enough that I could pull over and stop the car to do the sketch.  What you cannot see--to the left, outside of the frame of the painting's trees--is a wide, scrabby field, a "super fund site," i.e. a place of toxic dump.  At the far other end of this field is our municipal waste water treatment plant.  An odd landscape.  Still, the part of the view with pear trees is beautiful.

Easter 1916

Easter 1916 is the great, troubling poem about uprisings by William Butler Yeats.  He wrote if after an uprising by Irish nationalists against British rule failed--on Easter Monday April 24, 1916---and all but the one woman of the group who failed were executed.  Great poems re-arise.  This Easter poem comes again to mind this Easter 2011, when questions of nationalism and power are being sorted out in arenas of great human tragedy and violence, as ever, terribly, but newly, especially in the Middle East.


How poignant to think of the woman, here in stanza two as a young woman, before turmoil, destruction.  I share Yeats's ambivalence to this kind of Easter.  A terrible beauty is born.  Here is a link to the entire poem.  http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/soundings/easter.htm   I will print here the final stanza:


Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was is needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Spring drizzle

Early morning, drizzle, April

Do you use the word drizzle?  This kind of light rain--drizzle--allows light to come through.  Early in the morning when light is starting, the drizzle casts a kind of grey-green veil.

To get depth, I layered the color, but I did not want to quash the light.

Easter afterwards

Edge of Spring

Trees and bushes are ready to bloom any moment.  There is so much palpitation all around.  Still, even with catkins, bright, at the outer edges of the trees' twigs, winter-bare branches show and much sky shows through the treelines.  Soon, very soon, color will fill the branches and will fill the sky.  This day after Easter, we are poised for much life around us resurging.

Spring, almost

Catkins and light in the treeline

The sky was so very blue around noon yesterday, and the sunlight was mixing amid some of the high tree branches.  The treelines have not budded out into leafs or flowers yet.  Still, the dusty red catkins on some of the trees are fuzzy and full.  So the treelines are showing quite a lot of action.

I did a quick pencil sketch and then back in my studio I worked up layers of color into this small painting.  The painting wasn't lively enough last night at 5:30, when I had to stop and get ready for calligraphy class.  So this morning I worked on it some more.  Though the painting is dense with color and abstracted, it recalls--it echoes--for me the sense and sight of an almost fully emergent Spring treeline.  By the way, you can see some ruff and rib of the wonderful cotton rag paper which holds the color here.