Norman, M, and E.E.

Norman Friedman started Spring.  M now is the editor of Spring.  E.E. Cummings wrote this ever-lifting poem about Spring:

in Just-
spring      when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles      far      and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far        and        wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and
     the

         goat-footed

balloonMan    whistles
far
and
wee 

(Complete Poems 27)                  

We still have, in our neighborhood, an ice cream truck that comes around.  The ice cream man who dishes out our ice cream cones is almost always happy-looking and humming to the tune from his little truck.  Or else we are so glad to see him again after the long winter, we see him happy and humming.  E.E. must have had a balloon vendor come around each spring to his boyhood neighborhood of Cambridge Massachusetts.

Norman Friedman has given friends and friends of poetry exceedingly many treats:  thankstohim.

thankyou Dylan Thomas

Is there any line in English poetry that better heralds spring than this line from Dylan Thomas:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age;
Every spring, again this spring, this line comes to me.  Thankyou Dylan Thomas.  Here is the entire poem, whose title is the same as the line above.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

crocuses, spring

daffodils

daffodils in field

These daffodils are up before the daffodils outside are.  That is because I hung this painting Saturday at an exhibition space.  The painting is up; the daffodils are showing!  Outdoors the daffodils are only stubby shoots.  Each day now, more show themselves coming through.  Funny looking (and what a funny painting they'd make):  still, these stubs are mood-brightening!

The painting here is oil on canvas, quite large for me: 30 x 40 inches.

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.