Louise Fishman painting

oil/jute

Crisp.  Elemental.  Strong.  Physical.
Louise Fishman's paintings are like that.  Take a look at this link   www.theartsection.com  and scroll down just a bit to the first interview under Women Artists' Profiles;  it is a look at Louise Fishman and her painitngs.  The website itself, theartsection,  is wonderful; I'm glad to have found it.

hummingbird

We see this kind of hummingbird, a Ruby-throated Hummingbird, in our yards.  These birds are smaller than my thumb, and they buzz around.  David Sibley describes the buzz as "the blur and hum of their hovering wings."   (What a gift his books about birds are.)  Hummingbirds' hearts beat around 250 times per minute when they are at rest.  Flying, they beat 1,250 beats per minute:  how amazing someone can count a tiny, fierce heartbeat like that.

This small painting is watercolor and pastel and charcoal and graphite on paper.  How to suggest blur-and-hum in a picture?!

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.

David

Dove, here, there

E.E. Cummings wrote this for Paul Rosenfeld.  M included it in a talk he gave Friday in San Francisco, and he dedicated the talk to David.  David Kent Hendrickson, whom we love(d) so.

o

the round

little man we

loved so isn’t

no!w

a gay of a

brave and

a true of a

who have

r

olle

d i

nt

o

n

o

w(he)re                                    

Millie and Aaron also gave talks, wonderfully.  We all could see, more, how very lively is E.E. Cummings' poetry, how very not-dead is w(he)re.

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

Spring wild

We are having wild growth and color, every day anew.  You too?

Easter, faith

M sent me this poem by Edward Hirsch, who often writes with faith as a theme. I suppose faith is also a part of the life of poets; can you write poetry without faith?  M gets a "poem-a-day" each day of April (which is poetry month in the U.S.), and this poem appeared yesterday.  You can go to the poem-a-day site here:  poem-a-day    (you need to sign-up in the small box at the right of the link's page).

Green Figs 

I want to live like that little fig tree
    that sprouted up at the beach last spring
        and spread its leaves over the sandy rock.

All summer its stubborn green fruit
    (tiny flowers covered with a soft skin)
        ripened and grew in the bright salt spray.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good
    and Evil was a fig tree, or so it is said,
        but this wild figure was a wanton stray.

I need to live like that crooked tree—
    solitary, bittersweet, and utterly free—
        that knelt down in the hardest winds

but could not be blasted away.
    It kept its eye on the far horizon
        and brought honey out of the rock.